The Whisperers
Page 42
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The Bushuevs, the Gaisters and the Vorobyovs were the lucky ones – they were rescued by their relatives. But the arrest of their parents left millions of other children on their own. Many ended up in orphanages – intended for those under the age of sixteen – but others roamed the streets begging or joined the children’s gangs, which controlled much of the petty crime and prostitution at railway stations, markets and other busy places in the big cities. It was largely to combat the mounting problem of child criminality that a law was passed in 1935 to lower the age of criminal responsibility to twelve. Between 1935 and 1940, the Soviet courts convicted of petty crimes 102,000 children between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Many ended up in the children’s labour colonies administered by the NKVD.14
Some children slipped through the system and were left to fend for themselves. Mikhail Mironov was ten years old when his parents were arrested in 1936. They were both factory workers from the Ukraine, Red partisans in the Civil War, who had risen through the ranks of the Party, first in Moscow and then in Leningrad, before their arrests. Mikhail’s sister Lilia had already left the family home in Leningrad to study medicine in Moscow. So Mikhail was alone. For a while, he lived with various relatives, but he was a burden to them all, factory workers struggling to survive with large families of their own. In September 1937, Mikhail was accepted as a student at the drawing school established by the House of Pioneers in Leningrad. His aunt Bela, who had taken care of Mikhail in the previous months, saw it as an opportunity to be rid of him, and sent him off to live in the student dormitory attached to the House of Pioneers. Mikhail lost all track of his father (who was shot in 1938) and never heard from his sister, who was afraid that she would be expelled from medical school if she revealed her spoilt biography by writing to her relatives. His only contact was with his mother, and he wrote to her often in the labour camps of Vorkuta. He was isolated and lonely, without friends or family, and in desperate need of a mother’s love (his letters often end with such sentiments as ‘I kiss you 1000000000 times’). In the spring of 1941, Mikhail was excluded from the drawing school – for lack of talent – and enrolled instead in a factory school. Expelled from the dormitory in the House of Pioneers, he found a room in a barracks. ‘It is very boring for me,’ the fifteen-year-old boy wrote to his mother in July. ‘There is no one here. Everyone has gone, and I am on my own.’ In September, as the German troops encircled Leningrad, Mikhail escaped to Moscow, but by the time he arrived there, his sister had already been evacuated to Central Asia with her medical institute. None of his other Moscow relatives would take him in, so Mikhail ended up by living on the street. He was killed in the battle for Moscow in October 1941.15
Mikhail Mironov and his drawings (extract from a letter to his mother)
Maia Norkina was thirteen when her father was arrested in June 1937. A year later, when the NKVD took her mother too, Maia was expelled from her school in Leningrad. Maia had a number of aunts and uncles in Leningrad, but none would take her in. ‘They were all afraid to lose their jobs,’ Maia explains. ‘Some were Party members – they were the most afraid and refused outright.’ Everyone expected that Maia would be taken to an orphanage. But no one came for her. So she continued living in the three rooms that belonged to her family in a communal apartment conveniently situated in the centre of the city. Her relatives, eager to hang on to the precious living space, moved in one of her uncles and registered him as a resident, although in fact he was never there, because he lived with his wife and children in another part of the city. ‘I was living on my own, completely independently,’ recalls Maia. The fourteen-year-old girl would borrow books from her old school-friends. She’d travel for an hour to her aunt’s for meals, or buy food with pocket money from her relatives; neighbours in the communal apartment sometimes gave her scraps of food. Every day she would stand in queues at the NKVD headquarters in Leningrad, hoping to hand in a parcel for her father; the officials took the parcels for a while and then told her that her father had been sentenced to ‘ten years without rights of correspondence’ (meaning – though she did not find this out for years – that he had been shot). To get a parcel to her mother, in the Potma labour camps, was even more onerous: it required her to stand in queues for two whole days and nights. Maia went on living this way until August 1941, when she turned eighteen and joined the People’s Volunteers for the defence of Leningrad. She had no formal schooling and had little other choice.16
