released from the labour camps had no idea how to behave in a normal family home, never having been in one. A large handsome man with a thick beard, he was known in the literary circles of Moscow as a ‘wild man from Mars’, recalls Viktoriia Shweitser, who fell in love with him and married him. When she introduced him to her family, she was shocked by his table manners. She could not understand how he could help himself to all the food from the table without offering it to others first. For a long time, she said nothing, but one day she finally lost her patience and told him off for grabbing the last orange instead of leaving it for the children, as was the custom in their household. ‘Mikhail replied: “I didn’t know, nobody ever taught me that, why didn’t you explain it to me?”,’ recalls Viktoriia. ‘He was not greedy, but as he said about himself, he was tight-fisted’, perhaps even selfish, because of the way he had grown up. As she recalls in interview, it was at this point that she realized that she had fallen in love with a man whom she did not really know. ‘I had to learn to fall in love with him again, only this time with the real Misha, the boy from the orphanage, so that I could understand him properly and help him live a normal life.’28
It was often very hard for people who returned from the labour camps to re-establish relationships with relatives. After years of living in the Gulag, what sort of ‘normal family life’ could they hope to lead? There was no counselling or psychoanalysis for these people, no help for their physical and behavioural disorders, not even any recognition of the traumas they experienced. At the same time, those who returned often had little understanding of the tension under which their families had lived or the horrors they had suffered in the intervening years. People on all sides – those who had returned from the camps and those who had remained at home – felt rejected and estranged.
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
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
