Leningrad. In 1947, she married Yefimov. Ten years had passed since the arrest of Liudmila’s husband, and she had not heard from him. She could not get any information from the Soviet authorities, so she presumed that he was dead.* ‘You cannot keep someone waiting for ever,’ she wrote to her mother in 1945, after she was granted a divorce from her first husband. ‘People need to live in the real world.’
Liudmila was not in love with Yefimov. In her letters to her mother she describes him as ‘a good comrade from the first painful days in Kolyma’. He was strong and kind and supportive, they had a lasting friendship based on their experience of the Gulag, and she relied on him for emotional sustenance after her release. In 1948, Liudmila moved with Yefimov to Novocherkassk, near Rostov-on-Don, where she would live until her death in 1992. Once a year she visited her daughters and mother in Leningrad. Sometimes Yefimov would come with her. He remained a distant figure to his stepdaughters, who addressed him with the polite ‘you’ (
From left to right: Elena Konstantinova, her mother Liudmila, her grandmother Elena Lebedeva, and her sister Natalia, Leningrad, 1950
Ilia and Aleksandra Faivisovich were hairdressers in Osa, a small town in the Urals, south of Perm. They were both arrested in 1939, following reports by clients that they had complained about shortages. Ilia was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp near Gorkii; Aleksandra to five years in a camp near Arkhangelsk. Their daughter Iraida was brought up by her grandmother, until Aleksandra returned in 1945. Four years later, Ilia was released. Aleksandra had waited patiently for his return. Finally, the day came. The house was full of Aleksandra’s relatives; Aleksandra had prepared a special meal for Ilia’s homecoming. But Ilia did not appear. Instead his sister Lida came from Perm and told them that he had arrived at her house with a young woman, his new wife. Aleksandra and her daughter went to visit him, a scene Iraida remembers:
The door opened and there was Father – we had not seen him for ten years. He gave me a hug and kissed me… Nina [his new wife] was standing in the room. Mama started crying. Lida tried to calm her down: ‘What do you expect if you don’t see each other for ten years?’ she said. Mama went on crying. Father held me close to him, as if to say that there was nothing I could do. He had been drinking heavily and he was drunk, I think. Mama began to curse him. ‘You have ruined my life! You have destroyed our family!’ she kept shouting… ‘Why couldn’t you have written to me telling me not to wait?’
Aleksandra suffered a nervous breakdown and spent four months in a psychiatric hospital. Ilia and Nina settled in a small town near Sverdlovsk where they lived in an old bath-house. They had met in the labour camp, where Nina, a young Jewish doctor from Leningrad, was working in the hospital. Nina had saved Ilia’s life. He had been brought to the
Nina and Ilia outside their house, near Sverdlovsk, 1954
hospital with severe frostbite after he had collapsed from exhaustion, felling timber without food, and had not been found for several days. Nina gradually nursed him back to health. She fell in love with him. Ilia returned from the labour camps an invalid. He relied on Nina to help him walk. Once a year he would visit Aleksandra and Iraida in Osa. Sometimes he wrote to them, but the family was never close again. After Nina’s death, in 1978, Iraida tried to persuade her father to return to Aleksandra, but he married someone else instead. Aleksandra did not remarry. She never got over Ilia’s betrayal. According to her daughter, she was still in love with him. She kept his photograph by her bedside and had it with her when she died.38
Zinaida Levina was one of the founders of the Pioneer Organization in the Ukraine, where she was born into a Jewish family in 1904. She was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to eight years in the Kolyma labour camps. Her husband, Daniil, an engineer, was arrested too, as a ‘relative of an enemy of the people’, and exiled for three years to Turkmenistan (after his release he served in the army, was wounded at the front and evacuated to Siberia). Their daughter Larisa, who was four years old on the arrest of her parents, was brought up by her grandmother in the communal apartment the family shared in Kiev. In 1945, Daniil returned from Siberia with a new wife, Regina, and their daughter. They moved into two small rooms where Daniil’s three sisters also lived. Larisa went to live with them. She got on well with her half-sister but was hated by Regina and her aunts. According to Larisa, Daniil had chosen to renounce and divorce Zinaida because he was afraid he might be rearrested on his return from exile if he was still married to an ‘enemy of the people’. But Zinaida’s mother, who viewed her son-in- law as a womanizer, thought that he had simply taken advantage of his wife’s arrest to marry Regina, who was young and beautiful, and refused to visit them. Cut off in this way from her grandmother, Larisa’s situation in her father’s home became more difficult.
