فصل 2

CHAPTER 2

A STALINIST CHILDHOOD

Not long after my wife, Esther, and I moved to Moscow in January 1988, I was having tea and cake with Flora and Misha Litvinov at their apartment on the Frunzenskaya Embankment, where many families of Communist Party officials, active and retired, lived. The Litvinovs were a dazzling couple in their seventies, dazzling in their kindnesses and the unassuming way they seemed to know everyone and everything going on in Moscow. Misha was the quieter of the two. His reserve, I supposed, was the result of a lifetime sandwiched between a father, Maksim, who served in Stalin’s inner court as foreign minister and a son, Pavel, who helped strike one of the first blows against the regime as a dissident. Surrounded by history and its actors, Misha made an art of listening. He listened patiently, with nearly imperceptible amusement. There was not much that would surprise a man whose father slept with a Browning automatic under his pillow in case of attack and a son who flipped the bird to the men of the Politburo. In a room of friends or strangers, however, it was Flora who took the lead, provided the family positions, made the polite inquiry.

She asked what I’d be writing about in Moscow.

“I’m looking for Kaganovich,” I said.

Flora’s face tightened. She and Misha had known more than one American reporter in the past, and they had undoubtedly heard more reasonable journalistic ambitions: a mastery of arms control, human rights, Kremlin politics. Strange boy, she must have thought, but she was too kind to say so.

At the time, Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was in his mid-nineties and the last living member of Stalin’s inner circle. As the people’s commissar, he was once as close to Stalin as Goering was to Hitler. He helped direct the collectivization program of the 1920s and early 1930s, a brutal campaign that annihilated the peasantry and left the villages of Ukraine strewn with an endless field of human husks. As the leader of the Moscow Party organization, Kaganovich built the city subway system and, briefly, had it named for himself. He was responsible as well for the destruction of dozens of churches and synagogues. He dynamited Christ the Savior, a magnificent cathedral in one of the oldest quarters of Moscow. It was said at the time that Stalin could see the cathedral belltower from his window and wanted it eliminated.

Did Kaganovich still believe? I wanted to know. Did he feel any guilt, any shame? And what did he think of Gorbachev, the current general secretary? But that wasn’t it, really. Mostly I wanted just to sit in the same room with Kaganovich, to see what an evil man looked like, to know what he did, what books he kept around.

Misha listened, but with a certain ethereal inattention. As I talked, he was twisting and folding a napkin into … something. He had lately become a master of origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. He had filled an entire room with his paper menagerie: octagons, tetrahedrons, storks, bugs.

“You know,” he said, mashing out a crease with the butt of his palm, “Kaganovich lives downstairs.” Downstairs? I already knew that he lived on the Embankment, probably in one of the better buildings still stocked with the descendants of Old Bolsheviks and the Stalinist guard. But here, downstairs? In old photographs, Kaganovich was a huge man with a Prussian mustache and onyx eyes. In retirement, he had been the champion of dominoes in the Frunzenskaya Embankment neighborhood. He would play all comers in the courtyards. Once, when Brezhnev was still in power, Kaganovich made a call to the local Party committee and demanded that his courtyard be equipped with spotlights so he could play dominoes on summer nights. He still had the right to use the plush Kremlin hospitals—the “fourth administration”—and he was very much alive. Here, downstairs.

“It’s apartment 384,” Misha said. “We used to see him once in a while in the elevator or in the courtyard. The thing is, we never see him anymore. He never goes out, they say. He never answers the door. Maybe he has a nurse. I’m not sure he can walk. He is completely blind.” With that, Misha took a pair of scissors and made the slightest incision in his napkin. Slowly, he unfolded the paper. A turkey ruffled its feathers in his palm.

Afternoons in Moscow, when I had a spare hour or two, I would visit Misha and Flora’s building—50 Frunzenskaya Embankment, entrance 9—looking for Kaganovich. Over many months, I rang the bell at apartment 384 hundreds of times, sometimes for a half hour or more. I slipped notes under the door and into his mailbox. I rang and knocked and listened, my ear pressed against the door. Sometimes I could hear a kind of mumbling inside, other times a shuffling sound, slippers padding along the floor.

