Word for Word

By Lilianna Lungina, as told to Oleg Dorman

24

In June we studied for our exams. We were preparing to take, among others, an exam in nineteenth century literature. We studied together in groups. Oleg Troyanovsky, who was taking part in our little group, and whom I was expecting to bring over some lecture notes to me at home, called me up and said:

“You know, Lili, I was listening to the radio last night...” Now, Troyanovsky’s radio was not just some little black speaker, the kind that could be found in every household, but a huge, splendid, state-of the-art apparatus that they had brought with them from America. It was a record player combined with a radio, which could pick up western radio broadcasts. Oleg said, “I’m not sure, Lili, it was hard for me to make it out, but I think war broke out last night. I think Hitler crossed over the border.”

I said, “Come on, Oleg. You can’t be serious!”

“Well, don’t quote me, but that’s what I gathered from it.” He brought me the lecture notes.

“Oleg, what were you saying over the phone?”

He said, “Well, I tried to tune to the broadcast again in the morning, but they jammed it all. Listen to the Latest News at noon.” At twelve we turned on the radio, and listened to the Latest News. There were reports that some kolkhoz members won a competition somewhere, a shock workers brigade turned in so-many tons of coal, and so on. We listened to all this, then wondered: What is Oleg up to? Why is he trying to scare us? Suddenly we heard: “In fifteen minutes, Molotov will address the nation.” Molotov spoke, and told us that war had been declared.

We all rushed headlong over to the IPhLH. We gathered around our Latin teacher, Maria Grabar-Passek – she was a strict, dry, very no-nonsense person. She stood in the middle of the landing, surrounded by all of us, weeping openly. Tears streamed down her face. We were bewildered.

“Why are you crying?”

“Children” – she also addressed us as ‘children’ – “you have no idea what war is. I lived through World War I. It was horrific. It means that an era of horror is upon us.”

We, of course, were all thinking, what’s a little war? The Soviet Union is so powerful. In a week or two, or a month, it will all be over. Yet this image of Mrs. Grabar-Passek sobbing on the landing still remains my first image of the war.

No one knew why there was no word from Stalin. He kept silent. Now it’s common knowledge, but I want to tell young people, who might not be aware of this, that less than two months prior to the outbreak of war, Stalin had destroyed the remaining top military commanders of the country. One of my friends lived in Lefortovo, next to the prison. It was the most dreadful of the Moscow prisons, and it was there they were holding the arrested officers. After the war, my friend told me that for two nights in the beginning of May 1941, no one had been able to sleep. Rounds of rifle fire rang out all night long. They were executing those who had been imprisoned, for the most part, in 1937, the year when Marshal Tukhachevsky, unjustly accused of being a traitor and working for Germany, had been executed.

Only at the beginning of July did Stalin make a speech over the radio. He addressed us then not as “comrades,” but as “brothers and sisters.”

Soon the bombardments began, and air raid alarms sounded all over Moscow. My mother was deathly afraid of them. She was absolutely terrified. Of the bombardments, of war itself. I was faced with a choice. I could enter the labor force to support the war effort, as most of my girlfriends had, since the boys had already volunteered to fight. Zhenya Asterman, Mark Bershadsky – they had signed up immediately. Girls were recruited to dig the trenches. The other option was to consider my mother. Though my friends greeted it with censure, I decided that I had an obligation to consider my mother. I felt I had to take her away. None of us believed, of course, that the war would last so long. We thought it was a question of a few summer months... I went to the Moscow Komsomolets, since I had begun writing for them, and said to Kronhaus, “I need to take my mother away.” He said, “Fine, you can take our train.” So he organized this. They were going to Kazan.

Mother and I did everything the worst way possible, without any foresight, of course. True, someone did persuade me to take a winter coat at the last minute; but, for the most part, we didn’t take any warm things with us. We hardly took a thing. We locked up the apartment as if we were going on a picnic, and left. We had a single suitcase each. From the minute we got on the train, I felt that my mother was the child, and I was the full-grown adult who was responsible for her.

25

The Kazan Train Station was already frightening and chaotic. I still cringe when I remember how crammed it was with people, this crowd that swayed to and fro like a wave, first to one side, then to the other.

People were pushed up against each other as though they were in a packed bus. Mama was afraid to stay alone, but I had to leave her to find the local office of the Union of Journalists, as I had been instructed to do. I took whatever assignment they gave me, naturally. They appointed me senior correspondent (which was absurd, since there were only two of us in the office) at the district newspaper in Naberezhnye Chelny, which was then a village. (Now it has become a city.) The paper was called the Communist Banner.

