My Papa Murdered Mikhoels

Vladimir Gusarov - Translated by Clive A. Giller and Yuri A. Popov

The author’s father, when he was a senior Communist Party member in Belorussia, could have been implicated in the assassination of Mikhoels, the popular director of the State Jewish Theatre in the Soviet Union. This was carried out on the orders of Stalin in 1948 when Vladimir was twenty three years old. His own life is headed towards the theatre rather than politics—and subsequently, ‘shaming his father’s grey hairs,’ into the Moscow dissident movement. Early years are sheltered and privileged, but a psychotic outburst in a restaurant against the tyranny of Stalinism results in him being incarcerated in the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, where he comes across an aristocratic English spy. Gusarov himself has a keen interest in the West and expresses particular admiration for the British Labour Party as well as the Queen. Further deviations, run-ins with the KGB and Soviet psychiatry pattern a failing stage career. But he does at one point find himself the uneasy star of a film about Soviet railways ordered by Kaganovich. During all this time father, for his own sake as much as that of his son, saves Vladimir from being sent to a labour camp. Perhaps that is what allows him to write with such cynical humour about his slow descent into chaos and oblivion. His accounts of a multitude of encounters with people from all walks of Russian life (including colourful episodes with Voroshilov and Solzhenitsyn—as well as his marriages and wayward sexual adventures) are enormously enriched by the actor’s power of speech recall.

Hamilton Books

Pages: 298 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-0-7618-6534-6 • Paperback • May 2015 • $53.99 • (£42.00)

978-0-7618-6535-3 • eBook • May 2015 • $51.00 • (£39.00)

Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / General, Biography & Autobiography / Historical, Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography / Political, History / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union

My Papa Murdered Mikhoels

Paperback

eBook

Summary

The author’s father, when he was a senior Communist Party member in Belorussia, could have been implicated in the assassination of Mikhoels, the popular director of the State Jewish Theatre in the Soviet Union. This was carried out on the orders of Stalin in 1948 when Vladimir was twenty three years old. His own life is headed towards the theatre rather than politics—and subsequently, ‘shaming his father’s grey hairs,’ into the Moscow dissident movement. Early years are sheltered and privileged, but a psychotic outburst in a restaurant against the tyranny of Stalinism results in him being incarcerated in the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, where he comes across an aristocratic English spy. Gusarov himself has a keen interest in the West and expresses particular admiration for the British Labour Party as well as the Queen. Further deviations, run-ins with the KGB and Soviet psychiatry pattern a failing stage career. But he does at one point find himself the uneasy star of a film about Soviet railways ordered by Kaganovich. During all this time father, for his own sake as much as that of his son, saves Vladimir from being sent to a labour camp. Perhaps that is what allows him to write with such cynical humour about his slow descent into chaos and oblivion. His accounts of a multitude of encounters with people from all walks of Russian life (including colourful episodes with Voroshilov and Solzhenitsyn—as well as his marriages and wayward sexual adventures) are enormously enriched by the actor’s power of speech recall.

Details

Hamilton Books

Pages: 298 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-0-7618-6534-6 • Paperback • May 2015 • $53.99 • (£42.00)

978-0-7618-6535-3 • eBook • May 2015 • $51.00 • (£39.00)

Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / General, Biography & Autobiography / Historical, Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography / Political, History / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union

Author

Clive Giller (born 1933 in London) is a retired architect, but after graduating from Cambridge University practised at first as an engineer. He learned Russian when doing National Service and has since travelled in Russia and become keenly interested in recent developments there.

Yuri Popov (born 1951 in Kotlas, USSR) studied sculpture and architecture at the Repin Institute, Saint Petersburg. He came to England in 1991 and since then has continued to involve himself in building design and sculpture.

Table of Contents

The translators; acknowledgements

Introduction

Part 1
1. Prologue
2. About Homer
3. About father
4. To age seventeen
5. About mama
6. Childhood
7. Ideology
8First deviation
1. Papa’s friends
2. Pity
3. The whole country
4. All-Saints and Sokol
5. Reflections
6. Boy with a cock
7. Sverdlovsk
8. Kabakov’s black cat
9. Perm; it’s also Molotov
10. He and She
11. The theatre
20The other grandmother
1. Colleagues
2. Ignoramus
3. 22nd June 1941
4. Evacuees
5. Commissar Zavirokhin
6. A fighting friend
7. Antselovich
8. To the front
9. The front
10. German leaflets
11. Don’t be a white crow!
12. My universities
13. A situation
14. A pass to all locations
15. Mistakes
16. Again the theatre
17. Crisis
18. November celebrations
19. International Organisation for the Assistance of Casualties (MOPR)
20. The crisis develops
21. Not comrade Stalin, but Iosif Vissarionovich!
22. Seriozha Shtein
23. Dust, dust, dust…
24. The role of Lenin
25. Verkhovsky
46Internationale

Part 2
1. In the remand cell (KPZ)
2. Friday
3. Alone
4. The martyr’s crown of the Russian intelligentsia
5. A twilight state of the spirit
6. The commission
7. One floor higher
8. Taganka – every night filled with fire
9. Balashikha prison
10. The stolypin
11. Kazan
12. The Russian nationalist Soldatov
13. The Anthem of the Soviet Union
14. He is dead, dead, dead …
15. The doctors’ plot
16. Emperors and presidents
17. Beria – enemy of the people
18. To the gallows of the Bolsheviks!
19. The British subject
20. On the side of the party
21. Film director Kapchinsky
22. Intellizhens Servis
23. SR Lapshov
24. The dictator
25. Butyrka
72With your things

Part 3
1. How life treated me when I was free
2. Amorous business
3. Rumours
4. The American exhibition
5. Two more years
6. My little white pigeon
7. From my diary
8. A death and a funeral
9. Ivan Denisovich
10. Working days
11. Chapaevsky Street
12. Unemployed
13. Tomsk
14. Grandmother Fenia
15. Nikolia-the-fool
16. Television
17. Zaochni Narodni Universitet Iskusstv
90Kashchenko
1. In the homeland of a great writer
2. I love you
3. At the Ministry of Culture
4. Aesop and the GPU (State Political Administration)
5. A page from my diary
6. Pages from my diary
7. In the Kremlin hospital
8. The Klyazma sanatorium
9. The last lines of a confiscated diary
100 Vasili Ivanovich Chapaev and Petka
101 Yakir
102 Epilogue

Chronology

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

My Papa Murdered Mikhoels

Vladimir Gusarov - Translated by Clive A. Giller and Yuri A. Popov

My Papa Murdered Mikhoels

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