A Ransomed Dissident

A Life in Art Under the Soviets

Igor Golomstock, Sara Jolly, Boris Dralyuk

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786724496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

In 1939, a ten-year-old Igor Golomstock accompanied his mother, a medical doctor, to the vast network of labour camps in the Russian Far East. While she tended patients, he was minded by assorted 'trusty' prisoners – hardened criminals – and returned to Moscow an almost feral adolescent, fluent in obscene prison jargon but intellectually ignorant. Despite this dubious start he became a leading art historian and co-author (with his close friend Andrey Sinyavsky) of the first, deeply controversial, monograph on Picasso published in the Soviet Union. His writings on his 43 years in the Soviet Union offer a rare insight into life as a quietly subversive art historian and the post-Stalin dissident community. In vivid prose Golomstock shows the difficulties of publishing, curating and talking about Western art in Soviet Russia and, with self-deprecating humour, the absurd tragicomedy of life for the Moscow intelligentsia during Khruschev's thaw and Brezhnev's stagnation. He also offers a unique personal perspective on the 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel, widely considered the end of Khruschev's liberalism and the spark that ignited the Soviet dissident movement. In 1972 he was given 'permission' to leave the Soviet Union, but only after paying a 'ransom' of more than 25 years' salary, nominally intended to reimburse the state for his education. A remarkable collection of artists, scholars and intellectuals in Russia and the West, including Roland Penrose, came together to help him pay this astronomical sum. His memoirs of life once in the UK offer an insider's view of the BBC Russian Service and a penetrating analysis of the notorious feud between Sinyavsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Nominated for the Russian Booker Prize on its publication in Russian in 2014, The Ransomed Dissident opens a window onto the life of a remarkable man: a dissident of uncompromising moral integrity and with an outstanding gift for friendship.

PART 1

Russia

Lord, lead me not into temptation and deliver me from purple prose.

Author's prayer

CHAPTER 1

My Father's Arrest

I was born on 11 January 1929 in the town of Kalinin,¹ in the year of the Great Break,² when Stalin broke the backbone of the Russian peasantry and set the country on the road to collectivisation, industrialisation and terror. The first book I ever encountered was a short work by Arkady Gaidar about Malchish-Kibalchish (the Kibalchish Boy), with coloured illustrations. I don't remember the story, but the pictures of pot-bellied capitalists grimacing savagely as they tortured the heroic Boy, the instruments of torture, sizzling stoves, flashes of flame – all these images affected me like a terrible nightmare. The only time I have ever seen anything like this since then is in the representations of Hell by the artists of the Northern Renaissance and in miniatures in medieval religious books. Evidently, the writer's intention was to inspire children with a hatred of the enemies of the revolution, but the book only succeeded in inspiring me with an aversion to reading which lasted a long time.

When I was five, my father, Naum Kodzhak, was arrested – ‘for anti-Soviet propaganda’ as it said in his dossier. After that – only fragments, dribs and drabs from occasional family reminiscences, are stored in my memory. Naturally, my father had not been in any way involved in anti-Soviet propaganda. It was his misfortune to have been born into a rich Karaite³ family in the Crimea. According to my grandmother, the Kodzhaks were closely related to the Katiks – the owners of the tobacco company, A. Katik and Co., which was known throughout Russia. Paustovsky, in his story Kara-Bugaz, writes about this family as kulturtragers – people with a civilising mission – who had settled to the north of the Caspian Sea.

My father's father (my grandfather) was a ‘gabi’ (a Karaite rabbi) in the Karaite synagogue in Shanghai. Evidently he fled there after the revolution. My father studied at the Institute of Mining Engineering in Warsaw, he was an amateur musician, collected Tatar folk music and corresponded with the composer Reinhold Glière.⁴ During World War I, he served as an ensign in the artillery, then (briefly, I think) joined the White Army. During the evacuation of General Wrangel's⁵ troops from the Crimea, my father fell ill with typhus and was hidden from the Reds by friends or relatives and remained in Russia. Whether he stayed because of his illness, or because he actually wanted to, remains a mystery to me to this day.

I hardly know my relatives on my father's side. The large Kodzhak-Katik family was scattered to the four winds. Some emigrated, some went into the depths of Russia, and some, no doubt, went to the camps.

My relatives on my mother's side were Siberians. Most probably they came from a line of Jewish soldiers who, after serving in the Tsar's army, were permitted to settle outside the Pale of Settlement⁶ on the borders of Russia. My grandfather, Samuil, an inveterate card player and drinker, worked as a commercial traveller for the well-known Czech shoe manufacturer, Bata. At weekends friends would gather at his house in Tomsk⁷ to play Preferans,⁸ and, so the family story goes, during the game they would calmly get through three litres of vodka, accompanied by snacks of stroganina⁹ and pelmeni.¹⁰

The family was assimilated. My relatives only used a few Yiddish phrases – the ones I remember are azokhenvey (a plague on …), kalten kop (a head cold) and kush mir in tukhas (kiss my arse). My mother, Mary Samuilovna, studied at the Medical Faculty at Tomsk University and worked throughout her life in various places as a specialist in neuropathology. After the revolution the whole family moved from Tomsk to Kalinin. I don't know why.

