Lyubov Vinogradova on Books from the KGB Archives

Tell us about Olga Sliozberg’s The Journey.

Well, I absolutely adore this gulag memoir. It’s special. I don’t normally read this sort of literature because it’s so gloomy and actually quite dull, this monotonous suffering and nothing else. Usually, if you do read this kind of book, you certainly don’t want to reread it. But this is completely different.

Why?

She writes so well: a light, beautiful, elegant kind of writing. Its main message is that what you have at the end of your life is not the result of the circumstances in which you’ve been living but of what is inside you and what you did with that. She tells you about the people she met and the friends she made. Most of them are dead because she was in her 90s when she wrote the book. So she was probably the only witness in the world to tell about these people and the friends who supported her. She talks about bad people, too, but they are not the main characters, the heroes of the book, because, although she spent over 20 years in prison, it was not a bad place, because there were such stories, such friendships, such wonderful people.

Who was she and how did she come to be in prison?

She was just an ordinary woman born into an intellectual family, married to a man for whom she got into trouble, a scientist, a professor. It was the usual story. When the purges started in the early 30s she was sure that it was only bad people, traitors, spies, who were being sent to prison. She started to hesitate when she heard that her housekeeper, who was a peasant woman, whose whole family died because they’d been taxed in the dispossession of the kulaks. She went to her husband and he said, well, it’s such a difficult time now in the history of our young country that inevitably some mistakes occur. You can’t blame the system for that. It’s unfortunate but you can’t blame our beautiful young country. And then six months later the husband is arrested one night and, as she discovered in the 1950s, was shot. And then she herself was arrested, leaving behind her very young children – a boy aged two, a girl aged six – though luckily their grandparents looked after them. She returned as an old woman 20 years later. I love this book and I hope it gets a translator. She died in 1991, you know, the year the Soviet era ended. I wish I’d met her.

Now, Writers and Soviet Leaders.

This one, by Boris Frezinsky, describes the relationships between the communist intellectuals and the ruling élite. It’s a fascinating subject and a great book, and there are great photos in it too: Gorky, Lenin, Mayakovsky, Trotsky and so on.

What sort of shape does the book take?

It’s mostly documents. He writes introductions to every section – for example, the relationship between Ilya Ehrenburg and Nikolai Bukharin who was Ehrenburg’s friend and patron. And then he publishes letters and so on. So it’s a rare thing. It’s interesting to see characters that people think they know and then find out what they were really like: who turned out to be a coward and who possessed great will and courage in the face of this very dangerous time, the 1930s.

In particular I was struck by Ilya Ehrenburg, who was the great ideologist of communism and the Soviet state whom the Soviets used so effectively during the war as a cultural link between Russia and the West. Bukharin was a very powerful man, one of the original Bolshevik revolutionaries. Ehrenburg had been his schoolmate and loved to send him all sorts of complaints, about how Pravda was shortening his articles, how he hadn’t been paid enough money. At first you think he’s not a nice person, that he’s a bit of a shit. That’s your initial impression. But then when Bukharin gets into terrible trouble, Ehrenburg refuses to speak against him at his trial and takes a great risk to do this. And for the rest of his life he tries to do whatever he can for Bukharin’s widow. He even tried to write a chapter on Bukharin in his memoirs. Of course, he wasn’t allowed to, but he still manages here and there to insert a paragraph about this person who was his great friend.

Which archive did he draw his material from?

That’s a very good question. He worked mainly in the literature and art archive, the RGALI archive. Then he worked in the archive of the history of Moscow. But it’s mainly the RGALI that he looks at because, of course, a lot of stuff on his subject would be in the KGB archives at the Lubyanka. But there’s no way of getting in there.

What about The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis?

I’m sure this will be of interest to a Western audience. Its subject is those former American citizens who were made to give up American citizenship in exchange for Soviet citizenship.

How were they made to do it?