Nikolai Kovach was born in 1936 in the Solovetsky labour camp. Both his parents had been sentenced to ten years in the White Sea island prison in 1933. Because his mother was then pregnant with his older sister Elena, they were allowed to live together as a family within the prison. But then, in January 1937, the NKVD prohibited cohabitation in all labour camps. Nikolai’s mother was sent to a camp in Karelia (where she was shot in November 1937); his father was dispatched to Magadan (where he was shot in 1938). Elena was sick with TB at the time, so she was sent to an orphanage in Tolmachyovo, south of Leningrad, where medical provision was part of the regime; but Nikolai was taken north to Olgino, the resort on the Gulf of Finland favoured by the Petersburg elite before 1917, where the NKVD had set up an orphanage for children of ‘enemies of the people’ in a wing of the old white palace of Prince Oldenburg.
Like Nikolai, many of the children in the orphanage had no recollection of their family. But they forged a special bond with the kitchen workers, who gave them love and affection, and perhaps the feeling of a family. ‘There was a back staircase down to the kitchen area,’ recalls Nikolai.
I would go that way and the cooks would say: ‘Here comes Kolia!’ They would stroke my hair and give me a piece of bread. I would sit there at the bottom of the stairs and eat the piece of bread, so that no one else saw me with it. Everyone was hungry then – I was afraid to lose my piece of bread… The cooks, ordinary women from the local area, felt sorry for us orphans and tried to help us.
The children also visited the old people in the area and helped them on their allotments. ‘That was very good for us,’ Nikolai recalls:
If we helped an old grandpa he would be pleased and would do something nice for us. He might be affectionate and stroke our hair. We needed warmth and affection, we needed all the things a family would have given us – although we didn’t know what those things were. It didn’t bother us that we didn’t have a family, because we didn’t know what a family was, or that there was such a thing. We simply needed love.
Often, they found it in their relationships with animals and pets. ‘We had dogs, rabbits, horses,’ Nikolai recalls.
Behind the fence at the orphanage there was a horse farm. We loved it there, we felt free. Sometimes in the summer the stable workers let us take the horses to the river. We rode bareback, swam in the river with the horses and rode back with squeals and cries of joy. On the meadow by the town there were horse races in the summertime. We were always there. No one knew the horses better than we did. We were in love with them.
Among the orphans, small informal groups of mutual support performed many of the basic functions of a family: boys of the same age would join together to protect themselves from the boys who called them ‘enemies of the people’ and tried to beat them up; older children would protect the younger ones, help them with their lessons and their chores and comfort them when they cried at night or wet their bed. All the children were united in their opposition to the teachers at the orphanage, who were strict and often cruel.26
Nikolai had no idea what his parents looked like. He did not even know that they were dead. But he saw his mother in his dreams:
I often dreamed of Mama. I think it was Mama. I did not see her face, or even her figure. They were very happy dreams. I was flying in the sky with Mama. She was hugging me and helping me to fly. But I could not see her – somehow she had her back to me, or we were side by side. We weren’t flying high – just over the meadows and marshes near the orphanage. It was summertime. She would speak to me: ‘Don’t be afraid, we won’t fly too high or too far away.’ And we were smiling, we were always smiling in my dreams. I felt happiness – the physical sensation of happiness – only in those dreams. Still, today, when I think of happiness, I recall those dreams, that feeling of pure happiness.
Nikolai built up an imaginary picture of his parents, as did many other orphans. He never dreamed of his father but he pictured him as a pilot – a hero-figure in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and 1940s. In his dreams he yearned for a family, even though, as Nikolai reflects, he had no idea what a family was. He did not see an actual family, not even a mother with her child, until he was thirteen.27
Without the influence of a family, Nikolai and his fellow orphans grew up with very particular ideas of right and wrong; their moral sense was shaped by what he calls the ‘laws of the jungle’ in the orphanage. These laws obliged every child to sacrifice himself for the collective interest. Nikolai explains:
If a person had done something wrong, for which we could all be punished, then that person was made to confess to the authorities. We would make him take the punishment rather than be punished as a group. If we could not persuade him verbally, we would use physical methods to make him own up to his crime. We would not denounce him – it was forbidden to betray one’s own – but we made sure that he confessed.
But if it was forbidden to betray one’s own, a different law applied to the relations between children and adults. The orphans all admired Pavlik Morozov. ‘He was our hero,’ Nikolai recalls.