The family – my mother, my father (until his arrest), my grandfather, his second wife (the first, my mother's mother, a well-known midwife, died before the family left Tomsk) and I – occupied half of a small rustic-style house not far from the hay market, with a tiny garden (which seemed enormous to me then), overgrown with raspberry canes. For some reason, there was a memorial plaque on the wall. Horses, carts, cows, chickens all filled the road. The first lorry to appear on our street caused quite a stir. My friends and I all rushed out to look at it. The other half of the little house was occupied by an old lady who seemed as poor as a church mouse. She often used to call on us, and my parents would give her a cup of groats, some bread, a few sugar lumps. One day she was found strangled in her house and then lorries came and took away rugs, furs, crystal ware; obviously these valuables were being stolen. This was one of my earliest childhood impressions.

When I started school in Kalinin, Mama registered me under her maiden name, as she was afraid that my arrested father's surname would cause difficulties for me.

After an ‘enemy of the people’ was arrested it was awkward, to put it mildly, for his wife to go on living in the town where everybody knew her. This must have been why Mama and I went to Moscow and moved in to a small room with my great-aunt Lina Nevler (my grandfather's sister). She lived in a communal flat at number seven, Serov Passage (now Lubyanka Passage). Lina was an intrepid woman. She had once worked as a photographer in Kamchatka¹¹ and not long after we moved in with her she found herself a job as the director of a health resort in Sochi for workers from the Ministry of Food Production. Mama packed me off to Sochi as well.

It was 1937, and for me that year was accompanied by a particular song floating out of every loudspeaker. It began with the words: ‘You can't help singing when you're happy’, and ended with a quotation from Stalin: ‘We live cheerfully today but tomorrow will be even more cheerful.’ And life in Sochi really was cheerful for me. Sea, sun, mountains and a large garden where I fed 16 (or was it 18?) cats and two stray dogs. My acquaintance with a certain Andrey Ivanovich (I don't remember his surname; maybe I never knew it) meant a lot to me. He was tall, always neatly turned out, and had a little beard like the one Chekhov wore in middle age. He was a doctor and a colleague of my mother's, and I suspect he was rather sweet on her. He immediately took me under his wing. We went for long walks in the mountains, he taught me to collect and press wild flowers and to identify minerals in rocks. He showed me the stars and constellations and told me their names. Not long after I left Sochi he committed suicide by swimming far out to sea. Why? I don't know. It was the year 1937, the height of the purges, and there is probably no need to say any more.

When I returned to Moscow I discovered that I had acquired a stepfather. Iosif Lvovich Taubkin had been a Komsomol Party¹² worker in Siberia. He was singled out for promotion and sent to Moscow but he didn't go on to have a great career in the Party – he was a petty official, a sort of deputy director in the economic section of a couple of small factories.

We had nowhere to live. We rented tiny rooms in one place after another on the outskirts of Moscow and I moved from one school to another. My mother and stepfather didn't get on well – there were tiffs, rows, shouting matches. After one of their routine quarrels, Mama left for Moscow, taking me with her, and signed up for a two-year stint as a doctor in Kolyma with the Far North Construction Trust.¹³ The job was very well paid, and, even more important, she was able to keep her Moscow residence permit. Mama had only the vaguest notion of what Kolyma¹⁴ meant.

In the summer of 1939 we set off for Vladivostock. My stepfather got onto the train with us. Evidently, they had yet again managed to patch things up.

CHAPTER 2

Kolyma

Translated by Boris Dralyuk

In a space where no one ventures, where all living warmth is lost, someone's jaw with golden dentures gleams in moonlit permafrost.

Joseph Brodsky from Performance (Predstavlenie)
translated by Alexandra Berlina

Kolyma, Kolyma, wonderful planet

Nine months of winter – all the rest is summer

(folk rhyme)

It took us 12 days to reach Vladivostok from Moscow by rail. We then spent another three days on board the steamer Feliks Dzerzhinsky, headed for Nagaevo Bay. The steamer was famous: built sometime at the start of the century in the Glasgow shipyards (according to a bronze plaque mounted on the wall near the captain's cabin), its colossal cargo hold had transported countless bands of prisoners to the camps. My stepfather had been assigned to work in the Northwest Industrial Mining Administration of the Far North Construction Trust in Magadan. He was to direct a sector called Sportivny at the Vodopyanovo mine site.

The site was 700 kilometres to the north, in the direction of the Kolyma River. We rode out in a lorry – which was, at the time, the only means of long-distance transportation in that region. On either side of the road lay low hills, draped with the sparse vegetation of the forest-tundra. Tall mining towers for sifting gold stuck up in the hollows. Narrow wooden planks ran up to the towers on every side – as if a gigantic spider had spun its web between the hills. Hundreds of prisoners dragged wheelbarrows laden with dirt along these wooden tracks, overturning them onto moving conveyor belts. The belts wound their way up the planks and dumped the dirt into large funnels atop each tower, where the soil mixed with water. The rocks and gravel remained on the grids, while the rarified soil rolled down the chutes along with the water. The gold, being heavier than soil, settled at the bottom. This desolate landscape was animated by rows of barbed wire and observation towers surrounding the camp. And so it was for the duration of the journey.

