and slim with slender legs and fine ankles. Men would overtake us in the street and look back at her – but they could not understand. She looked completely different from the front… Her hair was grey and thin, and her face marked with cuts.
Short of money, Maria sold the coat and wore instead a quilted jacket, like those worn by prisoners in the Gulag.32
Vladimir Makhnach, the former boss of the Mosgaz Trust, which controlled Moscow’s gas supply, returned to the Soviet capital in June 1955 after fourteen years in the Taishet labour camp. His son Leonid, now a young man of twenty-two, had long resented the stigma of his ‘spoilt biography’. Born into the privileged conditions of the Soviet elite, he had lived with his mother in a desperate state of poverty following the arrest of his father. His mother had no income of her own. They occupied a room in a communal apartment which was raided several times by the police in search of incriminating evidence against the ‘relatives of enemies of the people’. Anxious to get on, Leonid lied about the arrest of his father when he applied to join the Moscow Film School (VGIK). By the time his father came back, Leonid was moving in the bohemian circles of the film world, which flourished in the liberal climate of the thaw. He had also developed connections with the MGB. His fiancee Tamara was the stepdaughter of Naftaly Frenkel, the man responsible for the conception of the Gulag system in 1929, who lived as a recluse in the Soviet capital. Frenkel took a keen interest in Leonid.
Vladimir’s return was bound to ruffle Leonid’s feathers. The young man was suddenly confronted by a father who insisted on asserting his authority over wife and child. Vladimir ‘was a difficult character’, according to his son.
He was moody and taciturn. He would not speak about the camps. Emotionally he was closed to us. He brought into the house the habits and the fears he had acquired in the camps and expected us to adapt to them. He would not sleep in the same bed as my mother, who was then forty-six. I remember how she said to him in tears one day: ‘I have stopped being a woman for you!’
Despite his years in labour camps, Vladimir remained a staunch Leninist; he continued to believe that Stalin’s policies of the early 1930s – the forced collectivization of agriculture and the industrialization programme of the Five Year Plans – were essentially correct. He himself had played a leading role in the execution of these policies. In his opinion, it was only in the later 1930s that Stalin ceased to be a Communist. For Vladimir the process of return was a question of putting the clock back. He rejoined the Party, which retroactively recognized his membership to 1921. He re-entered his old sphere of work and was appointed Deputy Director of Moscow’s Fuel and Energy Administration in 1956. He even received a chauffered car and a dacha near the one the Makhnaches used to have in Serebrianyi Bor. But Vladimir had little sense of the social changes that had taken place since his arrest. He came from the generation of peasants who had risen to the Soviet elite during Stalin’s industrial revolution of the early 1930s. His politics were radical, but his social attitudes were conservative (he had made Maria give up work when Leonid was born because he thought that ‘a senior party leader should have a wife who stays at home’). Now Vladimir fully expected to become the patriarchal head of the household once again. He did not like it when Leonid stayed out late at night, not least because the camps had left him with severe insomnia. There were constant arguments between the two. One night, Leonid returned from a party at midnight. There was an argument which became a fight. Vladimir punched his son in the face. Leonid stormed out of the apartment and went straight to Frenkel’s house, where he remained until his marriage to Tamara in 1958. As Leonid recalls, after the break with Vladimir, Frenkel became the main paternal figure in his life. An opponent of the Khrushchev thaw, Frenkel retained strong connections with the MGB, which promoted Leonid as a film director and commissioned his first film, a propagandist story about Soviet spies in the Cold War.33
A widespread feeling among survivors of the camps was a sense of the incommunicability of their experience, of an unbridgeable gap between themselves and those who had not been in the camps. In 1962, Maria Drozdova returned to her family in Krasnoe Selo after twenty years of imprisonment and exile in Norilsk. ‘What could I tell them?’ she writes:
That I was alive and had returned. But what could I say about my life out there? How I travelled in a convoy to Norilsk? How could they understand what the word ‘convoy’ really meant? However much detail I described, it would still be incomprehensible to them. Nobody can understand what we went through. Only those who know what it was like can understand and sympathize.34
