The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes

Author:Orlando Figes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2008-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

Valentina Serova, 1940

Valentina was young and beautiful, a famous widow and film star, but she had a secret history that made her vulnerable. Her father, Vasily Polovyk, a hydro-engineer from the Kharkov region of eastern Ukraine, had been arrested in Moscow during the industrial purges of 1930, when Valentina was thirteen, and sent to a labour camp. Released in 1935, Vasily was rearrested in 1937 and sentenced to eight years in the Solovetsky labour camp. All these facts were carefully concealed by Valentina’s mother, a well-known actress at the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow, where Valentina spent much of her childhood, playing all the leading parts for girls. Valentina’s mother changed her name from Polovyk, a Ukrainian name, to the Russian Polovikova, and worked hard to erase all trace of her Ukrainian past. Valentina was brought up to deny all knowledge of her father (in later years she claimed she had never seen him as a child). It was not until 1959 (fifteen years after his release from the Solovetsky labour camp) that she summoned up the courage to meet him, and then only after he had got in touch with her.70

In 1935, Valentina joined the Komsomol. She soon attracted the attention of Aleksandr Kosaryov, the leader of the organization, whose well-known fondness for young actresses was easily indulged through his control of the Lenin Komsomol Theatre in Moscow. Kosaryov promoted the career of his beautiful young protégée. But in November 1938 he was arrested (and later shot) in a general purge of the Komsomol leadership, which was accused by Stalin of failing to root out the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in its ranks. At a banquet in the Kremlin shortly before Kosaryov’s arrest, Stalin had approached him, clinked glasses, and whispered in his ear: ‘Traitor! I’ll kill you!’ The arrest of her patron placed Valentina in serious danger, particularly when she was denounced as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ by a jealous former boyfriend, whom she had jilted for Kosaryov. Called to account for herself at a purge meeting in the theatre workers’ union, she was questioned about the arrest of her father and made to renounce him to avoid expulsion.71

What saved Valentina in the end was the influence of her new husband, the famous aviator Anatoly Serov, whom she had met at a banquet thrown by Kosaryov. Pilots featured prominently in the pantheon of Soviet heroes. The air force, in particular, symbolized the Soviet Union’s military power and progress, and it was the glamour of the aeroplane that inspired many young men to join the military. With his handsome, clean-cut, healthy ‘Russian’ looks and perfect proletarian origins, Serov was the ideal figure for this propaganda role. His exploits in the Spanish Civil War were legendary, and by the time he met Valentina he had become a national hero and celebrity, one of the most honoured pilots of them all, and a Kremlin favourite. Married ten days after their first meeting, Anatoly and Valentina moved into the sumptuously furnished apartment recently vacated by Marshal Yegorov, who had been arrested in connection with the Tukhachevsky trial.

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