Zoia Arsenteva was born in 1923 in Vladivostok. Her father, the captain of a steamship, was arrested on a trip to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on 25 November 1937; her mother was arrested in her home in Vladivostok on the same day. Zoia was not taken to an orphanage: although only fourteen, she looked older than her years. She was left to fend for herself in the communal apartment where her family had lived since 1926. She had no other relatives to whom she could turn. Her mother’s sister lived in Khabarovsk, but only came to Vladivostok, where she had a dacha, in the summertime; her father’s family was in Leningrad. Zoia had enjoyed a sheltered childhood. Her mother did not work and had devoted herself to her only child. But now Zoia was forced to do everything for herself. She went to school. She cooked her meals on the little primus stove in the corridor of the communal apartment. With the help of her neighbours she sold off bits of the family inheritance (a gold watch, her mother’s silver ring, her father’s old binoculars and a camera, books and sculptures) to buy food and canteen meals in the factory near her house. Much of the money she raised this way was used to launch the appeal for the release of her father (accused of belonging to a ‘Trans-Pacific Counter-revolutionary Organization’), who sent her weekly letters from his jail in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky with complex instructions about obscure points of law and the recovery of bank accounts. Once a week she wrote back to her father with a report on his case; once a week she queued up overnight outside the jail in Vladivostok to hand in a parcel for her mother. Her father was impressed with the way she had grown up and responded to the family crisis. In May 1940, he wrote to his wife, who was by then in a labour camp near Iaia in Siberia:
I have received two letters from Zizika [Zoia]. I feel so bad for her but rejoice too over her success; she is flourishing and healthy – soon she will be seventeen, and she is completely independent. She is a clever girl and deserves praise for her bravery – she was not afraid to live entirely on her own at the age of fourteen. She has even come to enjoy it. I imagine her as a little mistress of the house, fully in command of her domestic and school affairs.17
Zoia Arsenteva, Khabarovsk, 1941
From Zoia’s perspective, coping on her own was not at all enjoyable. As she said years later, ‘One day Mama was arrested, the next day I began my adult life.’ In her letters to her parents she did not trouble them with the problems she faced. People posing as her parents’ friends tried to take advantage of her, offering to help her sell her precious items and keeping half the profits for themselves. In the spring of 1939, a genuine acquaintance of her mother, a secretary in the city Soviet, moved her things into Zoia’s room. She claimed that she was trying to protect her from having to share her living space with another family. But in fact, a few weeks later, the woman called for the police to arrest Zoia and take her to an orphanage, thus getting the room for herself. In the orphanage Zoia went on a hunger strike to protest against having been sent there. Eventually, through one of the workers in the orphanage, she made contact with her aunt from Khabarovsk, who had recently arrived to spend the summer at her dacha. Zoia stayed in the orphanage for three months, until her aunt managed to reclaim her room in the communal apartment and, on her sixteenth birthday, Zoia was allowed to return to it. She worked her way through the last year at school, studying at evening classes, and then attended the Railway Institute in Khabarovsk. In the winter of 1940, her father was sentenced to five years in a labour camp in Siberia, where he died in 1942. Her mother was released in 1944.18
Marksena Karpitskaia was thirtee
n when her parents, senior Party officials in Leningrad, were arrested on 5 July 1937. Marksena’s younger brothers were sent to different orphanages – the older Aleksei (who was ten) to a children’s home near Kirov, the younger Vladimir (who was five) to one in the Tatar Republic. Marksena was not taken to an orphanage because, like Zoia, she looked older than she was. Instead, she moved into a room in a communal apartment with her nanny, Milia, a simple peasant woman, who helped her and exploited her in equal measure. Like many children raised in Communist households in the 1920s, Marksena was brought up to be responsible from an early age. Her parents treated her as a ‘small comrade’ and put her in charge of her younger brothers. Now this training stood her in good stead:
Milia was with me, but I was in charge of everything, including the money. I paid Milia her salary, but then she began to steal from me, so I told her that I did not need her services any more. Still, I let her go on sleeping in my room, because she had nowhere else to stay.19
For a thirteen-year-old, Marksena was amazingly resourceful. She managed to survive by salvaging her parents’ personal possessions, which were sealed up in their flat on their arrest, and selling them through Milia in a commission shop, the last official remnant of the private market, where Soviet citizens could buy and sell their household goods. The key to this complex operation was the assistance of senior party official and family friend Boris Pozern (‘Uncle Boria’), at that time the Prosecutor for Leningrad Oblast, who had known Marksena since she was a little girl. Pozern sent a soldier to open up the flat so that Marksena could retrieve some money and take out things to sell: her father’s suit and shoes; her mother’s dress and a fur jacket; towels and sheets. ‘Uncle Boria’, who had risked his life to help the orphan girl, was arrested and shot in 1939.