Since we had no understanding of a family, and no idea what a father was, the fact that Pavlik had betrayed his father was of no significance to us. All that mattered was that he had caught a kulak, a member of the bourgeoisie, which made him a hero in our eyes. For us the story was all about the class struggle, not a family tragedy.28
The moral system of the orphanage – with its strong collective and weak familial links – made it one of the main recruiting grounds for the NKVD and the Red Army. There were millions of children from the 1930s who spent their lives in Soviet institutions – the orphanage, the army and the labour camp – without ever knowing family life. Orphan children were especially susceptible to the propaganda of the Soviet regime because they had no parents to guide them or give them any alternative system of values. Mikhail Nikolaev, who grew up in a series of children’s homes in the 1930s, recalls that he and his fellow orphans were indoctrinated to believe that the Soviet Union was the best country in the world, and that they were the most fortunate children in the world, because everything had been given to them by the state, headed by the father of the country, Stalin, who cared for all children:
If we had lived in any other country, we would have died from hunger and from cold – that is what we were told… And of course we believed every word. We discovered life, we learned to think and feel – or rather learned not to think or feel but to accept everything that we were told – in the orphanage. All our ideas about the world we received from Soviet power.29
Mikhail, too, was very struck by the legend of Pavlik Morozov. He dreamed of emulating his achievement – of exposing someone as an enemy or spy – and was very proud when he became a Pioneer. Like many orphans, Mikhail saw his acceptance by the Pioneers as the moment he fully entered Soviet society. Until then, he had always been ashamed about his parentage. He had only fragmentary recollections of his mother and father: a memory of riding with his father on a horse; a mental picture of his mother sitting by a lamp and cleaning a pistol (which made him think that she must have been a Party official). He did not know who his parents were; nor did he know their names (Mikhail Nikolaev was the name he had been given when he first came to the orphanage). He recounted an incident from when he had been four or five years old: his former nanny had come to visit him in the children’s home and had told him that his parents had been shot as ‘enemies of the people’. Then she said: ‘They should shoot you too, just as they shot your mother and father.’ Throughout his childhood Mikhail felt ashamed on this account. But this shame was lifted when he joined the Pioneers: it was the first time he was recognized and valued by the Soviet system. As a Pioneer, Mikhail looked to Stalin as a figure of paternal authority and care. He believed all goodness came from him: ‘The fact that we were fed and clothed, that we could study, that we could go to the Pioneers Camp, even that there was a New Year’s tree – all of it was down to comrade Stalin,’ in his view.30
&n
bsp; The children at Mikhail’s orphanage were put to work at an early age. They washed the dishes and cleared the yard from the age of four, worked in the fields of a collective farm from the age of seven, and, when they reached the age of eleven, they were sent to work in a textiles factory in the nearby town of Orekhovo-Zuevo, 50 kilometres east of Moscow. In the summer of 1941, Mikhail was assigned to a metal factory in one of the industrial suburbs of Orekhovo-Zuevo. Although he was only twelve, the doctors at the orphanage had declared him to be fifteen on the basis of a medical examination (Mikhail was big for his age) and had given him a new set of documents which stated – incorrectly – that he was born in 1926. There was a policy of declaring orphaned children to be older than their age so that they would become eligible for military service or industrial work. For the next two years Mikhail worked in the steel plant in a brigade of children from the orphanage. ‘We worked in shifts – one week twelve hours every night, the next twelve hours every day. The working week was seven days.’ The terrible conditions in the factory were a long way from the propaganda image of industrial work that Mikhail had received through books and films, and for the first time in his life he began to doubt what he had been taught. The children slept in their work clothes on the floor of the factory club and took their meals in the canteen. They were not paid. In the autumn of 1943, Mikhail ran away from the factory and volunteered for the Red Army – he did so out of hunger, not patriotism – and became a tank driver. He was just fourteen.31
Like Mikhail, Nikolai Kovach was extremely proud when he joined the Pioneers. It gave him a sense of inclusion in the world outside the orphanage and put him on a par with other children his age. Kovach went on to join the Komsomol and become a Party activist; The History of the CPSU was his ‘favourite book’. He joined the Red Army as a teenager and served in the Far East. When he was demobilized he could not settle into civilian life – he had lived too long in Soviet institutions – so he went to work for the NKVD: it enabled him to study in the evening at its elite military academy. Kovach served in a special unit of the NKVD. Its main task was to catch the children who had run away from children’s homes.32
3
Maria Budkevich, the fourteen-year-old girl who had been trained by her parents to survive on her own in the event of their arrest, was able to do so for the better part of a year after they were taken by the NKVD in July 1937. She lived by herself in the family’s apartment in Moscow until the summer of 1938, when the NKVD took her to the detention centre in the Danilov Monastery. While she had been living on her own, Maria had been helped by an old friend of her parents, Militsa Yevgenevna, who felt sorry for the child. Militsa’s husband, a Bolshevik official, had been arrested shortly before Maria’s parents, so Militsa presumed that they had been arrested on account of him. She soon became frightened of the consequences for herself if she continued to assist the daughter of an ‘enemy’, and called the NKVD. When they came for Maria, Militsa said to her: ‘Don’t be cross with me… It will be better for you in a children’s home. Afterwards it will be easier, you will no longer be the child of an enemy of the people.’33
From the Danilov Monastery Maria was transferred to an orphanage near Gorkii with twenty-five other children of ‘enemies of the people’. The director of the orphanage was a paternal type who encouraged Maria to study hard and make a career for herself, despite her spoilt biography. She joined the Komsomol, though she was warned that she would be forced to renounce her parents before she was admitted, and took part in its activities, which mainly involved shrill denunciations of ‘enemies of the people’ and singing songs of thanks to Stalin and the Party in mass meetings and marches. As she recalls, she joined the Komsomol in the belief that this was what her parents would have wanted her to do: ‘How could I have not joined? Mama always said that I had to become a Pioneer and then a Young Communist. It would have been shameful not to join.’ Yet at the same time – without quite grasping the political events that led to the arrest of her parents – she felt that it was somehow wrong to join. She remembers feeling a sense of guilt towards her parents, as if she had betrayed them, although, as it turned out, she was not called upon to renounce them. Still, she felt awkward about taking part in Komsomol propaganda, and, as she recounts, ‘only made a show of singing in praise of Stalin, mouthing words I did not quite believe’. At the root of her discomfort was her instinctive sense that her parents had been wrongly arrested (she even wrote to Stalin to protest in 1939), a conviction that conflicted with the political identity she had to adopt to survive and advance. As a member of the Komsomol, Maria was able to enroll at the Polytechnic Institute of Leningrad, a leading science university seldom attended by children of the ‘enemies of the people’.34
Millions of children grew up in the grey area between the Soviet system and its ‘enemies’, constantly torn by competing loyalties and contradictory impulses. On the one hand, the stigma of a tainted biography reinforced their need to prove themselves as fully equal members of society, which meant conforming to Soviet ideals, joining the Komsomol and perhaps the Party too. On the other, these children could not help but feel alienated from the system that had brought such suffering on their families.
