A STOLEN HEART, THEN PRISON
The Soviet Union collapsed 25 years ago on Christmas Day. “Today, it’s a new day. ... God forbid the sad errors of our history are repeated,” a TV newscaster said Dec. 25, 1991. One of the cruelest “sad errors” was dictator Josef Stalin’s Gulag prison system — forced labor camps for millions of criminals and political dissidents.
The inmates built roads and railways and worked in mines and in the Soviet Union’s vast timber industry. Millions died from exposure, starvation, disease.
“There’s not much interest in these people anymore,” said Lyudmila Sadovnikova of the Gulag History Museum in Moscow. “But there absolutely should be. Almost every family in Russia is connected to this tragedy in some way.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who chronicled the nightmare conditions political prisoners faced in
The Gulag Archipelago, wrote that “people were arrested who were guilty of nothing, and were therefore unprepared to put up
any resistance whatsoever.”
It has been 63 years since the Gulag camps were disbanded. Only about 3,600 of 18 million prisoners are still alive to bear witness to this dark period. That is why the story about Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan, 87, is so important, and why she will never forget the date Nov. 20.
‘ AT LEAST LET THIS GIRL TAKE A SWEATER’
“It was the destiny of MOSCOW the Soviet Union to disappear,” Lyudmila Khachatryan said a quarter- century later as she sat in the living room of her drab Soviet- era concrete apartment. “I miss nothing from this time.”
Khachatryan was 18 when she was arrested on the doorstep of her family home on the Raushskaya Embankment near Red Square. She has documents about her captivity, and the Gulag History Museum has recorded 25 hours of her testimony. Many details cannot be confirmed, but old photos and a still sharp memory tell the story.
Born on New Year’s Eve in 1929 to a wealthy military family, Khachatryan was a lively girl. She did well in school. But she had a contrarian streak that often got her in trouble.
“My mother was always saying to me: ‘ Why do I get so much hassle and grief from you when other children I know are not nearly as naughty? Why, child?’ ”
At age 8, she stole money from her mother’s purse to buy a statue of Lenin to bring to school. Khachatryan’s teacher had asked her to buy the statue, but her parents had refused on principle. They hated the Communist Party.
“They were more mad that I had bought a statue of Lenin than that I was a thief,” she said of the porcelain statue that portrayed Lenin with a full head of dark, curly hair. Most likenesses show him bald.
When her parents discovered what she had done, they whipped her with a belt. “After that, I never stole anything again,” she said.
Ten years later, she committed a crime that only the oppressive Soviet system would recognize and punish her for by sending her to the Gulag: “What was I guilty of? I can say it in one word: love.” Love of a foreigner. He was a military officer from Montenegro, at the time part of Soviet ally Yugoslavia. They had met by chance at a medical clinic. She was 17. He was a few years older and had come to Russia to study at one of its prestigious military academies. For several months, they met surreptitiously by the banks of the Moskva River in central Moscow.
He regaled her with dramatic stories of Red Army battlefield victories and boast- ed that he had been personally selected by Yugoslav leader Josip Tito to get a Soviet education. She wore her mother’s makeup, and on one occasion, it smeared. A gentleman, he mentioned it only once.
“It was one of the last times I saw him. We had just said goodbye, and he turned and said over his shoulder, ‘ As soon as you get home, please look in the mirror, and never do the same again.’ So I ran home, over the bridge, entered the house, and because we had a lot of mirrors in the hall, I immediately saw what he meant. There were black dots all over my face from the mascara. It had been snowing.” They married in secret. Because of her age — at 17, Khachatryan was too young, according to Soviet law — the union was formalized by the Yugoslav ambassador in the embassy. In Yugoslavia, the legal marriage age was 16.
“I had no plans to tell my mother,” she said. “Of course, she found out about it later.”
Around this time, the relationship between Stalin and Tito began to sour. Soon, there was a split. Yugoslav nationals, including Khachatryan’s new hus- band, were deported. Anyone who had communicated with foreigners was rounded up and detained. Khachatryan was one of them. “There was no way to reach him. He was simply gone,” she said.
