Siberia

WHY ME?

Pochemu ya

The story of Natalia Khaiutina

daughter of Nikolai Ezhov

Stalin's chief executioner

© Published by Contact - The Netherlands

De Goden hebben honger

by Gerard Jacobs

‘Papa loved only me,’ Natalia Khaiutina tells me proudly. ‘And Stalin,’ she continues. ‘When papa died, he had my name on his lips. “Bring my daughter” – those were his last words – “bring Natasha”. That’s what he called me, Natasha. And then they beat him to death.’

Natalia is about seventy. Big-boned, with a broad face. Grey curls, tousled and unkempt. She’s wearing a dingy, vaguely purple, jogging-suit jacket over a faded grey jumper. She chain-smokes, stubbing out the butts in an empty jar of instant coffee. ‘We loved each other,’ she says. ‘I can’t tell you anything bad about him. I was like a son to him. He adored me. Sometimes we played football together. I still love him.’ She looks at me defiantly. The smile playing around her lips disconcerts me.

I walk over to the window of her flat, no more than one room and a kitchen with an old, dirty, greasy cooker. The walls of her living room are bare, except for a poster of a little lamb and a passport photo of her daughter. There’s a bed standing in the corner.

I look outside at the grey concrete-block houses in this small fishing village on the Sea of Ochotsk. The façades are still decorated with communist agitprop: ‘Work, work, work for your mother country!’ In front of Natalia’s flat is an ice rink. A couple of lanky boys are playing ice hockey with homemade sticks. In the north loom the snow-capped peaks of the Kolyma Mountains, the easternmost part of Siberia. To the left lies the Bay of Magadan. It’s frozen solid. In May the ice will begin to melt, and in August the bay will freeze over again. There are twelve months of winter here, someone told me, and the rest is summer.

It’s stuffy in the room. The windows are frozen shut, the glass clouded from the ice.

‘I came here,’ Natalia tells me as I look out over the bay, ‘to look for him. I knew he was dead, but that was all. I didn’t even have a photograph of him. Nothing at all. I knew there were lots of prisoners here. Maybe one of them could tell me more about papa.’

‘How many women have I talked to in recent years during my travels through Siberia?’ I ask myself as my breath freezes on the window. How many women had remembered how their fathers were arrested and taken away by NKVD agents, never to return?

‘Now I have a photo of papa,’ Natalia continues enthusiastically behind me. She walks to a dilapidated cupboard. She keeps her personal papers in the bottom drawer, in a large, half-ripped-open envelope.

I remember Julia.

Julia lived in Vorkuta, on the other side of Siberia, some 13,000 kilometres from here. Her father had been arrested on the evening of his birthday. It was 1937, a lifetime ago. But Julia still remembered word for word how he had said goodbye to her and spoken words of encouragement. ‘Don’t lose heart, girl,’ he said as he was being taken away. ‘Don’t doubt yourself. Otherwise you’ll die.’

Later on Julia was arrested as well. The daughter of an enemy of the people, they had called her. For years she had been locked up in the prison camps around Vorkuta. Thousands of prisoners had died in the coal mines and been thrown into unmarked mass graves. Julia had survived. Calmly, she told me her life story. Next to her on the bed lay her favourite book, Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind. She read it sometimes, when she felt in need of the support of a fellow victim. She didn’t dare talk to her children about the past, she told me. They wouldn’t understand, they wouldn’t believe it.

Natalia proudly shows me the photograph of her father. ‘He was a little squirt, don’t you think?’ she says, laughing. She has a coughing fit, then looks again lovingly at her father’s photo. It shows a small man in uniform, bad teeth, thick dark hair, dark eyes. He looks away from the camera. ‘You can beat me,’ says Natalia unexpectedly, ‘you can tie me to the radiator, but I’ll never say anything bad about him. Never. Never.’

I remember Galina.

Galina lived in a village by the River Ob. She was around seventy when I first met her in her small wooden house in Pushkin Street. She was thirteen when her father was arrested on 3 September 1937 by men from the NKVD, Stalin’s security police. She remembered the exact date, and also his last words: ‘I’m innocent, girl. You have to do your best at school. This is a misunderstanding. I’ll be home again soon.’

