In 1954, Valentin was released from the navy. He decided to go and live near his mother in Kazakhstan rather than to return to his native Leningrad, and took with him his wife and their daughter. Valentin gave up good job prospects in Leningrad. He had excelled in the navy and left it with an excellent report. But his conscience told him that he should help his mother, who, at the age of sixty-one, was physically weak and mentally damaged by the years of living in the labour camp. Looking back on his decision, Valentin explains it in terms of the principles he was taught in his childhood:
My mother always told me to be moral and honest, to live a life of truth, as preached by the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century, Herzen in particular, whose works she read to us when we were young… When I got married I told my wife that I would not hide the fact that my mother had been in a labour camp and that I would live in such a way to help her as best I could… I could not have acted otherwise. It was my moral duty to help her.
Valentin’s decision to follow his mother into exile was partly influenced by the example of the Decembrist wives, the noblewomen who had followed their husbands into political exile in Siberia after the failure of their uprising in December 1825. As he himself admits, there was perhaps in his decision a conscious element of political dissent, a deliberate withdrawal from the Soviet system and the career path that awaited him in Leningrad, which was born from his own injury and sense of injustice.9
Valentin Muravsky with his daughter Nina, Karaganda, Kazakhstan, 1954
In Kazakhstan Valentin worked as the driver of a combine harvester on a large collective farm in the middle of the steppe. The Soviet government was just then investing in new technology as part of the Virgin Lands Campaign, an optimistic and ultimately disastrous project to open up vast new tracts of arid steppeland in Kazakhstan and Siberia for wheat cultivation. Valentin’s kolkhoz was among the first to launch the campaign in 1954, when no less than 19 million hectares of grazing land went under the plough. Valentin lived with his wife and daughter in a primitive barracks in a remote steppeland settlement. Once a week he walked the 100 kilometres to Akmolinsk to visit his mother in the ALZhIR labour camp and bring her clothes and food. The burden of caring for his sick and aged mother, and the hardships of the steppe, placed an unbearable strain on Valentin’s relations with his wife, who was not prepared for such a sacrifice. In 1956, she left Valentin and went back to her family in the Crimea, leaving Valentin with their three-year-old daughter and his mother to care for. In the same year, Valentin’s mother was released from the camp. Valentin returned with her to Leningrad, where they lived together in a small room in a communal apartment. He got a job as a labourer in the construction of the Leningrad Metro. In 1957, his mother died: eight years of life in the labour camp had broken her entirely. Two years later, Valentin was rejoined by his wife; they had two more children; but then, in 1964, she left them once again. Valentin brought up their three children on his own.10
Marianna Fursei was reunited with her family in the most extraordinary way. Four years old and dangerously ill, in 1942 she had been given away for adoption to the Goldenshteins by her grandmother, who had then gone with Marianna’s brother Georgii to Irkutsk. After the war, Georgii returned to his mother’s family in Leningrad. They had no way of finding Marianna, because they had lost all contact with the Goldenshteins and did not even know their proper name. Marianna grew up with the Goldenshteins in Tbilisi. She thought of them as her parents and had no memory of her real family. But things began to change in her teenage years.