“When the NKVD ( later KGB) came to arrest me, they told my mother they would bring me back home that same evening. It was near Artillery Day ( which commemorates the Battle of Stalingrad against Nazi Germany), and because my father was an officer, it was an important time for us,” she said.
“They didn’t even let me take any warm clothes with me. My mother said, ‘ At least let this girl take a sweater,’ but they told her, ‘ No, no, don’t worry we’ll bring her back in the evening.’
“We were about to go to a party to celebrate the holiday. My mother was wearing the most beautiful dress, and my father was in his full military uniform. I am glad I decided to take my mother’s advice.”
She brought the sweater. It would
prove useful. She would be away nearly seven years.
After her arrest, Khachatryan was taken to Moscow’s Lefortova prison, where she was interrogated.
“They removed all my clothes. And in all my holes, they put their fingers,” she said. “It’s a terrible sin. But the most horrible thing that occurred to me at this point was that I would never see my parents again.
“I don’t remember if they washed me or let me wash before putting me in the cell. You could not bring anything metal in there. They cut out two zippers from my dress. All my underwear and the metal bits on my bra — they took those. They even cut out my initials from my handkerchief.
“They took pictures of me because I was shedding so many tears. It was like a game to them. The ceiling of the cell was painted a brilliant- white color whereas the walls were very dark green, and it gave this very visual sense of having pressure constantly exerted on you. The walls closed in on you.”
LIVING A NIGHTMARE
For Khachatryan, there was no trial. Only a verdict.
“My sentencing was done by a real Soviet- Communist type. Big. Fat. He said, ‘ Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan!: In the name of the Soviet Union, blah blah blah, after members of the NKVD, blah blah blah. You have been given a term of work in the camps of eight years!’ I started to shout at him, then realized a girl next to me had received 15 years. I had gotten off lightly.”
She had been in Moscow’s Lefortova prison for three months. The next day, she was put on a train bound for the Soviet Union’s northernmost reaches, to an area that appeared to her to be filled with wooden churches. It was the Kargopollag camp in the Arkhangelsk region — the Russian Arctic. Here, it was not unusual for winter temperatures to plummet to 49 degrees below zero and to stay there for weeks.
What looked like wooden churches turned out to be some of the many structures that formed part of the vast camp.
Anne Applebaum, whose book Gulag: A History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, wrote that some of these camps had grown from “containing nothing more than a few huts and some barbed wire ( to) become true industrial giants.” The largest housed nearly 200,000 prisoners. Applebaum estimates that Kargopol- lag, a forestry camp, was home to about 30,000 prisoners.
Khachatryan was quarantined for two weeks so camp officials could assess her health and fitness. By day, she was put to work cleaning and re- cleaning barrack floors. If she complained, which she did initially, she would be given an injection that made her lose consciousness.
At night, interrogators would try to break her resolve through humiliation, sleep deprivation, intimidation and other psychological tactics. There were few meals, and she was hungry all the time.
“It was so cold, and the blanket in the cell was thin. Sometimes they would wake me every 15 minutes. I was happy I brought the sweater. I would put my legs in the sleeves to warm them.”
Eventually, through a stroke of luck, Khachatryan sent a letter to her parents to tell them where she was. They knew she had been detained but had no idea where. A fellow inmate whose five- year term was coming to an end agreed to smuggle out the missive.
It was an extraordinarily courageous act considering discovery could have meant re- imprisonment or even a charge of collaboration, resulting in execution by firing squad. Stalin personally signed off on these death lists, the Gulag museum said.
The letter probably saved her life. Within a few weeks, Khachatryan’s father appeared at the camp.
A second piece of luck would prove equally decisive.
Her father and the camp’s chief warden had served together under the same general in World War II. Although they did not know each other at the time, it was a sufficient excuse to share a bottle of brandy.
The two men drank late into the evening. Before dawn, Khachatryan’s father came to her cell. Still drunk, he told his daughter, “Your fate has been decided. You will work in the camp’s theater.”
Although Khachatryan had no formal experience as a performer, for more than five years until her release in 1953, she was partly occupied playing an American spy on the stage.
