Vaporized

The walk, the atmosphere, it is all so charming that it’s easy to forget that over the course of nearly 80 years, hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens were tried and butchered in anonymous basements along this touristy path. Not only in the bowels of the Lubyanka, whose hallways, writes Robert Conquest, smelled of “carbolic and disinfectant,” but at hundreds of locations scattered around the city center.

Lubyanka “is the best known of the NKVD prisons, since it lies within the headquarters of the Police Ministry, and has been the scene of the most famous imprisonments, interrogations, and executions,” writes Conquest in his magisterial The Great Terror: A Reassessment. “But though its great wedge looming over Dzerzhinsky Square [as Lubyanka Square was known during Soviet times] is only a few minutes’ walk from the Kremlin and the general tourist area, it is seldom pointed out to visitors even now.”

Wander through Moscow today, 26 years after Conquest published his great Reassessment, and you will see that not much has changed in this respect. If it is easy to forget the truth about this place, there is no one reminding anybody, either. The grand scope of this lack of historical memory is so jarring that it seems as if it’s purposeful, as if someone hopes the smiling chatter of restaurant-goers and boutique-shoppers will forever drown the muffled screams of the dead and the nighttime whimpers of their survivors.

On the night of February 5, 1938, Solomon and Dasha Levenson tucked their two young children into bed in their Moscow apartment and headed off to enjoy the evening at a relative’s. Their eldest, a 12-year-old girl named Olga, remembers the date clearly because at the time the Soviet Union was using the revolutionary six-day week calendar, meaning the sixth of every month was the day off, as were the twelfth and eighteenth, no matter on which day of the week they fell.

“Tomorrow is a day-off, we’ll go see The Blue Bird,” Solomon told his daughter before he left. The play, written by Belgian playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck, had premiered in 1908 at Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski’s production of the play was the theater’s crown jewel, and it had become a ritual for parents to take their children to see it.

It was after midnight when the couple came home. Three agents of the NKVD (as the KGB was then known) sat in the darkness, waiting. Solomon, a low-ranking bureaucrat in the political department of the People’s Commissariat for Water Transport, Narkomvod in Soviet lingo, was placed under arrest. Over the next few hours the apartment was thoroughly searched. “By dawn,” Conquest notes of the NKVD’s typical arrest process, the victim “would usually have been through the formalities and be in his cell.”

The next morning, Olga awoke early. The apartment—really just a single room in a large communal apartment shared with 22 other families, which they had split into three sections with temporary barriers—had been meticulously cleaned. Dasha lay on the fully made bed in the windowless closet that served as her bedroom, smoking and reading a book. Olga knew something was wrong. Her mother had never smoked, and she found it strange that the entire room should be so made-up first thing in the morning.

Solomon was born in 1897 to a wealthy Jewish merchant family in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. While some of his family members were taken by the revolutionary spirit—in 1906, his Socialist Revolutionary (SR) eldest brother was killed at the age of 18 by czarist police while attempting to rob a bank for the revolution—it seems that if Solomon ever did believe in earnest, by the early 1920s he already recognized the true nature of the project. In 1923 or ’24, shortly after their marriage, a young and enthusiastic Dasha wanted to join the Bolshevik party. Her husband nixed the idea immediately: “One party membership is enough for the both of us,” he told her.

Lubyanka today&#8212’the scene of the most famous imprisonments, interrogations, and executions’ of the Soviet regime (Photo credit: Dovid Margolin)

During the arrest, Olga later learned, her father had pointed with his eyes at their family telephone book, filled with names of friends and relatives who were now in imminent danger because of their association with Levenson. Her mother immediately understood and silently tipped it to fall between the wall and the couch. When the NKVD led Solomon out the door, down the long staircase, and into a waiting vehicle, Dasha picked up the cigarettes he had left behind. She smoked for the next 15 years.

Olga’s 8-year-old brother Dima believed the story that Solomon had gone away on a business trip, although he found it strange that his father would have left without taking along his wristwatch. For the next while, Dima wrote letters to his father, asking him to bring back a toy rifle as a gift. When another boy eventually slipped to him that his father had been arrested, Dima began addressing his letters to Comrade Stalin, pleading the case for his father’s innocence.

No reply ever came to the young boy’s letters, nor, for that matter, to any inquiry Dasha made of her husband’s whereabouts. Dasha knew that her own arrest as the wife of an “enemy of the people” could be soon in coming and so bravely packed a small suitcase for herself, which she kept near the door. She also made arrangements for her children to be taken in by relatives if the need arose, knowing the alternative would be a Soviet state orphanage.

