The Gulag killed his father, and he himself was accused of attempting to assassinate Stalin: how a fugitive from the USSR took root in the USA and still takes revenge on the 'Soviet scoundrels' - ForumDaily
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The Gulag killed his father, and he himself was accused of attempting to assassinate Stalin: how a fugitive from the USSR took root in the USA and is still taking revenge on the 'Soviet scoundrels'

Engineer Viktor Levenshtein experienced a lot in the 100 years of his life. In the 1930s, his parents were arrested, and his father died in a camp; in the 1940s, he himself was arrested - they tried to accuse him of an attempt on Stalin’s life, but in the end he served five years for anti-Soviet propaganda. In 1980, Levenshtein emigrated to the United States, in the 1990s he learned the details of his case and his father’s case - and since then he has set himself a goal: to talk about Stalin’s repressions, reports with the BBC.

Photo: Shutterstock

On December 1, 1934, in Leningrad, right in Smolny, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the actual head of the city, Sergei Kirov, was shot dead. It is believed that his murder was a signal for mass repression, which took place under the leadership of Joseph Stalin.

The next day, a lesson in the fifth grade of the Moscow Model School No. 25 (many children of high-ranking parents studied there, including Vasily Stalin; now it is school No. 1574) began with the class teacher reading to the children a newspaper report about the death of Kirov.

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Viktor Levenshtein, who was 12 years old at the time, recalls that immediately after the lesson, one of his classmates, Misha Chervonny, shouted to his friend Yura Muralov: “I will be [Kirov’s killer Leonid] Nikolaev, and you will be Kirov! Run!” And he took out a metal tape measure, which, unwinding, could fly 3-4 meters. To the delight of his classmates, the tape measure hit Yura Muralov right in the back.

Levenshtein says that Misha's father, Grigory Sokolnikov, the author of the monetary reform that stopped the incredible hyperinflation of the 1920s, was arrested in 1936 for “Trotskyist activities.” In 1939 he was given ten years, and soon after that, according to the official version, he was killed by fellow inmates. Yura Muralov’s father was Deputy People’s Commissar of Agriculture, and his uncle was the head of the Moscow Military District. Both were shot during the repressions that began with the murder of Kirov.

Victor Levenshtein's father will be arrested first, then his mother, then himself. He will never see his father again.

Happy days and scary nights

The family of Viktor Levenshtein did not belong to the elite of Soviet society, and he got into an exemplary school simply because he lived nearby. His parents, from Ukraine, moved to Moscow when his father, engineer Matvey Levenshtein, got a job building the Moscow metro.

He recalls that the family lived peacefully and amicably in a small apartment near Triumphalnaya Square, which was then called Mayakovsky Square.

“I remember these days when I was 14-15 years old,” says Levenshtein. “During the day we lived a normal life and had fun, but at night we were afraid, listening to who they were knocking on the door today. I didn’t understand any of this then, I just remember that my parents started going through albums with photographs and cutting out faces from there. These were the faces of their friends who had already been arrested. Of course, this didn’t help anyone, but many did it and somehow lived.”

They came for his father on December 9, 1937. Soon after his arrest, it became known that he was accused of spying for the United States. The fact is that in the 1920s he worked with the Joint Distribution Committee (known as the Joint), a charitable organization of European and American Jews. She delivered food, clothing and medicine to rural areas of Ukraine, where famine periodically began.

Later, “participation in a counter-revolutionary sabotage and terrorist organization at Metrostroy” was added to the charge. It is known that Matvey Levenshtein renounced all his testimony in court because he gave it during the investigation under the influence of continuous torture that lasted for weeks.

On December 24, 1937, Viktor Levenshtein’s mother, Gitta, was also arrested. She spent 13 months in Butyrka prison without being charged and was only interrogated once.

15-year-old Levenshtein was threatened with a special detention center for children of enemies of the people. He was saved by his aunt, his father's older sister, a doctor. She took him to her place in the Ukrainian city of Nikolaev.

Friends who love to read

At the beginning of 1939, when People's Commissar of State Security Nikolai Yezhov himself was declared an “enemy of the people” and he was replaced by Lavrentiy Beria, a small number of people were released from prison. Gitta Levenshtein was among those released. She was released and even given a room not far from Arbat.

Viktor Levenshtein returned to his mother, was able to finish school and, despite the damaging status of “the son of an enemy of the people,” managed to enroll in the physics department of Moscow State University. “I was just a really good student,” he says.

For a short time he managed to live relatively carefree: he continued to study well, girls and short novels appeared in his life, he had many friends.

