In 1997 Ernest began to write two books at the same time: one was his biography and the other was a "professional" book, devoted to the protection by the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation of human rights and freedoms. He liked to write most of all, but during the years of his work as a justice most if his writing consisted of draft court decisions and articles for the press, and there never seemed to be enough time for monographs. Nevertheless, he started to write at night. He only had time to write a preface to his which he tentatively called "My Genealogy", and an introduction to his book about the activity of the Constitutional Court. This book was entitled "A Duel with Tyranny". The last time he sat down to write ten days before his death. He opened his note book computer, turned it on, looked at it and turned it off. I think he already knew that he would not finish his books. He, who could always write so easily, clearly and fascinatingly about most complicated legal issues.
O.N.Zimenkova-Ametistova
PREFACE
Nowadays everyone writes memoirs. For a long time I was an exception. I kept waiting for the time when the last of the famous politicians, journalists or military commanders would publish his most important and intimate recollections. This would be followed by presentations, advertising campaigns and book signing events. The people would read the book, discuss it and exchange opinions. After that the usual every-day routine would make everyone forget the author and his or her writings. But then a time would come when the people would feel that something was missing. Something apart from their unpaid wages. Something that everyone has become accustomed to. For some time there would be confusion and no one would understand what was happening. And finally, the most quick-witted ones would realize that there were not more memoirs! Would that mean that everything had been recalled and there was nothing left? How could that be? Was that the end of history and the end of time?
And that is when I would enter the scene. In my Sunday best. I would calm down the agitated masses and assure them that although there had been a small hitch, now everything was fine. History was proceeding in the right direction and my memoirs were proof of this.
And again there will book presentations, banquets, autographs, literary prizes, pen-clubs, etc., and everyone would be reading and discussing my account of certain events and personalities. I'd be praised as our Russian Chateaubriand or even Casanova. In a word, I'd be famous!
But all this are just unrealizable dreams. Because there will never be an end to reminiscences, people will always be writing about their past and will be flooding bookstores with their creations. This means that I will never be able to monopolize this area. But life goes on, and during this not very long life of mine I have witnessed and sometimes have even participated in events that in many ways have determined the course of Russian and even world history of the second half of the 20th century and, perhaps, the 21st century.
I would like to discuss an idea that is by no means a new one: why is human memory so short? Why so many people are unable to learn the lessons of history? It is one thing when we refer to future generations, those who learn about the past from books, movies or stories told by veterans. But I am speaking about my contemporaries, people who had seen everything with their own eyes and who had gone through all those horrors. But as soon as five or ten years go by all the bad things seem to be forgotten, while the marginally good things are remembered, magnified and glorified and boil down to the idea that "before everything was better". Although the only thing that was better before was our youth. And following this idea these people are trying to go back not to the best thing of those times (because they cannot return their youth), but to the most miserable things. Luckily, quite often these attempts end in vain. It seems that history has its filters that prevent rubbish from penetrating to the future. And these filters are created by those who are capable of learning the lessons of history. These people are not in the majority, but they are the ones who guarantee the very possibility of a future. And these people are the ones for whom I write.
CHAPTER ONE
Who Am I?
Who are you, a Russian or a Jew?
I'm a Jewish Russia.
Who are you, Slutsky or Soviet?
I'm Soviet Slutsky.
(An old epigram)
If not for the October Socialist Revolution of 1917 I wouldn't have been born. This does not mean that I am the same age as the Revolution. I was born on May 17, 1934 in Leningrad where my father was in active service in the Navy and my mother was a school teacher.
That was the year of the 27th Congress of the All-Russian Communist (Bolshevik) Party - VKP(b). At this congress Sergei Mironovich Kirov, the most popular party functioner of that time, was elected the party's general secretary by a secret ballot. He voluntarily let Stalin have this position and in return for his favor the new general secretary had Kirov assassinated by someone named Nikolayev. The murderer was the husband of Kirov's mistress's. A friend of mine from Leningrad told me about this version of Kirov's death which she had heard from her mother who was Kirov's personal secretary.
