Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews Page A

lost.'
    Lenina asked her mother what was wrong. Martha didn't answer and sent her to bed.
    The previous night Sergei Kirov had been shot dead by a lone assassin in his office at the Party headquarters at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. 'We are lost,' Bibikov said as he wept for the death of a man he admired. But was he also weeping for himself? Weeping with anger for the mistake he had made in identifying himself too closely with the losing side? For all his cultivated proletarian bluffness, Bibikov must have been a political animal, a committee man, with a rising star's sense of the way the wind was blowing. As Bibikov lay on the sofa weeping for Kirov, he must have turned over those now-dangerous January conversations in his mind, wondering whether he had said too much.
    And yet the hammer did not fall at once. Stalin, too, wept in public at Kirov's funeral, and acted as chief pallbearer, leading the nation in mourning. There was time enough to take revenge on the enemies in the heart of the Party which Stalin had identified at the congress.
    On a local level, the Party machine continued to run smoothly. The KhTZ's production levels climbed to greater heights and the famine mercifully abated - if only because the millions of dead no longer needed to be fed. Bibikov, along with three other members of the KhTZ's management, was awarded the Order of Lenin, number 301, in a plush velvet box. It was a recognized prelude to greater things. In late 1935, the expected promotion came, to Provincial Party Secretary of the Chernigov region in the rolling farm country of the northern Ukraine. Bibikov was just thirty-two years old, well on his way to a high-flying future - perhaps membership of the Ukrainian or national Party Central Committee. Maybe higher still.
     
    After the belching factory smokestacks and screeching rail junctions of Kharkov, Chernigov must have seemed like a step back into a slower, older Russia. The Chernigov Kremlin, with its medieval cathedrals, stands on the high bank of the sluggish River Desna. Wooded parkland comes right up to the centre of the city, and in summer the air is filled with pollen from poplar trees which line the streets. The squat, ornamented houses built by Chernigov's wealthy merchants still stand, and the place has retained an air of pre-revolutionary bourgeois respectability. The town has many great churches which somehow escaped the Bolsheviks' dynamite. Chernigov was too out-of-the-way, perhaps, to warrant a thorough purge of religious buildings, too far from the great industrial heartlands of the eastern Ukraine where the future of Socialism was being forged. It was a backwater, but Bibikov was sure that if he made a success of his new Party job he would not be tarrying long.
    The Bibikovs lived the life of the privileged. Already the Spartan Party ethic of the early thirties was slackening. The élite quickly accrued perks which set them above their fellow citizens. Martha shopped at exclusive Party grocers', and Bibikov was entitled to holidays in specially built sanatoriums on the Black Sea. Every month, Bibikov would give Martha a little book of coupons for imported food, textiles and shoes from the Insnab, or 'Foreign Supply' shop. The family moved into a large four-room apartment with handsome furniture, confiscated from a wealthy merchant family for the use of Chernigov's new rulers. There, Varya scrubbed the Bibikovs' pans with brick dust until they shone.
    Boris installed shelves right up to the high ceiling of his study and filled them with books which he read in his big leather armchair. On his way back from work he'd stop in to the local bookshop and buy children's books for the girls and ideological tomes for himself. When Martha shouted at Lenina she would tiptoe into Bibikov's study and climb into his lap, sobbing. 'Let's not complain about her,' he would say. 'Let's strengthen our Union instead.' It was a joking reference to the current Party-speak.
    During their