Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  Another woman recalled hearing a rumor that all women with babies — mamki, in prison slang—would be released. She deliberately became pregnant afterward.50 Nadezhda Joffe, a prisoner who had become pregnant after being allowed to meet with her husband, wrote that her fellow inmates at the Magadan “wet nurse barracks” simply “didn’t have any maternal instincts,” and left their babies behind as soon as they were able.51

  Perhaps not surprisingly, not all of the women who found they had become pregnant while in a camp wanted to remain that way. The Gulag administration seemed to be ambivalent about whether women should be allowed to have abortions or not, sometimes permitting them, sometimes slapping second sentences on those who attempted them.52 Nor is it at all clear how frequent they were, because they are so rarely described: in dozens of interviews and memoirs, I have read or heard only two accounts. In an interview, Anna Andreeva told me of a woman who “stuffed nails into herself, sat down and began to work on her sewing machine. Eventually she began to bleed heavily.” 53 Another woman described how a camp doctor attempted to terminate her pregnancy:

  Imagine the picture. It is night. It is dark . . . Andrei Andreevich is trying to cause me to abort, using his hands, covered in iodine, without instruments. But he is so nervous that nothing comes of it. I can’t breathe from the pain, but I endure it without a sound, so that no one will hear. “Stop!” I finally shout from unbearable pain, and the whole procedure is stopped for two days. In the end, everything came out—the fetus, with a great deal of blood. That is why I never became a mother.54

  But there were women who wanted their children, and tragedy was often their lot too. Against everything that has been written about the selfishness, the venality of the women who bore children in the camps, stands the story of Hava Volovich. A political arrested in 1937, she was extremely lonely in the camps, and deliberately sought to give birth to a child. Although Hava had no special love for the father, Eleonora was born in 1942, in a camp without special facilities for mothers:

  There were three mothers there, and we were given a tiny room to ourselves in the barracks. Bedbugs poured down like sand from the ceiling and walls; we spent the whole night brushing them off the children. During the daytime we had to go out to work and leave the infants with any old woman who we could find who had been excused from work; these women would calmly help themselves to the food we had left for the children.

  Nevertheless, wrote Volovich,

  Every night for a whole year, I stood at my child’s cot, picking off the bedbugs and praying. I prayed that God would prolong my torment for a hundred years if it meant that I wouldn’t be parted from my daughter. I prayed that I might be released with her, even if only as a beggar or a cripple. I prayed that I might be able to raise her to adulthood, even if I had to grovel at people’s feet and beg for alms to do it. But God did not answer my prayer. My baby had barely started walking, I had hardly heard her first words, the wonderful heartwarming word “Mama,” when we were dressed in rags despite the winter chill, bundled into a freight car, and transferred to the “mothers’ camp.” And here my pudgy little angel with the golden curls soon turned into a pale ghost with blue shadows under her eyes and sores all over her lips.

  Volovich was put first into a forestry brigade, then sent to work at a sawmill. In the evenings, she took home a small bundle of firewood which she gave to the nurses in the children’s home. In return she was sometimes allowed to see her daughter outside normal visiting hours.

  I saw the nurses getting the children up in the mornings. They would force them out of their cold beds with shoves and kicks . . . pushing the children with their fists and swearing at them roughly, they took off their night-clothes and washed them in ice-cold water. The babies didn’t even dare cry. They made little sniffing noises like old men and let out low hoots.

  This awful hooting noise would come from the cots for days at a time. Children already old enough to be sitting up or crawling would lie on their backs, their knees pressed to their stomachs, making these strange noises, like the muffled cooing of pigeons.

  One nurse was assigned to seventeen children, which meant she had barely enough time to keep all of the babies changed and fed, let alone cared for properly:

  The nurse brought a steaming bowl of porridge from the kitchen, and portioned it out into separate dishes. She grabbed the nearest baby, forced its arms back, tied them in place with a towel, and began cramming spoonful after spoonful of hot porridge down its throat, not leaving it enough time to swallow, exactly as if she were feeding a turkey chick.

