For various reasons, survivors of the camps found it difficult to talk about what they had been through ‘on the other side’, and closed themselves off from their families. Some people were afraid to talk for fear of punishment (on their release, prisoners were told not to discuss what had happened to them in public, and many feared, in consequence, to talk about their past in private too). Others did not tell their relatives because they were reluctant to burden them, or because they were afraid that they would not and could not understand what they had suffered. Parents were afraid to tell their children, in particular, because they did not want to say anything that might alienate them from the Soviet system or get them into trouble with the authorities.
Even within families where talk became the norm, parents remained cautious about what they said to their children. On her return from Kolyma, Olga Adamova-Sliuzberg discovered that her son had grown up in her absence to become an active member of the Komsomol, fanatically devoted to Stalin. One day over dinner, she asked whether it was true that Stalin had been ill:
Nobody knew, but my son answered in a meaningful tone: ‘I don’t know whether he’s ill or not, but if he were ill and I had to give my life’s blood and die for him, I’d gladly do it.’ I understood that this was intended as a lesson and as a warning to me, and I bit my tongue.29
Adamova-Sliuzberg’s experience in the labour camps had made her sceptical of the regime, but she knew that she could not say that, even though she wanted her son to understand what she had been through. She recalls:
I was afraid to tell him what I had discovered ‘on the other side’. I could probably have persuaded him that there was a great deal wrong in our country, that his idol, Stalin, was far from perfect, but my son was only seventeen. Had I explained everything to him, and had he agreed with me, he would have been unable to applaud Stalin’s name, to write letters to Stalin, to proclaim in class that our country was just. And if he could not have done that, he would have died. Perhaps he would have found a way to live a double life. But I could not make him go through that. I was afraid to be frank with him. But somehow, gradually, I did win him over. He would look at me carefully. After several months he said to me: ‘Mama, I like you.’30
The opposite dynamic was more prevalent. Parents who remained committed to the Bolshevik ideals of the 1930s often came home from the labour camps to discover that their children had developed altogether different ideas and attitudes in the relatively liberal climate of the Khrushchev thaw, when censorship was gradually relaxed and the Stalin era was re-evaluated in the Soviet media. Young people turned away from politics and took up the pursuit of personal happiness, stimulated by the economic boom of the Khrushchev years, when private housing blocks were constructed, more consumer goods became available, and new technologies, fashions, art and music were imported from the West. Yet this inevitably gave rise to the fear, voiced by Communists whenever the regime relaxed control on the private sphere, that individualistic tendencies would lead to the demise of social activism, collectivism and other Soviet values in the young. There were thus renewed calls for Soviet youth to join the Komsomol as well as to become ‘enthusiasts’ of collective projects like the Virgin Lands Campaign.31
When she returned from the Potma labour camps, Maria Ilina encountered this form of the generation gap with her daughter Marina. Before her arrest, in 1937, Maria had been the director of a large textile factory in Kiev; her husband was the Party boss, until his own arrest and execution that same year. On her release, in 1945, Maria found Marina, then aged ten, in a Ukrainian orphanage. She had not seen her daughter since she was two. Mother and daughter lived together for the next twelve years, first in Cherkassy, and then Moscow, until 1958, when Maria moved back to Kiev. Until Maria’s death in 1964, they would visit one another on every holiday. Yet their relationship was difficult. Maria wanted to direct the way her daughter lived. She wanted her to be a model Communist, to be the sort of youth that she had been until her own arrest. Rehabilitated in 1956, Maria rejoined the Party and became an active propagandist of the Party cause. According to her daughter, ‘she needed to believe in the Communist ideals that had sustained her and my father when they had been young: otherwise the sacrifices she had made would have been too much to bear’.
Maria gave herself entirely to the political education of her daughter. She organized a programme of reading, a mixture of Soviet and Russian classics, designed to inculcate the correct Communist ideas and attitudes. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was considered bad, for example, because Anna was selfish, and ‘the main thing for a woman was not love but comradeship and duty to society’.