To get to Naberezhnye Chelny we had to go by steamboat, because there were as yet no railroads leading to it. Someone helped me buy the tickets. I was still very young and inexperienced, twenty-one years old and still wet behind the ears. So I had to rely on the assistance of strangers.

We stood for two days and nights on the pier – we couldn’t sleep, we couldn’t sit. In fact there was nowhere to sit anyway. The suitcases were standing upright for lack of space. Finally, we made it onto a steamboat.

The journey to Naberzhnye Chelny, which normally took two days, lasted four. There was even something romantic about it. A southern night, summer, stars, you stroll up and down the deck the whole night long... One of the passengers was an interesting young Polish man who was fleeing Poland, and we got into a conversation. In short, I’ve always had an adventurous streak... There I was sailing into the unknown. I had no idea what a small-town paper was, what a real Russian backwater was like (and this was, moreover, Tatar territory)... But I still remember that night as if it were yesterday: a dark starry night, the broad Kama River – I sensed the enormity of the world, and our paltriness in the face of it. There was something absolutely enchanting about it; and something frightening, too.

We arrived at Naberzhnye Chelny. I left Mama sitting on the pier, and went alone to find the local newspaper offices.

A small village with one main street – in other words, on a single street there were several two-story houses, like they used to build them: some sort of stone structure for the first story, and the second story built out of wood. The district committee was in one such building, the executive committee in another. All the other buildings were wooden, from the ground up. A true village. Dusty, on the higher bank of the River Kama, and surrounded by forests. Beautiful.

Life smiled at me once more. The editor-in-chief, the only editor on this paper, turned out to be a wonderful human being. His name was Darichev. I remember him: a person of natural talent, a complete autodidact – he had taught himself to read and write. He was very bright, a person with deep convictions, very humane, with liberal views. In addition to all this, he was an artist, a primitivist; his work appealed to me very much.

I had to look for a place to live. No one wanted to rent anything out: they were afraid of Muscovites. I knocked on the doors of at least twenty little cottages, but they didn’t let me in. It was a very unpleasant moment, but Darichev comforted me, saying, “It’s all right. We’ll find something for you, Lilya.” Indeed, we were able to rent a room on the main street, on the second floor – but only for barter. No one wanted to take money. My terrible landlady told me, “Every month you will give me one of your belongings – shoes, a dress, a sweater. These are the terms, if you want to live in my house.” I said, “What about when I run out of things?” “Then out you go,” she said. “I don’t need your money. What is this money worth to me?”

We had no choice. We settled into this little room. Darichev asked me, “Do you know how to harness a horse?” “Good lord!” I said. “Where could I have learned to do that?” “You can’t get along here without knowing that,” he said. “Every day you’ll have to drive over to another village, another kolkhoz, and collect data.” “Fine,” I said, “show me how.” He taught me how to harness and hitch up a horse in one day. It turned out to be not as difficult as I expected, and two or three days later, I set out, very nervous, because I was afraid the harness would come undone. . . I didn’t understand a thing, didn’t know what I was doing. Just imagine: a city girl, with Parisian beginnings, hitching up a horse and traveling through the forest to a Tatar village. In a horse and cart. And so off I went.

I found myself in a Tatar village where people could barely speak Russian. Still, the management of the kolkhoz spoke enough Russian to explain to me that the grain hadn’t been harvested, that there was no way to bring in the grain because all the men had been drafted, naturally, and the women had been mobilized to cut and process peat, that only old women were left to work in the fields, and that there was not enough fodder for the cattle – in short, they painted a picture of the complete collapse of agriculture.

I took notes on everything he said. They hitched up the horse for me, and I set out again, back the way I had come. Somewhere along the road, the horse stopped and refused to budge. He just stood still. What was I supposed to do? The forest there is wild and deep, very frightening. It began growing dark. I heard strange sounds, the wind started howling. I thought I would lose my mind if I had to stay there overnight. What was I to do? I buried my head in the horse’s neck and wept. Suddenly, the horse started to move again. I think it just felt sorry for me. Somehow or other we made it home. Someone helped me unharness the horse – it still wasn’t easy for me. Later, by the way, I mastered it, and it wasn’t at all hard. Practice makes perfect; that’s a wonderful saying. Remember the passage in Bulgakov? “ ‘How dexterously you tipple!’ ‘It comes with practice.’ ” In short, it turned out that a French-Jewish-Russian girl could harness a horse and cart like the best of them.

The next morning I went to report to Darichev. I said, “You know, things are so bad at the kolkhoz, it’s time to sound the alarm.” He said:

“Oh, come now! Who’s interested in that? Forget everything you saw. You and I will write an article together. ‘The grain has already been successfully harvested... ’ ”

I said, “Are you joking?”

He said, “No, I’m absolutely serious.”

