Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

In childhood, when my father woke up in the morning he could see his own father in the blue and ever paler light, already awake, doing push-ups or lifting his dumbbells, or bent over the washbowl splashing water, or in front of the mirror, soaping his jaw. His boots shone like lamps, and his officer’s shirt was pressed, and he was so very tall and so very dear to my father.

Among the very ordinary faces of my relatives there is this one very handsome man, handsome in the way Marina Tsvetaeva defines as: “war heroic, seafaring, savage, most real and unbearable male beauty,” the sort that sends three villages wild with desire. There are no photos of Nikolai Stepanov as a child, and there probably never were; he must be about twenty in the earliest picture I’ve seen, and wearing a cap and tie. This is before the shaved head, his later impressive stature, the military uniform, but it’s clear he already belonged to that generation of Soviet dreamers with their fury-fueled desire to carry out anything the country demanded of them: to get on with the job of building the future’s garden cities — and then to get on with the job of strolling about in them . Their generation had disappeared by the end of the 1940s, but I still see them in photo portraits (some in caps and leather jackets, others in overcoats, but all cut from the same cloth, with the same weary expression on their faces, as if they’d seen too much). I see them, too, in later films made by the children of these men, who never tire of the subject of their fathers.

We choose to remember them as young men, birthed by the revolution , as if their youth, or their enthusiasm, gives us permission to think of everything that happened as a children’s game. Those they killed, and the ones who murdered them, will get to their feet again; stand up from the dusty roadside or the communal pit; they’ll push back the cement slab; run a hand through their hair and set off about their business again. Secretaries, representatives, commissars, policemen, army officers, they all walked with their heads held high, as if the renewed world had made them a promise. Every man’s job was a fine job and even the long-held contempt for the police went away briefly. In my family archive there are a few pictures of librarians in Tver posing in front of the camera with their crushes: drivers from a convoy, a detachment guarding prisoners. These young girls are so very serious, they are kneeling on one knee and holding rifles, pressing them against their chests and pointing them into the white light, taking aim. One of them is my grandmother Dora, who had just arrived in this big town to study.

Dora’s parents, Zalman and Sofya Akselrod, were from a village near Nevel in the North West. All I know about Zalman is that he made soap, and delicious ice cream, and his ice cream was in great demand in another town called Rzhev. They had six children who all lived happily together and were all members of the local Communist youth movement. Their father, who was a religious Jew, and was not a man to welcome in the new, used to lock all the doors at eight o’clock, so the young ones couldn’t leave the house, and then he would go to bed. The children would wait for an hour or so at the attic window, then one by one, they would drop down a ladder and run to the Komsomol meeting. At one such meeting they were told that the country urgently needed librarians, so Dora set off to Tver to train as a librarian.

The story goes that a local school needed a book fund, and Dora was sent to see the newly appointed head teacher. He wasn’t in the staff room so she went to the empty history classroom and stopped at the door. Dora was a little woman and at her eye level all she could see was a pair of gleaming high boots — a tall man was standing on a desk and screwing in a light bulb. This is how my grandparents met and they were never ever to be parted. He was teaching history (after his four years of education in a village school, and two years in a party school) and political knowledge, until he left to join the Red Army.

You might think he’d have found his fulfillment in the Red Army; that, deep at the heart of the embodiment of “people’s power,” his life would be given meaning and purpose. But even here there was no sense of connection; it was as if the proletarian Nikolai, with his tragic longing for order, was once again on the margins, not needed by his country, never quite fitting in. He read constantly, he had a wife and a young daughter, he was an officer in a Far Eastern garrison, but none of this could quite disperse the somber clouds; the Stepanovs lived among other garrison families, but were not of them. The War Commissar rarely bothered to drop in.

It bears repeating what a handsome man he was. Upright, never a word in the wrong place, with careful movements and terse, measured speech, and a dimpled chin. He had a chivalrousness, inculcated by reading Walter Scott, which had no practical application in a garrison town with ten thousand newly imported inhabitants. Time passed peacefully enough for the first while, when the only changes were in the various libraries that fell under Dora’s management. Then, in the seventh year, misfortune befell them.

In our family there has always been a tendency to link the terrifying tectonic shifts of the external world to smaller human-size explanations, and so it was always said that grandfather’s eldest sister Nadya was to blame for everything. By this time, Nadya had already worked for the representative of the young Soviet Republic in Berlin, and she sent back from there a brand-new bike for her brother. Now she was climbing the greasy pole of the party, in charge of a whole swathe of land in the Urals, or perhaps Siberia. From this posting she sent her brother the dangerous present of a service pistol, and for some reason my grandfather accepted it. One of the accusations leveled against him in 1938 was that he had owned an illegal weapon. His daughter, my aunt Galya, remembered the last happy summer, walking across a huge field of rye to fetch the newspapers, and one of her father’s comrades insistently asking her, a tiny girl, whether her father possessed the tenth volume of Lenin’s writings.

In 1938, in what was later known as the Great Terror, the country’s punitive capacity was strained to the utmost: the Gulag could no longer cope with the quantity of prisoners. Production, so to speak, ground to a halt . Annihilation was the solution and army officers found themselves at the front of this grim line: hundreds and thousands of foreign spies were suddenly found among their ranks. So when people suddenly stopped talking to Nikolai, and his colleagues began looking at him as if from the far bank of a wide river, and then at a party meeting someone openly called him an enemy of the people, he went home and told Dora to pack her bags and go back to her parents. Dora refused: if they were going to die, they would die together.

He was never arrested, although he did have to hand in all his weapons nearly straight away. It was as if they were waiting for an order that was never given. All the same, in the small garrison town where everyone knew everyone else, the Stepanov family was very visible; if they went to the only shop people kept their distance, as if they were infectious. My grandfather was quite certain he had nothing to be ashamed of, and he began mentally preparing for interrogation. His preparations were suddenly cut short: he was told that an investigation had shown him to be innocent, and he was doing important work. He should wait for further orders. These orders arrived at the end of October and the Stepanovs were transferred to Sverdlovsk in the Urals. It was all completely mystifying.

The “unspoken” Beria amnesty lasted for a short time, during which a few of those who had been accused of crimes were pardoned, and some who were already in the camps were released and sent home. It confounded all logic and people sought out their own reasoning, if only for their private family stories. Our family was accustomed to believe that the mysterious Nadya had saved her brother by sending judicious word from her eastern realm. This was her very last gift before all contact lapsed. This version of events is not inherently less likely than any other, but given the unexpected shifts in policy, it feels more embroidered than the probable truth: two thirds and more of those who were under investigation on January 1, 1939, were freed, cases were closed and defendants, against all odds, were found not guilty. The amnesty didn’t last very long, but it gave Nikolai Stepanov his chance: this “reassessment” of political cases began with army officers.