She wanted me to be strong and resolute, brave and courageous, an active member of the Pioneers and the Komsomol… She wanted me to be the master of myself, to overcome the negative in me, to improve myself constantly, like the heroes of Soviet literature. For Mama that was the most important thing – to become the master of oneself… I was always being told that I had to do things I did not want to do.
Maria intervened in all sorts of ways. Her daughter wanted to study literature and become a schoolteacher, but she made her go to the prestigious Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Marina joined the Komsomol and became the chairman of the Komsomol committee at the institute. Having qualified as an engineer, she worked at a research institute in Moscow. Maria wanted her to join the Party and pleaded with her to accept the invitation to do so from the Party secretary of her factory, which she had worked hard to arrange. But Marina now had different ideas. Like many of her friends, she was inspired by the liberal climate of the Khrushchev thaw. Self-assured and independent in her thinking, she became increasingly sceptical about politics. She thought that joining the Party would demand too much from her – far more than she was prepared to give to activities in the public sphere. These ideas were reinforced by her new husband, Igor, whom she had married during her third year at the institute. Igor was critical of the Soviet system, and argued frequently with Maria, but Marina was not interested in their political debates. She rejected the Party, and politics, not because she had reflected deeply on the reasons for her family’s tragedy, but, on the contrary, because she wanted to forget about the past and begin a ‘happy life’. Her main interests were music and the cinema, dancing, and socializing with her friends. She was encouraged to pursue these interests by Igor, who was paid well as an engineer, and dreamed of keeping her at home. Marina’s attention to her personal appearance met with constant disapproval from her mother, whose Communist convictions and Spartan attitudes left no room for such ‘petty-bourgeois’ diversions. Maria was always neat and tidy. She had a good figure. But after her return from the labour camps, she never made the most of her appearance or even cared that much about the way she looked. Poorly paid, she could not afford to spend a lot on clothes or cosmetics. But according to her daughter, there was another reason for her lack of interest in such things: the experience of the camps had left her in a deep state of depression which became even worse after 1955, when she found out about the death of her son Vladimir in the Gulag. ‘After everything she had been through,’ Marina says,
she gave up on herself and let herself go. She never looked at herself in the mirror… or wore perfume or make-up… Only once she bought a coat that fitted her well, and from the back she looked very good. She was tall and slim with slender legs and fine ankles. Men would overtake us in the street and look back at her – but they could not understand. She looked completely different from the front… Her hair was grey and thin, and her face marked with cuts.
Short of money, Maria sold the coat and wore instead a quilted jacket, like those worn by prisoners in the Gulag.32
Vladimir Makhnach, the former boss of the Mosgaz Trust, which controlled Moscow’s gas supply, returned to the Soviet capital in June 1955 after fourteen years in the Taishet labour camp. His son Leonid, now a young man of twenty-two, had long resented the stigma of his ‘spoilt biography’. Born into the privileged conditions of t
he Soviet elite, he had lived with his mother in a desperate state of poverty following the arrest of his father. His mother had no income of her own. They occupied a room in a communal apartment which was raided several times by the police in search of incriminating evidence against the ‘relatives of enemies of the people’. Anxious to get on, Leonid lied about the arrest of his father when he applied to join the Moscow Film School (VGIK). By the time his father came back, Leonid was moving in the bohemian circles of the film world, which flourished in the liberal climate of the thaw. He had also developed connections with the MGB. His fiancée Tamara was the stepdaughter of Naftaly Frenkel, the man responsible for the conception of the Gulag system in 1929, who lived as a recluse in the Soviet capital. Frenkel took a keen interest in Leonid.
Vladimir’s return was bound to ruffle Leonid’s feathers. The young man was suddenly confronted by a father who insisted on asserting his authority over wife and child. Vladimir ‘was a difficult character’, according to his son.
He was moody and taciturn. He would not speak about the camps. Emotionally he was closed to us. He brought into the house the habits and the fears he had acquired in the camps and expected us to adapt to them. He would not sleep in the same bed as my mother, who was then forty-six. I remember how she said to him in tears one day: ‘I have stopped being a woman for you!’