Olga remembers how Dasha, now the family’s sole breadwinner and therefore unable to absent herself from work, once sent her to the NKVD information center at Kuznetsky Most 24, to see if she could find out any more information about Solomon. The office was around the corner from the NKVD’s aforementioned headquarters on Lubyanka Square, and Olga took along a book, Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, and a piece of paper with the only information the family had received:

“That’s all we knew, that he had been sentenced to 10 years without the right to communicate with anyone,” Olga tells me. “Well, as I certainly know today, 10 years also passes eventually. So I went there to find out more.”

The waiting room was not very big and its chairs were all taken by others, also waiting. Olga sat all day reading Hugo, before finally hearing her name called out.

From left: Dasha, Olga, and Solomon Levenson, circa 1928 (Courtesy of Olga Levenson)

“I walk into the inner office and in front of me is sitting one man, the person I am addressing myself to, and off to the side sat another man reading a newspaper. He didn’t even look up,” she remembers. “He looks at my paper and says ‘Levenson, Solomon Abramovich, 10 years without right of correspondence.’ That’s it. I told him, ‘But that’s what I wrote on the paper I gave you! What information is there about him?!?’ None. No, we don’t have any. Meaning, I sat there the entire day to read my own little paper.”

Conquest notes the misery the wives and children of the arrested were put through, the endless waiting at various information centers where, if they learnt anything of their loved one, it was a lie anyway. He quotes the Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova, who wrote in the introduction to her Requiem that if a monument ever be erected to her, it should be placed at the gates of the Leningrad prison where she stood for hundreds of hours hoping to glean some little piece of information about her son.

“Years we waited! We thought, ‘Oh, here he’s going to come back,’ ” my grandmother says. “We all waited for almost 10 years. My mother was 36 when he was arrested and that was it, her whole life she ended up waiting.”

It would be 18 years before the Levensons, Dasha and her children, heard anything more of their husband and father. By that point they knew. In 1956, a slip of paper arrived at the same apartment from which Solomon had been taken nearly two decades earlier, explaining that he had been wrongly accused and convicted of crimes and was therefore being rehabilitated. In a twisted bit of Soviet bureaucratic morality, Dasha also received two months’ back pay for her husband’s excused leave of absence.

The building where the Levenson family lived in 1938, sharing apartment 80. (Photo credit: Dovid Margolin)

That was the last information my grandmother ever received about her father from the government. The date of arrest, burned into her memory, and the date of his Khrushchev-era rehabilitation were all she had. It was not until 2009 that some late-night googling led me to a list of those purged in Moscow published a few years earlier by the Russian human-rights group Memorial. The list filled in a few spare details of the case of Solomon Levenson. He had been charged with being a member of a counterrevolutionary organization. He was tried and sentenced to be shot at the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court on June 20, 1938, and the sentence was carried out that same day. He is buried in a mass grave at Communarka, the former dacha of purged NKVD boss Genrikh Yagoda, and his case file today lies buried in the central archives of the KGB’s successor, the Russian Federation’s FSB.

The tarp-covered Military Collegium Shooting House, where thousands of summary trials were held. (Photo credit: Dovid Margolin)

Conquest writes that the Military Collegium “had a large staff and was able to mount many cases simultaneously. It took mere minutes even for leading officials or generals. A lesser figure, Eugenia Ginzburg [author of the Gulag memoir Journey into the Whirlwind], describes her seven-minute trial before the Collegium in 1937. The Court returned in two minutes with a ‘verdict’ which she estimates must have taken twenty minutes to type. Thus the Collegium got through tens of thousands of cases over the years of the Terror. From 1 October 1936 to 30 September 1938, it passed 36,157 sentences—30,514 of death and 5,643 of imprisonment. But these constituted a very small proportion of those condemned.”

I discovered the information about my great-grand-father at the end of April 2009. Two months later, my father went to synagogue to say Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer traditionally recited on the anniversary of death, for his grandfather. It was the first time anyone had ever said it on the proper date.

Memorial’s early Internet lists of Stalin’s victims were curiously organized. Generally, one can expect a list of names to read alphabetically, but Memorial’s lists were arranged geographically, with victims named by address and apartment number. The address at which my grandmother grew up, number 11 on its street, lists four victims, my great-grandfather in apartment 80, the others in apartments 93, 124, and 137. Go up and down the street and you can see more. Four men from building number 10 were also purged, one from number 13, and another five from number 14.

