O’er the Hills of Sorrow…
“o’er the hills of sorrow
There’s a land of the rising sun…” — Vladimir Mayakovsky
“Dear Grandma, once again I did not die. I don’t mean the time I already wrote you about. I die many times.” — Garik Yagoda (Larina 2010, 98)
Perhaps nobody since the revelations of the purges has ever felt bad for Genrikh Yagoda, but it is hard not to be moved by the words that his young son Garik sent to his grandmother Sofia Sverdlova in her period of prison and exile.
Despite Yagoda’s role as an architect of previous state persecution and his loyalty to Stalin, his surviving family was under constant persecution at the hands of the NKVD and GULAG. As Anna Larina puts it, “Yagoda’s entire family was cut out at the root, rooted out of life.” (Larina 2010, 97)
Garik Yagoda may have been one of the lucky ones — he was sent to an orphanage and undoubtedly suffered abuse there, but it was not uncommon for children of arrested individuals to themselves be subject to arrest. According to Stephen Cohen:
“The fate of children who had been “careless in choosing their parents,” another bitter remark attributed to Gumilyov, was especially tragic. As a result of the terror, orphaned children and their “destroyed childhoods” — a few even killed themselves — became a “commonplace story.” Early in Stalin’s mass repressions, he issued a particularly cynical declaration: “The son is not responsible for the father.” In reality, the NKVD had orders “to take” most of the children as well. Older ones, like those I knew and mentioned earlier, were usually sent to the Gulag, but so were many young ones. According to one source, 4 to 5 million children passed through special NKVD-run or Gulag facilities over the years, though not all of them orphaned by the terror.” (Cohen 2011, The Victims Return 29)
The great terror and purges impacted not only the “enemies of the revolution” and Old Bolsheviks who could be a threat to the monopoly of Stalin and his bureaucratic clique over political power in the Soviet Union but people from all strata of Soviet society. Fyodor Roskolnikov, an Old Bolshevik who defected during the terror (and “fell out a window”), deftly observed, “the hero of October and the enemy of the revolution[. . .] all are equally subject to the blows of your scourge, all are whirled in your bloody devil’s roundabout.”(Raskolnikov)
J Arch. Getty and Oleg Naumov give a typical account of a “nobody” caught up in this maelstrom in the form of the bureaucrat Alexander Tivel. Never an oppositionist, Tivel had the misfortune of being caught up in the “crime” of having worked alongside supporters of Grigory Zinoviev, and had worked under former Trotskyist Karl Radek as part of his legitimate activity working for the party.
The price? Tivel himself was interrogated and shot, and his family was destroyed — his wife suffered job loss, eviction, and ultimately imprisonment. Eva Tivel was only released upon the death of Stalin in 1953. It took two decades before she was finally able to get her husband’s sentence overturned, and remove the stigma from herself and her children. (Getty&Naumov 2010, 5)
The story of Eva Tivel is far from unique. Getty and Naumov observe that upon her release she had “joined the legion of widows, relatives, and former convicts who trudged from office to office in search of justice.” (Ibid)
Revolutionaries who had given their lives to serving the cause of the revolution found themselves under persecution from the apparatus that they had built — sometimes held in the same prisons in which they had languished under the Tsarist autocracy. Some of them may have felt that their entire lives had been spent in a hopeless endeavor — others kept hope in future generations completing the Socialist Revolution, and exposing the crimes of Stalinism.
There was not one universal reaction shared by all of the communist victims of Stalinism. People responded in many different ways, as humans are wont to do. For example, there are the cases of two communist true-believers: Anna Larina and Nadezhda Joffe.
Anna Larina was the adoptive daughter of the Old Bolshevik Yuri Larin, and the second wife of Nikolai Bukharin, leading Bolshevik and ideological leader of the right-wing of the Soviet Communist Party, and its international sympathizers in the Communist International. Larina was subjected to eviction from her home, being separated from her young child until his teenage years, and subjected to long periods of imprisonment. Perhaps unbeknownst to herself, Larina and her young child had also been used as a bargaining chip to elicit a false confession by her husband. Bukharin had stood defiantly under interrogation, but he was not willing to subject his wife and children to the same end he knew would be the ultimate outcome of his questioning.
According to Stephen Cohen’s “Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution”:
“On around June 2, 1937, he finally relented “only after the investigators threatened to kill his newborn son. This was no idle threat. “Wives of Enemies of the People,” with their children, were routinely arrested and used as hostages.” (Cohen 1980, Bukharin 375)
Despite the sacrifice made by Bukharin to protect his family, the Stalinist apparatus would not so easily let them escape from its grip. Larina would find herself first evicted from her home, and later subjected to further repression. Larina was initially exiled to Astrakhan, but subsequently, she would be subjected to a long series of arrests:
“I was sent to a camp in Tomsk for family members of so-called enemies of the people; on the way, I was held in transit cells in Saratov and Sverdlovsk; after several months in Tomsk, I was arrested a second time and sent to isolation prison in Novosibirsk, from Novosibirsk, I was transferred to a prison near Kemerovo, where after three months I was taken out and put on the train for Moscow.” (Larina 2010, 41)
While in prison Larina would experience repeated interrogation by whatever persecutor-in-chief was in Stalin’s good graces at the moment and would repeatedly be threatened with execution several different times if she refused to cooperate and implicate her husband and others in invented crimes. (Larina 2010, 88) Beria, on the other hand, advised her “If you want to live, then shut up about Bukharin!”(Larina 2010, 203) During this period of time, she would ultimately discover that her child had been placed in a children’s home. (Larina 2010, 77) She would not see him again for several years.
