Stalin's Meteorologist by Olivier Rolin

Author:Olivier Rolin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Nonfiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

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at the end of October 1937, 1,116 prisoners embark for Kem and from that moment all trace of them is lost for sixty years. It is a dismal autumn day, says Chirkov, the ship sets sail, its trail fades into the grey water, and for a long while it is still visible heading westwards, towards Kem, under a plume of vapor that mingles with the low, grey cloud, and then all that can be seen is the steam, then nothing. (There were probably several ships, or several voyages—I doubt that over 1,000 people can be crammed into the Udarnik, even deep in the hold.) Those 1,116 captives vanished with the steam from the ship into the bloody night of what today we call the Great Terror. Are we capable of imagining the horror of the endless wait, for years on end? Varvara, Alexey Feodosievich’s wife, receives no more letters. He told her not to worry if she didn’t hear from him for a while, that it didn’t mean something had happened to him. So, at first, she tries not to worry. Then, as the months go by and the silence persists, she starts trying to obtain information, but draws a blank. In May 1939 she appeals to Beria, who has replaced Yezhov at the head of the NKVD: “All my petitions have gone unanswered. I request that you let me know where my husband is at present, as a matter of urgency.” On June 28, she writes to the Prosecutor General of the USSR, the department headed by Vyshinsky, and it is they who eventually reply that Alexey Feodosievich is alive, that in 1937 his case was reviewed and that he has been sentenced to a further ten years without the right to send or receive letters, and transferred to a faraway camp whose name cannot be disclosed.

Ten years without being allowed to send or receive any correspondence—we now know that means death. But at the time, people do not know that, or rather, since death is everywhere—“The stars of the dead stand above us,” wrote Akhmatova in Requiem—it can hide behind this formula as behind any words, any face. But people probably do not imagine that on top of the Soviet state’s extreme brutality there is also the barefaced lie, that this Moloch that devours hundreds of thousands of lives also acts like a child caught misbehaving, that those who have no scruples about mass murder are afraid their crimes will be discovered. And so Varvara Ivanovna does not lose hope. Ten years—ten years without news—is an unbearably long time, but perhaps she will see her husband again one day. World war breaks out, with the USSR initially on the side of the predators alongside the Nazis, then, on June 22, 1941, Germany invades the Soviet Union and marches to the gates of Moscow. Evacuated to Magnitogorsk, in the Urals, Varvara takes her husband’s belongings with her, so he’ll be able to retrieve them on his return. The war

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