It’s a short walk from Lubyanka Square to my grandmother’s childhood home. An old building with high ceilings and big windows, its apartments would fetch a good price today if anyone could figure out how to empty them of their longtime inhabitants. Nobody has, and so the halls and stairways have essentially remained unchanged for decades: peeling brown and tan paint, crumbling tiles, flickering lights.

I hadn’t planned on entering the building, but the front doors opened with only a slight tug, so I let myself in. I knocked on what I thought was the correct apartment and explained that my grandmother had once lived here and if it was okay with them, I would love to take a look around. Strictly speaking, Moscow is the last place in the world where strangers allow you into their apartments (Muscovites do not give directions on the street, either, insisting briskly that they have not the slightest knowledge of whatever location you are seeking), but I got lucky. The kind Jewish woman who ended up being on the other side heard me repeat my familiar-sounding name, viewed my Semitic features through the peephole, and, after unlocking multiple chains and deadbolts, finally let me in.

“This is not your grandmother’s apartment, though,” she told me. “Three generations of my husband’s family have lived here, this was never a communal apartment.”

The woman was friendly and helpful, pointing out the places where the Soviets had built walls to split up apartments and various landmarks my grandmother had mentioned to me. But each time I brought the conversation to the central thought on my mind, Stalin’s early-morning arrest of my great-grandfather from the same musty apartment building that I found myself in, she waved it off, preferring to focus on the more pressing issues at hand.

“What Stalin?” she dismissed. “Today we have one czar, we have Putin, that’s all. Everyone has already forgotten all the rest of it.”

I mentioned to her that it seemed to me that Russia had never made a proper reckoning of its past. “Of course. That’s because we all, probably, were caught up in this,” she answered. “I hate the subject. I don’t even like to think about it.”

As I walked out into the hallway to leave, she advised me not to bother trying my grandmother’s actual apartment, elsewhere in the building. After Dasha moved out of the place in the 1960s, the entire communal apartment—the pre-revolution home of a wealthy doctor—was emptied of its tenants and given to a high-ranking official. Now his children lived there and, she said, they were off their rockers. “There’s no point in even knocking. They won’t open the door.”

Just as sites associated with Soviet crimes are popularly ignored and unmarked, it is nearly impossible to fish information and case files out of Russia’s FSB archives. This shutdown in access can be traced to the aftermath of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin’s first election as president in 2000. It wasn’t always like that. In the early post-Soviet days, the doors of the Lubyanka were flung open, as people rushed in to seek for themselves definitive information about their loved ones. While this openness allowed millions of people to discover the true fates of family members and finally learn historical truths their government had always lied to them about, it also turned the archives into total disarray—similar to other aspects of the country during that wild decade.

“It was all open, so you could do whatever you wanted,” explains Rabbi Boruch Gorin, a key adviser to Russia’s chief rabbi Berel Lazar and the editor of the Lechaim Jewish literary magazine. “That was very useful, but there was also great harm done because a huge amount of files were straight-out stolen. It could be as a souvenir, or it could be something that compromised them.”

In a land where millions of people were repressed, millions more had to do the repressing. There are many decent people who are embarrassed and remorseful over actions they or their families took during the Soviet era. There are also people who may not regret what they did but do not want it known publicly, either. Gorin, who is also the chairman of Moscow’s recently opened $50 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, says the archives are not completely sealed and a limited number of academics and historians have access to them, actively writing on Soviet crimes.

“Their thought is that when nonexperts begin to study this information and can access any files, it can lead to a lot of things—blackmail, suicide—as was the case in Germany,” says Gorin. “Many people don’t understand that if a KGB file contains a statement showing one person was an informant, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he actually was, and so on.”

The fact remains that it is extremely difficult to access archives, and there is a very obvious disdain for reminders of past crimes. Along with this comes a far more sinister development: In Russia, Stalin has reemerged as a leader to admire. According to polls conducted by the Levada Center, a majority believes Stalin had a positive effect on Russian history, and he has come out among the top three Russian leaders of the twentieth century. Growing admiration of Stalin is a stark reminder that no Communist party officials or KGB bosses were ever held accountable for their crimes. Gorin says that this is more than just a problem of history.

“Here there is an absolutely tolerant approach to the past. Bluntly stated, if you don’t go through the process of de-Nazification, then new Nazis appear,” says Gorin. “That today you have people in Russia who believe that if you don’t share their beliefs then you ought to be thrown in prison is because the people who did that in the previous regime were never held responsible.”