When the Cheka informed Stalin about the secret passion of his main rival, he decided to make good use of comrade Kirov's secret passion. To have a chance to visit Nikolayev's wife Kirov often sent him off on various business trips. The Cheka people had inform the betrayed husband and made several attempts to clash him with Kirov in flagrant delict (at the scene of the crime). Once when Nikolayev was in Murmansk on orders from Moscow he was provided with a plane (this was in the early 1930s!) because he was supposedly urgently summoned to Leningrad. The husband missed the lover by 10 minutes.
The game of setting Nikolayev against Kirov went on. It included stirring up jealousy and hostility in the cuckold toward Kirov and ended by Nikolayev's dismissal from his job. After Nikolayev had accomplished his missions of shooting the idol of Leningrad's workers in Smolny (the communist party's headquarters), his act of vengeance was presented as a terrorist act and the killer was declared a Trotskyite agent. He was shot immediately after the assassination on the way to prison. Afterwards those Cheka men who had killed Nikolayev were done away with, as those who had given these orders, etc. A lot of other people who were close to Kirov were annihilated, my friend's mother among them. She was first expelled from the communist party because of her failure to protect her patron and later, in 1938, was arrested and killed in Gulag. Before her arrest she told a lot to her daughter and even left some photographs and documents. I wouldn't have taken the liberty of publicizing this version if I hadn't seen a picture taken in the early 1930s on which my friend, at the age of 7, was sitting on Kirov's lap. Her mother and Nikolayev with his wife were on the same picture. They were probably old party buddies.
* * *
The friends of my parents were very different.
On my father's side I come from a succession of Russian Orthodox priests who lived in the Voronezh region. My great-great-grandfather Kuzma was born in the early 19th century and according to a family legend (which I do not really trust) was the illegitimate son of Count Orlov-Davydov and his serf Vishnevskaya whom the count had bought from the Polish magnate Potosky. After the child was born his mother was freed and provided with a modest allowance which was enough to place the boy in a theological seminary when he got older. After graduation Kuzma Vishnevsky was granted a new name: Ametistov (after the semi-precious stone amethyst). Many clergymen of the time were named after precious or semi-precious stones, precious metals or evangelical events. The new name often reflected the successes of the graduate: for example the fact that my great-great-grandfather was named after a semi-precious stone meant that he was a good student, but not an excellent one. Otherwise he would have had the name Almazov (Diamond). But someone named Chertkov (a derivative from the world "devil") was obviously a shirker and a bad student.
Kuzma Ametistov had three sons. One, Sergei, was a house-owner in Yekaterinodar, the other, Alexander, was a government worker who had risen to the position of the manager of the royal family's estates in the Crimea, and the third son, my great-grandfather Vasillii, was the archpriest of the city of Bobrov in Voronezh region. My grandfather, Yevgeny, was one of his two sons and six daughters. He was born on February 12, 1884 in the Orlyovka settlement of Bobrov uyezd (district).
In 1906 Yevgeny Vasilyevich Ametistov graduated from the Voronezh Theological Seminary by "first grade", according to his papers and in June of the same year became a sexton at the St. Nicholas Church in the Kuban region in a Cossack village Ust-Labinskaya. In less than a year he was promoted to the position of a priest at the Archangel Michael Cathedral in the city of Temriuk and during the following twenty five years served in the churches of many Cossack villages and in the city of Krasnodar.
In the end of 1933 my grandfather Yevgeny became the bishop of the city of Petrozavodsk and all the parishes around the city. He baptized me in 1935 when I was one-year-old and when my parents brought me to Petrozavodsk to show me to my grandmother and grandfather. In 1938 he was arrested and executed by NKVD butchers.
For quite a long time I could not bring myself to become acquainted with his NKVD file, although in 1991 this became possible for relatives of the victims of that regime. And though I had seen a lot of original documents of that sort before, in the process of founding the Memorial Association and when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union case was considered by the Constitutional Court, they all referred to strangers, to people I never knew. Finally, a couple of years ago, I requested my grandfather's file in FSB (the Federal Security Service). I read it in the mournful quietness of their in a way unique reading room on Kuznetsky Most Street, accompanied by other children and grandchildren of the perished victims of Gulag.