Kaganovich’s daughter, Maya, an old woman herself, came evenings to check on her father and prepare his dinner. She would not talk to me, and whenever I called her at home she passed the phone to someone else. “Look, he is too old to see anyone,” one relative told me. “We don’t want people coming here and bothering him with unpleasant questions about the past. It might upset him.” I’d hang around in the courtyard mostly talking to people about Kaganovich. “He doesn’t let anyone near him,” one of the neighbors, a young engineer, told me as we sat on one of the benches in the courtyard. “I think he’s afraid of the world now. One of these days, he’ll just die, and he’ll be lucky if they mention his name in Pravda. The bastard once had the power to kill every one of us.” Another day in the courtyard, one of Kaganovich’s oldest neighbors, a woman with a Byelorussian accent and eyes as blue as cornflowers, was taking her daily walk. Children were jumping rope and playing hopscotch, and the old men and women watched them. “Not long ago,” she said, “you’d see Kaganovich out here all day, playing dominoes or sitting off by himself with his daughter. Everyone knew who he was, what he’d done under Stalin. There are a lot of people in these buildings along the embankment who were big shots in the Party, but nobody like Kaganovich, no one still alive. Me, I always stayed away from him. Where I come from they have a saying: ‘The farther away you keep from the czar, the longer you stay alive.’ ” I had Kaganovich’s phone number—242-6751—but he never answered. A Russian journalist who had spent years trying to talk to Kaganovich later explained to me there was a code: dial the number, let it ring twice, hang up, and dial again. I tried, and an old man came on the line.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Lazar Moiseyevich?”

“Yes?”

“Lazar Moiseyevich, my name is Remnick. I am a reporter for an American newspaper, The Washington Post, and I would like to come visit you, if possible.” “It is not necessary.”

“I’ve heard your health is not very good, but I—”

“It is not necessary. I feel awful. I can’t see anything. I feel awful.” “Perhaps, on a day you are feeling a bit better, we could—”

“I always feel awful. No interviews. I don’t do interviews. Why should I do interviews?” His voice, weak at first, was beginning to pick up a little, as if just the use of it was a kind of exercise.

“Lazar Moiseyevich—”

“I said no interviews. That’s it!”

“Well—”

The line went dead. In the months ahead, he must have changed the code. The old one no longer worked, and playing with new codes of the same sort didn’t work either. Doorstepping was again the only hope. Reporting is often foolish work, but there was something especially shaming about knocking endlessly on a tyrant’s door. It raised insane questions of etiquette, such as what the rules of harassment are where a mass murderer is concerned. One afternoon I went up the elevator to see Flora, and with a motherly smile she listened to my complaints about the closed door downstairs.

“Well, what if he does open it, what would you learn?” Flora said. “Do you think he’d break down and apologize?” “Well, not exactly.”

“He’s an old man,” she said. “What does it matter?”

Then Flora told me a story.

On a winter’s night in the time of Stalin—1951 or 1952—Flora opened the door to her son’s room and bent low to kiss him good night. Pavel rolled toward her, the bedclothes rustling. In the dark, there was a shine to his face. He’d been crying, and his breathing had a wheezy jump to it. Pavel was a big child, self-assured and smart, but now it seemed that he was lost, scared even to speak.

“What’s wrong?” Flora said. “What is it?”

Pavel was quiet a long time and turned away, turned into himself somehow.

“Please, tell me. What’s wrong?”

“They said I can’t tell you,” the boy said. “I gave my word.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a secret.”

“A secret?”

“Yes,” he said. “A secret.”

“You can tell me,” Flora said. “It’s right that you keep your word, but you can always tell your parents everything.” Pavel’s grandfather Maksim Litvinov was Stalin’s foreign minister in the first years of the regime. He’d died just a few months before, but the family still lived, by the standards of the time, in privileged circumstances. Their legacy included an apartment in the House on the Embankment, a magnificent outpost for the Communist Party elite overlooking the Moscow River with huge rooms and special cafeterias and theaters. For the families of the elite there were foreign books, competent doctors, marmalade for the toast, tomatoes in wintertime. The Litvinovs even had their own cleaning woman—a lieutenant in the KGB. In the summer they spent much of their time at a dacha in the town of Khimki outside Moscow. Surrounded by birches and pines, the house had originally been built for Stalin’s family. Many of Pavel’s schoolmates were the sons and daughters of the Communist Party hierarchy, or what was left of it after the first wave of purges. At school, they all joined the Timur Society, a band of zealous young patriots, the Bolshevik Cub Scouts.

