Gender and Survival in Soviet Russia: A Life in the Shadow of Stalin's Terror by Ludmila Miklashevskaya (review)

Ludmila Pavlovna Miklashevskaya wrote her memoir toward the end of her life in 1976. This firsthand account was eventually published in its original Russian-language form by the publisher Zvezda, first in 2007 as part of a series of women's twentieth-century memoirs and then as a stand-alone single volume in 2012 running to some four hundred pages. Elaine MacKinnon's very readable annotated English-language translation of the original focuses only on Miklashevskaya's life in Russia and excludes the few short years from 1924 to 1927 when she lived in France. MacKinnon has carefully retained Miklashevskaya's reflective commentaries from the original manuscript in which the author reminds herself not to recall the retelling of her life story through the benefit of hindsight (P. 154).

With the omission of the years in Paris in mind, the book can be read in two parts. The first part details Miklashevskaya's childhood in Odessa, from her birth into a Jewish family in 1899. Like many of her contemporaries, she endured a precarious childhood, vacillating between periods of household economic feast and famine, and narrowly avoiding the diseases and epidemics that on several occasions swept through the city. It was in Odessa, at the age of eighteen, that she met her future husband, several years her senior, the charismatic actor and theater director Konstantin Mikhailovich Miklashevsky. She ran away with him to Petrograd and afterward rarely returned to her family and childhood hometown. The memoir of her early married life details the couple's regular social engagements in Petrograd with some of the leading cultural figures of the age. These included Mikhail Zoshchenko, who turned out to be a long-term aid to Ludmila through the difficult 1930s. The memoir also sets out the young wife's growing emotional insecurities arising from the marital indiscretions and flirtations of her husband.

Despite eventually separating from her husband while they were in France and returning to the Soviet Union alone, Ludmila decided to retain his surname. This was the case even when, following a series of short-term flings, she had embarked on another long-term relationship by the early 1930s with the man who fathered her daughter. Although in her relationship with Miklashevsky she "became his wife" (P. 79: this is a not infrequently-used euphemistic phrase in Russian women's narratives to signal the beginning of a sexual relationship) when the couple settled in Petrograd during the Civil War and subsequently registered the marriage with ZAGS, she considered their later wedding in the side chapel of a Lutheran church as "inviolate" (P. 103), even following their divorce in civil law some years later. To her great sadness, Miklashevskaya discovered through word of mouth that her former husband had taken his own life in Paris in 1939 believing that Ludmila had already been shot during the purges (P. 218).

The second part of the memoir details Miklashevskaya's return to the Soviet Union, where she attempted to make a new start for herself in Moscow before moving back to Leningrad. Here she scraped a living, touting around for typing jobs that would allow her to survive, and she seems to have enjoyed this time of her life that she mostly spent alone. The memoir hints at a number of abortions in the 1920s (P. 147, for one example), and then she declares: "It was only now, at age 31, that my life really began," when she became a mother (P. 151). The birth of their daughter cemented her relationship with Izya (the historian Isaak Moiseevich Trotsky), though they never formally registered their relationship. Izya, however, could never really compete with his wife's memories of her first husband, and the relationship became strained after their daughter was born. In 1936 Izya was arrested...