* * *

The Khatynnakh camp – centre of the sprawling Vodopyanovo mine site, where we arrived late in the summer of ’39 – was a conglomeration of wooden houses and huts, occupied by the site's civilian employees and their families. The place my stepfather was in charge of, the Sportivny sector, with its three mining towers, was five kilometres from the village.

And all around it lay pristine nature, untouched by human hands: hills, overgrown with dwarf pine – that northern cedar which spreads its branches on the ground, bearing cones full of small, but very tasty pine nuts. In spring, the hills took on a pinkish hue, as entire fields of cranberries, which had survived the winter, emerged from the melting snows. And another recurring detail of this idyllic landscape: a glum little horse dragging an oblong object wrapped in a red blanket, flanked by the bent figure of the accompanying driver. That's how they carted back the corpses of prisoners who had fled in the spring and froze to death in the winter.

We young fellows had the run of the place. In the winter, when the temperature dipped to −50^o Celsius, school was cancelled and we were completely free. We skied, built caves in the hulking snowdrifts, and even heated them by burning paper and hay. I remember one time when the temperature dropped to −69^o, but the air remained dry and the sun shone brightly. We had a snowball fight, but had to keep rubbing our faces with snow to avoid frostbite.

In the summer, our main occupation was digging for gold. There was a lot of it. When the rain washed a layer of soil from a mound of earth, gold flakes gleamed beneath it, and the same flakes glistened in rain puddles. We looked for gold in crevices of slate and underneath rocks, tearing up clods of earth. Once I found a nugget about the size of my little finger, weighing 30 grams. But the primary method was panning. We used special trays, with bottoms bevelled on every side and grooves in the middle. We poured earth into them, mixed it with water using scrapers, and removed all the rocks and pebbles. When the only thing left was a layer of sand, we carefully washed it, and particles of gold remained in the grooves. There is something astonishing about the strange mystical force that attracts man to gold. Once, they blasted a big chunk of dirt and discovered a vein of gold in the crater. People rushed to the pit from all sides and, pushing and shoving, began clawing pieces of metal from the earth. Why, one wonders? We had to take the gold to the gold bank, where we were paid – if I'm not mistaken – a rouble per gram (10 kopecks for convicts). But the money had a purely symbolic value: there wasn't a thing to buy with it.

There were no shops. All the necessities – groceries, clothes, soap, cigarettes – were distributed not even by ration cards, but according to some list or another. The groceries consisted of dried potatoes, various grains, frozen apples (one had to dip them in cold water, and then they'd develop an icy crust), and, very rarely, meat – venison, horse, bear. Vitamin deficiency was mandatorily treated with a disgusting potion from pine needles, which seemed to me worse than castor oil. The potion supposedly cured scurvy. And this, when there was a heap of vitamins all around: lingonberry, cloudberry, blueberries, nuts, mushrooms. For some reason, though, no one was interested.

I was essentially left to my own devices. My stepfather spent most of his time at Sportivny, my mother worked in the camp clinic, and I wasn't their concern. My stepfather's position allowed him to take on an orderly – that is, a domestic servant selected from the ranks of criminal, rather than political prisoners. It was they who – if not directly, then indirectly – served as my teachers. There was nothing worthwhile that school could teach me.

The first was a Tartar named Yusein, a counterfeiter. Although he didn't manufacture forged banknotes himself, and engaged only in their sale, he got 10 years in the camps for it. He and I lived in perfect harmony. But one day my mother, returning home from work, discovered a horrible scene: the room was cold, I lay with a high fever, Yusein was snoring on the floor, and someone's feet stuck out from under the table. Yusein had found a bottle of alcohol my stepfather had hidden, called friends over, and made a feast. Apparently I was fast asleep and didn't notice a thing. For this offence, the poor soul was sent back to the camp barracks.

The second was Kostya...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Translator's Note
• Acknowledgements
• Turning Point
• Part I Russia
• 1. My Father's Arrest
• 2. Kolyma
• 3. Moscow
• 4. Finances and Romances
• 5. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
• 6. The International Festival and Artists
• 7. The Sinyavskys, Khlebny Lane, the Far North
• 8. Dancing Around Picasso
• 9. The Museum Again
• 10. VNIITE
• 11. Great Expectations
• 12. The Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial
• 13. Dissidents
• 14. Pen Portraits of My Friends
• 15. Questions of Faith
• 16. A Waiting Game
• 17. Departure: An Obstacle Race
• Part II Emigration
• Translator's Note to Part II
• 18. The Journal Kontinent
• 19. The Anthony Blunt Affair
• 20. Radio Liberty, Galich
• 21. At the BBC
• 22. The Second Trial of Andrey Sinyavsky
• 23. Politics versus Aesthetics
• 24. Sinyavsky's Last Years
• 25. Perestroika
• 26. Family Matters
• Instead of a Conclusion The Benefits of Pessimism
• Afterword
• Notes
• Dramatis Personae
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Select Bibliography