Children of the Gulag

The Gulag, a network of labor camps across the former Soviet Union, first came to the attention of the English-speaking world in 1974, with the translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. According to author Anne Applebaum, as many as 18 million people passed through the Gulag between 1929 and 1953. And, as Lynne Viola documented in her Unknown Gulag, an additional 2 million were accused of being kulaks – capitalist peasants – and exiled to remote, often uninhabited areas of Siberia and the Arctic as “special settlers,” with little more than the clothes on their backs. As might be expected in any population, many if not most of these individuals had children. Those whose parents were arrested and imprisoned, like Misha Nikolayev, whose memoirs are excerpted here, were separated from their parents, often forever. Those whose parents were deported, like Maria Solomonik, shared their parents’ fate in exile and were often the first to perish from hunger and disease.

While memoirs such as Solzhenitsyn’s brought the knowledge of the Gulag to a wide, international audience, they unintentionally created the impression that the camps were a phenomenon restricted to male intellectuals and dissidents. The reality was much broader and more variegated. While intellectuals are much more likely to leave behind written evidence of their lives, in fact only
1-2% of the Gulag population was people with higher education, according to historian Oleg Khlevniuk. Additionally, once someone had been designated an “enemy of the people,” Soviet law authorized the imprisonment of that person’s family members. Countless women were thus drawn into the Gulag as well. Usually their children were taken from them and placed in orphanages under the jurisdiction of the secret police, where they were subjected to both neglect by an overburdened and understaffed bureaucracy and stigmatization due to their social background. Children who were deported joined the special settlements with their parents. At one point, Khlevniuk reports, 40-70% of the population of the settlements consisted of children under the age of 14.

Upon the arrest of his or her parents, a child’s first stop was usually a Children’s Reception-Distribution Center, which was in theory a temporary way-station until a place in a children’s home was assigned. Yet sometimes, due to overcrowding, children could remain there for years. Special settler children usually entered the Gulag with their families via a sborpunkt (collection point) for families rounded up from several villages, before being placed on a train for a journey that could last weeks. Many children opted for a different fate – or escaped from the one they’d been assigned – by living on the road, forming crowds of besprizorniki, homeless children who traveled around the country living if not on charity then on theft. Like children the world over who lack a family structure, many besprizorniki became a permanent part of the criminal world.

The Gulag also contained children like Viktor Serbsky, who was born in a camp. Most such children did not survive, due to malnourishment and disease. Those who did were usually removed from their mothers by age three, if not earlier, and their mothers rarely saw them again. If the mothers survived their camp sentence, they theoretically had the right to reclaim their children, but in practice this rarely happened, whether due to chaotic conditions, poor record-keeping, or in some instances the intentional concealment of children by changing their identities. Such concealment in some instances may have been intended as protection, but it meant that children like Misha Nikolayev were not only deprived of their family, but of their identity as well.

The following selections are taken from the book Children of the Gulag (Deti Gulaga in Russian), one volume in a multi-volume series of documents from the recently opened Soviet archives. It was compiled and edited by the late Alexander Yakovlev, one of the chief architects of glasnost under former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and by Semyon Vilensky, founder of the Moscow-based Vozvrashchenie Society, an organization dedicated to assisting camp survivors and preserving the memory of their experiences. Their work has created the opportunity to balance the historical record by making accessible material from a population about whom the historical record is often silent.  The stories of these children summon all of us to consider the effects of our political and social choices on the most vulnerable among us.

A volume of these narratives is forthcoming from Slavica Publishers.

– Deborah Hoffman

From the Memoirs of Viktor Serbsky

Viktor Serbsky was born on May Day in a camp where his parents had been imprisoned. After his parents were shot, he was sent to an orphanage in Vladivostok. In Bratsk, where he has resided since 1967, he has assembled a 30,000-volume library of Russian poetry that is available to the public. He is also one of the founders of the Bratsk branch of Memorial, a historical, educational, and charitable society that documents the experiences of former Gulag prisoners and provides support for those still living and their families.

What do I remember?

A barrack.