  Slowly, Eleonora began to fade.

  On some of my visits I found bruises on her little body. I shall never forget how she grabbed my neck with her skinny hands and moaned, “Mama, want home!” She had not forgotten the bug-ridden slum where she first saw the light of day, and where she’d been with her mother all of the time . . .

  Little Eleonora, who was now fifteen months old, soon realized that her pleas for “home” were in vain. She stopped reaching out for me when I visited her; she would turn away in silence. On the last day of her life, when I picked her up (they allowed me to breast-feed her) she stared wide-eyed somewhere off into the distance, then started to beat her weak little fists on my face, clawing at my breast, and biting it. Then she pointed down at her bed.

  In the evening, when I came back with my bundle of firewood, her cot was empty. I found her lying naked in the morgue among the corpses of the adult prisoners. She had spent one year and four months in this world, and died on 3 March 1944 . . . That is the story of how, in giving birth to my only child, I committed the worst crime there is.55

  In the archives of the Gulag, photographs of the type of camp nursery Volovich described have been preserved. One such album begins with the following introduction:

  The sun shines in their Stalinist fatherland. The nation is filled with love for the leaders and our wonderful children are happy just as the whole young country is happy. Here, in wide and warm beds, sleep the new citizens of our country. Having eaten, they sleep sweetly and are certainly dreaming happy dreams . . .

  The accompanying photographs belie the captions. In one, a row of nursing mothers, white masks covering their faces—proof of the hygienic practices of the camp—sits solemn-eyed and unsmiling on a bench, holding their babies. In another, the children are all going for their evening walk. Lined up in a row, they look no more spontaneous than their mothers. In many pictures, the children have shaved heads, presumably to prevent lice, which has the effect of making them look like the tiny prisoners they were in fact considered to be.56 “The children’s home was also part of the camp compound,” wrote Evgeniya Ginzburg. “It had its own guardhouse, its own gates, its own huts and its own barbed wire.” 57

  At some level, the Gulag administration in Moscow must have known how terrible life in the camps was for children who lived in them. We know, at least, that the camp inspectors passed on the information: a 1949 report on the condition of women in the camps noted disapprovingly that of the 503,000 women then in the Gulag system, 9,300 were pregnant while another 23,790 had small children with them. “Taking into account the negative influence on the health and education of children,” the report argued for their mothers’ early release, as well as the early release of those women who had children at home, a total—when exceptions were made for recidivists and counter-revolutionary political prisoners—of about 70,000. 58

  From time to time such amnesties were carried out. But few improvements were made in the lives of those children who remained. On the contrary, because they contributed nothing to the productivity of the camp, their health and well-being ranked very low on most camp commanders’ list of priorities, and they invariably lived in the poorest, coldest, oldest buildings. One inspector determined that the temperature in one camp children’s home never rose higher than 52 degrees Fahrenheit; another found a childrens’ home with peeling paint and no light at all, not even kerosene lamps.59 A 1933 report from S
iblag said the camp lacked 800 pairs of children’s shoes, 700 children’s overcoats, and 900 sets of cutlery.60 Nor were those working in them necessarily qualified. On the contrary, nursery jobs were “trusty” jobs, and as such usually went to professional criminals. Joffe writes that “For hours on end, they would stand under the stairway with their ‘husbands,’ or they would simply leave, while the children, unfed and unattended, would get sick and begin dying.”61

  Nor were mothers, whose pregnancies had already cost the camp a great deal, usually allowed to make up for this neglect—assuming that they cared to do so. They were made to return to work as soon as possible, and only grudgingly allowed time off from work to breast-feed. Usually, they would simply be released from work every four hours, given fifteen minutes with the child—still wearing their dirty work clothes—and then sent back again, meaning that the children went hungry. Sometimes they were not allowed even that. One camp inspector cited the case of a woman who arrived a few minutes late to nurse her baby, thanks to work obligations, and was refused access to him.62 In an interview, a former supervisor of a camp nursery told me—dismissively—that children who could not drink their fill in what she said was the half hour allowed, were given the rest out of a bottle by one of the nurses.

