Physics teacher Dmitry Streletsky (seated far right) with schoolboys of the seventh class in the Chermoz ‘special settlement’, September 1939. The director of the school, Viktor Bezgodov, is standing on the right
Despite all his suffering at the hands of the Soviet regime, Dmitry was a Soviet patriot, he believed fervently in the justice of the Party’s cause, and wanted desperately to become a part of it. ‘I dreamed of joining the Party,’ he explains.
I wanted to be recognized as an equal human being, that is all I wanted from the Party. I did not want to join for my career. For me the Party was a symbol of honesty and dedication. There were honest, decent people who were Communists, and I thought I deserved to be counted among them.
It was a huge disappointment when he was turned down for Party membership in 1945 (recounting the episode sixty years later, his hands shake and he finds it hard to speak from emotion). But after 1956, when the Party tried to attract members from the groups which Stalin had repressed, he was at last admitted to the comradeship of equals he had yearned to join for over twenty years.41
4
Zinaida Bushueva was sentenced to eight years in the ALZhIR Labour Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland near Akmolinsk in Kazakhstan. After five years in the camp she was transferred from the inner prison zone to the surrounding settlement, where conditions were better, and families could sometimes join the prisoners. Zinaida wrote to her mother in Molotov. Although she was desperate to be reunited with her two daughters, Angelina and Nelly, Zinaida did not want to ‘spoil their lives’ by subjecting them to the hardships of camp life. In Molotov, however, there were chronic shortages of food. It was a city overcrowded by evacuees from the war-torn Soviet territories, and families like the Bushuevs, ‘enemies of the people’ who had no food ration or allotment, were in dire straits. Zinaida’s mother decided it was best to reunite the girls with their mother. She could not imagine that conditions in the camp could be any worse than they were in Molotov.
To get the children to ALZhIR they first had to be given to an orphanage: once they had been made wards of the state, Zinaida could appeal for their transfer to the labour camp. After three months at the orphanage, Angelina and Nelly were collected by their grandmother and taken on the train journey from Molotov to Kazakhstan, arriving in Akmolinsk late one January evening. Zinaida came to meet them at the station, where she found them sitting on the platform sheltering themselves from a snowstorm. She was dressed in a quilted jacket, trousers and felt boots, the standard winter clothes of a prisoner. When Nelly, who was nine, saw her mother, she ran up to her and flung her arms around her neck. But Angelina, who was only two when she had last seen her mother, was too young to remember her. She recoiled in fear. ‘That’s not my mama,’ Angelina said. ‘That’s just a peasant uncle (diaden’ka muzhik) in his winter clothes.’ After five years of hard labour, Zinaida had lost her feminine appearance; she no longer looked like the ideal image of a mother Angelina had seen in family photographs and built up in her mind.42
Left: Zinaida with her brothers, 1936. Right: Zinaida (centre) in ALZhIR, 1942. A rare private photograph of Gulag prisoners, it was taken to send to relatives. The three women were photographed together to reduce the costs
ALZhIR was the largest of the three labour camps in the Gulag system exclusively for female prisoners (the others being the Tomsk labour camp and the Temnikovsky camp in the Republic of Mordovia). Built in a hurry to meet the regime’s urgent demand for prisons for the wives of ‘enemies of the people’, it received its first convoys of female convicts in January 1938. Most of them were housed in the barracks of a former colony for orphan children under the control of the NKVD. By 1941, there were an estimated 10,000 women in the camp, most of them employed in agriculture, like Bushueva, or in the textiles factory, which made uniforms for the Red Army. Conditions in the camps of Kazakhstan were relatively good compared to those in the Far North or Siberia. But for the women of ALZhIR – especially for those who had grown accustomed to the comfortable lifestyle of the Soviet elite – camp life was very difficult, particularly during the first years. Initially categorized as a high-security penal institution, ALZhIR imposed an extremely punitive ‘special regime’ (spets-rezhim) on its prisoners, as part of the campaign of repression against the ‘wives of traitors’. The inner prison zone, distinct from the barracks settlement, was enclosed by a wire fence with observation towers and patrolled by guards with dogs. The women were awoken at 4 a.m. for work; the last roll-call before they were allowed to sleep was at midnight, although, as many prisoners recall, the guards were so innumerate that they often had to get the women up again to recheck their numbers. Food rations were given in accordance with the prisoner’s fulfilment of her working quota; anyone who failed to meet the quota for ten days in succession was transferred to the ‘death barracks’ and left to die. ‘Every morning the dead were carted out and buried in the mass grave just outside the camp,’ recalls a former guard. The hardest thing to bear for many prisoners was the prohibition on letters from relatives (a condition of the ‘special regime’). After May 1939, the ‘special regime’ was lifted. ALZhIR was designated as a ‘general labour camp’ and conditions began to improve. The barracks settlement was gradually enlarged, as more women completed their sentences in the prison zone or were rewarded for their labour in the prison with an early release to the settlement.