Marksena, Leningrad, 1941
Marksena stored these items in her room in the communal apartment. Piece by piece, if not sold off, they were gradually stolen by the neighbours in the other rooms. Then Milia moved her boyfriend into the room, until Marksena found the courage to kick the couple out and put a lock on the door. For the next three years, Marksena lived in the communal apartment on her own. She sold her last possessions through an aunt, who had barely dared to talk to her after the arrest of her parents, but who now jumped at the opportunity to help Marksena sell her property. The communal apartment where Marksena lived was situated in a deeply proletarian area of Leningrad; all her neighbours were factory workers. They knew that she was living on her own – an illegal situation for a minor to be in – but none reported her to the police (apparently, they were more interested in keeping her near so they could steal from her). Bullied at school by one of the teachers as the daughter of an ‘enemy of the people’, Marksena transferred to a different school, where the headteacher was more sympathetic and helped her to conceal her spoilt biography. In 1941, at the age of seventeen, Marksena graduated with top marks in all subjects. She enrolled as a student in the Faculty of Languages at Leningrad University. When the university was evacuated, in February 1942, she remained in Leningrad, working in the Public Library. Until the city was cut off by the German troops, she kept writing to her brother Aleksei in his orphanage. Aleksei returned to Leningrad, deeply damaged by the orphanage, in 1946. Her younger brother Vladimir disappeared without a trace.20
The Great Terror swelled the orphan population. From 1935 to 1941 the number of children living in the children’s homes of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine alone grew from 329,000 to approximately 610,000 (a number which excludes the children ‘lent out’ by the orphanages to Soviet farms and factories).21 Most children’s homes were little more than detention centres for homeless juveniles and runaways, young ‘hooligans’ and petty criminals, and the ‘strange orphans’ (as the writer Ilia Ehrenburg described them), who had lost their parents in the mass arrests of 1937–8. Conditions in these homes were so appalling that dozens of officials were moved to write to the authorities to express their personal distress at the overcrowding and the dirt, the cold and hunger, the cruelty and neglect, to which the children were systematically subjected. Children of ‘enemies of the people’ were singled out for harsh treatment. Like Marksena’s younger brothers, they were often sent to different children’s homes as part of a policy of breaking up the families of ‘enemies’. They were told to forget their parents and, if young enough, were given different names to forge a new identity. They often suffered bullying and exclusion, sometimes at the hands of the teachers and caretakers, who were afraid to show them tenderness, in case they were accused of sympathizing with ‘enemies’.22
After the arrest of their parents, Inessa Bulat and her sister Mella were sent to different children’s homes. Inessa, who was three, was taken to a home in Leningrad, while Mella, eleven, was sent to one near Smolensk. Both girls were constantly reminded that they were the daughters of ‘enemies of the people’ – their parents having been arrested in connection with the trial of Piatakov and other ‘Trotskyists’ in January 1937.* Inessa has no recollection of her childhood prior to the orphanage. But what she recalls from the two years she spent there left a deep scar on her consciousness:
Conditions there were terrible – I could not even go into the toilet: the floors were covered ankle-deep in liquid shit… The building faced a big red-brick wall. It felt like being trapped in a kind of hell… The head of the home would always say to me: ‘Just remember who your parents are. Don’t make any trouble: just sit quietly and don’t stick your spy’s nose into anything.’… I became withdrawn. I shut myself away. Later, I found it very difficult to lead a normal life. I had spent too long in the orphanage, where I had learned to feel nothing.
In Mella’s orphanage there were ‘several dozen’ children of politicals. As she recalls:
None of us whose parents had been arrested ever dared to speak about our families. They called us ‘Trotskyists’ and always lumped us together, so we formed a sort of group. There was no particular friendship between us, but we tried to stick together… The other children would throw stones at us and call us names, so we kept together to protect ourselves.