Later in the Biryusinsk Children’s Home, taking care of the animals, I’d remember it often:  the pig sty, the stables, and the cow shed had the same type of partitions that didn’t quite reach the ceiling as there’d been in that barrack at Kolyma. Each of the stalls held a lot of people and there was a thick smell. I and my mother were among this crowd. Her name was Zhenya, short for Yevgenia. For many years this name was my childhood secret. I never told anyone what my mother’s name had been.

In the winter of 1957, in the shop at the Norilsk Plant where I was working as a foreman, I was called to the telephone. I could barely hear my wife’s excited voice over the noise of the machines. She said that the Norilsk Department of Health had received a letter; relatives from Moscow were looking for me. I asked her only one question: “What did they call my mother?” She replied, “Yevgenia.”

Two years later I named my first daughter Zhenya.

My entire life I’ve remembered two words: Kolyma and Magadan, knowing I hadn’t been born there, but taken there.

But where and when was I born?

Unfortunately, even today, past the threshold of retirement age, I don’t know. My relatives say May 1, 1933. Which is completely possible; it’s an easy day to remember. But who can verify it? And where was I born? Most likely at the Upper Ural Prison – or the political isolator, which sounds better. But as of now no such document exists. I only know one thing: it was a prison cell, on the first of May. In personal histories, of which like every Soviet citizen I was obligated to write many, I’d put, “I don’t remember my parents, I was raised in children’s homes, I graduated, and I went to work.”

But what came before the children’s homes? Who were my parents? My relatives? I have a lot of questions.

In 1964 I was summoned to the KGB in Norilsk, where they politely explained to me that I needn’t write anywhere anymore, that everything possible had already been relayed to me. Towards that time, I received my parents’ death certificates: my father’s dated October 13, 1937, from thrombophlebitis, and my mother’s, dated January 10, 1942, from croupous pneumonia; along with a letter from the Prosecutor of Kursk Province refusing their rehabilitation (the Kursk Regional Court only rehabilitated them on October 17, 1988).

My intuition that my mother and father had been shot has been confirmed. I recently received new death certificates dated October 13, 1937, but in the column “Cause of Death” it said, “Executed by shooting.” The certificates were signed June 21, 1989, by the Magadan Bureau of Vital Statistics.

Letters From Children of Arrested Parents

The following letters are among many that have been received by the Memorial Society.

On November 14, 1937, the buzzer rang in our apartment in Leningrad. Three men and a dog came in, told my father to get dressed, and began conducting a search. They dug through everything, even our bookbags. We cried when they took Papa away. He told us, “Don’t cry, children. I’m not guilty of anything. I’ll be back in two days.” That was the last we heard of him. He never came back. We don’t know anything about what happened to him, and we never received any letters.

My father, Ivan Petrov, had been a laborer at the Arsenal factory in Leningrad. My mother, Agrippina, worked at a plant. On March 27, 1938, they arrested her too. They took me and my brother along with her. They placed us in the car, put my mother in the Kresty Prison, and took us to a children’s reception center. I was twelve and my brother was eight. The first thing they did was shave our heads bare, hang a board with a number on it around our necks, and take our fingerprints. My brother was crying hard, but they separated us, and wouldn’t let us see each other or talk. Three months later they took us from the reception center to the Kalinin Children’s Home in Minsk. There I received the first message from my mother. She said she’d been sentenced to ten years and was serving her time in the Komi Autonomous Republic.

I stayed in the children’s home until the war. I lost my brother during a bombing. I searched for him everywhere and wrote to the Red Cross, but I never did find him.

Lyudmila Petrova, Narva

Children’s homes for children like us were mostly located on the Amur River. The settlement where they brought us initially was called Mago. The homes consisted of long, wooden barracks. There were a lot of children. The clothing was poor, the food scant – mostly soup from dried smelt and potatoes, sticky black bread, and sometimes cabbage soup. I knew no other type of food.

The educational method consisted of beatings. The Director used to beat boys older than me right in front of my eyes. She’d hit their heads against the wall and punch them in the face because she’d found bread crumbs in one of their pockets and suspected they were making dry biscuits for an escape. The attendants would tell us outright, “Nobody needs you.” When they’d take us out on walks, the nurses’ and attendants’ children would point their fingers at us and shout, “It’s the enemies, the enemies!” And actually we probably did look like enemies. Our heads had been shaven, and we were dressed in whatever was at hand. Our clothes and sheets came from our parents’ confiscated property.