* Conditions there were much more bearable. There were no fences, the women were escorted by the guards to work and counted every evening on their return, but otherwise they were left largely to themselves. There was a vibrant cultural life in the club house of the settlement, which was encouraged by the camp commandant, Sergei Barinov, who was to be remembered as a relatively kind and decent man. Among the women in the camp were the wives and relatives of many senior Bolsheviks and Red Army commanders; they included writers, artists, actresses and singers, even soloists from the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. According to Mikhail Iusipenko, the deputy commandant of ALZhIR, there were 125 doctors, 400 qualified nurses, 40 actresses and 350 pianists in the first convoy of prisoners. Mikhail Shreider, the second-in-command to the NKVD chief of Kazakhstan, recalls his discomfort on visiting ALZhIR, where there were so many of his former colleagues’ wives, ‘for whom I could do nothing’. The camp administration assured Shreider that the prisoners enjoyed good conditions at ALZhIR, but it still seemed to him a ‘frightful place’, as bad as any of the Gulag camps, not because of the physical conditions, but because it contained such a concentration of mothers separated from their children.43
In this respect the Bushuevs were fortunate to be together. Zinaida’s son Slava, who had been put into the orphanage on their arrival at ALZhIR, was reunited with his mother when she was transferred to the barracks settlement. Her transfer also meant that Nelly and Angelina could join her. They all lived in one of the barracks, which had long rows of sleeping planks on two levels. As Angelina remembers:
Children at ALZhIR, 1942. Slava Bushuev is standing far right
The other women rearranged themselves so that we could live as a family in one corner, with two of us on top and two below, a bedside table and a little corner shelf, which was all our own, where we kept our bread and jam… We took our meals from the canteen and ate them sitting on our sleeping planks… No one ever stole our things… There were four families in our barracks. Each one had a corner, where they could enjoy some privacy. It was agreed that this was right.
Angelina and Nelly went to the school in the labour camp. They even joined the Pioneers, which operated in the camp, encouraged by the authorities to cultivate a Soviet ethos in the children of ‘enemies of the people’. There were no red scarfs in the labour camp, so the Pioneers made their own by dyeing cotton strips with the blood of mosquitoes, which swarmed all around the camp.44
However, most of the women at ALZhIR had little connection to their families. Once ALZhIR became a general labour camp the inmates were permitted to write and receive letters according to the r
ules of correspondence stipulated by the Gulag code of 1939: prisoners were allowed one letter and one parcel every month, or once every three months if, like most of the women of ALZhIR, they had been convicted of ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’. But in reality the number of letters the women received depended on the whim of the camp guards, on the regime inside the camp and on the location of the camp (some labour camps were too remote to be reached by any mail). Inna Gaister recounts the elaborate arrangements for sending parcels to her mother in ALZhIR. Normal post offices did not accept parcels for dispatch to labour camps. Special posting stations were designated for the purpose, but since there were no public announcements about their location (the existence of the camps was not acknowledged by the Soviet authorities), people had to rely for information on the rumours that circulated within the prison queues. In 1938, all dispatches from Moscow were stopped, so Inna had to travel to Mozhaisk, a town 100 kilometres south-west of Moscow, and battle with the crowds to hand in a parcel at a designated carriage on a special train taking prisoners to Kazakhstan.45
To be deprived of these letters was a form of torture for the women of ALZhIR, who were sometimes known to make their feelings heard. When Esfir Slavina, the wife of the jurist Ilia Slavin, arrived at ALZhIR in 1938, she was horrified to find a large number of teenage girls – many of them younger than her sixteen-year-old daughter Ida – who had somehow ended up in the labour camp. Esfir was afraid that Ida, too, was in a camp somewhere, but she had no rights of correspondence and had heard nothing from her daughter. In fact Ida was coping on her own, staying in the homes of various schoolfriends in Leningrad and sending parcels to her mother, which never reached her. Esfir went on a hunger strike. It was the first sign of protest at ALZhIR, where the prisoners – mostly Party members or the wives of Bolsheviks – had on the whole been loyal to the Soviet regime and done their work conscientiously and without complaint. Esfir was not involved in politics. She had never paid attention to her husband’s legal affairs, and her only interest was in her family. When she refused