My grandfather was arrested on January 16, 1938. The next day during the first interrogation investigator Lavrukhin accused him of "taking part in a countrer-revolutionary organization" and demanded "essential evidence". Of course, my grandfather denied this nonsense with indignation.
The next interrogation was a week later and this time investigator Lavrukhin was joined by an NKVD lieutenant named Gailin. The first thing I noticed was the change of my grandfather's signature: the letters were crooked and wobbly.
I could imagine what they had done to him during that week to make him vividly describe (himself or it was dictated to him?) how in 1919 he became an agent of the White-guard Gen.Denikin's intelligence service, then became a German agent and afterwards served the Finnish secret service which was not far away from Petrozavodsk. The "secrets" he disclosed to the enemies of the Soviet state deserve to be mentioned: information about the length, width and depth of the rivers Neglinka and Lososinka and the bridges over these rivers in Petrozavodsk, the capacity of the local bakeries and the location of the city's post office, telegraph office and hospitals.
But the most terrible things began at the following interrogations at which my grandfather began to give away "persons he had recruited" - - some unfortunate workers of the Onezhnsky factory, and berry and mushroom collectors, and his colleagues, clergymen. I was terrifeid: no one, of course, has the right to judge those who were nightly tortured by Stalin's sadists, and no one knows how he would behave in such a situation. But my grandfather was a servant of God and was supposed to have a special responsibility before Him.
The last document of the case deserves to be quoted in full:
Act
Top Secret
4 March 1938, Petrozavodsk
We, the undersigned: Head of Petrozavodsk NKVD Dept. Travin, NKVD sergeant Tatarsky and NKVD commandant Efremov on this day have carried into effect the statutory order of comrade EZHOV, Minister of the Interior, and comrade VYSHINSKY, Chief Prosecutor of the Soviet Union, of February 13, 1938 (Protocol #36) proceeding from which Yevgeny Ametistov, b.1884, has been sentences to be shot.
The sentence was carried out 12.05 a.m. by Travin, Tatarsky and Efremov.
The people should know their executors.
The file also contained the file of my grandfather's rehabilitation. It began with a letter from my grandmother, Alexandra Ivanovna Ametistova, dated September 11, 1958 and addressed to the Prosecutor of Petrozavodsk. In the letter she requested the rehabilitation of her husband Yevgeny Ametistov, a minister of religion, who had in no way committed himself before the authorities.
This file included numerous letters of inquires that were sent to various cities with the aim of finding at least one of those whom my grandfather had mentioned as "accomplices" in his "espionage activities". From the responses to these letters it became obvious that part of these people had been shot before his arrest and that the other part never lived at the addresses he had indicated. It turned out that my grandfather gave his torturers names of either dead people or non-existent ones. He probably hoped that his evidence would not be checked until his death. And that is exactly what happened. As a result, on January 19, 1958 Yevgeny Ametistov was officially rehabilitated. However, the Soviet justice could not do without its usual falsehood: the rehabilitation statement that was issued to my grandmother said that her husband died in 1942 of "coronary deficiency".
Please forgive me, my poor grandfather Yevgeny, for my momentary doubts about your decency. You could not bear the terrible tortures and slandered yourself, but you did not ruin a single innocent soul and have arrived before Him as an honest person. Let your memory be blessed.
Because of some strange coincidence I am writing this on the day of the "80th anniversary of the Russian counter-intelligence service" which, in new democratic Russia, still continues to celebrate its anniversaries from the day of the appearance of Cheka. This was the most murderous and bloody organization of the 20th century. And these people continue to proudly call themselves "Cheka men". This is the same as if the German Constitution Protection Service staff would call themselves "Gestapo men".