‘Father never came back,’ she told me, fighting to hold back her tears. Later, much later, Galina discovered that shortly after his arrest he had been executed. He was buried in a mass grave in the prison garden. In 1979 the river bank on which the prison stood had caved in and the bodies had fallen into the river. More than 1,500 of them, according to Galina. They didn’t re-bury the dead. Instead, the authorities arranged for a tug boat to grind up the corpses with its screw propeller.

I think often of Julia and Galina and the hundreds of survivors in Siberia who have told me the stories of their lives during that horrible period when millions of Soviet citizens were taken prisoner and executed or banished to camps in the Gulag Archipelago.

Now I’m sitting across the table from Natalia, together with Vladimir Sukhatsky, my loyal travelling companion who has accompanied me around Siberia for seventeen years, following the great rivers, listening to the stories of the inhabitants of this god-forsaken land.

But Natalia is different. Her papa is different. Her story is different.

Natalia is the daughter of Nikolai Ezhov, Stalin’s chief executioner and head of the communist secret police, officially called the Peoples’ Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD. Her father was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The name of that small, uniformed man whose picture Natalia so lovingly holds – who taught Natasha to ride a bicycle and adored her until he fell from grace and was shot by order of Stalin – that name still sends a chill down the spine of every Russian.

‘I love him,’ says Natalia, and again I have the feeling that she’s challenging me. ‘He never mistreated me. Not me. When the truth came out, when the stories appeared in the newspapers, I was shocked. I didn’t know anything about it. I was five years old when he was arrested. I was still just a child. I always loved him. I only have a few years to live. I’m standing with one foot in the grave. I’m not going to change my mind now. No, no, no,’ she says resolutely, ‘nyet.’ She lights another cigarette and blows the smoke in my face. There are tears in the corners of her eyes, but she keeps looking hard at me.

I look away from her. On the table lies a photo of Natalia and her mother. Natalia is about four years old, sitting in a wicker chair in the garden of her father’s country house. Her mother leans over the back of the chair, a pretty woman in a summer dress, slender, with short, dark, curly hair. ‘I have the same name as mama, Khaiutina. Mama died in hospital,’ she tells me with little emotion in her voice. ‘She was poisoned. She was given a box of chocolates full of luminal. Now people say that my father sent it, that he murdered her. I don’t know,’ she says, ‘I hear so many different stories.’ For the first time she seems vulnerable. She opens her eyes wide and raises her hands in the air. ‘How can I believe that?’

I feel sorry for Natalia, defending her father so fanatically. ‘What was Stalin like?’ I ask to relieve the tension. ‘Did you see him sometimes?’

‘Of course I knew Stalin,’ she answers. Her self-confidence seems to return. ‘I called him Uncle Josik. He loved that. When I called him Uncle Josik, he beamed and stroked my head. He often came to see us at the dacha. He always asked me how I felt. He was small, but not as small as papa. Stalin liked to have small people around him.’

I ask if she also loved Uncle Josik. She’s shocked at the question. ‘No, of course not,’ she says hastily. ‘He frightened me. I never heard him coming. He was forever creeping around. He always gave me a fright.’

I take a photograph from the stack: Stalin and Natalia’s father walking along together, having a lively conversation on their way to a military parade in Red Square. ‘It’s all Stalin’s fault,’ she says angrily. ‘He ruined my whole life. I lost everything. Everything.’

Natalia tells us that after her mother’s death and the arrest of her father in 1939 she was sent to a children’s home in Penza, a city to the south of Moscow. ‘I was seven years old,’ she recalls. ‘The only thing I was allowed to take was my doll. Everyone was always scolding me. I was beaten so hard. I didn’t understand why. They called me 'the child of an enemy of the people', but what had I done wrong? I was still just a child.’ She talks without stopping, smoking one cigarette after the other. ‘They told me I had to forget my parents, but I missed my father. I didn’t even have a picture of him. After his arrest they destroyed all the photographs of him. They ripped his portrait out of all the books, as though he had never existed. I was supposed to forget him. It was so cruel. One day, when I couldn’t stand the sorrow any longer, I put a knot in a rope. I threw it over a branch and tried to hang myself. The rope broke and I fell to the ground. Do you know what they said? “You stupid cow. If you’d succeeded, they would have punished us”. So they beat me. They only thought of themselves.’