I said, “Why did you bother to send me there then?”

“Just forget about all that. The paper should contain only life-affirming little pieces, full of hope and a positive outlook.”

I said, “But why did I have to go there, when we could have written the article without all the fuss and bother?”

He said, “What do you mean? You have to familiarize yourself with the material.”

I said, “Are you making fun of me?”

“No, you have to go there, so that when the higher-ups ask whether we are visiting the kolkhozes, I can honestly answer: yes, we are. And then we write what we are supposed to write. That’s all there is to it. And that’s how you and I are going to work.”

I was so upset he could see the horror in my eyes. He said, “Well, I was kind of baffled, too, at first. Before the war, we could allow ourselves to write otherwise now and then – not often, and it still had to be optimistic in tone. But now that the war is on, we can only write positive reports. At the last staff meeting, we were instructed directly: report only what is positive; but go around to the collective farms. So that’s what we’ll do. We’ll go to farms, and write positive reports.”

I must admit that my job at the local newspaper office and my life in Naberezhnye Chelny gave me real insight into the workings of the Soviet system. Until then I had imagined, like many, by the way, that arrests and terror touched only the cities – the industrial centers, where there was some degree of awareness. Here I discovered that the entire country was one single territory, rife with terror, where every second person, or at least every third, ran the risk of arbitrary arrest. There was not a single house in these Russian, half-Tatar, or primarily Tatar, villages (though villages were never viewed as ethnically mixed; a village was considered to be either Russian or Tatar) that was not a victim of this. In every family, at least one member had been arrested. They were arrested for nothing, for taking a handful of grain, for tardiness. There had been a decree that if you were ten minutes late for work... They imprisoned people because there was a “quota” (Darichev, who was privy to everything that was discussed in secret local authorities’ meetings, told me this) specifying how many people in each district had to be sent up every month. I want to talk about this so that people who have forgotten will remember; and young people will know. They followed a plan for arrests. Broken down by district. Completely arbitrary. It didn’t matter who had done what. The smallest infraction would suffice. The cobweb of bans and prohibitions was so dense that it was impossible not to transgress them at some point. Every person was breaking the law by simply breathing. They could gather the numbers they needed with impunity, and every month the KGB (NKVD) managed to fulfill its quota.

Naberezhnye Chelny is on the old “manacle and leg irons” road to Siberia. It has an ancient, pre-Revolutionary prison with very thick walls. It is not large, but very capacious. The room we rented on the second floor of a house looked out onto this prison. Just as they had been many years before, convicts were still being driven down this road. The first time I saw a convoy of prisoners, they were women. Accompanied by guards on horseback, exhausted, bedraggled figures, almost all of them barefoot. Their feet swaddled in rags, carrying satchels of some kind, and surrounded by packs of dogs. I felt I was watching some sort of horror film. It was hard to believe that I was seeing this in real life, all my misgivings about the system notwithstanding... I think it’s important to stress that there is a vast chasm, an impenetrable wall, between speculative notions and perceptions, and what you see with your own eyes, experience with your own senses. It’s one thing when I am sitting here in this room, telling you about it... I knew, of course, that somewhere people were being deported under convoy, that they, most likely, were barefoot, that they collapsed from weakness and hunger. I had even heard that they were guarded by men on horseback, and dogs... But seeing this with my own eyes... How can I tell you what it was like? At a certain moment, even though you are only twenty-one years old, you no longer want to live. I had the feeling that human malice had reached such a fever pitch – that certain people could look on in complete apathy at other people who were utterly broken and full of anguish – I simply didn’t want to take part in life anymore. That was what I felt. I didn’t want to continue living. Then I got used to it. I will say it again: you get used to everything. That first convoy, however, I’ll never forget it. And then I saw convoys in winter... Oh, my.

Lilianna Lungina was a leading literary translator in the Soviet Union. She translated, among many authors, the works of Astrid Lindgren, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Henrich Boll, Knut Hamsun, and Boris Vian. The acclaimed director Oleg Dorman interviewed Lungina for a documentary film based on her life, which was released in 2009 and became one of the most popular television programs in Russian history. The documentary was then transcribed into a book, Подстрочник, which was a bestseller, and which is being released in English this November, by Overlook Press. A short excerpt recounting events of 1941 appears below.

Kolkhoz organizers arrive in a rural village, 1930.

Excerpted from Word for Word: A Translator’s Memoir of Literature, Politics, and Survival in Soviet Russia by Lilianna Lungina as told to Oleg Dorman. Copyright © 2009 by Oleg Dorman. Translation copyright © by Polly Gannon and Ast A Moore. Published in 2014 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. www.overlookpress.com. All rights reserved.

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