Vladimir in 1956
Despite his years in labour camps, Vladimir remained a staunch Leninist; he continued to believe that Stalin’s policies of the early 1930s – the forced collectivization of agriculture and the industrialization programme of the Five Year Plans – were essentially correct. He himself had played a leading role in the execution of these policies. In his opinion, it was only in the later 1930s that Stalin ceased to be a Communist. For Vladimir the process of return was a question of putting the clock back. He rejoined the Party, which retroactively recognized his membership to 1921. He re-entered his old sphere of work and was appointed Deputy Director of Moscow’s Fuel and Energy Administration in 1956. He even received a chauffered car and a dacha near the one the Makhnaches used to have in Serebrianyi Bor. But Vladimir had little sense of the social changes that had taken place since his arrest. He came from the generation of peasants who had risen to the Soviet elite during Stalin’s industrial revolution of the early 1930s. His politics were radical, but his social attitudes were conservative (he had made Maria give up work when Leonid was born because he thought that ‘a senior party leader should have a wife who stays at home’). Now Vladimir fully expected to become the patriarchal head of the household once again. He did not like it when Leonid stayed out late at night, not least because the camps had left him with severe insomnia. There were constant arguments between the two. One night, Leonid returned from a party at midnight. There was an argument which became a fight. Vladimir punched his son in the face. Leonid stormed out of the apartment and went straight to Frenkel’s house, where he remained until his marriage to Tamara in 1958. As Leonid recalls, after the break with Vladimir, Frenkel became the main paternal figure in his life. An opponent of the Khrushchev thaw, Frenkel retained strong connections with the MGB, which promoted Leonid as a film director and commissioned his first film, a propagandist story about Soviet spies in the Cold War.33
A widespread feeling among survivors of the camps was a sense of the incommunicability of their experience, of an unbridgeable gap between themselves and those who had not been in the camps. In 1962, Maria Drozdova returned to her family in Krasnoe Selo after twenty years of imprisonment and exile in Norilsk. ‘What could I tell them?’ she writes:
That I was alive and had returned. But what could I say about my life out there? How I travelled in a convoy to Norilsk? How could they understand what the word ‘convoy’ really meant? However much detail I described, it would still be incomprehensible to them. Nobody can understand what we went through. Only those who know what it was like can understand and sympathize.34
Like many former prisoners, Maria felt much closer to her Norilsk friends than to her own family, and she continued to see them regularly after her release. ‘The friendships formed in the labour camps were friendships for life,’ writes one ex-prisoner. According to many Gulag survivors, people who had been in the camps together tended to be more supportive of each other than relatives and friends at home. In a society where former prisoners were frequently the victims of prejudice and malice, they forged special bonds of trust and mutual reliance. While prisoners did not talk to their families about the camps, they did talk with their friends from the Gulag. They would correspond, meet on holidays, visit one another and arrange reunions. Sonia Laskin had a large network of old friends from the Vorkuta camp. She was always putting someone up in her apartment in Moscow. Some of them were practically members of the Laskin extended family and attended all the Laskin anniversaries. ‘The spirit of comradeship was extraordinary,’ recalls Valerii Frid of his old friends from the Inta labour camp. ‘Without any affectation, without long conversations, we would simply help each other out.’ According to Frid, the great writer of the Gulag, Varlam Shalamov, was wrong when he wrote that there was nothing positive a prisoner could take from his experience in the camps. His own life-long friendship and collaboration with the film-maker Iurii Dunsky was strengthened by the years they spent together in Inta. ‘I was grateful to the camps for teaching me the meaning of friendship,’ recalls Frid, ‘and for giving me so many friends.’35
Some prisoners returned home with new husbands, or new wives, whom they had met ‘on the other side’. For women, in particular, these ‘Gulag marriages’ had sometimes been motivated by the struggle to survive. But they were also based on the understanding and trust that frequently developed between prisoners.