Marianna first began to suspect that the Goldenshteins were not her real parents in 1949, when other children at a Pioneer camp teased her as a foundling. The incident brought back traumatic memories of her early childhood in Arkhangelsk. She had a vague memory of her grandmother and could recall that she had a brother. As she grew older and began to rebel against the strict discipline of the Goldenshtein household, she attached even more importance to these distant memories, building them into an almost mythical picture of her long-lost family. Recalling that she had been in a hospital in Arkhangelsk, Marianna set out to trace her brother:
I was sixteen years old – it was 1954. I wrote a letter to Arkhangelsk. To the Medical Institute. On the envelope I wrote: First Year, First Group, to the First Female Student in Alphabetical Order. I told this girl that I had lived in Arkhangelsk as a child, on Pavlin Vinogradov Street, that I had a brother, and that there was a female doctor who might know something about him. Could she find her? And, would you believe it, this girl tracked down the doctor! The doctor told the girl how my grandmother and Georgii had been destitute and hungry. She also found out through acquaintances that my brother was studying physics somewhere in Leningrad. When the girl wrote back to me with all this information, I was in a frenzy of excitement. I sent letters to all the institutes in Leningrad, asking them to find a student called Georgii who had come from Arkhangelsk. It turned out that he was studying in the Polytechnic Institute. He wrote to me and sent a photograph.11
Georgii spent three months with Marianna in Tbilisi during the summer of 1954. He remembers their reunion as a joyous occasion, although he sensed some jealousy on his sister’s part, as he recalls, ‘that I had lived with grandma while she had been given away to strangers’. The Goldenshteins were decent people who loved Marianna as their own daughter. They never told her anything about her real parents, partly because they were trying to protect her from the facts of their arrest, but mainly, it seems, because they were afraid that she would leave them if she found out. Their ‘materialistic values’, according to Georgii, were very different from those of the Fursei family, who were artists and musicians, and from those of the German family, on their mother’s side, who were part of the cultural elite in Leningrad. In the autumn of 1954, Marianna spent a week with the Germans in Leningrad. They showed her photographs of all her relatives, including pictures of herself in Arkhangelsk, but did not tell her that her parents had been arrested, or that they had died in labour camps, only that they had been killed during the war. Looking back on that visit, Marianna thinks that there must have been some agreement between the Germans and the Goldenshteins to keep the truth from her, and perhaps there was.* Her brother Georgii, who also knew about the fate of their parents, concealed it from her as well. ‘The truth was an inconvenience for him,’ concludes Marianna, seeking to explain the silence of her brother, who was then a physics student at Leningrad University (he went on to become a professor). ‘The only thing that was important for him was to study and get ahead.’12
Marianna with Iosif and Nelly Goldenshtein, Tbilisi, 1960
Marianna enrolled at the Institute of Light Industry in Tbilisi and then worked as a schoolteacher in the Georgian capital. She did not discover the true story about her parents until 1986, when she received an invitation to view an exhibition of her father’s paintings in Arkhangelsk, where she was told everything by his old friends and colleagues. Having grown up in a strictly Communist household, and having always thought that her father had been killed as a soldier in the war, it was a shock for Marianna to discover, at the age of nearly fifty, that he had been shot as an ‘enemy of the people’. It opened her eyes to a history of repression in the Soviet Union which she had previously ignored in the naive belief that it had not affected her own family. ‘I felt sorry for these people (my blood parents),’ she recalls:
I sympathized with them and wondered how it could have been that such good and law-abiding people could have been repressed so unjustly… I could not understand. I mean if they were suspected of some crime, why was there no investigation? Why didn’t the courts function properly? I began to question the Soviet system, which I had been brought up [by the Goldenshteins] to accept uncritically… Gradually, I came to realize that I shared the values of my real parents, even though I had been apart from them since the age of three.13
Along with the return of prisoners, the years after Stalin’s death witnessed the release of tens
of thousands of children from orphanages and other children’s homes, where many of them had grown up without any knowledge of their relatives.