“Tell me. Please,” Flora said once more to her son. “What is it? What could be so secret?” Pavel was frightened. He had sworn his silence to the Timur Society, and he knew enough to be afraid. But, still, he could not deny his mother.

There was a new hunt on for “enemies of the people,” he said. One of his best friends had told him so. Flora recognized the boy’s name. He was the son of an officer in the KGB.

“He said there can be enemies of the people anywhere,” Pavel went on. “Anywhere. Even in our own homes!” Flora felt a rage gather inside her. She knew the adults who supervised these groups were doing nothing less than training children to work as informers, as traitors against their own families. She was terrified—for her son most of all—but not completely surprised. These were children, after all, who were taught to revere Pavlik Morozov, the twelve-year-old Young Pioneer who was made a national hero and icon for all Soviet children when he served his collective by ratting on his own father for trying to hide grain from the police. These were children raised in schools designed according to the “socialist family” theories of Anton Makarenko, an ideology officer of the KGB. Makarenko insisted that children learn the supremacy of the collective over the individual, the political unit over the family. The schools, he said, must employ an iron discipline modeled on that of the Red Army and Siberian labor camps.

Now the story was pouring out of Pavel. He said that two strange men had told him that soon he would have a “special task.” Flora knew pretty well what that meant. They wanted the boy to report on the family.

Stalin and his circle had always been wary of Maksim Litvinov and his odd family. Although Maksim had served the regime impeccably as foreign minister and as ambassador to the United States, he was nothing at all like the most loyal of Stalin’s gray henchmen. He was a man of the world. He spoke foreign languages. He had foreign friends. Maksim had also married a foreigner, an eccentric Englishwoman named Ivy who wrote fiction, had heterosexual and lesbian affairs, and preached C. K. Ogden’s gospel of Basic English, an 850-word system for learning the rudiments of the language. When her husband gave her George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism to read, she gave him volumes of Austen, Lawrence, and Trollope.

Especially after his forced removal from the Central Committee in 1941, Maksim Litvinov was possessed of a certain sympathy for the political interests of foreigners. In 1944, he told reporters that Stalin had imperial designs on Eastern Europe and wondered aloud why the West did not intervene. In an article for Foreign Affairs in 1977, the historian Vojtech Mastny described Litvinov as the “Cassandra in the Foreign Commissariat,” a diplomat unafraid to complain about the “rigidity of the whole Soviet system.” Stalin, of course, was listening. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that the secret police drew up an elaborate plan to “ambush” Litvinov while he was on the road to the dacha in Khimki. Litvinov, however, was a lucky man. For years he slept with his revolver close at hand, but in the end he escaped arrest. Miraculously, he died of old age. “They didn’t get him,” Ivy remarked to her daughter just after Maksim’s death. The family and historians could only guess why. Stalin undoubtedly valued Litvinov’s contacts in the West, and he may have thought the foul publicity abroad was not worth the execution.

But even after Litvinov died on December 31, 1951, his family still lived in fear of Stalin’s whim, of a knock on the door. Pavel’s parents, Misha and Flora, and his aunt Tanya were more subtle characters than Ivy, more attuned to the risks of their time and country. But they, too, behaved in a way that could have landed them in jail or in front of a firing squad. Misha was a celebrated young engineer at the Aviation Engines Institute and a self-made Hero of Soviet Recreation: a mountain climber, a jogger, a dabbler in game theory. Surely this was suspiciously eccentric behavior. Pavel’s aunt Tanya was thrown out of an art institute for an “excessive interest” in “decadent Western art.” At home, at least, they all spoke their minds. Once Pavel brought a book home from the library about the derring-do of Pavlik Morozov. He was entranced by the boy’s great service to the Bolshevik state, his heroic betrayal of his father. Flora spun off into a rage. She tore out the pages and said that Pavel should never, never betray his parents. No child should, no matter what such foolish books said.