He and his mother lived poorly, she took on any job, her aunt from Nikolaev sent them money, and sent parcels of food to their father. They transported them to a camp beyond the Arctic Circle.

“Of course, I was not such an already formed enemy of Soviet power,” Levenshtein recalls. “But I already had enough knowledge to understand that this is the wrong government.”

Plus, he says, many of his friends, although they didn’t say it out loud, thought the same way as he did. His whole company read a lot - Erich Maria Remarque, Ernst Hemingway, William Faulkner. All of them, Levenshtein recalls, were considered critics of bourgeois reality, so in the USSR they were not only published, but also translated very well.

Later, John Steinbeck was added to this list - in some US states his “The Grapes of Wrath” was banned until the 1980s as too naturalistic communist propaganda, and in the USSR it was published immediately after its release in 1940. Victor Levenshtein also remembers the English writer Richard Aldington. His novel Death of a Hero, about the "Lost Generation" of World War I Britons, is considered one of the most powerful anti-war statements of the XNUMXth century.

In the summer of 1941, Levenshtein completed his first year of physics, and the Great Patriotic War began.

"Little Snakes"

Levenshtein recalls that literally immediately after the declaration of war, a rally took place at the university, its participants - and he himself - were eager to go to the front. But instead of the front, students were sent to dig fortifications west of Moscow.

He returned in October 1941 and learned that his physics department had been moved to Ashgabat. During these days, the Germans stood close to Moscow and the evacuation was underway. Levenshtein traveled first to Kuibyshev (now Samara), then to Karaganda, where his relative lived. The Mining Institute was evacuated there, to Karaganda, and Viktor Levenshtein was accepted there for his second year. He lived in Karaganda until the fall of 1943, then their course returned back to the capital. The students were given armor from the army and the task of restoring the coal mines of Donbass.

Their company often gathered in an apartment on Strastnoy Boulevard. “Of course, we were not dissidents, we did not plan anything like that. But some of us went through the front, evacuation. Many had parents arrested. We understood a lot,” he says.

In the spring of 1944, company members began to be arrested one by one. Viktor Levenshtein was detained in May, and in total there are thirteen people in the case.

Thus began the “case of the little snakes,” as the security officers called it. And if his investigation was successful, they would have received a significant promotion - they believed that they had solved the assassination attempt on Joseph Stalin.

"My little fish"

“I still live with this, and it’s terrible,” says Victor Levenshtein. — For the first six days they kept me in a box. This is a cell one and a half meters by meter, there are no windows, the light is on around the clock. Every night - for interrogation: will you confess? No? Well, sit and think. I sit thinking, fall asleep, they beat me on the legs to keep me awake. In the morning they send you back to your cell, but you can’t even lie down there, the step inside gets in the way. Plus the security is constantly looking through the peephole: you can’t! Mode! You can't sleep during the day! And like that for six days without sleep.”

One day, my mother came to pick up my third-grader Vitya at school and called him “my little fish” in front of his classmates. Of course, the next day the whole class teased Levenshtein as a “fish”, then it even became his nickname. And now the investigator told him: “Viktor Levenshtein, underground nickname Rybets.”

Every new night, Levenshtein was shown confessions signed by his friends.

As it turned out later, the apartment where the young people gathered was bugged by the NKVD. And the Chekists combined several conversations with each other.

In the first, one of the young people told a funny story, as everyone thought at the time, about how his younger brother and his friends stole a machine gun from a landfill where downed German planes were stored - and played war with it in the yards and dachas.

Following this conversation, another participant in the company said that he was walking along Arbat and met a motorcade of cars there - and Stalin was riding in one of them. And finally, one of Viktor Levenshtein’s friends began dating a girl living on Arbat - and the company also discussed this.

So the investigative authorities concluded that the young people were conducting anti-Soviet conversations and planning an assassination attempt on Stalin by attacking his motorcade with a machine gun - from the window of that very house on Arbat.

This business should have fallen apart before it started. Entering the room, the NKVD investigators discovered that its windows did not face the Arbat, but the courtyard of the house. It was impossible to make any attempt from there.

However, no one was going to stop the matter. After constant pressure and torture, seven out of thirteen people admitted that they were preparing an assassination attempt on Stalin. Those who remained, including Viktor Levenshtein, admitted only to anti-Soviet propaganda. The participants in the “attempt” in March 1945 were given ten years in prison, the “anti-Soviet” - five years. Three out of thirteen people will die in the camps.

