The door opened and there was Father – we had not seen him for ten years. He gave me a hug and kissed me… Nina [his new wife] was standing in the room. Mama started crying. Lida tried to calm her down: ‘What do you expect if you don’t see each other for ten years?’ she said. Mama went on crying. Father held me close to him, as if to say that there was nothing I could do. He had been drinking heavily and he was drunk, I think. Mama began to curse him. ‘You have ruined my life! You have destroyed our family!’ she kept shouting… ‘Why couldn’t you have written to me telling me not to wait?’
Aleksandra suffered a nervous breakdown and spent four months in a psychiatric hospital. Ilia and Nina settled in a small town near Sverdlovsk where they lived in an old bath-house. They had met in the labour camp, where Nina, a young Jewish doctor from Leningrad, was working in the hospital. Nina had saved Ilia’s life. He had been brought to the
Nina and Ilia outside their house, near Sverdlovsk, 1954
hospital with severe frostbite after he had collapsed from exhaustion, felling timber without food, and had not been found for several days. Nina gradually nursed him back to health. She fell in love with him. Ilia returned from the labour camps an invalid. He relied on Nina to help him walk. Once a year he would visit Aleksandra and Iraida in Osa. Sometimes he wrote to them, but the family was never close again. After Nina’s death, in 1978, Iraida tried to persuade her father to return to Aleksandra, but he married someone else instead. Aleksandra did not remarry. She never got over Ilia’s betrayal. According to her daughter, she was still in love with him. She kept his photograph by her bedside and had it with her when she died.38
Zinaida Levina was one of the founders of the Pioneer Organization in the Ukraine, where she was born into a Jewish family in 1904. She was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to eight years in the Kolyma labour camps. Her husband, Daniil, an engineer, was arrested too, as a ‘relative of an enemy of the people’, and exiled for three years to Turkmenistan (after his release he served in the army, was wounded at the front and evacuated to Siberia). Their daughter Larisa, who was four years old on the arrest of her parents, was brought up by her grandmother in the communal apartment the family shared in Kiev. In 1945, Daniil returned from Siberia with a new wife, Regina, and their daughter. They moved into two small rooms where Daniil’s three sisters also lived. Larisa went to live with them. She got on well with her half-sister but was hated by Regina and her aunts. According to Larisa, Daniil had chosen to renounce and divorce Zinaida because he was afraid he might be rearrested on his return from exile if he was still married to an ‘enemy of the people’. But Zinaida’s mother, who viewed her son-in-law as a womanizer, thought that he had simply taken advantage of his wife’s arrest to marry Regina, who was young and beautiful, and refused to visit them. Cut off in this way from her grandmother, Larisa’s situation in her father’s home became more difficult.
After her release in 1946, Zinaida was ordered by the state to live in Zvenigorodka, a small town near Kiev. One day, she turned up at her mother’s apartment with a little boy called Valerii and introduced him as her son. In the Kolyma camps Zinaida had learned about the massacre of Kiev’s Jewish population at Babi Yar in September 1941. Fearing that her family had been destroyed, she resolved to have another child before it was too late (she was then thirty-seven) and gave birth to Valerii in 1942. She refused to say who the father was (and took her secret to her grave) but everyone assumed that it was a prison guard. In 1949, Zinaida was rearrested as an ‘anti-social element’ (it was the height of the campaign against the Jews) and sentenced to three years in the Potma labour camps (she was later exiled to Dzhambul in Kazakhstan). Valerii was taken in by his grandmother; but a few months later the old woman died. Larisa begged her father to rescue Valerii. She felt responsible for her half-brother, a difficult boy with severe behavioural problems: ‘Something made me love him. I had this feeling of responsibility. It came from the heart. I had no family, and wanted to protect him as my own.’ Valerii, however, was given to an orphanage by Daniil’s sisters, who took the view that the son of a prison guard should be looked after by the state. Valerii disappeared until 1953, when he wrote to Larisa from another orphanage, in Uzhgorod, in western Ukraine. Larisa went to collect him and took him to their mother in Dzhambul, where they all lived for the next two years. ‘At that time,’ recalls Larisa,
I hardly knew my mother. I had never really lived with her, and that time, from 1953 to 1954, was the first I had spent with her… She drowned me with her love… I was overwhelmed by it. I was not used to it… But I soon discovered the joy of family love.