I was five years old and my sister was six in 1940 when a notice came that our father had died. Three years later, in 1943, a strange woman took me home. She told her husband, “Well, I’ve brought a little prisoner. Now you’ll live with us, and if you don’t want to, you can go back to the children’s home, and from there to jail.” I started crying and said I wanted to live with them. That’s how they took me in as a daughter. I was already eight and a half at the time. My sister and I were separated. I never had the chance to see her again. For many long years I looked for her and made inquiries with various agencies, but nobody would help me.

Natalia Saveleva, Volgograd

My father, Aleksandr Kulayev, a Tatar by ethnicity, was arrested in Vladivostok in the spring of 1938. I remember him leaving for work. He never came back. My mother, Galina Kulayeva, a Russian, was arrested later, in August 1938. She was 27 at the time. There were four children in our family. I was the oldest, born in 1929. The next was Anatoly (Tolya), who was six-eight years old, then Vladimir (Vova), who was probably five, and Vitya, a baby. They took us all to prison together. I can see my mother very clearly, standing on a scale practically undressed and with her hair loose. When some man led us three past her along the narrow corridor, she started screaming terribly and threw herself towards us. They dragged her away and took us away. I also remember some cradles being there; one of them was probably for little Vitya.

I never saw my mother again. For some reason they placed us in a school for deaf-mutes, which was later disbanded. One time I happened to be hospitalized and when I came back my brothers were gone. They told me they’d sent Tolya and Vova to the Odessa Children’s Home. After that I was in a reception-distribution center and sometime in 1939 I wound up in a children’s home in Petrovsk-Zabaikalsky, in Chita Province.

I never saw any of my relatives again, and I don’t know anything about them. Maybe they’re alive? If not my father and mother, then my brothers? Or one of them? After all, it shouldn’t be that I have nobody left at all in the world.

Georgy Barambaev, Verbovy Log, Rostov Province

They came for me on May 12, 1938. “Get yourself and the child ready. You’re under arrest.” I answered that I wanted to send my son to stay with my parents. I received the following answer: “We don’t have time to fool around with transporting a child.” Then I informed them I wasn’t going and I’d scream and fight with everything I had. When they found out my parents lived close by, they let Sasha run and get them.

Two days after my arrest, a man from the NKVD came to my parents’ and told them my son had been given to them illegally and he had to take him back. He emphasized, “The child was being raised in a family of enemies of the people, and we’re obligated to re-educate him.”

The children’s home for children of “enemies of the people” was located at First River; that was what they called the little place twelve miles from Vladivostok. It was a converted Pioneers’ camp, now surrounded by a tall, tall fence with barbed wire. It had a checkpoint, armed guards, and bars on the windows. The banners that read, “Thank you beloved Stalin for our happy childhood” remained.

One day a commission came. It ordered the dirty, scabby, lice-ridden children to be bathed. During one of these baths in the Amur Gulf, Sasha ran away. He slipped under a bridge and hid. When it got dark, he got dressed and fled. They didn’t look for him—they just decided he’d drowned. They never even informed any of his relatives.

Sasha didn’t go back to my parents since he was afraid he’d be picked up again and put in a children’s home for “family members of traitors to the motherland.” He traveled around the country with other besprizorniki like him, riding the trains. They’d ride on the roofs, between the cars, or under the seats. When he’d wind up in a children’s home, he’d invent himself a new name. He was 14 when the war started in 1941. He claimed he’d been evacuated and lost his parents, so he was sent to Trade School No. 1 in Sverdlovsk, and from there to Uralmash. In 1943 he applied to the enlistment office and joined the army as a volunteer, although he had a defense worker exemption, was too young to be drafted (he was 16), and came from an “enemy background,” which he concealed. He was a paratrooper and fought in the Third Ukrainian.

E. A. Voiloshnikova

From Notes of a Kulak’s Daughter, 

by Maria Solomonik

We sailed north along the Ob, to Narym.

