were kept in a special stable near the kolkhoz offices, although Olga’s mother, like many of the villagers, worried that her horses were unhappy there, and often brought them home to make sure that they were groomed and fed. In an effort to eradicate this connection between the peasants and their animals, the kolkhoz chairmen of the area embarked on a policy of sending people away from their villages. Olga’s father was allowed to remain on the kolkhoz in Krivosheino, but Olga and her mother and the other children were sent off to a different kolkhoz, 8 kilometres away, near the village of Sokolovka, where they lived in a rented room. ‘We worked there for two years,’ recalls Olga. ‘We saw our father only once or twice, because we had only one day free from work, and it was rarely the same day as his.’ In 1935, the family was reunited in Tomsk, where Olga’s father worked in the stables of a building site. Olga’s mother got a job in a meat factory, and the family lived together in a dormitory with a dozen other families, all former peasants who had left the land.35
After a good harvest in 1930, the harvests of 1931 and 1932 were disastrously bad. Yet state procurements in 1932–3 were more than twice the level they had been in the bumper years of 1929 and 1930. The Party based its excessive grain levies on the good results of 1930 and on inflated 1931 and 1932 figures submitted by local officials, eager to demonstrate their political success. The actual harvest of 1932 was at least one-third smaller than official figures showed (it was in fact the poorest harvest since the famine year of 1921). The inevitable outcome was widespread famine, beginning in the spring of 1932 and culminating during the next year, when 70 million people (nearly half the Soviet population) were living in the famine area. The number of deaths is impossible to calculate, not least because so many of them were unregistered, but the best demographic estimates suggest that between 4.6 million and 8.5 million people died of starvation or disease between 1930 and 1933. The worst affected areas were in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, where peasant resistance to collectivization was particularly strong, and the grain levies were excessively high. This conjunction has prompted some historians to argue, in the words of Robert Conquest, that the famine was ‘deliberately inflicted’, that it was a ‘massacre of men, women and children’ motivated by Communist ideology. This is not entirely accurate. The regime was undoubtedly to blame for the famine. But its policies did not amount to a campaign of ‘terror-famine’, let alone of genocide, as Conquest and others have implied.36 The regime was taken by surprise by the scale of the famine, and had no reserves to offer its victims. It continued to requisition grain from the worst-affected areas and only reduced its procurements in the autumn of 1932, which was too little and too late. Once the famine raged, the regime tried to conceal the extent of it by stopping people fleeing from the devastated regions to the cities of the north.37
Nonetheless millions of people fled the land. For every thirty peasants who entered the kolkhoz, ten left agriculture altogether, mostly to become wage labourers in industry. By the early months of 1932, there were several million people on the move, crowding railway stations, desperately trying to escape the famine areas.38 The cities could not cope with this human flood. Diseases spread. Pressure grew on housing, food and fuel supplies, which encouraged people to move from town to town in search of better conditions. Frightened that its industrial strongholds would be overrun by famine-stricken and rebellious peasants, the Politburo introduced a system of internal passports to limit immigration to the towns. The new law stated that adults were required to have a passport registered with the police to obtain the residence permit (
Families disintegrated, as younger peasants left their homes for the cities. Millions of children were abandoned in these years. Many peasants left their children when they ran away from the collective farms. ‘Kulaks’ gave their children to other families rather than take them on the long journey to the ‘special settlements’ and other places of exile, where it was said that many children died. ‘Let them exile me,’ explained one Siberian ‘kulak’, ‘but I will not take my children. I don’t want to destroy them.’ Among famine victims, the abandonment of children was a mass phenomenon. Mothers left their children on doorsteps, delivered them to Soviet offices or abandoned them in the nearest town. Orphans lived on building sites. They roamed around the streets, rummaging through rubbish for unwanted food. They scraped a living from begging, petty theft and prostitution, many joining children’s gangs which controlled these activities in railway stations, drinking places and busy shopping streets. Some of these children were rounded up by the police and taken to ‘reception centres’, from which they were then sent on to children’s homes and camps. According to police figures, an astonishing 842,144 homeless children were brought to the reception centres during 1934–5. By the end of 1934, there were 329,663 children registered in orphanages in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus alone, and many more in special homes and labour camps (‘labour-educational colonies’) controlled by the police. From April 1935, when a law was passed lowering the age of criminal responsibility to twelve, the number of children in the Gulag system began to rise steadily, with over 100,000 children between the ages of twelve and sixteen convicted by the courts and tribunals for criminal offences in the next five years.40
When they left Obukhovo, Yevdokiia Golovina and her three young children were taken to the nearest railway station at Pestovo, 56 kilometres away, where they were held in a detention camp. Three days later, they were loaded into cattle trucks for the six-week journey to Kemerovo in Siberia. The trucks were full of families, with children, men and women of all ages. A bucket in each truck served as the toilet, which was emptied once a day, when the doors were opened and a piece of bread was given to each person by the guards. At Kemerovo the Golovins were taken to a distribution centre, where several hundred families were kept under guard in an open field, enclosed by a high barbed-wire fence, with nothing but their baggage to sleep on. A month later, they were transferred to Shaltyr, a ‘special settlement’ for ‘kulaks’ in the remote Altai region of Siberia.
The ‘special settlements’ were primitive and isolated camps. Most of them consisted of a few barracks, built by the exiles on their arrival, in which several hundred people slept on wooden planks, although in many ‘special settlements’ the ‘kulaks’ lived in dug-outs in the ground, or were housed in abandoned churches and buildings, cattle sheds and barns. The overcrowding was appalling. At the Prilutsky Monastery near Vologda there were 7,000 exiles living on the grounds, with just one kitchen, but no proper toilet or washing facilities. In Vologda itself 2,000 people were living in a church. An eye-witness described the living conditions of 25,000 exiles in Kotlas:
In the barracks, which are each meant to house 250 people, it is almost dark, with little window openings here and there that let in light only to the lower bunks. The inhabitants prepare food outside, on camp fires. The latrine – is just a fenced-off area. Water – there is a river below, but it is still frozen. The local residents lock the well (‘You will infect us; your children are dying’) and sell water in bottles.
The ‘special settlements’ were not technically a form of imprisonment (the mass deportations were carried out by administrative directives beyond the jurisdiction of the courts) but from the spring of 1931 they were controlled by the organs of OGPU, which was responsible for the exploitation of their slave labour. The exiles in the ‘special settlements’ had to report once a month to the police. Matvei Berman, the chief of the Gulag system, said that conditions in the settlements were worse than in the labour camps. The men were employed in back-breaking work in logging-camps and mines, the women and the children in lighter work. They were given very little food (a few loaves of bread for a whole month). When they succumbed to illness and disease, they were simply left to die, as they did in their hundreds of thousands during the winter of 1931–2.41
Shaltyr consisted of five two-storeyed wooden barracks built along a river bank. The population (about a thousand peasants) had been sent there from all over the Soviet Union, though Russians, Ukrainians, Volga Germans and Siberians were the largest groups. The men were sent to fell timber at a nearby logging camp, returning on Sundays. Yevdokiia’s son Aleksei Golovin was one of them, although he was just fifteen. On 1 September, her younger son Tolia and her daughter Antonina went to school – a single class for all the children of the settlement housed in one of the barracks. The girls were forced to cut their braids (traditionally worn by peasant girls before they were married) – as if to symbolize their renunciation of the peasant culture into which