In 1955, Zinaida fell in love with another Jewish exile in Dzhambul, a man who had lost his family at Babi Yar. He helped her with Valerii and loved him as if he were his own. They were married in 1956. Released from exile, they returned to Kiev, where they began a new life as a family.39
For some prisoners, family life itself was no longer possible. They were too afraid – of disappointment, of being a burden, of being unable to connect.
Natalia Iznar was born in 1893 to a family of lawyers in St Petersburg. In the 1920s she worked as a graphic artist and stage designer for the Moscow Art Theatre and Stanislavsky’s Opera Studio. In 1932, she divorced her first husband and married Grigorii Abezgauz, a minor official in the Commissariat of Education and the Arts. In 1937, Abezgauz was arrested and shot. Natalia was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the ALZhIR labour camp. After her release, in 1946, she remained in Dolinka, where she worked as a decorative artist for the MVD’s Political Department, which was responsible for propaganda art and theatre in the labour camps. Natalia had relatives in Moscow and in Leningrad. She had a daughter from her first marriage. But she chose to remain in the Gulag settlement rather than return to her family. Years of separation in the labour camp had broken something inside her and it could no longer be repaired. Natalia wrote to her sister-in-law in Moscow to explain:
Chistye Prudy 15, Apt. 27
Elena Moiseyevna Abezgauz
My dear, it is fortunate that Liudmila Aleksandrovna [a friend from ALZhIR] can deliver this by hand. At last I can explain in a way that you may understand. Six weeks have past since I gained my freedom, and yet this is my first letter. How can I explain? It is painful to have to recognize that after the long years of separation there is now an unbridgeable division between us. In the short period of my so-called freedom I have come to realize that I can’t feel close to you again. When I think of coming back to you, I am overcome by the terrifying thought that I will not be needed, that I will be out of place, and that I will be no help to you. I have lost the confidence of a mother. I am a different person after all these years – I have become more sober. I want to work. I am trying to educate myself to live without the feeling that I need a family, to eradicate that feeling to such a degree that it might never have existed in me in the first place. There is nothing that I need except my work… Liudmila Aleksandrovna will tell you everything about the way I live, my character, appearance, and so on. She is the dearest person to me in the world, closer to me than any family could be, because she has been with me and experienced the same things in the camp. It is such a joy when you meet a person who is absolutely good… I feel that I have lost you all internally. I no longer feel the need for a family – that feeling has died inside of me… It’s not a bad thing. It’s just how it is’ 40
3
When Sonia Laskina was released from the Vorkuta labour camp, she was given two things: a certificate of release signed by two administrators of her labour camp and a second-class train ticket to Moscow. Sonia had a family, a job and an apartment to return to in Moscow. Other prisoners were far less fortunate. They had nowhere to go: either their families had broken up or moved away, or their homes had disappeared or been taken over by others, or they were forbidden to return to the cities where they had once lived. Banned from the major centres, many ex-prisoners were forced to live a marginal existence in temporary housing, w
herever they were able to get registered as residents by the Soviet authorities, which were often reluctant to give such rights to former ‘criminals’. The struggle to overcome the legal obstacles and institutionalized discrimination that prevented them from returning to their towns and homes was long and complicated.