to eat, Esfir was put into a punishment block, but after several weeks, as she neared the point of physical collapse, the camp administrators finally agreed to let her receive letters from her family. Perhaps Esfir’s hunger strike was not the determining factor: it is hard to imagine that the camp authorities were concerned about an individual death, and they were in any case already preparing to transfer ALZhIR from a ‘special regime’ to a ‘general labour camp’, which would allow the prisoners to receive letters from their relatives. But the authorities may have been concerned by the possible reaction by the other prisoners in the event of Esfir’s death, for feelings on this issue had been running very high, and there had been frequent complaints about the lack of mail. A few days after the capitulation of the camp authorities, Ida was summoned to the NKVD headquarters in Leningrad and informed that she could send a parcel to her mother. It arrived in the winter months of early 1940, a time when hardly anyone in ALZhIR was receiving letters, let alone parcels. Esfir’s victory made her a celebrity. Hundreds of women gathered in her barracks to inspect the precious contents of her parcel. It encouraged some of the others to protest to the camp authorities.46
As the rules of correspondence were relaxed, the women of ALZhIR poured all their emotions into their letters, often making little gifts to enclose for their children as tokens of their love. ‘We so wanted for our children to have something we had made for them,’ recalls one of ALZhIR’s prisoners.47
Dina Ielson-Grodzianskaia was sentenced to ALZhIR in 1938, following the arrest of her husband Yevgeny, the director of the Moscow Higher Technical School, in December 1937 (he was shot in 1938). Their daughter Gertrud (Gerta), who was then aged five, and her younger brother were adopted by their aunt. A trained agronomist, Dina played a senior role in the agricultural management of the labour camp – one of the many ‘trusties’ in the Gulag system who worked as specialists or collaborated with the camp authorities to earn those small advantages which in a labour camp could make the difference between life and death.48 Compared to the other prisoners, Dina was allowed to send and receive letters relatively frequently. She often sent her daughter little presents she had made by hand – a piece of clothing or a toy, or on one occasion a beautiful embroidered towel with animals, which Gertrud was to treasure all her life. ‘I always kept it on my bed, wherever I was, in student dormitories, in every place I lived,’ she recalls. ‘In my mind it was synonymous with the fairy-tale mother of my imagination. In her absence I had constructed an image of a mother who was good and beautiful, but who lived far away.’49
Embroidered towel (detail) made by Dina for Gertrud
The yearning for a mother found its parallel in the yearning for a child, even in the conditions of a labour camp. A printer from Ukraine, Hava Volovich was twenty-one when she was arrested and sentenced to a labour camp in the Far North in 1937. Feeling isolated and lonely, she longed to have a child, to feel the joy of a child’s love. It was a longing felt by many women in the camps, as she recalls in a memoir full of emotion:
Our need for love, tenderness, caresses, was so desperate that it reached the point of insanity, of beating one’s head against a wall, of suicide. We all wanted a child – the dearest and closest of all people, someone for whom we would give up our own life. I held out for a relatively long time. But I did so need and yearn for a hand of my own to hold, something I could lean on in those long years of solitude, oppression, and humiliation.
Hava had an affair with an unnamed man (‘I did not choose the best of them by any means’) and had a little girl with golden curls whom she called Eleonora. The camp had no special facilities for mothers. In the barracks where Hava gave birth three mothers were confined in a tiny room.
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 we could find who had been excused from work; these women would calmly help themselves to the food we had left for the children.
Motherhood gave Hava a new purpose and belief in life:
I believed neither in God nor in the Devil. But while I had my child, I most passionately, most violently wanted there to be a God… 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.
Hava was put to work in a brigade felling trees and then transferred to a sawmill. By bribing the nurses in the children’s home, she was allowed to see her daughter outside the normal visiting hours, before the morning roll-call and during her lunch break. What she found was disturbing:
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 to 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, responsible for seventeen infants, found ways to speed up her work:
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.
It was only their own children that the nurses cared for properly, and these, claims Hava, ‘were the only babies who lived to see freedom’. Eleonora became sick. Her little body was covered in bruises:
I shall never forget how she grabbed my neck with her tiny skinny hands and moaned, ‘Mama, want home!’ She hadn’t forgotten the bug-ridden slum where she first saw the light of day, and where she’d been with her mother…
Little Eleonora… 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 1944.50
The Whisperers Page 45