The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays by Vasily Grossman
The apparent peak of Yezhov’s career was on December 20, 1937, when the Party held a huge gala at the Bolshoy Theatre to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the NKVD; Stalin, however, pointedly failed to toast or congratulate Yezhov. From early 1938, Stalin made it increasingly obvious that Yezhov had fallen into disfavor. Yezhov, who had always drunk a great deal and had many affairs with both men and women, turned to sex and alcohol with greater desperation than ever. As for Yevgenia, she became more and more emotionally disturbed. In May 1938 she resigned from The USSR Under Construction and moved to the family dacha. In mid-September 1938 Yezhov told her that he wanted a divorce. He may have wanted to disown her because he was afraid that, having lived in both London and Berlin, she was vulnerable to accusations of espionage, or he may simply have been jealous with regard to her recent affair with Sholokhov. As head of the NKVD, Yezhov had been monitoring Sholokhov, and he had recently received an all-too-detailed report of a visit by Yevgenia to Sholokhov’s hotel room. Not only was Yevgenia being unfaithful; not only was Yezhov being forced to notice an infidelity he might have preferred to overlook; worst of all, Yevgenia was being unfaithful with one of her husband’s most fearless critics. During a recent audience with both Stalin and Yezhov, Sholokhov had criticized Yezhov and begged Stalin to put an end to the Purges.
Yezhov abandoned divorce proceedings, but, in late October 1938, Yevgenia was hospitalized for depression. On November 19, at the age of thirty-four, she died from an overdose of sleeping tablets; it was Yezhov who had supplied her with these tablets, and it is probable that the couple had agreed that she should commit suicide rather than allow herself to be arrested. Yezhov’s rival, Lavrenty Beria, had already arrested nearly everyone close to her. According to Yezhov’s friend and lover, Vladimir Konstantinov, Yezhov later said, “I had to sacrifice her to save myself.” On November 25, 1938, long after he had lost all effective power, Yezhov was formally succeeded by Beria. In April 1939 Yezhov was arrested. Accused of plotting against Stalin’s life, he was shot during the night of February 3–4, 1940.
After Yevgenia’s death, Natalya was taken care of by her nanny, Marfa Grigoryevna. After Yezhov’s arrest, however, when Natalya was six years old, she was taken to an orphanage in Penza, a city about seven hundred kilometers southeast of Moscow. The woman who accompanied her during the journey tried to teach her that her surname was now “Khayutina” (the authorities, unsure what to do with this girl and generally embarrassed by her existence, had given her the surname of her adoptive mother’s first husband, Lazar Khayutin—Gladun was Yevgenia’s second husband, and Yezhov was her third). When Natalya, unable even to pronounce this name, insisted that she was not “Khayutina” but “Yezhova,” her companion hit her on the mouth until her lips bled. In the orphanage, as during the whole of her adult life, Natalya refused to disown her father. She has described the price she paid for her loyalty: “They called me a traitor and an enemy of the people. There was nothing they didn’t call me.”
After seven years of schooling, Natalya attended a trade school, to which she gained admittance only with difficulty. She was badly bullied. Once she tried to hang herself from a tree, but the branch broke. Then she worked for several years in a watch factory. Finally she was able to go to music school and study the accordion. In 1958 she voluntarily settled in the Russian Far East, in Kolyma, a region six times the size of France that had, in effect, been a single vast camp—an almost autonomous State run by the NKVD. She worked as a music teacher in schools and local Houses of Culture. Though never married, she had a daughter and several grandchildren.