Sonia’s certificate of release. It gives the dates of her imprisonment, cites the decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court to close the case against her ‘for failure to prove the charges’, and allows her to return to Moscow as her place of residence
In 1953, at the age of seventy-eight, Liudmila Tideman (née Obolenskaia) returned to Leningrad from Orenburg, where she had been living in exile since 1935. The eldest of Simonov’s three Obolensky aunts, Liudmila was the only one to have survived the hardships of exile (Dolly and Sonia had both died in Orenburg). After much petitioning, she received permission from the city Soviet to move back to her old room in the communal apartment where she had lived with her son and daughter before her arrest. When she returned to the apartment, however, the house committee refused to register her as a resident, on the grounds that three people in her family had previously been living there, so she could not live there on her own. For several weeks Liudmila stood in queues at the police station, the local housing department, the city Soviet and various other offices in an effort to establish her right to occupy the room alone. ‘The most disgusting aspect of it all was that everywhere they thought I was a swindler,’ she wrote to Simonov. ‘They said I had listed extra names [on the housing order from the Soviet] to receive more living space.’ The authorities would not let her live there on her own, nor would they change the names on the housing order, claiming, as she put it, that ‘they do not make mistakes’, so the case dragged on. Months later, Liudmila was finally allowed to return to her home.41
Simonov’s personal secretary, Nina Gordon, had an equally difficult time. Her husband, Iosif, had been rearrested and sent as a punishment to Krasnoiarsk, where Nina joined him in 1951. On the couple’s return to Moscow in 1954, they stayed with Simonov until they could find a place to live. Although Nina and Iosif were Muscovites, it proved impossible to get them registered as residents, even with the help of Simonov, who wrote to the city Soviet and even to the head of the Moscow militia on behalf of this ‘honest working couple who have suffered such misfortune during recent years’. Eventually, they were permitted to stay in Moscow for a year, and they moved into a room in a communal apartment obtained for them by Simonov. Iosif got a job at the Gorky Film Studios, while Nina went back to work for Simonov. But their rights of residence were soon annulled, for no apparent reason, and the couple were informed that they would have to leave the capital within a month. As Simonov protested in a letter to the head of the Moscow MVD,
The conclusion is simple: a person who for no crime whatsoever has spent many years in prison and exile, and who at last has returned to the work from which he was unjustly torn away, is being forced to leave that work again and go away. His wife, who already gave up her own job once to be with her husband, must now give up her job and again leave her native city, if she wants to be with him. It is not only unjust, it is inhumane.
Thanks to Simonov’s petitioning, the couple were allowed to stay on a temporary basis in Moscow. They lived in eight different rooms and apartments over the course of the next four years, until at last they were registered as permanent residents. In 1958, Simonov got them put on a waiting list for an individual flat in an apartment block, which was then being built for the workers of the Gorky Film Studios. But the building was delayed, forcing Iosif and Nina to find yet more temporary accommodations. It was not until 1966, shortly before Iosif’s death, that the couple finally got a small flat of their own.42
Finding work was just as onerous as finding a place to live. Soviet officials were generally mistrustful of former prisoners, and many employers continued to regard them with suspicion as potential troublemakers and ‘enemies of the people’. The return of political prisoners followed the release of common criminals from the labour camps as a result of the amnesty of March 1953. The mass of the Soviet population did not distinguish between ‘politicals’ and criminals. They associated all the releases from the Gulag with the rise of crime and ‘hooliganism’ after 1953 (just as they connected them with the reappearance of ‘internal threats and enemies’ after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, when the Soviet press was full of propaganda on that score). Even after their rehabilitation, many former prisoners were refused work. The very fact of their rehabilitation was frequently a cause of prejudice and suspicion among employers, who did not want to run the risk of taking on a person who had been labelled as a political ‘criminal’ only a few years before. One ex-prisoner recalls being told by a factory boss in Kharkov that ‘even though I had been rehabilitated, in his eyes I was still a person with a shameful past’. Until Khrushchev’s explicit condemnation of Stalin’s crimes, at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, the public attitude towards the returning Gulag prisoners wavered between mistrust and hostility. People were afraid to have any connection with the former ‘enemies’ who came back from the camps. The sight of these returning prisoners stirred up awkward memories, perhaps even feelings of guilt and shame, in many citizens, who had had a relatively comfortable existence while their compatriots had languished in the labour camps. Most people preferred to put the returning ex-prisoners out of sight and out of mind, just as during Stalin’s reign they had avoided any mention of the missing millions. Lev Kopelev recalls that, after his return from the labour camps, he felt uncomfortable with successful people who had managed to avoid the purges of the Stalin years and that he preferred the company of people who had been ‘unlucky in some way’. With them at least he could be sure that he was not in the presence of someone who had made his or her career by collaborating with the system of repression.43
