Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [84]
Soviet citizens with foreign connections were no less suspect. First in line were the “diaspora nationalities,” the Poles, Germans, and Karelian Finns who had relatives and contacts across the border, as well as the Balts, Greeks, Iranians, Koreans, Afghans, Chinese, and Romanians scattered across the USSR. According to their own archives, between July 1937 and November 1938, the NKVD convicted 335,513 people in these “national” operations.5 Similar operations would be repeated during and after the war, as we shall see.
But it was not even necessary to speak a foreign language in order to come under suspicion. Anyone with a foreign connection was suspected of spying: stamp collectors, Esperanto enthusiasts, anyone with a pen pal or with relatives abroad. The NKVD also arrested all Soviet citizens who had worked on the Chinese Eastern Railway, a railway line across Manchuria whose origins dated from the Czarist era, and accused them of having spied for Japan. In the camps, they were known as the “Kharbintsy,” after the city of Harbin, where many had lived.6 Robert Conquest describes the arrests of an opera singer who had danced with the Japanese ambassador at an official ball, and of a veterinarian who attended to dogs belonging to foreigners.7
By the late 1930s, most ordinary Soviet citizens had worked out the pattern, and wanted no foreign contacts at all. Karlo Stajner, a Croatian communist with a Russian wife, remembered that “Russians only rarely dared to have private dealings with foreigners . . . My wife’s relatives remained virtual strangers to me. None of them dared visit us. When her relatives learned of our plan to marry, Sonya was warned by all of them ...” 8 Even as late as the mid-1980s—when I first visited the Soviet Union—many Russians remained wary of foreigners, ignoring them or refusing to make eye contact with them on the street.
And yet—not every foreigner was picked up by the police, and not everyone accused of having foreign connections actually did have foreign connections. It also happened that people were picked up for far more idiosyncratic reasons.9 As a result, asking the question “What for?”—the question Anna Akhmatova so disliked—produces a truly astonishing range of ostensible explanations.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s husband, Osip Mandelstam, for example, was arrested for his poetic attack on Stalin:
We live, not feeling the land beneath us
We speak, and ten steps away no one hears us
But where there’s even a whispered conversation
The Kremlin’s mountaineer, murderer, and peasant-slayer will be mentioned.
His fat fingers, like grubs, are greasy
His words, like lead weights, are final
His cockroach moustache sneers
His boot rims shine
And all around him, a gaggle of spineless leaders,
Half-humans, serve as his toys
One whinnies, one purrs, one whines
Only he shouts and points
Throwing decrees like horseshoes
Hitting a groin, a head, an eye—
Every death sentence tastes sweet
For the broad-chested Ossete10
Although different reasons were officially stated, Tatyana Okunevsksaya, one of the Soviet Union’s best-loved film actresses, was arrested, she believed, for refusing to sleep with Viktor Abakumov, the wartime head of Soviet counter-intelligence. To make sure she understood that this was the true reason, she was (she claims) shown an arrest warrant with his signature on it.11 The four Starostin brothers, all of them outstanding soccer players, were arrested in 1942. They always believed it was because their