Nikolai Kovach had no idea of family life when he was released from his orphanage, at the age of sixteen, in 1953. He had no memory of his parents, who had both been shot in labour camps when he was only one, nor any recollection of his older sister, who had been sent to a different orphanage. His earliest experience of living with a family occurred after he was sent by the Komsomol to help with the first harvest of the Virgin Lands Campaign in Kazakhstan (more than 300,000 people were recruited by the Komsomol as volunteers for the harvest of 1954). One of the leaders of the tractor brigade, an older worker, took a paternal interest in Nikolai. He brought him back to live with his wife and their three children, who all accepted him as an equal member of their home. ‘It was just an ordinary Russian household. The three children were all younger,’ recalls Nikolai, ‘and they fell in love with me. I played games with them and loved them too.’ Nikolai lived with them for eighteen months, until 1957, when he was mobilized by the army. ‘I had never known what a family was,’ he says:
But I observed how this family functioned, how all the relations worked, and the experience was good for me. Later on I read books by psychologists which explained that children grow up like their families. When I was a child I did not have a family, and I was an adult before I knew any kind of family life. I was lucky to meet such wonderful people. I married [in 1962] and brought up a family of my own. I could not have achieved that without that experience in Krasnoiarsk… It taught me the importance of respect and love – they were always helping each other, thinking of each other and of me – and I had never seen that before, certainly not in the orphanage.14
Elizaveta Perepechenko knew nothing about her father when he came to collect her from an orphanage in 1946. She was just a baby when he was arrested in 1935, and he had not been heard from in the ten years he had spent in a labour camp and exile in Kazakhstan. Elizaveta’s mother had died in a labour camp, and she had no other family. So she had little choice but to join her father in Alma-Ata, where he worked as a geologist. They lived in the basement of a large communal house, which was shared by several other families. Although she was only a teenager, Elizaveta took on all the household duties for her father, a taciturn and difficult character who had been deeply damaged by his experience in the camp. It was particularly hard for Elizaveta to get on with him and to relate to him as a father, because she had never been close to any men (all the workers at her orphanage had been women). Like many parents who had returned from the labour camps, Elizaveta’s father was strict and controlling. He would not let her go out in the evenings without knowing exactly where she was and with whom. There were frequent conflicts, as they each tried to impose their will on the other. Elizaveta remembers ‘one occasion when we sat at a table facing each other for more than an hour, because I refused to eat a piece of bread. We were both equally stubborn.’ Her father never spoke to her about his past, and she never spoke to him about the orphanage. So they lived together in a state of mutual estrangement. In 1953, Elizaveta moved to Leningrad and applied for a job in the MVD: she had no idea that her father had once been arrested as an ‘enemy of the people’. When he found out about his daughter’s application, he came immediately to Leningrad to tell her prospective employers about his spoilt biography. He was afraid she might be punished if it was discovered that she had not declared it in the questionnaire. On his request the MVD agreed not to tell Elizaveta about her father’s history. She did not find out about his arrest until 1959.15
During the years of separation from their parents, children naturally constructed an image of their mothers and their fathers in their minds. It was often very different from the reality they encountered on their reunion.
Galina Shtein was eight years old when her father, Aleksandr Sagatsky, was arrested in 1936.* Galina grew up without knowing anything about what had happened to her father, an economics professor from Leningrad. Her mother, who was sacked from the library where she worked after the arrest of Aleksandr, cut all ties with him and reverted to her maiden name. During the war, when Galina was evacuated with her mother to Siberia, she began to feel a desperate need for a father. She recalls:
Everyone was talking about their ‘papa at the front’, about how their papa was a hero, or how he had died. I began to feel inadequate. I did not have a father. I did not even know who or where or what he was. I did not know what he looked like, because Mama had destroyed all the photographs of him.
Galina wrote to the Bureau of Addresses in Leningrad in the hope of tracking down her father’s younger brother, but she was told that he had died in the siege of Leningrad. She gave up hope of finding her father, until 1947, when chance put her on his tracks. Galina was studying biology at Leningrad University. One day, while standing in a library queue, she heard a student say the name Sagatskaia. The student was referring to a lecturer in Marxism-Leninism. Galina waited for the lecturer outside one of the lecture halls:
A middle-aged woman with an attractive face came out of the hall. I was very nervous, apologized profusely for disturbing her and then asked: ‘You aren’t by any chance a relative of Aleksandr Pavlovich Sagatsky?’ She was silent for a moment. Then she said: ‘Are you Galina?’ It turned out that she was my father’s first wife.16
Galina’s father was in Norilsk. He had been sentenced to ten years in the labour camp and then, after his release in 1948, to another five years of exile in the Gulag settlement. Galina wrote to him, giving her address at the central post office in Leningrad. ‘I did not want to worry my mother,’ she explains.