Despite this, she remained faithful to her husband’s request to transmit his ideas to future generations and to not “feel malice about anything. Remember that the great cause of the USSR lives on, and this is the most important thing. Personal fates are transitory and wretched by comparison.” (Larina 2010, 355) Larina would live to see the end of the USSR that she and her husband had dedicated their lives to and suffered so much in service of. Despite this, she would succeed in clearing her husband’s name, and he has become a well-known figure once again both among socialists, and academic history.
Nadezhda Joffe came from the exact opposite side of the Soviet political spectrum. Daughter of Adolph Joffe, a Soviet diplomat and left opposition leader, Nadezhda would herself take up the cross of the Left Opposition — ultimately being one of the only pre-purge Trotskyists to survive to tell her tale. (Her mother Maria also survived to publish a memoir) Joffe’s suffering under Stalin’s grip began much earlier than many others.
Her father committed suicide in 1927 in protest against Trotsky’s expulsion from the party, and after having been denied urgent medical care by the Stalin-Bukharin bloc in the party leadership. He left a letter expressing his feelings of having no other choice, expressing his optimism about the cause of the Left Opposition, and saying to his comrade Trotsky: “ I do not doubt that the moment is not so far distant when you will again resume the position in the Party which is yours by right. Do not then forget my wife and my children.”(Joffe 1995, 62 ) Trotsky, unfortunately, could no more protect Joffe’s family than he could protect his own.
Unlike many other people who found themselves facing charges in the same period, Joffe faced charges for her own conduct — she had joined the Left Opposition at the time of its foundation and had already been exiled — while heavily pregnant — to Krasnoyarsk in August 1929. (Joffe 1995, 71)
In 1936 Joffe would be arrested again and sent to the notorious labor camp in Kolyma. Her two youngest children would be born here, and her husband Pavel would be executed during this period. (Joffe 1995, 156)
While in a transfer prison in Kuibyshev (Samara) in 1950 Joffe came to realize the extent to which the families of executed Old Bolsheviks had continued to be subjected to repression. No longer were only immediate family members caught up in the dragnet of the purges, but even very distant relatives:
“When I was in the cell I came into a new category of prisoners — relatives. In 1937 there had been ChSIRs, family members of a traitor to the motherland. These were mainly wives, but sometimes children. Now, it turned out, they were arresting all relatives, even the most distant ones. Next to me was a young girl, the grandniece of Krestinsky. She had never laid eyes on him. When he was shot in 1937, she was eight years old. There were many such distant relatives in prison.” (Joffe 1995, 213)
Joffe remained a defiant revolutionary into her old age and until her death. Following her own rehabilitation after Stalin’s death she was also able to get her husband posthumously reinstated into the Communist Party, something she thought important for her children: “I want the children to know that their father lived as a Communist and died as a Communist.”(Joffe 1995, 230) She finished her memoir with this afterword:
Many of those whom Stalin considered to be the Opposition paid with years of exile, prison and camps for fighting him, and for understanding that the socialism which had been built in the Soviet Union was not the same socialism about which the best minds of mankind had dreamed. I would like my readers to remember this short afterword of mine. (Joffe 1995, 237)
Joffe would remain in the Soviet Union until its fall in 1991, after which she would move to New York City with her family. She passed away in Brooklyn after having a stroke in 1999. (Halyard 1999)
A highly contrasting case is that of Margarete Buber-Neumann, wife of German Comintern representative Heinz Neumann and herself a leading journalist working for the German Communist Party. Like many Communists from countries where Fascists had taken power, Buber-Neumann and her husband ended up in the Soviet Union. They would not receive the welcome that one would hope for. First her husband, and later Margarete herself were caught up in the purges. Margarete spent two years in prison and labor camps in the USSR, only to be greeted on the other side not by freedom, but by being handed over to the Nazis during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Margarete would subsequently spend five more years in Ravensbrück concentration camp near Berlin. Unlike Larina or Joffe, Margarete had come to a completely different conclusion about the Soviet Union and its future.
While Larina and Joffe had held hope in the eventual triumph of communism in every way different from that Stalinism claimed to be building, Buber-Neumann had concluded that there was a qualitative equivalence between Fascism and Stalin-style “Communism”:
“Between the misdeeds of Hitler and those of Stalin, in my opinion, there exists only a quantitative difference. To be sure, Communism as an idea was originally positive, and National Socialism never was positive; it was, since its origin and from its beginning, criminal in its aims and its programme. I don’t know if the Communist idea, if its theory, already contained a basic fault or if only the Soviet practice under Stalin betrayed the original good idea and established in the Soviet Union a kind of Fascism.” (Buber-Neumann 2008, 300)
While Buber-Neumann leaves open the possibility that Stalin had betrayed socialism as opposed to having been its inescapable outcome, her future political trajectory would be to the right, and she forever parted ways with the Socialist movement of which she had long been a member.