‘ HE WOULD SIMPLY NOT DIE’
Nov. 20 is a black day on Khachatryan’s calendar. She does not answer the phone. The TV is switched off. She refuses the company of all but close friends or other Gulag survivors. When she was younger and more agile, she would travel to the cemetery to ask her parents’ forgiveness. She hasn’t done so in years.
Nov. 20 is the day Khachatryan was arrested. She was released shortly after Stalin died March 5, 1953. She was 24.
“It was all my fault, and after all these years, I feel this responsibility still,” she said.
“I made it so hard for them. I was their only child. They did so much for me.”
This year, Khachatryan spent Nov. 20 with just one person, her doctor. They ordered pizza and shared a bottle of wine.
Virtually all of Khachatryan’s friends have died.
She does not feel especially abandoned by the government or anyone else, in part because she never really felt supported by them. Officially, she was compensated 8,100 rubles ( about $ 130) for each year she spent in the camp. She did not receive the money until Dec. 17, 1991 — eight days before the Soviet Union fell apart. When she went to claim the money a few weeks later, Russia’s economic collapse and runaway inflation had turned this payment into dust.
For years, Khachatryan refused to talk about her experiences, fearing the potential consequences.
“I was worried. I could go back to prison,” she said. “The Soviet Union had not been declared dead for that long.”
After her release, she moved to Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. There, her mother took her to church and made her pray that she would never again contact “the Yugoslav,” as she now calls her first husband.
Kachatryan found work in a cultural center, giving art lessons to military officers and performing on the side. She married again. Then for a third time. She had a son, but he died of leukemia at an early age. She finds it too upsetting to talk about him.
A social worker visits Kachatryan once a week and brings her supplies. Recently, the government purchased her a refrigerator, a microwave and a washing machine. This was not because she is a Gulag survivor but because her third husband, an Armenian who had also been imprisoned in Stalin’s camps — for falling in love with a German girl — was due money for being a World War II veteran. A musician, he died in 1997. The time they had together was a happy one.
“Nothing teaches people if they don’t want to see. For me, Lenin was Russia’s butcher No. 1, and Stalin was No. 2. Lenin started it all. He was worse. That’s what people need to know.”
There was something else she wanted to say: “Listen to me.”
“Toward the end — this was early 1953 — we would run every day to the camp doctor and ask whether Stalin was alive or going to die that day. We knew that he was very ill at this point,” she said. “And every day, the doctor would say ‘ die.’ But he always lived. He would simply not die.
“Then one day, they announced it over a loudspeaker. Everybody was really shocked and confused. No one had any idea what to do. Not even the guards. Finally, someone took charge and told us to gather together, so we could pay our respects. At this moment, we were all sitting on the ground, and so they told us to stand up, so we could properly honor the greatest leader of our nation.
“But a friend of mine — an actress who before her imprisonment, ( Yugoslav leader) Tito fell in love with and would send her black roses — she refused to stand up.
“Eventually, someone started to shout at her: ‘ Stand!’ ‘ Stand!’ Then others joined in, before finally people were just screaming at her: ‘ Bitch, get up!’ ‘ Bitch, stand up!’ She never did.”
PRICE OF COURTSHIP
Until a few months ago, Khachatryan had kept her promise to her mother and never attempted to make contact with “the Yugoslav.” But a chance encounter with the grandchild of a military officer who had known him convinced her that it might be a good time to write a letter about what had befallen her.
It was too late. The letter reached his home a few weeks after he died. She found out that he had gone on to have a distinguished military career, but she learned few details about his personal life.
Khachatryan said she did not think readers of her account need to know his name, although she did share it in the end. She also shared the single picture she has of them together, as well as a personal dedication the actress wrote in a book she published about life in the camps.
In her letter to “the Yugoslav,” Khachatryan briefly described the price she paid for their courtship. She did not ask him any questions about their time together or anything else. She didn’t want to know.
“It was so cold, and the blanket in the cell was thin. Sometimes they would wake me every 15 minutes. I was happy I brought the sweater. ” Lyudmila Khachatryan