The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

This was the early 1970s, years before Arutyunyan became a professional psychologist, but she needed no special training to see through the family myth. It was all compensation. Maya loved her mother, and she needed a story grand enough to make up for her betrayals. Anna Mikhailovna had taken Maya's father away—twice: first by denouncing him and again by destroying all traces of him. She had also abandoned Maya repeatedly, first as a baby: that beautiful picture from 1925 had been taken in a Berlin children's home, where the little girl was kept while her parents were off uniting the world's proletariat in revolt. The calligraphically perfect caption on the back of the photograph said, "Liebe Mutter, liebe Tochter," and this broke Arutyunyan's heart. When Anna Mikhailovna went off to teach school in a remote city, she did not even say goodbye—she simply disappeared. There were no letters, only an anonymous message that Maya's mother was "well and living in a different city." Wounds that large required equally large myths, which was why Maya had had to conjure a father so heroic and a mother so long-suffering that they could exist only in her imagination. This explained why Maya chose to believe, too, that Korzhavin's tragic, romantic poem had something to do with her mother even though the plot details did not match: if the poet had such compassion for his protagonist, then she must have deserved it. Arutyunyan was a loving daughter too, so she kept her doubts to herself.

twenty years after that conversation, in a friend's kitchen in Munich, of all places, Arutyunyan met a historian of the samizdat, the keeper of the largest known collection of self-published Russian writing. She did not even know why she felt compelled to mention the family legend according to which Korzhavin's poem "Tan'ka" had been written for and about her grandmother. The archivist became curious. A day later he returned to that kitchen to tell Arutyunyan that he had located an early manuscript of the poem and it contained a dedication to A. M. Pankratova, her grandmother. He suggested that the dedication had been omitted from later iterations to avoid endangering Anna Mikhailovna's family—Arutyunyan and her parents.

Maya was not a sentimental person, but when Arutyunyan told her that she had confirmed the legend of the poem, she teared up— perhaps because her daughter had remembered what she had told her so many years earlier, or perhaps because she had finally believed her.

Maya died in 1999. In her papers, Arutyunyan found Anna Mikhailovna's journals. Maya had quoted lines from them to her daughter but had never let her see them: she said that they were too intimate. They were.

1 November 1923 (night)

We have just parted, and I have flown back to my room like a bird, so incredibly, insanely, unconscionably happy.

"Why do I love you so?" he asked. "Why does it make me so happy to see you?"

"Is that true?" I asked. I could not yet believe it, but I could feel the fire engulfing me.

We were standing on the stairs and discussing Party business.

Anna Mikhailovna carried this love through the rest of her life, just as Maya had said. Her later notes contained a chronology of nonstarter romances. "Gr. would never do a thing like that," she would write, damning a potential suitor with this comparison to her late husband. "No, he is no Gr.," she would write, dismissing another.

Arutyunyan asked a close friend, a historian well-versed in Stalin- era archives, to look up her grandfather's case files. She gave him power of attorney for the purpose—by this time, access to archives was restricted to family members.

It all checked out. Grigory Yakovlevich was every bit the hero from Maya's stories. He never named a name, never lost his dignity, never gave an inch to his tormentors. Transcripts of his interrogations were repetitive:

"I consider it inappropriate to name people."

"I deny that."

"Prosecutors and investigators may be concerned with actions, not opinions and intentions. . . . I do not see a need to testify with regards

to opinions."

"I don't recall."

"I will not name anyone."

"That's a falsehood. I am aware of no such group."