As a child, at a time when it was standard practice to obliterate all images of “enemies of the people” and to tear out their photographs from books, Natalya doggedly tried to save photographs of Yezhov, to hide them from the ever-watchful eye of the orphanage director. As an adult, she petitioned several times, both in the 1960s and more recently, for the official rehabilitation of Yezhov, arguing that his guilt is no greater than that of any of the other prominent figures around Stalin, and that she and Yezhov alike are victims of the “repressions” of Stalin’s day. The awareness that Yezhov is one of the last century’s most terrible mass murderers seems—not surprisingly—to be more than she can live with. She herself claims that she went to Kolyma in order to get away from KGB supervision, to escape to a world where she would no longer be labeled “the daughter of the Iron Commissar.” This, however, makes little sense; nowhere in the Soviet Union would she have been more likely to encounter people who had suffered because of her father. She has also, in some interviews, suggested that she was hoping to find her father in Kolyma.
Natalya never—except, possibly, as a small child—had any contact with Grossman, and she has no idea what sources he used; she has written to Grossman’s daughter, Yekaterina Korotkova, asking if Grossman’s papers contain any more information about her life story. As we have seen, Grossman knew a considerable amount about her life in the orphanage. The passage in “Mama” about Nadya’s disappointment at being denied the chance to study at music school accords precisely with Natalya’s real story. The authorities, afraid that Natalya might become well known and thus attract attention not only to herself but also to a “father” who had been erased from the history books, initially denied her the opportunity to study either at a music school or at a sports academy. Eventually, however, Zinaida Ordzhonikidze, the widow of a prominent Soviet politician and a close friend of Yevgenia Yezhova, intervened on Natalya’s behalf—and Natalya was allowed to enter a music school and study the accordion.
It is possible that Grossman’s informant was Natalya’s former nanny, Marfa Grigoryevna. Even though the authorities repeatedly refused to give her any information, Marfa Grigoryevna managed to find out Natalya’s whereabouts, and she visited her in the orphanage soon after World War II, when Natalya was fourteen. Her intention was to adopt Natalya, but Natalya—wounded by her repeated experience of being abandoned—treated her with extreme aggression, and Marfa Grigoryevna gave up the idea. Natalya and Marfa Grigoryevna do, however, seem to have met at least once more, in Moscow, around 1949. We also know that Natalya met Zinaida Ordzhonikidze in Moscow in 1957. It is possible that Grossman could have heard about this meeting, and he could have met Marfa Grigoryevna any time between 1946 and 1960, when he wrote “Mama.”
Grossman, however, was not simply observing the world of the Yezhovs from a distance; he was more personally involved than is immediately apparent. When Boris Guber, Ivan Kataev, and Nikolay Zarudin (all of them former members of the literary group known as Pereval and all of them friends of Grossman) were arrested in 1937, two main accusations were leveled at them. They were accused not only of a failed plot against Stalin’s life in 1933 but also of attempting, in late 1934, to organize a plot against Yezhov’s life. They intended—according to a scenario constructed by the NKVD with their characteristic blend of unbridled fantasy and careful attention to detail—to take part in one of the literary evenings presided over by Yevgenia Yezhova and then attack Yezhov when he came home late at night. Among the other writers expected—according to this scenario—to be taking part in the literary evening, though not in the “conspiracy,” were Babel, Grossman, and Boris Pilnyak. A woman by the name of Faina Shkol'nikova—a friend of Yevgenia Yezhova, and also of Grossman, Guber, and Kataev—was supposed to have provided the conspirators with information about the layout of the apartment and the running of the household.
Guber, Kataev, and Zarudin were shot in 1937; Pilnyak and Babel in 1938. As on several other occasions in his life, Grossman seems to have been extraordinarily—almost miraculously—fortunate to survive.
The only other survivor among those implicated, however peripherally, in this “conspiracy,” was Faina Shkol'nikova. She too was arrested but, rather than being shot, she was sent to the Gulag. After returning to Moscow in 1954, she became one of the several camp survivors who paid regular visits to Grossman. Conversations with her—about the Yezhov
It is not difficult to imagine the impact of such conversations on Grossman. The “conspiracy,” which he was almost certainly learning about for the first time, could easily have led to his own execution—and most of those implicated in the “conspiracy” were people who had played a crucial role in his life. Babel was one of the writers he most admired; Guber, Kataev, and Zarudin were his main sponsors at the beginning of his literary career; and Guber was the ex-husband of his second wife and the father of two boys he brought up as his own sons.