Mella wrote to her grandmother in Leningrad. When her parents were arrested, her grandmother had refused to look after her and Inessa. Recently divorced from an alcoholic husband who had beaten her, she was living in terrible conditions in a basement room and working as an inspector at the Leningrad Tobacco Factory. She was afraid that she might lose her job if she gave shelter to children of ‘enemies of the people’. She also thought that her grandchildren would be better off in a children’s home. But Mella’s letters shocked her. She had no idea of the appalling conditions in which her granddaughters had been living. In 1939, she rescued both girls from the children’s homes and brought them back to live with her in her basement room in Leningrad.23
When Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko and his wife Sofia were arrested, in October 1937, their daughter Valentina was aged fifteen. Sofia and Vladimir were both shot on the same day, 8 February 1938. Vladimir was Valentina’s stepfather. Her real father was Aleksandr Tikhanov, a printer from a large working-class family in Moscow who became an editor at the Young Guard publishing house in Moscow and then moved to International Books in Prague, where Sofia had met Vladimir, the Soviet ambassador. Valentina had seen her father before 1934, but then they lost contact. ‘He did not come to see us when we returned to Moscow. I did not ask my mother why,’ Valentina says, ‘and she did not explain it. No doubt my father did not want to intrude on our life.’ When Sofia and Vladimir were arrested, Valentina was taken to the NKVD detention centre in the grounds of the old Danilov Monastery, from which the children of the ‘enemies of the people’ were sent to orphanages across the Soviet Union. Immediately on her arrival Valentina became ill. Her father, Aleksandr, knew where she was but did not try to rescue her. Recently remarried, perhaps he was afraid of endangering relations with his new wife, who was herself arrested in 1938. From the Danilov Monastery, Valentina was transferred to a children’s home in Dne
propetrovsk, where she remained until 1941, when she returned to Moscow. Reflecting on her life in this period, Valentina says:
The orphanage was a trauma that I never overcame. This is the first time I have spoken about it to anyone. These were the years when I was growing up, I needed a mother, a mother and a father, and when I began to understand that they were dead, a sense of loss cut into everything. At the orphanage they used to give us sweets for the New Year, sometimes the teachers made a fuss of us. But the only thing I felt was this awful sense of loss, of being on my own, without anyone. I was the only girl who had no mother to contact, who had no letters. I was all alone. The only one in the whole group whose mother had been shot [long silence]. And I felt that bitterly.24
Girls from Orphanage No. 1, Dnepropetrovsk, 1940. Valentina is in the centre of the second row from the top
The one redeeming feature of the orphanage – it saved her from despair – was the strength of the friendships she formed there with the other orphan girls.
There are countless horror stories about growing up in orphanages. But there also examples of children finding love and ‘family’ there.
Galina Kosheleva was nine years old when she was taken to an orphanage, following the arrest and execution of her father, a peasant from the Podporozhe region, north-east of Leningrad, during the ‘kulak operation’ of 1937. The family dispersed. Galina and her brother were taken to Kirov, from where he was sent to an orphanage in the nearby town of Zuevka, and she northwards to Oparino, between Kirov and Kotlas. As soon as she arrived, Galina caught pneumonia. ‘I had travelled all the way from Leningrad in a summer dress, with a white pelerine, nothing else, and just a pair of light sandals; it was summer when we left but November by the time we reached Kirov.’ Throughout that winter Galina was very sick. She was nursed by the director of the orphanage, a young Siberian woman called Elizaveta Ivanova, who gave Galina her own winter coat and bought her milk with her own money from the neighbouring collective farm. The relationship between Elizaveta and Galina resembled one between mother and child. Without children of her own, Elizaveta doted on the nine-year-old girl: she read to her at night and helped her with her studies when she could not go to school. She wanted to adopt her but did not have the living space to qualify for adoption rights. Then, in 1945, Galina’s mother suddenly appeared. In 1937, she had fled the NKVD and lived in hiding with a new-born baby. She had worked as an ice-breaker on the Murmansk Railway, until her capture by the German army, when she was sent to a Finnish concentration camp in Petrozavodsk. Liberated by Soviet troops in 1944, she went in search of her children. Galina was very sad to leave Elizaveta and the orphanage. She moved to Podporozhe with her mother and brother, and then to Leningrad in 1952. Throughout these years she kept on writing to Elizaveta at the orphanage. ‘I loved her so much that it made my mother envious,’ she recalls. ‘I did not love my mother half as much, and relations between us in any case were not so good.’25