After her release in 1946, Zinaida was ordered by the state to live in Zvenigorodka, a small town near Kiev. One day, she turned up at her mother’s apartment with a little boy called Valerii and introduced him as her son. In the Kolyma camps Zinaida had learned about the massacre of Kiev’s Jewish population at Babi Yar in September 1941. Fearing that her family had been destroyed, she resolved to have another child before it was too late (she was then thirty-seven) and gave birth to Valerii in 1942. She refused to say who the father was (and took her secret to her grave) but everyone assumed that it was a prison guard. In 1949, Zinaida was rearrested as an ‘anti-social element’ (it was the height of the campaign against the Jews) and sentenced to three years in the Potma labour camps (she was later exiled to Dzhambul in Kazakhstan). Valerii was taken in by his grandmother; but a few months later the old woman died. Larisa begged her father to rescue Valerii. She felt responsible for her half-brother, a difficult boy with severe behavioural problems: ‘Something made me love him. I had this feeling of responsibility. It came from the heart. I had no family, and wanted to protect him as my own.’ Valerii, however, was given to an orphanage by Daniil’s sisters, who took the view that the son of a prison guard should be looked after by the state. Valerii disappeared until 1953, when he wrote to Larisa from another orphanage, in Uzhgorod, in western Ukraine. Larisa went to collect him and took him to their mother in Dzhambul, where they all lived for the next two years. ‘At that time,’ recalls Larisa,
I hardly knew my mother. I had never really lived with her, and that time, from 1953 to 1954, was the first I had spent with her… She drowned me with her love… I was overwhelmed by it. I was not used to it… But I soon discovered the joy of family love.
In 1955, Zinaida fell in love with another Jewish exile in Dzhambul, a man who had lost his family at Babi Yar. He helped her with Valerii and loved him as if he were his own. They were married in 1956. Released from exile, they returned to Kiev, where they began a new life as a family.39
For some prisoners, family life itself was no longer possible. They were too afraid – of disappointment, of being a burden, of being unable to connect.
Natalia Iznar was born in 1893 to a family of lawyers in St Petersburg. In the 1920s she worked as a graphic artist and stage designer for the Moscow Art Theatre and Stanislavsky’s Opera Studio. In 1932, she divorced her first husband and married Grigorii Abezgauz, a minor official in the Commissariat of Education and the Arts. In 1937, Abezgauz was arrested and shot. Natalia was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the ALZhIR labour camp. After her release, in 1946, she remained in Dolinka, where she worked as a decorative artist for the MVD’s Political Department, which was responsible for propaganda art and theatre in the labour camps. Natalia had relatives in Moscow and in Leningrad. She had a daughter from her first marriage. But she chose to remain in the Gulag settlement rather than return to her family. Years of separation in the labour camp had broken something inside her and it could no longer be repaired. Natalia wrote to her sister-in-law in Moscow to explain:
Chistye Prudy 15, Apt. 27
Elena Moiseyevna Abezgauz
My dear, it is fortunate that Liudmila Aleksandrovna [a friend from ALZhIR] can deliver this by hand. At last I can explain in a way that you may understand. Six weeks have past since I gained my freedom, and yet this is my first letter. How can I explain? It is painful to have to recognize that after the long years of separation there is now an unbridgeable division between us. In the short period of my so-called freedom I have come to realize that I can’t feel close to you again. When I think of coming back to you, I am overcome by the terrifying thought that I will
