* In August 1935, the Donbass coalminer Aleksei Stakhanov dug a record amount of coal. Widely applauded in the national press, his achievement began a movement of rewarding skilled and devoted workers, efficiency being one of the stated aims of the Second Five Year Plan. Stakhanovism soon developed into another form of ‘shock labour’ in which workers who had exceeded the production quotas were rewarded with bonuses in pay, consumer goods, better housing and even promotion to administrative jobs (especially in the police). For the Stalinist regime, the movement was a means of raising the production norms and of lowering the basic rates of pay by making workers more dependent on piece rates. It placed enormous pressure on managers and officials, who took the blame (and were frequently denounced as ‘saboteurs’ and ‘wreckers’) when shortages of fuel or raw materials prevented the Stakhanovites from meeting their targets.
* In October 1935, Stalin made a well-publicized visit to his mother in Tbilisi. It began a press campaign to show the Party leader as a family man. Stalin was photographed in the Kremlin gardens with his children, something he had never permitted before (most Soviet people had never even known that Stalin had children).
* For this reason she wishes to remain anonymous.
* Psychiatrists have also found a high proportion of people suffering from paranoia and schizophrenic delusions among long-term residents.
* It is possible that Simonov was thinking here of Pyotr Palchinsky (1875–1929), the mining engineer whom Kerensky placed in command of the Winter Palace in October 1917. Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, Palchinsky was released and subsequently allowed to resume his work at the Russian Technical Institute during the 1920s. He was rearrested in 1928 and executed the next year. There were many camp legends about famous prisoners like Palchinsky, and it seems that Simonov was taken in by one of them.
* There is no record of Piatnitsky’s speech, and no surviving stenographic record of the June plenum, although there is evidence which suggests that whatever Piatnitsky had said was erased from the corrected stenogram (a common practice in the archives of the Central Committee) where it might encourage other dissidents. Before closing the last plenum session on 29 June, Stalin announced: ‘As far as Piatnitsky is concerned, the investigation is ongoing. It should be completed in the next few days.’ At the bottom of the page there is a handwritten note by one of Stalin’s secretaries: ‘This communication was crossed out by comrade Stalin because it should not go into the stenogram’ (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 622, l. 220). There may be other records of the alleged incident in closed archives (such as the Presidential Archive in the Kremlin). Until that evidence becomes available, the only record of Piatnitsky’s stand against the mass arrests of the Old Bolsheviks comes from his son Vladimir, who claims to have reconstructed the events of the June plenum from his father’s personal file in the FSB archive, fragmentary evidence in other archives and the alleged reminiscences of Kaganovich, as related to him by Samuil Guberman, the head of Kaganovich’s secretariat (Zagovor, pp. 59–70; interviews with Vladimir Piatnitsky, St Petersburg, September 2005. See also, in support of the Piatnitsky version of events, B. Starkov, ‘Ar’ergardnye boi staroi partiinoi gvardii’, in Oni ne molchali (Moscow, 1991), pp. 215–25).
* It is possible that Stalin had a hand in the murder of Kirov. The Leningrad Party boss was a very popular and more moderate leader than Stalin, who had good reason to be afraid that Kirov might emerge as a serious rival to his leadership. No hard evidence has ever come to light of Stalin’s role in his murder. But Stalin used the murder to pursue his obsession with an internal threat and to persecute his ‘enemies’.
* They are epitomized by Rubashov, the old revolutionary in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1940), who confesses to the treason charges made against him at his trial – even though he knows that he is innocent – because he wants to serve the state.
* At a meeting of Party workers and combine-operators in December 1935, one young combine-operator said that he would fight for the victory of socialism even though he was the son of a ‘kulak’, to which Stalin replied: ‘A son does not answer for his father.’ The press seized on this mendacious slogan and built it up into the ‘directive’ of Stalin.
* Irina never found out about his death. She continued to look for him, writing hundreds of letters to the Soviet authorities until her own death in 1974. After 1956, Irina was invited to rejoin the Party, but she refused.
* In 1941, Igor was charged again with organizing a ‘counter-revolutionary conspiracy’, this time involving children of ‘enemies of the people’, and five more years were added to his sentence. He returned to Leningrad in 1948, but was soon rearrested for ‘counterrevolutionary agitation’ and sentenced to five years (he served eight) in the Norilsk labour camp.
* Their father, Pavel Bulat, was a political economist at the Military-Political Academy in Leningrad; their mother, Nina, an engineer and geologist.
* Ida was interviewed for the BBC film The Hand of Stalin (1989).
* After the collapse of Communism, Liuba became an active member of her church and published her own book about the life of her father (L. Tetiueva, Zhizn’ pravoslavnogo sviashchennika, Perm, 2004).
* Elizaveta had no photograph of her mother until the early 1990s, when she received her mother’s file from the former KGB archives.
* After the outbreak of the war, in June 1941, prisoners who had served their sentences in the prison zone were forced to live and work in the barracks settlement. A prisoner sentenced to three years in 1938 would thus not be released from ALZhIR until 1945.
* Yevgeny was tortured and then shot by Beria himself, who at that time was the Party boss in the Georgian capital. Ketevan was the prototype of the character of Ketevan Barateli in Tengis Abuladze’s film Repentance (1984).
*According to her memoirs, published in 1998, Okunevskaia had married Gorbatov in 1937 in the hope that, as a well-known writer and Pravda journalist, he might protect her from arrest (her father, who had been arrested as a tsarist officer in 1925, was rearrested with her grandmother and sent to a labour camp in 1937, while she herself was dropped from the film she had been shooting and could not find any other acting work). For the next ten years the couple lived the luxurious lifestyle of the Soviet elite. They were always to be seen at receptions in the Kremlin, where Tatiana’s beauty attracted the attentions of NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria. In 1947, she was raped repeatedly by Beria. The event became common knowledge in the Soviet leadership. In her memoirs Okunevskaia claims that Gorbatov did nothing to protect her. He had just been promoted to the Central Committee and did not want to rock the boat. Tatiana became wild and outspoken. She drank heavily and acted indiscretely at Kremlin receptions. Afraid of her arrest, Gorbatov pleaded with his wife to try to save herself by joining the Party. But she refused. To save himself, according to Okunevskaia, Gorbatov gave evidence about his wife’s activities to the authorities. Tatiana was arrested and sentenced to ten years in the Kolyma camps for espionage (she had often been abroad and was well known for her affairs with foreign men, including Josip Tito, the Yugoslav Prime Minister). Okunevskaia’s arrest was a cause of frequent arguments in the Simonov household. In her memoirs Okunevskaia is deeply hostile towards Simonov, depicting him, like Gorbatov, as a loathsome Party careerist. Recalling her first meeting with Simonov, at Peredelkino in 1937, when she claims he tried to force himself on her, she describes the writer as ‘the most unsympathetic [of all Gorbatov’s friends], coarse and blunt, lacking graciousness, dirty and unkempt’, a description radically at odds with the cultured and respectable figure described by others at the time (T. Okunevskaia, Tat’ianin den’ (Moscow, 1998), pp. 65–6).