After her release from the Norilsk labour camp in 1946, Olga Lobacheva, the specialist in mineralogy, stayed on in Norilsk as a voluntary worker. She married a geologist called Vladimir, a student volunteer from Saratov University, who was twenty years younger than herself. In 1956, they returned together to Semipalatinsk, where, before her own arrest, Olga had been living in exile, following the arrest of her first husband Mikhail. Olga did not know what had happened to Mikhail. Without any news of him, she had presumed that he was dead, and on that understanding she agreed to marry Vladimir. In fact Mikhail had been sentenced to ten years of labour in the Karaganda camps. There he had married a fellow prisoner, a young and beautiful Hungarian Jew called Sofia Oklander, who gave him a daughter in 1948. ‘They too had been brought together by their need for love and friendship in the camps,’ reflects the son of Olga and Mikhail. ‘It was not their fault, but both my parents fell in love with younger people and ended up betraying each other.’ In 1956, Mikhail moved with his new wife and their daughter to Alma-Ata. He got in touch with Olga and went to visit her in Semipalatinsk. He even tried to persuade her to return to him. But Olga refused to forgive her former husband for marrying Sofia without trying to locate her first.36
Liudmila Konstantinova also married someone she had met in the labour camps. Mikhail Yefimov, a strong and handsome peasant man from Novgorod, had been sent to Kolyma on some petty charge of ‘hooliganism’ in 1934 and was part of a team of labourers that built the town of Magadan. By 1937, Yefimov had served his three-year sentence, but he did not have the money to return to Novgorod, so he stayed in Magadan as a volunteer. Liudmila met him in 1938, when she had been working as a prisoner in a cotton factory where Yefimov was building ventilation pipes. Liudmila had been in Kolyma since 1937; she did not know what had happened to her husband after his arrest in 1936. Shortly after she met Yefimov, Liudmila became very ill with a kidney infection. Yefimov nursed her back to health, buying special medicines and food for her. In 1944, she learned that her daughters Natalia and Elena had been rescued from an orphanage by their grandmother, who had brought them up in exile in the remote steppeland town of Ak-Bulak. A year later, when Natalia and Elena returned to Leningrad with their grandmother, Yefimov began to send them parcels and
money. Liudmila was released from the labour camp in the autumn of 1945, but she remained in Magadan to be with Yefimov, who was refused permission to move to Leningrad. In 1947, she married Yefimov. Ten years had passed since the arrest of Liudmila’s husband, and she had not heard from him. She could not get any information from the Soviet authorities, so she presumed that he was dead.* ‘You cannot keep someone waiting for ever,’ she wrote to her mother in 1945, after she was granted a divorce from her first husband. ‘People need to live in the real world.’
Liudmila was not in love with Yefimov. In her letters to her mother she describes him as ‘a good comrade from the first painful days in Kolyma’. He was strong and kind and supportive, they had a lasting friendship based on their experience of the Gulag, and she relied on him for emotional sustenance after her release. In 1948, Liudmila moved with Yefimov to Novocherkassk, near Rostov-on-Don, where she would live until her death in 1992. Once a year she visited her daughters and mother in Leningrad. Sometimes Yefimov would come with her. He remained a distant figure to his stepdaughters, who addressed him with the polite ‘you’ (vy) normally used for speaking to strangers. ‘Only shortly before Mama died did I start to use [the informal] “ty”,’ recalls Natalia. Elena and Natalia remained with their beloved grandmother until she died in 1968; they were never reunited with their mother as a family.37
From left to right: Elena Konstantinova, her mother Liudmila, her grandmother Elena Lebedeva, and her sister Natalia, Leningrad, 1950
Ilia and Aleksandra Faivisovich were hairdressers in Osa, a small town in the Urals, south of Perm. They were both arrested in 1939, following reports by clients that they had complained about shortages. Ilia was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp near Gorkii; Aleksandra to five years in a camp near Arkhangelsk. Their daughter Iraida was brought up by her grandmother, until Aleksandra returned in 1945. Four years later, Ilia was released. Aleksandra had waited patiently for his return. Finally, the day came. The house was full of Aleksandra’s relatives; Aleksandra had prepared a special meal for Ilia’s homecoming. But Ilia did not appear. Instead his sister Lida came from Perm and told them that he had arrived at her house with a young woman, his new wife. Aleksandra and her daughter went to visit him, a scene Iraida remembers:
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