“Even if the parents are bad?” Pavel said.

“Yes. Even if they are bad.”

Now Flora had to decide what to do about her boy and his “special task.” She would not allow Pavel to become another Pavlik Morozov. In the morning, Flora put on her finest dress and went to the apartment of Pavel’s friend, the son of the KGB man. She would try to bluff the officer, scare him into thinking that someone “on high” supported the Litvinov family. She tried to dress the part of a powerful Bolshevik matron and wore an elegant scarf and a pompous hat.

“You have no right to carry on negotiations with my son!” she told him. “You will stop at once!” She left immediately, still shaking with anger and a giddy sense of her own daring. Only a little later would she begin thinking about what she had risked.

In the next few weeks, Misha and Flora talked long about what they should do about their children. They decided they could no longer hold back as much as they had. It was not enough to tear up a book once in a while and then retreat again into a baffling silence. If they were to prevent Pavel and Nina from becoming the sort of young Stalinists that the schools were so eager to create, then they had to speak the truth whenever possible. They had to describe what had happened to so many of the parents and grandparents of Pavel’s friends at school, how they had been thrown into the vans known as Black Marias and shipped off to camps in Kolyma, Vorkuta, and Kazakhstan, where they had vanished. They had to begin to impress upon their children that Stalin, the Mountain Eagle, was a lowly beast. Pavel must learn somehow to think outside of a system that engulfed him all day long.

Flora and Misha could not afford to be too direct too often. Such were the times and the dangers. Nor could they compete very well with the immensity of the Stalin cult in all its forms: the parades celebrating Stalin as a god on earth, the newspapers describing his heroic deeds, the radio addresses, the history books written by the Kremlin ideologists, the rallies and paramilitary drills of the Young Pioneers. Pavel had learned to love Stalin the way other children in other places learn to love God. Stalin was a kindly deity, omniscient, a gentle father. He rarely appeared in public. Instead his image was painted on banners, zeppelins, billboards, and icons. His words filled the schoolbooks, the newspapers, the airwaves. “It’s not easy to compete with that,” Flora thought. “Perhaps it is impossible.” On the day Stalin died, in March 1953, Pavel was thirteen years old and inconsolable. He cried for days. In the schoolyard, he got into fights with the children who failed to mourn Stalin as deeply as he did. At home, he was furious when he discovered his parents and their friends laughing and joking about Comrade Stalin. He saw them in the kitchen, not mourning but celebrating. Pavel reddened, stormed out of the kitchen, and went off to bed, angry and confused.

It was not easy for any of the Litvinovs in those years after Stalin’s death. Misha and Flora were young parents, and they were often at a loss in dealing with Pavel. He struggled in school. He married at seventeen and quickly divorced. He drank a bit, played in marathon card games, and gambled on the horses at the Hippodrome. “The horses were an obsession with him,” Flora said. “We were scared that Pavel would end his life a broken-down gambler.” But Pavel was growing up, and he was in no way immune to the “thaw,” the wave of anti-Stalinist sentiment, history, and ideology encouraged by Khrushchev in the middle and late 1950s. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners returned home from the labor camps, and all of them had stories to tell. The Litvinovs knew many intellectuals who had been in the camps: writers, artists, scientists, even Party officials. It was a time of revelation for Pavel. He sat at the kitchen table and heard for the first time the real history of the years under Stalin. One of his parents’ closest friends, a physicist named Mikhail Levin, came home from prison in 1955 and described the conditions there, the senseless deaths of countless innocents. “It was the experience of waking up after years and years of sleep,” Pavel would say a long time after. “All the fantasies of childhood and Stalin were suddenly painful and ridiculous.” In the early 1960s, Pavel got a job teaching physics at the Lomonosov Institute and eventually became friendly with a group of intellectuals who monitored the first celebrated dissident trial—the trial of the “anti-Soviet” writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. Among the older writers and scientists, Pavel was a kind of pet: a charming young man of intelligence and curious pedigree. He immersed himself in this new world, reading the underground manuscripts known as samizdat, taking part in the endless kitchen-table discussions that were the center of all intellectual life. Pavel read Solzhenitsyn, the camp stories of Varlam Shalamov, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror. He helped draft letters in support of political prisoners and released them, at great peril to himself, to Western journalists. He also married into one of the best-known intellectual families of Moscow. He married Maya, the daughter of the literary scholars Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova. Kopelev, who had been one of Solzhenitsyn’s cellmates and the model for one of the characters in his novel The First Circle, was also a model for Pavel Litvinov. Kopelev had grown up a committed Communist, a true believer, and then “got an education.” Kopelev’s life, for Pavel, was living proof of a man’s ability to see and think clearly, to act honestly, even in the conditions of a nightmare.

