13.2 Queen of Evidence

In June 1939, Marina and her son had to vacate their final residence in Paris, Hotel Innova, 32 Boulevard Pasteur, and returned to Russia unaware of the reception she would get. It was an absolute disaster. Marina’s sister, Asia, was already in a labour camp. The sisters never saw each other again. First, they stayed at the Bolshevo dacha with Efron, a house used by the Soviet secret police. They became victims of Stalin’s terror.

On that fateful evening on 27^th August, Ariadna appeared even ready to be arrested. They delved through her writings and notebooks until dawn in a robber raid, tearing out sheets. She was not ashamed of herself in the car at dusk. Through the veil of tears, she saw her father, mother and little brother waving her goodbye.

Interrogation conducted at Lubyanka by senior investigator Lieutenant Kuzminov demanded from her a recognition that she was an agent of French Intelligence and that her father knew about it. She denied all charges. Interrogation continued around the clock, they were kept barefoot in the punishment cell, stripped off, beaten with rubber, sleep deprivation, ice water on the head, bullying and rape. “There is no hope for you, the only solution is to plead guilty.”

She was handed a piece of paper to write if she wouldn’t talk. She wrote frankly about herself and family during the years of emigration and what she knew about her father’s activities in the Eurasian movement and the magazine Versta. There was nothing to complain about.

Eventually, the confession was torn out. “I plead guilty that since December 1936 I am an agent of French Intelligence and I had the task to conduct espionage work in USSR.

“On this note, I must report that my father, like me, is an agent of French Intelligence.”

She was accused of complicity with Sergei Efron, considered a traitor. She was tortured and raped until she testified against her own father. According to the brilliant formula of Soviet justice, the confession of the accused is ‘the Queen of Evidence’. Ariadna was convicted by the OSO under Article 58-6, for espionage, and sentenced to eight years of forced labour in a punitive camp. She learnt years later that she was exposed by Samuel Gurevich, her fiancé – love of her life, who was an NKVD mole assigned to patronise the family.

Ariadna correctly identified the reason for her arrest. She was used as a patsy. Throughout her father’s intelligence work, he enjoyed the confidence and respect of his leadership abroad and in the USSR. The arrival of Lavrentiy Beria as the deputy head of the NKVD changed the attitudes towards Efron and in fact, Beria’s aim was to destroy a whole group of Soviet intelligence. She was arrested to discredit her father in order to compromise him so as to give false information against him. This was also proof that NKVD didn’t have factual material against Efron, otherwise they would not need a false testimony.

On 10^th October, early in the morning, uniformed idols, warrant with the signature of Beria, arrived at the dacha to search his place. Sergei Efron was arrested and received the same treatment of torture but he confessed for no wrong doing, mentioned no names.

Out of solitary confinement, Ariadna stood on the Kuznetsky Bridge, on a chilly dawn, ambling around the filmed corners, waiting for prison transport.

Quoted from her, “I screamed soundlessly. What illusions and hope could still be fed, in the offices and cells in the Lubyanka, after the horrors and fears of the hours of bullying and beating?” She was brought from grilling blue and bloodied, in a semiconscious state. Later she’d break the phrase, “I could not believe that it was I and that I was able to bear it all!”

Ariadna Efron was posted to a logging camp on exile in the Sevheldorlag from Kotlas – a transit point for the transportation of prisoners and material in the Komi ASSR.

In the cold winter and frigid temperatures, she turned thin like a candle dragging logs and one of the inmates, an actress by the name of Tamara Slanskaya, took the burden and wrote a letter to Samuel Gurevich to take her to another camp. She arrived at Vorkuta still alive in the Stolypin Wagon. Ariadna was transferred to Potma in the Mordovian ASSR.

Prisons in Mordovia were regarded having more severe conditions even by the GULAG standards. As the saying goes among female inmates rather, “If you haven’t done time in Mordovia, you haven’t done time at all.”

Camp mails reached efficiently. Marina wrote to say that on 8^th November, they left the dacha in Bolshevo to the town of Golitsyn with help from Boris Pasternak who set them a room from Litfund at the Writer’s Holiday House. They moved to Moscow, 6 Herzen Street, and then spent a month with Aunt Lily (Efron’s sister Elizaveta) at 16 Merzlyakovskaya Lane and finally to an apartment on Pokrovsky Boulevard.

In the meantime, war was pounding on Russia as Germany breached the Nazi-Soviet alliance and launched Operation Barbarossa on 22^nd June 1941 to invade Russia. Tens of thousands were evacuated from the capital in the following weeks and months. Marina was evacuated to a remote town in the Tatarstan ASSR on 8^th August while other members of the Union of Soviet Writers were sent to Chistopol. She was driven penniless, isolated from her colleagues and banned from writing to make money in Yelabuga. She left for Chistopol seeking a job desperately and applied to the Literature Fund for a job at the Litfund canteen. Her request was turned down and not permitted to live in Chistopol. Marina came back to Yelabuga on 28^th and tried to earn a living by washing dishes. On August 31^st, Marina committed suicide by hanging herself at the house on Malaya Pokrovskaya Ulitsa, after being solicited to become a Russian spy.

Sergei Efron was shot dead in Lubyanka prison on 16^th October 1941, executed by military tribunal, and buried in a mass grave. Georgy was killed, presumably in action, as a Soviet soldier in WWII in 1944.