A few days later they settled us in a swampy place with low hills that was swarming with mosquitoes, gnats, and black flies. There was only one hastily-built storehouse for storing grain, but they didn’t give us the grain. We were supposed to fend for ourselves the best we could.

We lived with the older people as a family. We worked together and quickly dug out a den in one of the hillsides, put up walls made out of logs, and made a roof out of poles, birch bark, pine branches, and earth. We even made a window and a door, covering them with tablecloths that my mother’s sister Varvara had managed to slip into our bag. There was nothing to eat, and people died by the dozens every day. There was a large ditch nearby where they carried the bodies. Nobody had the strength to make coffins or dig graves. People carried the dead on stretchers made out of birch bark and poles. They’d form a line of people one after the other and place their dead into the ditch. My grandfather, who lived with us, got sick. The only food was plain kasha, not much nourishment for his weakened old body. 

At this point my mother, Yevdokia (Dunya), and another young woman captured the commandant’s horse, which had broken its leg in the forest. For days it only barely moved, all bitten up by mosquitoes and gnats, and they were able to kill it and bury the meat in the ground where it was cold. But they needed salt, so they decided to go three-five miles across the river, where there was a family of kerzhaks (Old Believers who’d broken with the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century) living alone in the forest. They knew the Old Believers had strict morals, so they put on long skirts and covered their heads with black scarves all the way down to their eyes. They said a prayer and went to the Old Believers cap in hand. They were met by barking dogs; then the owner of the house appeared and asked them if they could somehow help his wife, who was dying. Two of his children had already died from smallpox. My mother and her friend agreed to treat her, and the owner promised them two loaves of bread and a container of honey in return.

My mother, afraid of getting sick herself, crawled up onto the stove where the sick woman lay. There she saw a body that had already started to decay. The stench was horrible, but the woman was still alive. She also saw a large jug of salt there. With her friend on the lookout, she crossed herself, took off her stockings, filled them with salt, and hid them under her skirt. Shaking from fear that the owner would notice and set the dogs on them, they took what they’d been promised and set off on the road back. As soon as they reached the trees, they broke into a run. So that’s how they got the precious salt that preserved the meat, kept our strength up, and saved the old people’s lives. My mother had a deck of cards with her, and she’d often lay them out (tell fortunes) to calm the desperate people, and she’d say that everything was going to be fine. She also told her own fortune, and the cards said that my father would come for us.

Everyone around us laughed.

One time the smell of burning grain came from the storehouse, which stood on a little hill. The guards didn’t come. What was there for them to do there? People were dying by the dozens even without them. They were sitting tight in a more dry and livable place about three miles away, robbing the kerzhaks and getting drunk.

The young women and the old people decided to raise the corner of the storehouse with poles (it was on a foundation), and the most agile young women, including my mother, crawled in. They used birchbark baskets to gather the grain, brought it out, and distributed it to the people who were standing outside the storehouse. I caught a chill, fell sick, and for a few days gave no signs of life. Feklinya sewed me a shroud, and Grandpa carved out a coffin for me and made a cross. Feklinya told my mother, “Dunya honey, wash her in warm water while she’s still alive.” My mother poured hot water into my little coffin, lined it with moss and pine branches, placed me in, and covered me with a scrap of cloth. While Feklinya was watching I opened my eyes and told Mama, “The deceased is leaving this world.” Mama poured more hot water on me, my cheeks turned pink and I started sweating, but I was still sick, and if my father hadn’t come and brought oil and other goods with him, then my life would apparently have broken off right there, in that Godforsaken place called Narym.

Let me say a little about my father, Alexei Okorokov, may God reward him for the suffering he endured! They’d exiled us separately – my sister and I along with our mother were sent to Narym. They took my father on May 2 and shipped him to Stalinsk in a separate barge for men only, like work animals, then took him along the Tom, then up the Ob to the Far North, beyond Kargasok. He was marched under guard to a place called Galka. There’s a lot of villages there now, even cities, all built on the bones of exiles, but then there was only taiga, marshes, and impassable brush. They traveled for several days. The food was very bad, mostly hard bread and water. There weren’t many guards and one night my father slipped away from them and escaped. While making his way back across the taiga he met another fugitive who’d also escaped from Galka. He looked awful—just skin and bones—and he told my father he’d done the right thing to not go to that death camp, that nobody came back from there and it was easier to have escaped on the way there. But it still wasn’t that easy! Where could he go without documents or money, wearing rags and broken-down shoes? Nevertheless he decided to go back to his village, which was about 500-550 miles, not a short trip. And he didn’t go on a train or in a taxi, but on foot through the forests and swamps of the taiga. He made it to his village at the end of May-beginning of June. On the way there, he found out approximately where they’d unloaded us from the barge. 