Mechanical engineer

In the fall of 1945, a poster appeared above the workshop in the colony near Moscow, where Viktor Levenshtein began serving his sentence: “Let’s celebrate the 27th anniversary of the Great October Revolution by completing the plan for the production of product number one ahead of schedule!” “Product number one” were handcuffs - they were made in that workshop.

In 1946, Levenshtein was transferred to Angrenlag, a huge camp in Uzbekistan. He was greatly helped by the knowledge that he managed to obtain at his two institutes. The United States, as part of allied assistance, sent materials for the construction of the power plant. Lowenshtein, a dropout engineer, was one of the few prisoners who understood how it worked, and could also read the documentation in English.

After the power plant, he and his team installed a diesel station in the same way. Levenshtein says that one of his main impressions from his five years in prison was the impossibility of being left alone. Crowds of people were everywhere and always: in cells and barracks, in common areas, at construction sites, even in toilets.

Even many years later, he will go to visit, receive guests - but in the middle of the evening he will get up from the table and go to another room or to the street. To be alone for a little while.

He served his full five-year sentence, then spent another four years in exile in the city of Ekibastuz in northeastern Kazakhstan. There he was a mining mechanic. “It was an excellent engineering school,” he says.

Only in the early 1950s did he receive a letter that his father had died in a camp in 1942. According to the official version, from a heart attack. Whether this version is true or not, no one will ever know.

Climbing poles and baking pies

In 1954, Viktor Levenshtein was rehabilitated - and he began to live the normal life of a Soviet man. Met the love of his life Dora - they will spend 61 years together. At first we lived with his mother in a 13-meter room on Arbat, then we bought a cooperative apartment, exchanged it for a larger apartment, and bought a car. Levenshtein defended his Ph.D. thesis and received the maximum salary possible for an engineer. His wife became a famous piano teacher in Moscow.

When emigration from the USSR began in the 1970s, the Levenshteins, despite their well-established life, began to think about leaving.

“I could forgive the authorities for what happened to me, but I could not forgive them the fate of my father who died in the camps. I hated this country with its prisons and camps,” says Levenshtein. — My wife agreed with me. As a little girl, she survived her father's two arrests. We understood that it might be difficult for us in a new country, we were both over fifty, but we were ready for anything. I said that I could work as an electrician, climb poles, fix electricity, I learned this in the camp. My wife said that she would bake pies to sell.”

Their son Matvey, named after his grandfather, entered the architectural institute and began dating a girl. At first he did not accept his parents’ decision to emigrate. The girl’s father was a teacher at their university and was friends with the head of the special department - essentially, this is a representative office of the KGB; in Soviet times there were such people in every higher educational institution; In one form or another, intelligence services monitor universities in modern Russia.

The head of the special department told his friend: “Listen, you hold your daughter. She meets with Matvey Levenshtein, and they have conversations in the kitchen that are better not to be discussed.”

The girl laughingly told this to Matvey Levenshtein, who told her parents, and they just sighed: “Look, Matvey! Now they don’t imprison anyone, the climate is different, but a personal file has already been opened against you there.”

In 1980 they moved to the USA.

Revenge on Stalin

In the early 1990s, a successful American engineer, lead designer of the Jeffry Mining Machinery company, Victor Levenshtein, and his wife, a successful music teacher, left the cinema. They watched the Soviet-American film “The Inner Circle” by Andrei Konchalovsky. This film tells the story of repression through the story of the main character: a projectionist who worked for Joseph Stalin.

The actor Alexander Zbruev, who played Stalin, had his father shot, he and his mother spent six years in a correctional camp in the Yaroslavl region.

Later, Victor Levenshtein saw an interview with the actor. In it, Zbruev said: “I took revenge on Stalin, I played him.” “And indeed, he turned out to be a completely unusual Stalin - malicious, bastard, just such a bastard,” recalls Levenshtein.

Since then, Viktor Levenshtein also began to take revenge on Stalin - in his own way. He visited Moscow several times and was allowed to rewrite the main details of his father's case and his own case.

He was published in the American émigré press. Wrote books in Russian (“Behind the Butyrka Stone Wall” and “Tobacco Smoke Below and Above the Bunks”) and in English (Thirteen Nasty Little Snakes. The Case of Stalin's 'Assassins')
On one of his visits to Moscow, he met with representatives of the Memorial society (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia and then liquidated) and told them for several hours about himself, about the prison, about his cellmates and the order.
Already at the age of 94, Victor Levenshtein told his story in English to American and Canadian audiences on The Moth, a public organization that teaches people how to tell stories. Levenshtein ended his story with the words: “I survived,” and he had never seen such an emotional reaction - from tears to applause from hundreds of people - in his life.

two writers

At the very beginning of his term, Viktor Levenshtein and his friends were sitting in a cell in the Butyrka prison, there were about two hundred people there, including several guys who were with him on the same case. They decided: let's write a song. One of the guys, Volodya Sulimov, sang a melody, everyone else put words on it and sang loudly several times.