The problem of finding work and housing was so acute that some ex-prisoners ended up returning to the labour camps. After 1953, many of the camps remained in operation as special economic zones employing nominally free labour, mainly released prisoners. They received a wage but were not free to leave the remote settlements because of legal restrictions on their movements. There were also those who chose to remain in the camps and settlements because they felt unready to return to society. In some labour camps the old barracks were inhabited by ex-prisoners well into the 1960s. There were even cases of former prisoners committing minor crimes in order to be arrested and sent back to the camps, where at least they could be sure of a bread ration.44
After his return from the Kolyma camps in 1953, Ivan Uglitskikh was unable to find a job or a place to live in his home town of Cherdyn; the police had refused to grant him the necessary passport for rights of residence. He travelled round the country in search of work, living from the money he had saved as an electrician in Kolyma. First he went to Moscow. It was his great ambition to see Red Square. But he was so badly dressed in his patched-up wadded camp jacket that he was immediately stopped by the police and deported. He was, in any case, prohibited from going to Moscow. Next he went to Novozybkov, a small town in the Briansk region, south-east of the capital, where his former wife was living with her new husband and their two children, but he could not find work there. Then he went to the Donbass, hoping for a job in the mines, but there was nowhere for him to live, and without registration as a resident no one would hire him. He encountered the same problem in Zhdanov and Taganrog. After months of desperate searching, Ivan ended up on a state farm near the Azov Sea where all the workers lived in dug-outs in the ground, but even here he could not find a job: one look at his release certificate from Kolyma was enough for the farm officials to reject him. Ivan finally got work just as he decided to return to Kolyma. On the way there he stopped in Krasnokamsk to visit his brother’s family, who were living in the barracks of a former labour camp. Ivan approached an official at the brick factory attached to the camp, asking for a job. Although he was turned down
initially, a bribe of a watch persuaded the official to change his mind. Ivan remained at the brick factory until his retirement in 1981.45
Between 1953 and 1957, an estimated 612,000 former prisoners were rehabilitated, many of them posthumously, by the Soviet authorities. In the rhetoric of the Soviet leadership the process of rehabilitation was about restoring truth – about reviving faith in the principles of justice established in 1917 – and seen from the outside it had something of this idealistic quality. But from the perspective of the ordinary people trying to regain their civil rights the practical reality was very different. For them it meant a long and humiliating series of visits to offices, where they were made to stand in queues, fill out forms and battle with officials who were often hostile to their cause. It was not unusual for a former prisoner to write a dozen letters before his appeals were granted by the Soviet authorities, although the process of judicial review and rehabilitation was speeded up after 1956. Sometimes appellants were summoned to appear before a commission in the offices of the MVD or the Justice Ministry, places that inspired fear among former prisoners, who would often turn up in their winter coats, accompanied by weeping relatives, convinced that they were about to be sent back to the labour camps. Not surprisingly, such fears and obstacles deterred many people from applying for rehabilitation altogether (which was probably the intention of the authorities). The required judicial reviews and bureaucratic procedures were carried out extremely grudgingly. Soviet officials had an obvious motive to drag their feet: many had been promoted on the basis of cases they had fabricated against ‘enemies of the people’, and they were afraid of being prosecuted if these injustices were revealed. Some of their attempts to salvage something from these cases were petty and ridiculous. One war veteran, for example, had been sentenced in 1947 to ten years in a labour camp for ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ (he had told some ‘anti-Soviet’ jokes). In 1954, he had his sentence reduced to five years on appeal and he was immediately released. The investigating procurator in his judicial review had decided that the jokes were not anti-Soviet after all. But he had justified the original prosecution (and thus refused to overturn the case and rehabilitate the prisoner) on the grounds that one of them was capable of being understood as anti-Soviet.46
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