My father didn’t want to cause anyone any trouble, so he snuck into my grandmother’s former home at the edge of the village, where only his sister [Frosya] and her husband Batalov lived; they had two children already. Even though my father was the one who’d introduced her to Batalov, Frosya went to the village soviet to inform on her own exiled brother who was hiding in her attic, but her husband Batalov caught up with her on the way and beat her half to death. She lay in a ditch for two days without moving, and then they brought her into the house. But Batalov would not let her inform on her brother.

My father acquired false documents through a Polish friend, Zhikha, who was a medical assistant. They said his name was Loginov (my mother’s maiden name), and that his wife Yevdokia had married a kulak named Okorokov while he was away working as a logger. His friends helped him with what they could. My mother’s sister, Auntie Varvara, helped him get goods, bought him a horse, gave him two sets of decent clothes for everyone, and my father set out on the way back. How he made it back across those 500 miles again is known only to him.

My mother was preparing birch bark for shoes and baskets, and Grandpa was putting them together as best he could, for those in need. Suddenly she heard the women yelling, “Dunya, Alexei’s here!” My mother thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t. Her Alexei had come for her. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, it’s hard to believe such men existed, that he’d made it back to Narym, let alone found his family. My father had indeed come for us. In two months he’d covered more than 900 miles. Truly only God could have brought him to us. My mother and father (each individually) prayed to the Almighty, and in His Mercy He didn’t abandon them.

From Children’s Home,

by Mikhail Nikolayev 

Mikhail Nikolayev was raised in a series of children’s homes and was never able to discover his real name. As an adult, he spent 15 years in prison camps for political activity before emigrating to the United States in 1978. His wife, Viktoria Schweitzer, who taught for many years at Mt. Holyoke College, is a biographer of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Mikhail Nikolayev passed away in 1987. 

In the very first of my children’s homes (I was about five) I’d either been fighting with someone or maybe I’d been teasing some little girl when the attendant came over and said to me with such hatred, “You little vermin! An enemy of the people, just like your parents! You should be shot too, just like they were.”

I was little, and of course I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but it stuck somewhere in my mind and then rose to the surface later. Of course, in Russian “kill” is an everyday word. We throw it around all the time and it’s just a word. For the least little thing you’ll hear, “I’d have killed him!” or “Killing’s too good for him!” So maybe it was the atypical word “shot” that struck my child’s mind, and that’s why I remembered it. Another thing I remember was the Director, Maria Ugolnikova, speaking with me in 1941, when I was about to be released from the children’s home. She told me then that I shouldn’t be ashamed of my parents, or of the fact I didn’t have any.

“You had parents, Misha, and they didn’t abandon you,” she said. “They were good people.”

I should mention that I’ve been ashamed almost my entire life of being from a children’s home, of not having any roots, like something left on the doorstep. And even Maria Ugolnikova’s words didn’t help. I still felt ashamed, and I still hid the fact I was from a children’s home.

“Maybe you don’t understand now,” she continued, “but when you grow up, you’ll realize they were good people, and they didn’t suffer because they’d done anything wrong.”

She then told me that my father was no longer alive, but that I might see my mother again someday. Many years later I realized that my parents had been arrested in about 1932 or 1933, even before the murder of Kirov, since I’d ended up in a children’s home in the summer of 1933. But when my father was shot, and what happened to my mother, I can’t even guess. It just surprises me now that Maria Ugolnikova hadn’t been afraid to say they were good people.

No, I never found my mother, and I never found out anything about her, although I tried. But for some reason, when I hear Bulat Okudzhava’s “Don’t Hang your Head in Sorrow,” and “Komsomol Goddess,” I always think the words are about her, and I can’t hold back the tears.