* * *
My father, Mikhail Yevgenyevich Ametistov, was born on February 14, 1909 in the city of Temriuk in the Kuban region. The family legend goes that when he was a child he was blessed by the White-guard general Denikin. But despite this fact in his biography he did not become an enemy of the Soviet power although all his life he was persecuted and humiliated by it. By the fact of his birth in a family of "socially alien elements" my father was doomed to become an outcast in the new "society of social justice". After the victory of the Red Army over the White-guards the family moved to a big Cossack settlement called Sergeyevskaya. As a "priest's son" the boy could not even attend middle school. His parents sent him to Yekaterinodar to relatives where he was able to conceal his social inferiority and graduate from middle school. And that was the end of his education. All his attempts to enroll in an establishment of higher education ended in vain. He was dismissed after the first glance at his papers. The same were the fates of his sister and brother. The children of clergymen were not allowed to receive an education, no matter how capable they were.
My father became interested in literature. He wrote good poetry and hoped that his works would be published. But for this he had to become "a proletarian poet". He relocated to our native town, Voronezh, where he worked as a stoker at an electric power station. In this status he managed to publish his first poems in the local press using a pen name "Michael the Alien". He chose to use a pen name not because he wanted to be special, but because he had to conceal his real name which gave out his social background.
In the end my father succeeded in becoming a professional writer and even published several small books of prose and poetry which were quite loyal to the regime. But during his whole life he was haunted by the terror of social discrimination. He had to use various means to hide his real background, and these included frequent relocations. When the truth was revealed it was used for intimidating and blackmailing him. The situation became precarious after his father's arrest. I think that my father escaped the general fate only because he and his father lived in different parts of the country (in 1939 our family returned to Voronezh from Leningrad), and also because of the slovenliness of the Cheka people and the fact that they were overwhelmed by their "work".
Paradoxically, but World War II saved my father and many others like him.
My father was drafted on the second day of the war as a correspondent of a front newspaper in which he served until Victory Day. He received ten awards and two serious shell-shocks from which he suffered for the rest of his life and which have, probably, shortened his life. He went through the disgrace of the army's retreat and the glory of the victories that followed. He participated in the Battle of Kursk, the Battle of Kinigsberg, and in the liberation of Byelorussia and Poland from the Nazis.
I remember my father's warm recollections of Gen.Gorbatov in whose army he served most of the war. Here is one of his stories. Once, before an important attack a heading in their newspaper that was supposed to read "Stalin's Way of Winning!" read as "Stalin's Way of Running". This happened because of a mistake made by the typesetter who worked after a sleepless night. All the copies were immediately burnt, but the information about this incident had already reached SMERSH, an army Cheka agency. The whole editorial board including my father were arrested. However, when Gen.Gorbatov had learned about this he sent the Cheka people away and freed the prisoners.
Probably the general still remembered what these people had done to him when he was arrested before the war. He was one of the few who did not confess to anything, no matter how he was tortured. That may have saved his life. After the Lubyanka (the street on which the Cheka building was located) basements he feared nothing. He did not care about SMERSH when he was saving his people. During the war you could sometimes get away with such things. My father often told me that never in his life had he experienced such a sense of freedom as during the war. And the closer to the front lines, the freer he felt. In the extreme situation of warfare a person became much more responsible and this reduced or even did away with the habitual fear of the authorities. And at the front lines there were not many of those who had to be feared - they preferred to sit snug in the hinterland.
My father and his younger brother Victor ended the war in Berlin. Our family name was inscribed on the columns of the German Reichstag, which is a reason of special proud among war veterans. This is what the well-known poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky wrote about my father and his brother in his book: "The Biography of Victory": "It is interesting that on the same day (May 7, 1945) my old pre-war friend Mikhail Ametistov headed for Reichstag after learning that all of us had written our names on it. But when he came closer he saw that his quite rare name was already there and recognized the hand of his younger brother Victor (there were no initials on the column). This meant that Victor was alive! He hadn't written for a long time and their mother wrote about her worries to Mikhail from Voronezh. And who would think that a Reichstag column would bring such good new."