On August 21, 1968, Pavel and six of his friends reacted with horror to the shortwave reports coming out of Czechoslovakia. For months they had been listening for every detail of the Prague Spring, cheering on Alexander Dubček’s attempt to create a “socialism with a human face.” They waited to see how Khrushchev’s conqueror and successor, Leonid Brezhnev, would deal with the rebellion of a satellite state. Would he show the same ruthlessness Khrushchev showed Hungary in 1956, or would there be a new sense of tolerance? Now the answer was clear. The voice on the underground Czechoslovak station was brittle and choked: “Russian brothers, go away, we have not asked you to come,” the voice said. Pavel’s close friend among the early dissidents, Larisa Bogoraz, was crushed. Her husband, Anatoly Marchenko, was in jail for his political activities, and now she saw that the regime itself was prepared to stamp out large-scale dissidence with soldiers and tanks.

“We need a bold act, a movement,” she thought. “We need it now.”

Pavel, Bogoraz, and five others met to talk it through. They planned a brief noontime demonstration for August 25 against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. They knew well the consequences for such an “anti-Soviet” activity: a prison term, internal exile, or a long stay in a psychiatric hospital. They prepared themselves for nothing less than that. Pavel began to gather his possessions and give his books away to friends. His fate was inescapable.

On the night before the demonstration, Pavel went to the Kopelevs’ apartment for a party where the famous bard Aleksandr Galich was singing. The mood was funereal, and the vodka did nothing to lighten it. The Prague invasion was surely the end of the “thaw” and all hopes of a “socialism with a human face”; Brezhnev had begun a movement of blatantly neo-Stalinist politics. For all its hesitations and half-measures, the Khrushchev era would soon seem like a paradise lost. The invasion, the novelist Vasily Aksyonov said, “was a nervous breakdown for the whole generation.” At the party, they spoke of their anger, how they were ashamed before the Czechs, the Hungarians, and the Poles—before the entire world—to be a Soviet citizen. They were not citizens at all, they felt; they were subjects.

Then Galich began to sing a song of the Decembrists, the rebels during the reign of Nicholas I: Can you come to the square?

Dare you come to the square

When that hour strikes?

Pavel felt Galich’s eyes on him as he sang. The double meaning of the lyrics, their reference to the dissent of another century and the clarion call to a new generation—it was lost on no one, least of all on Pavel. When Galich put down his guitar, Pavel was tempted to announce the plans for the demonstration, but he decided against it. He was afraid that the older people in the room would feel compelled to come. For them, years in internal exile or prison could mean death.

The next day, at a few minutes before noon, Pavel, Larisa Bogoraz, and their friends gathered at Lobnoye Mesto, the spot on Red Square where the czar’s executioners once chopped off the heads of heretics against the state and the church. At the sound of the noon bell on Spassky Tower, they unfurled a series of banners. In Czech: “Long Live a Free and Independent Czechoslovakia.” In Russian: “Free Dubček” and “Hands off Czechoslovakia” and “Shame on the Invaders.” The poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya brought her three-month-old son to the square. When the others showed their signs, she reached into the baby carriage and pulled out from under her sleeping son the flag of Czechoslovakia.

The demonstration would not have lasted long under any circumstances. KGB men had followed Litvinov and the others to the Kremlin. But a special contingent of KGB officers was also stationed on Red Square that day. They were there waiting for the end of a meeting inside the Kremlin between Brezhnev and the leaders of the Prague Spring, who had been brought to Moscow in handcuffs on the night of the invasion. When the officers saw the banners, the guards pounced on the demonstrators, shouting, “These are all dirty Jews!” and “Beat the anti-Soviets!” Pavel’s face was badly bruised, and the art critic Viktor Fainberg lost a few teeth. The officers packed the protesters into unmarked cars and headed for the police station.