How do I know in what year I wound up in the children’s home? Completely by accident. When Maria Ugolnikova asked me to come to her office to talk (when she told me about my parents), and we were sitting at her desk, someone suddenly called her away, and she went out for a minute. I was left sitting alone at her desk, and in front of me lay my “personal file.” This “personal file” is kept on every Soviet person. It follows him his entire life, but only rarely does someone get to peek into his own file. Well, I was curious… I opened it and on the first page I saw a little piece of paper with a stamp in the corner that read, “State Political Directorate of Moscow Province.” There it was written that, “Misha Nikolayev, age 4, is being sent to you,” and then some kind of signature, the secretary of the GPU, or the OGPU. The date on the stamp was 1933. I remember it all very well; after all, it was the first official document in my life. From it I learned that I’d been born in 1929.

I often think about how many people had to participate in depriving children like me. I’m not even talking about those who came to arrest our parents. But after all somebody picked me up and dropped me off somewhere else, someone decided which city and which children’s home I’d be sent to, some secretary – probably a woman, herself a mother – signed the order and affixed her illegible signature. Something should have occurred to them while doing this every day, some kind of explanation for this mass orphanhood, something to somehow justify their own participation in it. Although it’s true that people find it simple and easy to justify what they do.

And the orphanhood was truly on a mass scale. Take Pokrov, where I’d been taken and where I lived in children’s homes right up till the war began. Pokrov was a small rural town about 60 miles outside of Moscow, something like a county seat both before and after the Revolution. When I lived there it had a total of 5,000 residents – and five children’s homes. Each of them held different ages, and I eventually lived in three of them: No. 1, No. 3, and No. 4. Kids in children’s homes only received seven years of education, and that was the age group the homes in Pokrov were designed for: 3-4  to
14-15 years old. In the homes I lived in there were 400 children all told. There were two other homes, No. 2 and No. 5, that as I remember now had no contact with ours. No one from our group was ever transferred to them, and no one from there was ever transferred to us. They didn’t go to the city schools—maybe they had their own school? These homes were surrounded by high fences, and the kids weren’t allowed out into the town. What kind of kids lived there? And how many of them were there? In tiny Pokrov alone there were 600-700 children living in children’s homes. How many little towns like this were there across the whole of Russia? I found out that in our children’s homes – the ones I lived in – we were all children whose parents had been arrested as enemies of the people. In any event, the overwhelming majority.

In our children’s homes nobody ever mentioned our parents, not ever. And it never happened that somebody’s relatives were discovered or that somebody came to visit. We were all victims of the repressions; otherwise it’s inconceivable how so many children were suddenly orphaned without there having been an epidemic or a war. It’s a known fact that children of enemies of the people were often not given even to close relatives; they were hidden from their relatives. The idea was that they wouldn’t know or be known to anybody, so they’d forget the past.

We had a friend, Nonna, whose parents had been arrested when she was five. She had relatives that wanted to take her in. But she was picked up and taken to a children’s home, with nobody the wiser. She was little, and couldn’t let anyone know where she was. Her uncle searched through children’s homes for her for several years, and he only found her because they hadn’t changed her name. But they wouldn’t give her to him. After that, he wouldn’t let her out of his sight and never stopped petitioning for her. It took him four years to get her back. The story went that he’d almost had to steal her from the children’s home. Maybe I didn’t have any relatives left in the outside world, or maybe I did, but they’d even taken away my name – ow would anyone find me? This is what they’d do:  they’d change your name to make sure you wouldn’t have any memories. They didn’t usually change the first name, since even a small child is used to it already, but they’d give you a different last name. Even Nadezhda Mandelshtam told me she’d worked for a whole month once in a children’s home where they did this, until the administration discovered she was an “undesirable element” herself and got rid of her. Mikhail Nikolayev is more like a pseudonym or an alias than a name in the usual sense of the word. At the end of my days, I don’t even know whose name I bear.

The regime’s main goal in taking away arrested people’s children was so they’d know nothing at all about their parents and wouldn’t think about them, so that, God forbid, they wouldn’t grow up to become potential enemies of the regime who might take revenge for their parents’ deaths. That’s why it was useful to change a small child’s name. And I’m convinced they achieved this goal, because most, if not all, the children knew nothing about their parents and forgot about them very quickly.