A dun statue of Karl Marx looms among festive lights in the Moscow dusk. (Photo credit: Dovid Margolin)

Of course, the creation of a grand and continuous arc of Russian history is a pillar of Putin’s ideology, turning expressions of strength and power into reflections of the country’s purported natural destiny. If that is the case, then crimes committed in the process do not hold much significance. In fact, acknowledging them will be seen as an affront.

“Everything breaks down into those who love Russia and those who don’t,” Gorin says, explaining the reasoning of “right-thinking” Russians. “Stalin loved Russia. How do we know? It was big and powerful, everyone was afraid of it. What of the millions he shot? That doesn’t matter. You are blackening our history.”

If Putin has appropriated Russia’s past achievements while shirking responsibility for its darker underbelly, the opposite extreme also exists: Members of the liberal opposition in Russia have rhetorically lifted Putin’s alleged crimes to the level of Stalin’s.

To say that Putin is today’s Stalin is simply not true, asserts Gorin. “Where are the Gulags? Where are the thousands of arrests? There is, after all, a difference between propaganda and Gulags. To say that contemporary Russia is like Stalinist Russia is to say, exactly as the government does, that Stalin’s Russia wasn’t all that bad.”

In 1927, the religious leader of Soviet Jewry, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, was arrested in Leningrad for his leading role in sustaining Jewish life after the revolution. Schneersohn, the then-Lubavitcher rebbe, writes of the nighttime executions he heard at the Spalerno prison: the screams followed by gunshots followed by the heavy silence of death.

An official portrait of Solomon Levenson in party uniform (Photo credit: Dovid Margolin)

“Who knows if at that very moment, as these individuals are being taken to be slain, shrieking and pleading, at the very same time, their wives, sons and parents are in deep slumber with visions of hope, unknowing that this very instant their husbands, fathers, or sons are being led to slaughter?” he records in his memoirs, translated into English as The Heroic Struggle. “How tragically unfortunate is the man who in his last moments is denied the opportunity to express his last requests to his survivors—to have a last glance of those dear to him, his beloved and his friends, to bless his children.”

No marker has ever been affixed to the Lubyanka or Spalerno or any other Soviet prison where millions of men and women were forever silenced.

The KGB information center where my grandmother and thousands of others sat waiting was knocked down in 1982, the old buildings making way for a massive KGB annex, still occupied by the FSB today. There is no plaque or marker for the millions of combined hours spent there by parents, spouses, siblings, and children.

But it is the central and almost shrouded location of the Military Collegium, where so many were tried and executed, that is most shocking. Covered by a massive tarp since the early 2000s, the building that housed the collegium stands at Nikolskaya 23, just down the road from the St. Regis on the street formerly known as 25th of October. During Soviet times not many people knew what was taking place in that building, although the NKVD had a small information center there, too.

Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky was tried there. So were the great Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel and the Hasidic chief rabbi of Moscow Shmarya Leib Medalia. And my great-grandfather.

“I passed that building countless times, I didn’t know anything about it,” my grandmother says. “We all thought everything happened in the Lubyanka and that was it.”

Constructed during czarist times on foundations built centuries earlier, the building has thick walls. It is not known exactly how many people were executed in the building’s basement, but with such a heavy caseload, there is no doubt there were many. It is said that so heavy was the smell of blood during those dark years that horses startled as they passed by. Today the building is known as Dom Rasstrelny, the Shooting House, and is stuck in limbo between a private developer and advocates for memorialization of the crimes that happened there. Moscow’s Gulag Museum sets up a photo exhibition every year on the street outside of it and protesters gather there from time to time, yet the building remains covered as if under construction, not even a hint of its awful nature visible to passersby. According to Gulag Museum officials I spoke with, hopes for the building’s future memorialization are dim.

Olga Levenson in 2016 (Photo credit: Dovid Margolin)

Today, Olga Levenson is a full-fledged, voting American (and Weekly Standard reader) who has lived happily in Boston for the last 31 years. While she heartily throws back shots of vodka (as we did together during our interview), she does not miss Moscow or Russia even a shred. But on a dresser in her room, next to pictures of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, sits a black-and-white photo of her father, his penetrating eyes looking out from under a peaked hat of the party.

“I tell you, my whole life has gone by, 79 years, but if I’m dusting the top of the dresser, or if I just look at the picture, my heart tears,” she tells me. “It’s not just like a symbolic figure sitting there, he’s a familiar person to me. How many years have gone by that I haven’t seen him, but to this day I feel a pain. I always remember him.”

Unlike those who arrested and killed Solomon Levenson—and so many of his countrymen and women.

Dovid Margolin is an associate editor at Chabad.org.