All three of the aforementioned subjects were communists before falling victims to the terror, but they exhibited entirely different reactions to their persecution. Surely personality must play a part, but on the other hand, they also hold many differences in their background as well. While Buber-Neumann was a veteran of the German Communist movement and sacrificed many years to the cause of Socialism, Larina and Joffe were the children of revolutionary leaders of the Bolshevik revolution. Larina was the wife of a leading figure who purported to have an alternative path to Stalinism, while Joffe was herself a militant of the Left Opposition.
Buber-Neumann could denounce her past views as those of someone who didn’t know better, and could simply move on with her life. Larina and Joffe could not do the same simply out of virtue of who they were — they carried with them a name deeply wound with the history and fate of the Soviet Union, and an inheritance around which was constructed a large part of their own identity.
Larina and Joffe remained politically a world apart in terms of the communist movement and might not have had much to say to each other if they had met, but to brush off all their hard work, and that of their family and comrades as a failure — this was not a choice either easily could have made. Their identity was bound up with the fate of the Soviet Union. This, of course, cannot be taken as the only factor. Some did not share this pedigree but also remained loyal to the ideals of the Bolshevik revolution, and it is well known that Stalin’s own daughter would defect to the United States, having faced her own kind of torture during this period. (Sullivan 2016, 8)
Some other people considered themselves good communists but were forced to flee the USSR to be able to speak out against what they saw as a Stalinist betrayal. For example: The high-ranking Old Bolshevik Fyodor Raskolnikov, and the NKVD agent Ignace Reiss. Raskolnikov’s wife Larissa Reissner, herself a towering revolutionary figure, was “lucky” enough to have passed away from an illness in the 1920s, and was spared the fate of her husband and many of her comrades. Ignace Reiss had long been stationed out of the country in a clandestine capacity but was suddenly ordered to return to the Soviet Union and understood that he would not be able to leave again alive.
In 1937 he wrote a letter denouncing Stalin and announcing that he was going to join the Trotskyist movement. Elisabeth Poretsky, the wife of Ignace Reiss, would follow her husband to hiding in Switzerland along with their son, and would suffer the pressure of living with a “marked man”.(Poretsky 1970, 228) Within a month her husband would be murdered by the NKVD. Poretsky suspected that she too had been meant to be killed by Gertrude Schildbach, a German Communist and NKVD agent who had worked under her husband, and previously a personal friend. Schildbach apparently either became nervous or had second thoughts about killing her friend. Strychnine-laced candies were found in her trash can — likely meant originally to be given to Poretsky.(Poretsky 1970, 236)
Poretsky would for a time continue to associate with the Trotskyist movement and would write several works on the history of the Soviet Union. Eventually, she would find herself in the United States and gradually fell out of active politics. She would be pursued by the Dies Committee — she refused to inform, despite all that the Stalinists had done to her. (Poretskty 1970, 269)
Mountains of historical work have been written on the tendency of revolutions to turn ultimately on the very revolutionaries that have led it. In this case, the revolution not only ate its children, but it’s grandchildren as well. Mountains of historical and polemical works have been written as well about the possibilities of an alternative — whether a Bukharin or Trotsky might have been able to prevent all of this carnage — this is beside the point.
Bukharin had hoped that a new generation of Bolsheviks would rehabilitate his legacy, and get the Soviet Union on the right path. Trotsky banked on the everyday worker in Russia and thought they would push out the bureaucrats and restore Soviet Democracy. Hopes like this animated many devoted people in the history of the Soviet Union and this no doubt helped keep people like Larina and Joffe going in the most difficult of times as well. Neither of these things happened, but one thing has: the voices of the devoured children of the revolution, and its survivors are finally being dug up from what Larina called the “dirty spots” of history. A silenced generation is given a voice once more, and this voice cannot help but indict not only Stalinism but the autocracy in contemporary “free” Russia as well.
Buber-Neumann, Margarete, and Edward Fitzgerald. Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler. London: Pimlico, 2008.
Cohen, Stephen F. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: a Political Biography, 1888–1938. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
________. 2011. The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin. London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd.
Getty, John Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov.. The road to terror: Stalin and the self-destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
Helen Halyard, “Nadezhda Joffe 1906–1999: A Socialist Opponent of Stalinism.” Workers’ Liberty, no. 57 (September 1999).
Joffe, Nadezhda, and Frederick S. Choate. 1995. Back in Time: My Life, My Fate, My Epoch : The Memoirs of Nadezhda A. Joffe. Oak Park, Mich: Labor Publications.
Larina, Anna. This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow. London: Hutchinson Random House, 2010.
Poretsky, Elisabeth K. Our Own People: a Memoir of ‘Ignace Reiss’ and His Friends. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970.
Raskolnikov, Fyodor. “Raskolnikov’s Open Letter to Stalin.” https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1918/raskolnikov/ilyin/ch08.htm.
Sullivan, Rosemary. Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. HarperCollins UK. 2016.