In Penza, Natalia learned to play the accordion and after her studies she was sent to teach music in Yagodnoye in the Kolyma Mountains. ‘I never married,’ she tells me unasked. ‘There was a boy in Penza, a student. He wanted to become a watchmaker. I loved him, but he didn’t want to marry. He was afraid. He knew who my father was. Everyone was afraid of me, everyone hated me, but what had I done wrong?’ She looks at me questioningly, as though after her long, sad life I’m the one who will finally tell her the answer.

Nikolai Ezhov was Stalin’s chief executioner. He cleansed the communist party of Stalin’s political opponents. He cleansed the army, then the civil service. Ezhov led the great campaign of terror that lasted from July 1937 to November 1938. More than 1½ million people were arrested in that period. Nearly 700,000 prisoners were executed by order of Ezhov. More than 18,000 wives of ‘enemies of the people’ were arrested, and 25,000 children were sent to orphanages.

The lists that Ezhov drew up of ‘the enemies of the people’ grew longer and longer until finally the whole country, paralysed by fear and deprived of its ruling elite, came to a standstill. Stalin had him arrested and replaced by Beria. After his arrest, Ezhov was tortured and confessed to being ‘a foreign spy’ and ‘a homosexual’. He was executed on 2 February 1940. His name was purged from all official documents. Photographs were retouched to remove his likeness. And the apple of his eye, the little Natasha, whom he had taught to ride a bicycle, was – by order of the decree that Ezhov himself had issued – banished to a children’s home in Penza as ‘the child of an enemy of the people’.

‘What did I do wrong?’ Natalia repeats stubbornly.

I remember the pain in Galina’s angelic face when she pointed to the place on the bank of the River Ob where her father was shot. I hear Julia’s brittle voice as she tells about the bitter cold of the winter night when her hair froze to the mattress in the barracks where she was serving her time.

Ezhov, Natalia’s father, was not a bureaucrat like Adolf Eichmann. Ezhov often tortured his victims with his own hands, and his close colleagues received the same treatment once they had fallen from grace. He personally shot prisoners and kept the used bullets in his study as a souvenir. Then he had his chauffeur drive him home to teach little Natasha to ride her bicycle, I think bitterly.

‘What did I do wrong?’ Natalia repeats. ‘Why was I punished for what my father did?’

In 1995 Natalia submitted a request to have her father rehabilitated. ‘Papa did not kill those people,’ she says determinedly. ‘He was only doing his job. Stalin gave the orders. Papa believed in Stalin, he worshipped him. When papa died, he had Stalin’s name on his lips. That’s how much he loved Stalin.’ She has tears in her eyes. ‘Papa was a small man. He was afraid of being beaten. They beat him to death. Then they put a bullet in his head. That’s how it happened.’

Natalia stops talking. We smoke a cigarette in silence. ‘How could it happen, Natalia?’ I finally ask. ‘How could your father kill so many people so cruelly?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answers softly, and all defiance seems to have disappeared from her voice. ‘I can’t understand it. He was given his orders. He carried them out.’

‘He also gave orders, Natalia,’ I say cautiously. ‘He gave orders. He issued commands. He compiled the lists of names of the people who were to be arrested.’

‘I understand now that my father is also guilty,’ she admits in a weak voice. ‘I also understand why they can’t rehabilitate him. But they were all guilty, all of them.’

She looks at the photograph of her father and the entire Politburo assembled on Red Square. ‘Stalin, Kaganovitsch, Molotov, they’re all guilty. But they blame my father. Why do they talk about Stalin again as though he were a hero? Why does his daughter live in luxury in Moskow? Why do I live my life in fear? Why am I followed by the KGB? What have I done wrong? Why is my name not cleared? Why am I not rehabilitated? I don’t exist,’ she complains bitterly. ‘My file has been lost. And now they say that I’m not even Ezhov’s daughter, that I’m a foster child, that papa killed my parents, that mama isn’t my mother.’

‘No one wants to help me,’ Natalia continues sadly. Then she murmurs, ‘why me?’

'De Goden hebben honger' was published in the Netherlands in 2003 by publishing house Contact..

Gerard Jacobs has been travelling through Siberia since 1986. De Goden hebben Honger is a poetic but razorsharp eye-witness account of life in Siberia written during a period of over 15 years: oral history at its best, from remote places like Vorkuta, Kolpasjevo, Susuman and Kemerovo. The book penetrates deep into the history of Siberia and describes the transition from the Sovjet Gulag Archipelago into modern day Russia.