  This same woman also confirmed prisoners’ descriptions of another form of cruelty: once breast-feeding ended, women were often forbidden any further contact with their child. In her camp, she said, she had personally forbidden all mothers to go on walks with their children, on the grounds that convict mothers would harm their children. She claimed to have seen one mother giving her child sugar mixed with tobacco to eat, in order to poison him. Another, she said, had deliberately taken off her child’s shoes in the snow. “I was responsible for the death rates of children in the camps,” she told me, explaining why she had taken steps to keep the mothers away. “These children were unnecessary to their mothers, and the mothers wanted to kill them.”63 This same logic might have led other camp commanders to forbid mothers from seeing their children. It is equally possible, however, that such rules were another product of the unthinking cruelty of the camp administration: it was inconvenient to arrange for mothers to see children, so the practice was banned.

  The consequences of separating parents from children at such a young age were predictable. Infant epidemics were legion. Infant death rates were extremely high—so high that they were, as the inspectors’ reports also record, often deliberately covered up.64 But even those children who survived infancy had little chance at a normal life inside the camp nurseries. Some might be lucky enough to be cared for by the kinder sort of female prisoner nurse. Some might not. Ginzburg herself worked in a camp nursery, and found, upon arrival, that even the older children could not yet speak:

  Only certain of the four-year-olds could produce a few odd, unconnected words. Inarticulate howls, mimicry and blows were the main means of communication. “How can they be expected to speak? Who was there to teach them?” explained Anya dispassionately. “In the infants’ group they spend their whole time just lying on their cots. Nobody will pick them up, even if they cry their lungs out. It’s not allowed, except to change wet diapers—when there are dry ones available, of course.”

  When Ginzburg tried to teach her new charges, she found that only one or two, those who had maintained some contact with their mothers, were able to learn anything. And even their experience was very limited:

  “Look,” I said to Anastas, showing him the little house I had drawn. “What’s this?”

  “Barrack,” the little boy replied quite distinctly.

  With a few pencil strokes I put a cat alongside the house. But no one recognized it, not even Anastas. They had never seen this rare animal. Then I drew a traditional rustic fence around the house.

  “And what’s this?”

  “Zona!” Vera cried out delightedly.65

  Usually, children were transferred out of the camp nurseries and into regular orphanages at the age of two. Some mothers welcomed this, as a chance for the children to escape from the camp. Others protested, knowing that they might be deliberately or accidentally transferred to different camps, away from their children, whose names might then be changed or forgotten, making it impossible to establish a relationship or even contact.66 This sometimes happened to children in ordinary children’s homes. Valentina Yurganova, the daughter of Volga German kulaks, was put into a children’s home where some of the wards were too small to remember their names, and the authorities were too disorganized to remember them. One child, she told me, was simply renamed “Kashtanova” (“Chestnut”) because there were so many chestnut trees in the park behind the orphanage.

  Years later, another such child wrote a heartbreaking description of her unsuccessful, lifelong search to find the real names of her parents: there was no record of any child being born in her region under the surname that appeared on her passport, and she had been too small to know their real names. Nevertheless, she remembered fragments of her past: “Mama at a sewing machine. Me asking her for a needle and thread . . . Myself in a garden . . . Then later . . . The room is dark, the bed on the right is empty, something has happened. Somehow I am alone. I am terrified.”67

  No wonder some mothers “cried and screamed and some even went crazy and were locked in bunkers until they quieted down” when their children were taken away. Once they were gone, the chances of a reunion were slim.68