Zhenia Yevangulova had mixed emotions following the arrest of her parents in the summer of 1937. She was nineteen years old, she had just finished school, and now her chance of going on to study in Moscow was dashed. Instead she went to live with her father’s uncle, a retired professor of metallurgy in Leningrad, who helped her to get into the Workers’ Faculty (rabfak), from which she hoped to transfer to the Polytechnic Institute. As the day of her application to the institute approached, Zhenia became more fearful, knowing she would have to reveal the arrest of her parents in the anketa. She felt like a ‘leper’ and feared that she would be disqualified from joining the institute, even though she had got top marks in the entrance examinations. In 1938, she was admitted, albeit to the Metallurgical Department, where competition for places was not as acute as in other departments. Throughout her first year there, Zhenia confessed in her diary to a feeling of depression, even to thoughts of suicide. Reflecting on this sadness, she explained it to herself as the ‘shutting down’ of her personality that followed her parents’ disappearance. At the Workers’ Faculty, their arrest had been a source of constant shame; her fellow students had bullied her mercilessly, calling her the daughter of a ‘traitor to the motherland’. At the institute, Zhenia tried to overcome this stigma by proving herself a model student.
There were moments when she struggled to break free of her parents, to enjoy herself with the other students, to move on with her life. But these brief moments of happiness were always followed by feelings of guilt when she recalled her parents in the camps. Shortly after the arrest of her father, Zhenia had had a dream in which her father reappeared as an aggressor. It continued to haunt her:
My father appeared from the mist of an adjoining room, pressed his pistol to my heart and shot. There was no physical pain, only the sensation that I had failed to stop him… And then I noticed that my chest was soaked in blood.
While at the institute, she went skating with her friends one evening and felt happy for the first time in many months. But that night she again saw her father in the dream and the next morning she awoke with a ‘heavy feeling of depression’.35
Looking back on their teenage years, many of these ‘strange orphans’ recall that there was a moment – a moment they had all hoped for – when the stigma of repression was at last lifted and they were recognized as ‘Soviet citizens’. This desire for social acceptance was felt by nearly all the children of the ‘enemies of the people’. There were few who turned their backs on the Soviet system or became opposed to it.
For Ida Slavina, that moment of acceptance came in the summer of 1938, shortly after the arrest of her mother (her father was taken in 1937). She was invited by her physical education teacher to take part in a school parade. Ida was an athlete, tall and fit. She had participated
in school marches as an athlete and gymnast since the age of fourteen, but after the arrest of her father she had been excluded from the parade team. In her memoirs (1995) she recalls her joy on being readmitted to the parade team as a gymnast-parachutist for a demonstration on the theme ‘On Land and Sea and in the Sky’ to celebrate the achievements of Soviet sport:
‘On Land and Sea and in the Sky’ gymnastic demonstration, 1938: Ida is in the middle of the back row
I remember the surprise of my interviewers,* when they recognized me in a photograph among a group of athletes at the parade. How, they asked, could I bring myself to go on a parade when my mother had only just been sent to a labour camp? Thinking back, I recognize the egoism of youth, of course; I was sixteen, I couldn’t stand to be unhappy, I longed for happiness and love. But there was more to it than that. Joining the parade was also an expression of my deep desire to feel whole again in my shattered world. To feel again the sensation of being part of an enormous ‘We’. Marching in columns, with everybody else, singing the proud song, ‘We Have No Borders’, it seemed to me that I was indeed a fully equal representative of my Motherland. I was filled with the belief [in the words of the song] that we would ‘carry our Soviet banner over worlds and centuries’. I was with everyone! My friends and teachers once again believed in me – and that meant, or so I thought, that they must also believe in my parents’ innocence.36
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