Maybe it’s only possible to understand the unnaturalness of collective life for a child when you’ve experienced it yourself. This collective or society consisted of 100-150 people who were always in full view of each other. The entire time: day and night, winter and summer, for weeks, months, years – you see each other all the time and there’s no way to get away from other people. You’re constantly in view of somebody, either your friends or the attendants. In addition, they’re constantly organizing you. You go to school in formation, and there they talk to you for four hours about happiness and how good your life is. You go back to the children’s home in formation and sit down to do your homework, again with everyone together and under an attendant’s supervision. But even a small person, a child, has a need to think about the world and his environment. It’s something natural and indispensable, but there was almost no opportunity to do it.

Everyone in the children’s home had the same standard of living, not counting minor privileges that the attendants or kitchen workers might provide intermittently. In terms of the standard of living and education, everyone was treated the same. But children are different from each other from birth. Each one has a different genetic makeup, and that’s why one child gravitates toward one thing, and another toward something different, but there was no allowance for this. You were supposed to do everything like everyone else, and to be like everyone else. Those who were different were disliked and constantly tormented. Nonna, the same girl I mentioned earlier, told me that when her parents were arrested and she was taken away she’d had a big, beautiful bow in her hair. She still had it with her in the children’s home. She was five years old, and it was like a memory of home, like home itself. It was extremely important to her, she was terrified of it getting lost, and she was always asking the attendants to tie it in her hair. If you can imagine, all the girls hated her because of that bow! They simply hated her. Probably some of them were jealous, and some of them missed their own hair bows and their homes that had been taken away long ago. If you’d asked them they wouldn’t have been able to tell you why they were always so mean to the girl with the hair bow. It was only when that hair bow finally disappeared and she became like everyone else that the girls made friends with her and accepted her into the group.

That’s the cruelty of life in a collective, that you’re forced to be like everyone else, and do everything with everyone else, rather than what you’d prefer to do, or are capable of doing, in your own way.

Since earliest childhood we were told over and over that we were the most fortunate children in the world, that nobody, not a single child anywhere, had such a happy life as we did. And nobody would be as happy as we would when we grew up, because we were surrounded by the care and tenderness of our beloved leader Comrade Stalin. We were fed, clothed, and educated, all due to how much the Soviet regime, and Comrade Stalin personally, loved us. And we should be thankful to our beloved leader for everything. We’d repeat, “Thank you Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood!” like a prayer. We had the impression that, if it weren’t for the Soviet regime and mighty Stalin, those of us without parents – after all, nobody had told us why we had no parents – would’ve been completely lost. If we’d lived in another country, we’d have died of hunger and cold. We were only alive and happy thanks to the fact that we lived here. In the capitalist countries children were dying because they had to go work in factories and plants starting at the age of six or seven. They were cheap labor and would work until they died from hunger and starvation. Of course we believed it all. In the children’s home we learned about life, and learned to think and feel – or rather, not to think about anything, but to take everything on faith. We received all our ethical teachings from the hands of the Soviet regime.

They instilled in us the belief that we were surrounded by enemies who were sending spies to undermine and destroy our wonderful country. We were supposed to be always on our guard. Enemies, enemies, enemies, enemies... Against the enemy, to the enemy, about the enemy… Things are simpler for a child who has a home. He has a whole family and he knows that Uncle Petya is Mommy’s brother – he’s a friend – and Auntie Masha, Daddy’s sister – she’s a friend – and nobody in the world is better and kinder than Grandma and Grandpa! But who did we have? Maria Ivanovnas and Ivan Petroviches, who would change fairly frequently. Of course we believed them, like children believe adults, and they were the ones explaining to us that the whole world was teeming with enemies. It all started very early, from the moment I entered the children’s home. We were raised to be vigilant and suspicious of everything. We’d been very lucky to be born in a country where there’d been a revolution that had brought happiness to the people. But we always had to be on the alert, because our enemies never slept and they wanted to destroy that happiness by any possible means.

That’s how the Soviet regime molded us into the kind of people it needed, who’d be ready to follow it without a backward glance.  RL