Like many former prisoners, Maria felt much closer to her Norilsk friends than to her own family, and she continued to see them regularly after her release. ‘The friendships formed in the labour camps were friendships for life,’ writes one ex-prisoner. According to many Gulag survivors, people who had been in the camps together tended to be more supportive of each other than relatives and friends at home. In a society where former prisoners were frequently the victims of prejudice and malice, they forged special bonds of trust and mutual reliance. While prisoners did not talk to their families about the camps, they did talk with their friends from the Gulag. They would correspond, meet on holidays, visit one another and arrange reunions. Sonia Laskin had a large network of old friends from the Vorkuta camp. She was always putting someone up in her apartment in Moscow. Some of them were practically members of the Laskin extended family and attended all the Laskin anniversaries. ‘The spirit of comradeship was extraordinary,’ recalls Valerii Frid of his old friends from the Inta labour camp. ‘Without any affectation, without long conversations, we would simply help each other out.’ According to Frid, the great writer of the Gulag, Varlam Shalamov, was wrong when he wrote that there was nothing positive a prisoner could take from his experience in the camps. His own life-long friendship and collaboration with the film-maker Iurii Dunsky was strengthened by the years they spent together in Inta. ‘I was grateful to the camps for teaching me the meaning of friendship,’ recalls Frid, ‘and for giving me so many friends.’35
Some prisoners returned home with new husbands, or new wives, whom they had met ‘on the other side’. For women, in particular, these ‘Gulag marriages’ had sometimes been motivated by the struggle to survive. But they were also based on the understanding and trust that frequently developed between prisoners.
After her release from the Norilsk labour camp in 1946, Olga Lobacheva, the specialist in mineralogy, stayed on in Norilsk as a voluntary worker. She married a geologist called Vladimir, a student volunteer from Saratov University, who was twenty years younger than herself. In 1956, they returned together to Semipalatinsk, where, before her own arrest, Olga had been living in exile, following the arrest of her first husband Mikhail. Olga did not know what had happened to Mikhail. Without any news of him, she had presumed that he was dead, and on that understanding she agreed to marry Vladimir. In fact Mikhail had been sentenced to ten years of labour in the Karaganda camps. There he had married a fellow prisoner, a young and beautiful Hungarian Jew called Sofia Oklander, who gave him a daughter in 1948. ‘They too had been brought together by their need for love and friendship in the camps,’ reflects the son of Olga and Mikhail. ‘It was not their fault, but both my parents fell in love with younger people and ended up betraying each other.’ In 1956, Mikhail moved with his new wife and their daughter to Alma-Ata. He got in touch with Olga and went to visit her in Semipalatinsk. He even tried to persuade her to return to him. But Olga refused to forgive her former husband for marrying Sofia without trying to locate her first.36
Liudmila Konstantinova also married someone she had met in the labour camps. Mikhail Yefimov, a strong and handsome peasant man from Novgorod, had been sent to Kolyma on some petty charge of ‘hooliganism’ in 1934 and was part of a team of labourers that built the town of Magadan. By 1937, Yefimov had served his three-year sentence, but he did not have the money to return to Novgorod, so he stayed in Magadan as a volunteer. Liudmila met him in 1938, when she had been working as a prisoner in a cotton factory where Yefimov was building ventilation pipes. Liudmila had been in Kolyma since 1937; she did not know what had happened to her husband after his arrest in 1936. Shortly after she met Yefimov, Liudmila became very ill with a kidney infection. Yefimov nursed her back to health, buying special medicines and food for her. In 1944, she learned that her daughters Natalia and Elena had been rescued from an orphanage by their grandmother, who had brought them up in exile in the remote steppeland town of Ak-Bulak. A year later, when Natalia and Elena returned to Leningrad with their grandmother, Yefimov began to send them parcels and money. Liudmila was released from the labour camp in the autumn of 1945, but she remained in Magadan to be with Yefimov, who was refused permission to move to