A few years after emigrating, Levenshtein read “The Gulag Archipelago” and was amazed to find verses from their song, which “Moscow students sang with their fragile voices.” “It turns out that Solzhenitsyn was sitting somewhere next to us, but I don’t remember him at all,” said Levenshtein.

He was even more amazed when he saw the portrait of the writer: he recognized him, they were together in the Kazakh Ekibastuz, at least several times they crossed paths.

Levenshtein and Solzhenitsyn nevertheless met in Moscow in the spring of 2004, the meeting was helped by the writer's wife Natalya.

As a result, “two writers” (as Dora Levenshtein later ironically) drank tea and pies, recalled the events in the convict Ekibastuz and found out the history of the song that Solzhenitsyn quoted in “The Gulag Archipelago.” As it turned out, he heard the song three months after his friends were transferred from Butyrka to different camps. That is, she remained to live - as they dreamed of it. Solzhenitsyn remembered and years later quoted three of the five verses.

The fate of the “little snakes”

Dora Levenshtein died in 2019, Victor was left alone. He discovered Facebook - and regularly writes stories from his life in Russian and English, talks about his friends and acquaintances, including those who were involved in his case.

Volodya Sulimov, the author of the music for that prison song, was his close friend. In 1941, he went to the front, was wounded, and shortly before prison he recovered and was demobilized. He died in the camp, the cause is unknown.

Another close friend from the “baby snake business”, Alexander Gurevich, lived in Moscow and said that he was too lazy to emigrate - it was enough to lie on the couch and listen to the BBC with the Voice of America. In 1989, he nevertheless left for Israel and died suddenly ten days after that.

Valery Frid and Yuli Dunsky were studying together at VGIK at the time of their arrest. After their release, they became famous screenwriters, and they wrote the script for the Soviet industrial drama “Incident at Mine Number Eight” while still in prison.

Fried and Dunsky worked together all their lives; the cult Soviet films “Two Comrades Served”, “The Tale of How Tsar Peter Married the Arab”, “Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson”, “The Crew”, “The Tale of Wanderings” were filmed based on their scripts " They were buried nearby, at the Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

Mark Kogan dreamed of becoming a lawyer, but received this status only in 1975 - partly because of his past, partly because of his tough character. His autobiography is called “Notes of an Obstinate Lawyer.”

Nina Ermakova, from whose room on Arbat the assassination attempt on Stalin was allegedly being prepared, married the scientist and future Nobel laureate Vitaly Ginzburg. Moreover, Ginzburg was removed from work on the creation of a hydrogen bomb for having an affair with her - an exile, politically unreliable.

Another “little snake,” Alexei Sukhov, died in prison in 1947. Yuri Mikhailov served eight years out of ten, returned home mentally ill and died almost immediately.

Elena Bubnova was the daughter of the People's Commissar of Education of the USSR Andrei Bubnov, he was shot in 1938. After Stalin's death, she returned to Moscow and came to the member of the Politburo of the Communist Party, Kliment Voroshilov, who had known her since childhood and sympathized with her father. Voroshilov and contributed to the fact that the entire group of young people was quickly rehabilitated.

With almost none of them, Viktor Levenshtein was never able to really talk about the past. They just wanted to erase everything that happened from memory and not return to it.

The chief investigator in their case, the head of the investigative unit for especially important cases of the NKVD of the USSR, Lev Vlodzimirsky, was shot in 1953 as part of the case of Lavrenty Beria.

Victor Levenshtein says that now he would rewrite his books published in the 2000s, and in Facebook he writes his stories from a different angle.

“I blamed myself very much for these books. Why did I turn out to be weak? Why did you give in, why didn’t you fight? There were people who fought,” says Victor Levenshtein. - I don't blame myself anymore. It’s not my fault for what happened, it’s the government’s fault for what it did to us. And it’s important for me to explain this kitchen, to explain who and how put pressure on the good guys so that they would follow the lead of the scoundrels and admit to something they didn’t do. This is important, and this is what I am talking about. Let each of my posts be read a hundred times, reposted twenty times - let this be my revenge on those times and all those scoundrels - and a lesson to those who live in current times.”

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