I went to the post office every day to see if my father had replied. I started going there in the autumn [of 1947] and was still going there in the winter. There was never a reply. Finally, in April 1948, I decided that I would make just one more journey to the post office, and if there was nothing, then I would give up. It was fortunate that I made that final trip. At the counter they gave me four fat envelopes. They were made by hand out of some sort of crude paper. Inside each of them, on light-blue writing paper, was a long letter.
The first letter was full of feeling:
4 April 1948. Norilsk
Letter No. 1
(I am sending three letters all at once on 6.IV)
My darling daughter Galia!
Your letter filled my heart with joy… One of the greatest tragedies of my life is to have been separated for so many years from the child I love. You write: ‘My letter, no doubt, will be a surprise, but I hope, nonetheless, that it is a pleasant one.’ And I reply: 1. A surprise – yes; 2. Pleasant – more than that – it is a joy. Even in the way you phrase your thoughts, that ‘nonetheless’, I recognize myself! In your place I would have written just the same. It makes me smile to notice traces of myself in you… Believe me, Galia, you have found your father, who lost you for so many years but never stopped loving you.17
Through their letters, Galina started an intense relationship with her father. She imagined him to be the sort of romantic hero she had read about in books: ‘I admired courageous men, bold scientists, fearless explorers, or people like my father who had survived against the odds. I had never come across such people in my life.’ In the early correspondence her father matched her ideal image. His letters were passionate and emotionally engaging, full of details about how he lived, what he read and how his views had changed in recent years. Galina fell in love with this literary persona. ‘In my mind I had a fantasy of the father I had yearned for all those years,’ she recalls.
He seemed the sort of man with whom I could be open, to whom I could say absolutely anything, and he would always listen, give me advice, and so on. A new life began for me, and I was entirely absorbed by it. Despite my reserved character, and my general reticence, it seemed that I, like him, was an emotional person after all. Now of course I understand that it was easier for me to be emotional in these letters than it was in re
al life.18
In 1956, Aleksandr visited Galina in Leningrad. But the meeting was a disappointment: they could not re-create the connection they had forged in their letters. Recently released from exile in Norilsk, Aleksandr had been rehabilitated by the Party; he was preoccupied with the resurrection of his political career. According to Galina, he was too busy with his work in the Party to engage with her. ‘I had the impression that he was no longer interested in me,’ she recalls.
I even think he disapproved of me. I remember he once said to me, ‘You have become such a slut.’ Why did he think that? Because I didn’t show an interest in the poetry of Mao Tse-tung. Because I hadn’t read some political article that he wanted me to read. I wasn’t interested in politics. But he lived for it.
Aleksandr and Galina, Leningrad, 1956
In 1956, Aleksandr moved to Ulianovsk, Lenin’s birthplace on the Volga. He taught political economy at the university and wrote on the subject for various journals. ‘My father hated Stalin,’ Galina recalls, ‘but he remained a convinced Leninist. Despite everything he had suffered, he continued to believe that there was no other way. He had been unjustly treated, but Soviet history was correct.’ This unshakeable belief in the Communist ideal, so necessary for his own survival, became an obstacle to Aleksandr’s communication with Galina, who was more sceptical but saw no point in political debate. ‘What was the point of arguing with a believer? He was totally rigid in his opinions. Politics, which was at the centre of his life, became a subject we could not talk about.’ Galina went to see her father in Ulianovsk in 1958. It was her only visit there. They barely said a word to each other, except to ask some polite questions about each other’s work. Out of duty, Galina went on writing letters to her father until the early 1960s. But, as she admits,
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