Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews Page A

sighed heavily, and told me, wearily, as though she was trying to explain life's hard facts to a child, that it wouldn't be possible. She was not a hard-hearted woman, even after years of busting stupid little people for stupid little crimes. Yet even though she had seen the men's weeping wives and knew the case was trivial, unworthy of the terrible retribution which she was about to unleash, she knew that that afternoon she would type up a full report recommending that the two men be remanded in custody pending trial.
    We were all caught up in it now, the momentum, the grinding wheels. My foreignness meant all this was to be done by the book. The file, the all-important file. We were all forced to follow its course now, step by step, because what had been written could not be unwritten.
     
    The two men spent eleven and a half months in the Butirskaya Prison, one of the most notorious jails in Russia, waiting for a trial date. I eventually got a summons to the trial, but was too scared to go. A friend went instead, to present my excuses. He heard that both brothers had come down with tuberculosis in jail. Even in the absence of the victim, they were convicted, and given a sentence matching the time they'd already served on remand. They had lost their jobs and their families had gone back to Tatarstan. By the time I heard the news the shock and even the memory of the night our lives collided so disastrously had faded. The story was lost, I tried to convince myself, in the Babel of horror stories which swirled in the newsroom where I worked. It was perverse, I told myself, to mourn the fate of guilty men when every day the papers which piled on my desk in drifts were full of terrifying stories of the suffering of innocents.
    But the memory of the horror and the guilt I felt as those two men grovelled before me was buried deep, and it festered. Many Russians, I believe, carry a similar black slime inside themselves made of trauma and guilt and wilful forgetting. It makes a rich compost in which all their hedonism, their treachery, their every pleasure and betrayal, takes root. It's not the same for the cosseted Europeans among whom I grew up, though many of them were convinced they had suffered parental indifference, spousal cruelty or personal failure. No, the average Russian seventeen-year-old, I concluded from my years of wandering the nastier side of the new Russia, had already seen more real abuse and hopelessness and corruption and injustice than most of my English friends had seen in a lifetime. And to survive and be happy, Russians have so much to bury, to wilfully ignore. Small wonder that the intensity of their pleasures and indulgences is so sharp; it has to match the quality of their suffering.
     
    For days after the Bibikovs' Chernigov apartment was searched there was no news. Boris did not return from his holiday. The NKVD kept telling Martha that she would be informed as soon as there were any developments. Varya was sent away to her relatives in the country, and Martha and her two daughters lived in the apartment's bathroom and the kitchen because all the other rooms were locked and sealed. Martha bought food with the money she had left in her purse, and accepted the charity of their remaining neighbours.
    Bibikov's colleagues knew nothing - in fact many had themselves disappeared, and the rest were either terrified or naïvely confident that the NKVD would soon correct its error.
    There was a moment of panic when Martha left the children alone to eat their cherry soup, a Ukrainian summer treat, while she went once again to the NKVD office for news. Lenina was reading a book her father had given her, and didn't notice that her little sister Lyudmila had stuffed all the cherry stones up her nose so far that they could not be extracted.
    'I'm a money box,' Lyudmila told her sister as she pushed up another stone. There was uproar when their mother returned. Lyudmila was rushed to hospital to have the stones