The discovery of a massgrave in the village of Kolpasjevo on the bank of the river Ob was filmed in 1994. The documentary won first prize at the filmfestival in the Netherlands and in Munich, Germany and a DVD is included in the book.

I take a photo from the stack, avoiding her gaze. Natalia is standing with a beautiful young woman in the snow. ‘Yes, that’s mama.’ Her voice is flat, her face shows no emotion. ‘Was she a nice mama?’ I ask, by way of breaking the silence. ‘She was never there,’ she answers stiffly. ‘Mama was always gone. She was always working.’ She puts the photo back on the stack. ‘Papa,’ she says affectionately, picking up the photo of Nikolai Ezhov. Her face is radiant, happy as a child.

‘Natalia, why did you ask that your father be rehabilitated?’ asks Vladimir. ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ she answers spitefully. ‘There was a historian from St Petersburg, Yevgeni Shoshkov. He wanted to write papa’s biography. He sent me a letter, asking all kinds of questions. I never talked to him. He never came here. We corresponded by post. He’s an invalid, and I’m penniless.’ She bursts out laughing and walks over to her cupboard. She rummages around in the bottom drawer and then plonks the biography down on the table in front of me. ‘Here,’ she says triumphantly. ‘He wrote to tell me that what they say about papa is all a lie. Shoshkov did new research in the archives. He discovered new information. It was all a lie. Papa was innocent, he said.’

I look at the cover but don’t dare read the title of the book out loud: Opravdaniu ne podledzit: Rehabilitation is impossible.

‘You don’t believe me, do you? she says defiantly. She doesn’t care, I think. I know the book, I know the conclusions: Ezhov was certainly not a foreign spy, nor is there any proof that he killed his wife, but he was indeed responsible for the campaign of terror. ‘He was not a victim of Stalin’s regime,’ maintains Shoshkov, ‘but a link in the chain of terror.’

‘Everyone forsook him,’ says Natalia stubbornly. ‘Even his own family. No one defended him. Only me.’

Her eyes flash fire. When I ask why she can’t just let the matter be, she goes right on talking. ‘I did a crossword puzzle in the newspaper. Period of extreme terror, they asked. One word, twelve letters. Ezhovshchina. The period in which papa worked for the NKVD. That’s how they talk about him. What would you do? She raises her voice. ‘What would you do?’ Now she’s screaming. ‘What would you do if it were your father?’ She glares at me.

‘You could have kept quiet,’ I answer cautiously, ‘out of respect for the dead.’

She shakes her head angrily and yells right through me. ‘Nobody loves him. Nobody.’ She shakes her fist in my face. ‘Everyone hates him. Everyone says he’s the devil. They call him the bloody dwarf. But what about me? Why should I have kept quiet any longer? I’d already hit rock bottom. Everyone has always hated me, my whole life long. Nobody needs me. Nobody loves me. Nobody dares to marry me. Why shouldn’t I fight for my father?’ She fixes her eyes on me. ‘Would you renounce your father?’ Now she’s screaming again. ‘Would you renounce your father?’

‘Why me?’ she says with a deep sigh, the anger subsiding. She looks away from me, lights a cigarette, and stares out the window. A foreigner from a country whose name she’s never heard before. ‘What do you know about it?’ she says.

‘Pochemu ya,’ she says softly, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Why me? Why did all of this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this? I was just a little girl. Pochemu ya.’ She stares outside for a long time, as though she’s forgotten me.

I shake Natalia’s hand when we part, and give her some money to buy coffee. She accepts it gratefully. ‘You’re always welcome in my house,’ she says kindly.

I don’t embrace her, as I did Galina, in her village on the bank of the River Ob. ‘Pochemu ya.’ Galina had also quietly asked the question ‘why me?’

I hadn’t been able to let go of Julia’s hand. For minutes we had stood silently in the hall of her flat in Vorkuta, astonished at the cruelty of life.

‘We Russians,’ says Vladimir as we walk down the stairs, ‘we always ask ourselves “why me?”’ He will often repeat those words – ‘Pochemu ya’ – as we drive in our Wolga through the Kolyma Mountains, over the Death Road that links the camps in the Gulag Archipelago, constructed by hundreds of thousands of prisoners, victims of Nikolai Ezhov, the father of little Natasha.

memorial victims Gulag near Magadan

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g.f.m.jacobs [at] chello.nl