Mariia Shapiro, A Soviet Capitalist
Mariia Shapiro found herself in a woman’s concentration camp in Eastern Siberia in 1946 after being arrested and sentenced for anti-Soviet writings. She was arrested in northern China, in Harbin, once a thriving Russian city established during the Russian expansion eastward. Its growth was greatly stimulated by the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway. After the Civil War many Russians found a haven in that city since it was not in Soviet territory. M. Shapiro completed law school there and turned to journalism as a profession. Her articles dealt with aspects of emigre life, but she also concentrated on Soviet legal proceedings. This did not stand her in good stead when Harbin fell to the Soviets after the defeat of the Japanese in World War II. She managed to keep a secret log of her years in prison which she later expanded into memoirs. Excerpted from Mariia Shapiro, “Zhenskii kontslager’” [A Woman’s Concentration Camp]. New York:
Once two new women appeared in our cell. They arrived loudly enough, in some sort of nervous excitement. In about two days they calmed down. The older of the women, Zoia Zhigaleva, immediately attracted my attention. I often recalled her later, already living in a camp, and tried to define the nature of this 38-year-old uneducated but clever woman with dark eyes and a quite correct, pleasant face which so distinguished her from the crowd that even our anarchist, criminal element immediately felt her power.
268
I soon understood that Zoia was a born leader and organizer. This is as much a talent as any other. It was as if Zoia was surrounded by a taboo. She would spread out the contents of her or her friend’s food parcel on a clean napkin on the table and a few times invited me. It was strange to sit and eat the tasty things so demonstratively in the public eye and in the presence of criminals who flung evil glances at us and gnashed their teeth like hungry wolves.
Zoia was the daughter of a hardy Siberian peasant, an energetic and capable landholder in spirit (and perhaps by blood)—the descendant of courageous Siberian explorers. When the children became adolescents, the father decided to move to an absolutely out of the way place, far into the
The wild
The steamship lines on the Lena turned their attention to the new population center and established a landing there. The children began to go to school in town. But Zoia managed to finish only three grades. After the collapse of the White regime in Siberia and the end of the Civil War, the first wave of liquidation of private farms began. Zoia’s father, having created a blossoming household in the Iakutsk
Zoia’s voice trembled when she spoke about parting from her beloved place. The homestead passed into the hands of the government, and when Zoia went back after a few years to see what had become of the homestead, she found a frightening desolation. Some people still seemed to work there, but there were almost no cattle and no vegetable garden either. The house had been gutted and had fallen into complete decay, and even her favorite painting in the dining room hung in tatters on the dirty wall.
Zoia formed a definite worldview, well-considered and shaped by suffering. Rarely did I meet among educated women such clarity of mind, such comprehension, as possessed by this young Siberian woman with a third-grade education.
269
In her first years of marriage Zoia did not work anywhere. There was no necessity and not even the desire. The war began. Zoia’s husband was registered at his plant and was not subject to being dispatched to the front. But Zoia with her sharp mind realized that she, a young, healthy, childless woman, would sooner or later be mobilized for some kind of, perhaps unpleasant, work. And she decided to take the bull by the horns. Zoia proposed to the administration of the plant where her husband worked that she take charge of the supply of provisions for the workers of the plant. The proposal was accepted and Zoia began to work.
So here was this young woman, not having had the slightest trade or business experience, not having ever worked even as a simple sales clerk, not having had even a high school education, beginning an undertaking under conditions of war and great shortages. And this very person took upon herself the task of supplying hundreds of workers scattered throughout the
And the work went well. Zoia sent shiploads of products up and down the Lena, and entire convoys into the
The plant’s administration, seeing how well Zoia managed the acquisition and distribution of food, put her in charge of all the vegetable gardens and the creation of new gardens. And she was successful here as well. Then they entrusted her with the organization and supervision of the renovation of workers’ and employees’ living quarters. And she successfully organized this as well.
“But I didn’t forget about myself,” Zoia openly declared to me. “My apartment was first in line for the renovations.”
The war ended. After her enormous achievement and the joyous awareness of knowing her revealed abilities and strengths, a series of humdrum days set in. The former, quiet pre-war life spent in the shadow of her husband and the reading of books no longer satisfied Zoia.
I understood Zoia’s nature: during my childhood before the revolution I saw, in Siberian cities, such female merchants and gold dealers. There would be an elderly widow who, after the death of her husband, had mines, flour mills, and steamships left to her. In a city such as Blagoveshchensk on the Amur River, such an entrepreneur would leave her home in the morning in her surrey and go to the bank and her enterprises: to the mill, the basin to check the repairs to the steamships, and so forth. She would usually drive the horse and buggy herself. Often she would be barely literate, even unable to sign her name. But what an organizer, what acumen in questions of trade and, in particular, of business obligations and banking laws.