Part of the power of “Mama” derives from a tangible sense that there is much that Grossman does not tell us. He writes laconically and with tact and decorum. This is evident in his decision not to incorporate the personal material discussed above—which could easily have overloaded the story. It is still more evident in his matter-of-fact and nonjudgmental portrayal of Yezhov. As if considering it dangerous to look for too long and too directly at Yezhov and his world, Grossman shows them to us, for the main part, through a protective prism of innocence—through the eyes of a child and the eyes of a peasant nanny with something of a child’s wisdom.
Both Grossman’s “Mama” and Natalya Khayutina’s true story encapsulate much of the lasting suffering inflicted on Russia by Stalin. Grossman’s version, however, is gentler. He describes only the general physical misery of the orphanage in Penza, saying nothing about the emotional torment Natalya underwent there. He says nothing about her fierce loyalty to the disgraced Yezhov. And as if wanting to find a way out for her, to give her at least the possibility of a better future, he ends the story on a note of quiet hope—in accord with the name he has given her.
Grossman assigns a greater place to Natalya’s birth parents, whereas she herself assigns the determining role in her life to Yezhov. Grossman’s Nadya remembers seagulls and the splashing of waves; the real Natalya remembers nothing further back than her kind, loving, adoptive father. Central to both stories, however, is a sense of rupture—and a sense of the power of that from which we have been cut off, of recollections of still more distant recollections, of “echoes that had been repeated many times and were now dying away in the mist.”
Afterword*
by Fyodor Guber
In late 1937 or early 1938, my mother was arrested. My brother and I were still living, along with my nanny, Natalya Ivanovna Darenskaya, in the room on Spaso-Peskovsky Street where we had lived with my father before his arrest on June 20, 1937. Our mother was living with Vasily Grossman, whom she had married a year earlier in May 1936. She was arrested on one of her regular visits to us. The NKVD had evidently been too busy to spend time looking for her; instead, they must have asked a neighbor to phone when she appeared at what was still her official address.
Since Misha and I now had neither father nor mother, the authorities must have been intending to send us to a special orphanage—or, more likely, orphanages. But Vasily Grossman insisted on looking after us himself. He was recovering from a severe attack of asthma, but he made sure that we were brought to him immediately. And so we were taken at night to Herzen Street, where Grossman had recently obtained two rooms in a communal apartment. My brother, who was five years older than me, had witnessed Mama’s arrest, but I myself had been sound asleep and I had no idea what was happening. All I remember is streets covered in snow and the uniformed men in the car. We drove into a yard and stopped beside a two-story building. One of the NKVD officers rang, and Grossman opened the main entrance door. Disturbed by our arrival, other tenants were looking out of their windows. The following morning—I was to learn later—Grossman went to the People’s Education Department and began the process of having himself appointed our legal guardian.
Anyone who remembers those years will appreciate the remarkable strength of character he showed in taking it upon himself to bring up the children of an “enemy of the people.” There was no realistic hope of my mother’s release. It was with regard to these months that Grossman once said to his friend Semyon Lipkin, “You can have no idea what life is like for a man trying to look after small children while his wife is in prison.” Nevertheless, Grossman’s determination, and the letters he wrote to Nikolay Yezhov and Mikhail Kalinin and many other important people, brought about a miracle. On April 1, 1938, my mother was released; she remembered the date all the more clearly because fellow inmates had thought that she was making an April Fools’ Day joke when she told them her news. One morning I woke up and saw Mama’s dressing gown hanging on the door between our two rooms. Misha and I rushed into the other room. There she was—our Mama. Misha at once understood that she had been released from prison. I, on the other hand, had been told that Mama had gone to see her parents in Siberia. Now I believed that she had, at last, come back. Only in 1944 did she tell me the truth—in response to my saying, “But Mama, you went to see grandmama and grandpapa in 1938!”