  Outside, life for children born in camps did not necessarily improve. Instead, they joined the massed ranks of the children who had been transferred directly to children’s homes following the arrests of their parents— another category of child victim. As a rule, state orphanages were vastly overcrowded, dirty, understaffed, and often lethal. A former prisoner recalled the emotions and high hopes with which her camp sent a group of prisoners’ children into a city orphanage—and the horror they felt on hearing that all eleven had died in an epidemic.69 As early as 1931, at the height of collectivization, the heads of children’s homes in the Urals wrote desperate letters to regional authorities, begging for help in caring for the thousands of newly orphaned kulak children:

  In a room 12 square meters, there are 30 boys. For 38 children there are seven beds, on which the “recidivists” sleep. Two eighteen-year-olds have destroyed the electrical installations, robbed the shop, and drink with the director . . . children sleep on the dirty floor, play cards which they have made from torn-up pictures of the “Leader,” smoke, break the bars on the windows and climb over the walls intending to escape. 70

  In another home for kulaks’ children:

  Children sleep on the floor, and don’t have enough shoes . . . sometimes there is no water for several days. They eat badly; aside from water and potatoes, they have no lunch. There are no plates and bowls, they eat out of ladles. For 140 people there is one cup, and not enough spoons; they eat in turns, or by hand. There is no light, only one lamp for the whole home, and it has no kerosene.71

  In 1933, a children’s home near Smolensk sent the following telegram to the Moscow children’s commission: “Food supply of the home has been cut. One hundred children are starving. The organization refuses to give rations. There is no help. Take urgent measures.”72

  Nor did much change over time. A 1938 NKVD order describes one children’s home in which two eight-year-old girls were raped by some of the older boys, and another in which 212 children shared twelve spoons and twenty plates, and slept in their clothes and shoes for lack of nightclothes. 73 In 1940, Natalya Savelyeva was “kidnapped” from her children’s home— her parents had been arrested—and adopted by a family who wanted to use her as a house servant. She was thus separated from her sister, whom she never found again.74

  Children of arrested politicals had a particularly hard time in such homes, and were often treated worse than the ordinary orphans they shared them with. They were told, as was Svetlana Kogteva, age ten, to “forget their parents, since they were enemies of the people.”75 NK
VD officers responsible for such homes were ordered to maintain special vigilance, and to single out the children of counter-revolutionaries, to ensure that they did not receive privileged treatment of any kind.76 Thanks to this rule, Pyotr Yakir lasted precisely three days in one of these orphanages, following his parents’ arrest. During that time, he “managed to get a name as a ringleader of the ‘traitors’ children” and was immediately arrested, at age fourteen. He was transferred into a prison, and eventually sent to a camp.77

  More often, the children of politicals suffered teasing and exclusion. One prisoner remembered that upon arrival at the orphanage, children of “enemies” had their fingerprints taken, like criminals. The teachers and caretakers were all afraid to show them too much affection, not wanting to be accused of having sympathy with “enemies.”78 The children of arrested parents were teased mercilessly about their “enemy” status, according to Yurganova, who deliberately forgot the German language she had spoken in her youth as a result.79

  In these surroundings, even the children of educated parents soon learned criminal habits. Vladimir Glebov, the son of the leading Bolshevik Lev Kamenev, was one such child. At the age of four, his father was arrested, and Glebov was “exiled” to a special children’s orphanage in western Siberia. About 40 percent of the children there were children of “enemies,” about 40 percent were juvenile delinquents, and about 20 percent were Gypsy children, arrested for the crime of nomadism. As Glebov explained to the writer Adam Hochschild, there were advantages, even for the children of politicals, to having early contact with young criminals:

  My buddy taught me some things which helped me a lot in later life, about protecting myself. Here I have one scar, and here another . . . when people are attacking you with a knife, you need to know how to fight back. The main principle is to respond in advance, not to let them hit you. That was our happy Soviet childhood!80