My father remembered Reichstag not only for the good news it had brought him about his almost lost brother. Many times he told me: "If you only knew how many people died for nothing only to seize those ruins. And these were people who had miraculously escaped death during the four terrible years of the war. By that time Reichstag was surrounded and doomed. If the German's hadn't capitulated it could have been crushed by artillery and air bombs without any casualties on our side. But there was Stalin's order to hoist the flag of victory over the Reichstag. And because of this political fancy several thousand people had to die!". However, this was only a drop in the ocean of tens of millions of lives that were sacrificed for the political whims of the "Father of All Peoples".
My father returned from the war with his head proudly raised. He quickly changed his uniform for a smart German suit and tie (to my great regret, since I wanted everyone to see that my father was an officer with so many awards). He got a job at the local newspaper without any problems. His poems and essays were often printed. It seemed that the sin of his alien origin was redeemed by his valor. And that true during a short period after the war.
When the situation at the frontlines became critical Stalin, trying to reach a "national alliance" rehabilitated the Russian Orthodox Church and lessened persecution for social reasons. The idea of proletarian internationalism was replaced by the slogans of Great-Russian patriotism. It seemed that the official canonization of outstanding Russian princes and generals of the past who had defeated foreign occupants; the return of the traditional accessories of the Russian army, such as shoulder straps, uniforms and ranks; and the propaganda of Russian military traditions all drew a line under the past. Those of the "former" ones who were lucky to survive in the war were relieved of the pressure of social discrimination during the last years of the war and the first couple of years after the war. These people returned home from the war full of hopes for a better and free future. "Now everything will be different," that's what my father used say at that time. These hopes were also nourished by the alliance Soviet Russian was compelled to conclude with Western democracies. As a result, the Soviet people now had access to a much greater amount of intellectual, cultural and material information about real life in other countries: they danced to jazz music, watched trophy films, wore clothes brought from Germany or sent from the United States, and stilled their hunger with US tinned meat and egg powder. All this resulted in Russian society becoming more open which, in turn, presented a fatal threat to the regime.
I do not know whether it was a conscious decision, or Stalin and his associates followed their instincts, but very soon the naive hopes for freedom and openness were shattered. Purges among writers began in 1946 and soon the punitive machine of the Ministry for State Security was in full swing. Those who had already spent ten years in prison and were lucky not to perish were arrested once again, as were new categories of martyrs: the so-called nazi collaborators and "cosmopolitans".
And again clouds gathered over my father's head. First he was criticized for paying too much attention in his writings to the subject of war and suffering at a time when the "main goal of the Soviet people was to restore the ruined economy". Then security service people began to hint that despite his war feats he was still the son "of an enemy of the people", forcing him to "cooperate" which meant he was supposed to inform on his friends among writers. He also found out that someone had slandered him and he was to become one of the victims of a forthcoming purge among Voronezh writers.
My father became frantic and found his usual way out: he began to move from one place to another, this time it were Makhachkala, Krasnodar, Volgograd and other cities. By that time he and my mother had separated. But wherever he went he was followed by the all-seeing eyes of the valiant Cheka agents. And the threats and blackmail would start all over again. They finally left my father alone in the early 1960s in Moscow thanks to the efforts a top-ranking relative of his second wife.
My father loved me very much and never abandoned me, despite his divorce with my mother and his new family. We were real friends. I remember how happy he was when I graduated from the University - it was as if his dream came true through his son. I am grateful to him for many things. He was the one to teach me to hate fascism in all of its forms. He acquainted me with the heritage of our ancestors, their religion, traditions, optimism and humor, their family legends, songs and jokes. And I hand all this down to my daughter and can fell all of us being connected by one time link.
He died in 1985, literally in my arms. This vision has been haunting me for the rest of my life.
* * *
My mother, Raisa Solomonovna Itkina, was born on July 13, 1907 in Voronezh. Her father was a Jew, "Zalman Abramov Itkin, a sewing machine mechanic" according to a certificate that was issue by the Velyzhsky Board of Trades in 1899. This certificate granted my maternal grandfather the right to "engage in this trade, have a sign over his shop, and train apprentices". In other words, he could open his own business. However Zalman (Solomon in the Russian transcription) refused to become an entrepreneur and up to the early 1920s worked as a repairman at the Russian branch of the famous Singer sewing machine company.