From the moment we moved in with him until the end of his life, I called Vasily Grossman “Papa.” Misha, however, always addressed him more formally, as “Vasily Semyonovich.” The fact that Misha was eleven when our father was arrested, while I was only six, was very apparent. Grossman looked on both of us as his sons; if he did not adopt us formally, this was only to avoid creating the impression that he was asking us to betray our father.
We continued to live in the apartment on the corner of Herzen Street and Bryusov Lane until 1947. It was in a two-story building said to have been built in the reign of Catherine the Great. It was now surrounded by eight-story buildings, and we shared it with three other families. Our two rooms must have once been one large room. Standing in what was the left-hand corner of our room and the right-hand corner of the room that served as Grossman’s study, bedroom, living room, and dining room was a large, snow-white Russian stove. In the shared kitchen there were tables with the small paraffin and Primus stoves that we used in those days for cooking. There was no bath in the apartment. We went regularly to the bathhouse, but we also greatly enjoyed going to my aunt Marusya’s or to the apartment of one of Grossman’s friends, Ruvim Fraerman, for what we called a “real bath.”
Grossman tried several times before the war to move to a self-contained apartment, but without success. The communal apartment was, of course, a considerable improvement on “nomadic” existence—on living in the corners of rooms belonging to friends and acquaintances, as he had done since the arrest of Nadya Almaz in 1933. Nevertheless, life in a communal apartment was far from conducive to literary creativity.
And yet it was in this building on the corner of Herzen, with its six-foot-thick walls, that Grossman wrote his second novel, Stepan Kolchugin, and a great number of stories. It was from here that he set out, in a jeep provided by Red Star, to work as a war correspondent. And it was in this building, immediately after the war, that he wrote a large part of For a Just Cause—the prequel to Life and Fate.
***
When I was a child, Grossman spent a lot of time reading poetry to me. He sang songs and even arias from operas, although he did not have a musical ear. He especially loved Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. He told me stories from his own childhood and youth, and fairy tales that he made up as he went along. He retold Jack London’s Star Rover and Charles de Coster’s novel about the adventures of Till Eulenspiegel—, and all for my benefit alone. He did not carry on reading poetry aloud after I had grown up.
The poet he read to me most often was Nikolay Nekrasov, the great “civic” poet of the second half of the nineteenth century. He also read Eduard Bagritsky’s “The Lay of Opanas,” a long poem, in the style of a folk epic, about the Russian civil war. Opanas is a simple Ukrainian peasant caught up in the complex struggle between the Reds (Communists), the Whites (anti-Communists), and the Greens (peasant anarchists). Grossman knew the whole of this poem by heart, and often quoted his favorite lines from it. He also read me more modernist poems that were far from standar
Grossman often told me about the Museum of New Western Art, the fine museum of impressionist and early-twentieth-century art based on the collections built up before the Revolution by Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. This museum was closed after the Second World War; the paintings were divided between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum, but many were not exhibited for several decades. He told me about Gauguin, Monet, and Matisse, about Picasso’s Blue Period and Rose Period, and about Matisse’s friend Albert Marquet. I was able to imagine these paintings vividly from his descriptions of them.
I often saw Grossman reading his black volumes of Tolstoy and his red volumes of Dostoevsky, but the writer he loved most of all was Chekhov. The small Marx Publishing House volumes were always on his writing desk. He also very much admired Ibsen and Knut Hamsun. Before the war I saw him read and heard him talk about many other writers and works of literature: Homer, Aristotle, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Catullus (whom he often quoted), Machiavelli, Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe, Shakespeare...
Grossman often reread the work of Isaak Babel—both Red Cavalry and the Odessa stories. He more than once read his favorite stories aloud to us, and there were particular sentences that remained with him throughout his life. He always spoke with passionate enthusiasm about the work of his friend Andrey Platonov. He knew not only the published work but also the unpublished stories and novels.