After a few moments, the square was quiet once more. The summer tourists went back to watching the changing of the guard at the Lenin Mausoleum. They gaped at the candy-striped whirl of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The old women peddled vanilla ice-cream bars and the old men sold snapshots to the visiting comrades from Sofia, Budapest, and Hanoi. Suddenly, guards blew their whistles and ordered people to clear the lane coming out of the Spassky Gate from the Kremlin. A line of official black cars drove through at terrific speed. Then the guards blew another signal. The coast was clear. No one knew it then, but one of the men in the caravan was probably Alexander Dubček, the leader of the Prague Spring and now a prisoner of Moscow.

“It would have been wonderful if Dubcek and the others had seen the demonstration of support for what they had been doing. They didn’t,” Andrei Sakharov told me later. “But most important was that somewhere in this country there were some people who were willing to uphold its dignity.” The trial of the Red Square protesters, of course, was a sham, a totalitarian theater piece. On October 11, 1968, Pavel was given the chance for a last statement before the sentencing: “I will not take your time by going into legal details; the attorneys have done this. Our innocence of the charges is self-evident, and I do not consider myself guilty. At the same time, that the verdict against me will be ‘guilty’ is just as evident to me. I knew this beforehand when I made up my mind to go to Red Square. Nothing has shaken these convictions, because I was positive that the employees of the KGB would stage a provocation against me. I know that what happened to me is the result of provocation.

“I knew that from the person that followed me. I read my verdict in his eyes when he followed me to the metro. The man who beat me up in Red Square was one I had seen many times before. Nevertheless, I went out into Red Square. I shall not speak of my motives. There was never any question for me whether I should go to Red Square or not. As a Soviet citizen, I deemed it necessary to voice my disagreement with the action of my government, which filled me with indignation.… “ ‘You fool,’ said the policeman, ‘if you had kept your mouth shut, you could have lived peacefully.’ He had no doubt that I was doomed to lose my liberty. Well, perhaps he is right, and I am a fool.… “Who is to judge what is in the interest of socialism and what is not? Perhaps the prosecutor, who spoke with admiration, almost with tenderness, of those who beat us up and insulted us.… This is what I find menacing. Evidently, it is such people who are supposed to know what is socialism and what is counterrevolution. This is what I find terrible, and that is why I went to Red Square. This is what I have fought against and what I shall continue to fight against for the rest of my life.” No one escaped punishment. Pavel Litvinov was sentenced to five years in internal exile. He was sent to live in a remote village in Siberia—not far from where the rebel Decembrists had been imprisoned more than a century before.

After he returned home to Moscow, Pavel saw that he faced an unavoidable choice: jail or exile abroad. If he continued his human rights work—and he could not do otherwise—he would be sentenced this time to a prison camp, a far more severe fate than he had known in Siberia. An application for emigration, a KGB officer suggested to him, would likely meet with a “positive response.” Pavel said his farewells to his friends and family at a bleak party in 1973.

“I thought that when I left the country it was forever and that I would never see my parents again,” Pavel said. “This was a typical experience for many people. You left, and for you the people you were leaving behind were as good as dead. They were alive, but you lost them the way you lose people when they die.” Pavel and Maya Litvinov began a new life in the United States. Pavel found a job teaching at the Hackley School, a small private school in Tarrytown, New York. They traveled, they met new friends. But for years they lived in a painful limbo. Pavel Litvinov had gone through a transformation, from obedience to independence, that had cost him his family, his home. Most of those he had left behind did not have the means or the chance to win their independence. The Soviet Union was no longer what it was under Stalin. But even with the prison camps in ruins, the system survived. The fear remained, and no one was free.