Like most Russian Jews, my grandfather Solomon and my other Jewish relatives were "air people" as defined by the Jewish writer Sholom Aleichem. They were inefficient dreamers and home-bred philosophers who spoke about "brilliant deals" that would bring them "crazy money" but in reality lived their modest if not meager lives.
Unlike my father, my mother spent the first half of her life in relatively favorable social situation. Of course, to come from a repairman's family was worse than to come from a factory worker's family, but that was much better than to have a priest for a father.
At that time my mothers nationality was also a certain advantage. During a time of proletarian internationalism the children of Zion who had previously been oppressed by the czar, became the favorites of the new power. We must not forget that Jewish revolutionaries have contributed greatly to the victory of this power.. They were an active element of the Bolshevik party and of other revolutionary parties. A lot of them occupied high positions in the evolving Soviet nomenclature including positions on the very top. That is why the enemies of the communist regime associated communists with Jews, treating both with equal mercilessness.
However, in the mid-1920s, when my mother graduated from middle school, a person's fate was determined not as much by one's nationality as by social origin. That is why my mother quite easily enrolled to the Voronezh University. Here, at one of the literary soiree she met a rather gloomy young man who was reciting his own poetry which he composed under the mysterious penname "Michael the Alien". That was love at first sight! It resulted in the appearance of the author of this book. And now I ask myself: Could the son of a Russian Orthodox priest marry the daughter of a Jewish mechanic in pre-Revolutionary Russia? I think that the answer is "no". And that is why I began my memoirs by announcing that if not for the October Revolution I wouldn't have been born. This, probably, seems to be the only positive outcome of this historic event for my entire life.
* * *
My childhood recollections are also connected with notable political events. Following is one of these.
It is a summer evening and the whole family is sited at a large square table having tea. A newspaper with a picture of two men shaking hands is circled around. My father's mother, grandmother Alexandra Ivanovna, sighs sorrowfully: "He'll cheat him, I'm sure he will." I become worried and ask the grown-ups who will cheat whom and why. No one wants to answer and the subject is quickly changed. Many years later my father explained to me that this conversation took place in August 1939 when I was five years old. The photo in the newspaper showed Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands after signing the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. Grandmother feared that the former would deceive the latter. And she was right!
Another vision from childhood: my mother is getting ready for work and is standing before a mirror admiring her new beautiful coat with a grew astrakhan collar and muff. Grandmother is frantic and keeps telling her: "Go, or you'll be late and you'll go to prison. You'll be late and will go to jail -" This was 1940, the time of the government's order on work discipline following which tens of thousands of young women like my mother were sent to labor camps for being late for work for five or ten minutes. My mother was lucky - she was always on time. I was the unlucky one - her muff had this wonder, a green zipper, with which I loved to play although I was forbidden to do so. And of course I broke it. For this crime I was thrashed by my mother and grandmother. It was humiliating and painful. But that was the first and last time I was punished in such a way.
A sunny summer day. I am playing with our neighbors' children in the yard. The superintendent of our building comes out of his semi-basement and says: "The war with German just began. Hitler will soon be here. Run home and hide." At home everyone is listening to Molotov's speech over the radio. The women lament: "What's going to happen? What's going to happen to us?" But I feel optimistic, I run outside and shout to the super: "We will win and will seize Berlin!" It turned out that both of us were right."
Several days later my mother and I were seeing our father off to the front. At the railroad station he treated us with hot and tasty army soup. For the rest of my life I have remembered the aroma of that soup and the smell of the new leather of my father's officer belt and holster. Since then the smell of things has become a strong component of my memory. Whenever I sense a familiar smell I get a vivid picture from the most distant past of my life. I would have probably made a good taster-
Quite soon we became refuges. As the super had predicted, the Germans were rapidly approaching our city. Large factories and organizations were being evacuated. Those who worked in other places could only rely on their feet. We were lucky: my mother taught Russian language and literature at the Voronezh flying school which prepared students for flying academies. One late autumn night together with the other teachers and students of this school we boarded a train consisting of wooden cars and started on our journey.