In nearly four years of living and traveling in what was once the Soviet Union, I often found myself wandering accidentally into old prison camps. During the first strikes in the Siberian coalfields in 1989, some miners in the Siberian city of Kemerovo told me to look over a fence and into a field—that low set of buildings to the left of the cows. Barracks. In a working prison outside the city of Perm in the Urals, I had tea and cookies with the commandant. He had buried a few dissidents in his time and now he was thinking about his pension. At one time the entire country was part of the camp system—the gulag archipelago, as Solzhenitsyn called it—and you did not have to travel far from home to see it. One evening I was drinking tea and visiting an old man in an apartment house on Leninsky Prospekt just down the street from where I lived in Moscow.

“I’ve always felt honored to live here,” the man said.

The apartment was just one room, and the heat was off and the plumbing was rotting.

Why? What honor can there be in living here? I asked him.

“Solzhenitsyn helped build this dump,” he said, his gold incisors flashing. “He was on the prisoners’ crew when they put this place up.” At every one of these meetings, it was not hard for me to feel at once connected to the place, and lucky to have escaped it. Both my grandfathers, Alex and Ben, were born around the same time and in the same sort of place. They lived in muddy villages around the turn of the century: Alex outside Vilna (now Vilnius), Ben outside Kiev. Neither village, so far as I have been able to determine, still exists. Neither of my grandfathers knew much, or wanted to know much, of his boyhood in the Russian empire. They were bewildered in old age by the craze for “roots.” There was no nostalgia in them. They were lucky to have escaped. Upon hearing the rumors of pogroms they fled Russia on foot, on horseback, on wagon, and finally on a ship. They came to Castle Garden and Ellis Island. Alex sold “notions” in New York: girdle snaps, nylons, hairpins at a corner store on Prince Street and Broadway. Ben worked as a salesman in clothing stores in Paterson, New Jersey. When I began learning Russian in high school, my grandfathers smiled with curiosity and let it go at that. If they knew seven or eight words of Russian, it was a lot. For them, Russia was a burning house they had fled in the middle of the night. Just before I left for Russia, I flew to Miami Beach. Ben had managed to trade in his house in Paterson for a small room with a view of the Atlantic Ocean and an ambulance in the basement garage. He was one hundred years old. When I told him I was planning to live in Moscow for three or four years, he said, “You must be crazy. We almost got killed going out and you, meshuggah, you want to go back in.” My wife’s family was even more suspicious of our going to Moscow. And with good reason. They were less successful at escape. Esther’s grandfather Simon was a renowned rabbi, born in Byelorussia. After taking a pulpit in Poland, he married Nechama, the descendant of seven generations of rabbis. Robinson was her maiden name: son of rabbis. Eventually he moved back to Byelorussia, where he was both a rabbi and a teacher of philosophy in the local gymnasium. In 1939, an officer of the NKVD secret police came through the town of Diesna looking for Simon. The townspeople and congregants refused to give him up. But when Simon found out about the agent, he sought him out and invited him to his home. When the agent arrived at the door, he said something strange. “If you don’t mind,” he said to the terrified family, “I’d like to pray with you first.” When they were finished praying, it became clear that the NKVD man was a kind of double agent, or at least an agent with a hint of mercy. He told Simon that the police were after him. “You must leave,” he said. “Leave now with just the clothes on your back.” Simon fled to independent Lithuania, and his wife and children soon followed. But in June 1940, just days after the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, he was arrested and jailed for six months in Vilna. Then he was deported to a labor camp in the town of Sukhobezvodnoye—meaning “Dry, Without Water”—in the Urals. He was never heard from again.

As relatives of an “enemy of the people,” Nechama and her children, Murray, Rita, and the baby, Esther’s mother, Miriam, were all deported to Siberia. Nechama was put to work on a collective farm. When she refused to let her son go into the army—she claimed Polish citizenship—the two of them were arrested and jailed. Rita, at fourteen, was left to fend for herself, and Miriam was put into a children’s camp in western Siberia. After the war, Miriam and her sister, brother, and mother fled Russia.

For the longest time, Esther’s grandmother refused to speak of the past. By the time Esther began to insist that she needed to know what had happened, Nechama could no longer think clearly. Her mind moved in and out of time, from one language to another. Three months after we were married, Esther and I moved to Moscow. “I hope you come home once in a while,” Miriam said, “because I don’t think I could visit you there.”