my father called me and my brother into a room and explained that his way of life was not appropriate for modern times. He did not want us to repeat his mistakes, such as observing Jewish religious traditions. He said we had to go to the editor of a school wall-newspaper and announce there that we were now living a new life and that we did not want to have anything in common with the religious past of our father. My father made us do this. He said it meant nothing to him, but he thought this action would open up a brighter future for us.78
Other factors, too, not least ambition, led young people to renounce their relatives. Many of these public letters of renunciation were written on the eve of leaving home for universities or careers in the towns; they were a declaration of a new identity, a commitment to Soviet dreams and goals. The early 1930s were a period of enormous opportunity and social mobility: workers’ sons and daughters aspired to become professionals; peasant children dreamed of coming to the towns. All these ambitions were purposefully fuelled by Soviet propaganda, which placed the cult of personal success at the centre of the Five Year Plan. Films, books and songs featured the exploits of ‘ordinary heroes’ from the proletariat – engineers and scientists, model workers, aviators and explorers, ballerinas, sportsmen and women – who were all bringing glory to the Soviet Union. Young people were encouraged to believe that they could emulate their achievements, provided they worked hard and proved themselves as worthy Soviet citizens.
Such ambitions were often held most dearly by the children of ‘kulaks’ and other ‘enemies’ of the Soviet regime – a paradox that stands at the centre of the conflict between ‘kulak’ fathers and their sons. Growing up with the stigma of their origins, they wanted to be recognized as equal members of society, which could only be achieved by breaking with the past. Some renounced their ‘kulak’ relatives; others erased them from their biography or claimed that they were ‘dead’, or had ‘run away’. Such acts of denial were often necessary for survival. Yet the memory of them can still evoke feelings of remorse and shame, not because these young people had actually denounced anyone, but because they lived relatively ‘normal’ lives and pursued careers while their parents disappeared in the Gulag. They had reconciled themselves to the Soviet system and had found their place in it, even though they knew that the system had destroyed their own family.
No one expressed these feelings of remorse more powerfully than the poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky. He was born in 1910 in the village of Zagore, in Smolensk province, where his father, Trifon, a blacksmith, made a comfortable but modest living for his wife and seven children. Aleksandr was a teenage Communist. He joined the Komsomol in 1924 and became an activist in the village. He often argued about politics with his father and twice ran away from home, unable to reconcile himself to his family’s peasant way of life. In 1927, he joined the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), moved to Smolensk, and published his first poem, ‘To a Father and Rich Man’ (‘Ottsu-bogateiu’) in the Komsomol newspaper
In your home there is no shortage,
You are rich – and I know this,
Of all the five-walled peasant houses,
The best is yours.79
In the spring of 1930, the authorities imposed a heavy tax on Trifon’s family. Fearing arrest, Trifon ran away to the Donbass in search of work, followed in the autumn by his sons Ivan (then aged seventeen) and Konstantin (twenty-two), who reckoned they would ease their mother’s burden by going off in search of their father. Ivan returned that winter, only to discover that he had been barred from the village school as a ‘kulak’ son. In March 1931, the Tvardovsky family – with the exception of Aleksandr – was deported from Zagore. Konstantin (who had been imprisoned in Smolensk) and Trifon (arrested on his return from the Donbass) joined their convoy on its way to the Urals. The family spent the next two years in and out of labour camps and ‘special settlements’, living on the run, picking up odd jobs in factories and mines wherever they could find a loophole in the passport system, splitting up and reuniting, until the autumn of 1932, when Trifon found work as a blacksmith in a factory in the Urals town of Nizhny Tagil.
All this time, Aleksandr was studying at the Pedagogical Institute in Smolensk, where he was making a name for himself as a young poet. In his first long poem,
Afraid for his career, Tvardovsky distanced himself from his family. In the spring of 1931, his parents wrote to him from the ‘special settlement’ at Lialia in the Urals. They did not expect him to help them with money – they knew that he had none, recalled Ivan in 1988: ‘they simply hoped that he might want to keep in touch with his own mother and father, and with his brothers and sisters’. Ivan takes up the story:
Aleksandr wrote back twice. In the first letter he promised to do something. But a second letter soon arrived. It contained these lines, which I cannot forget: ‘My dears! I am neither a barbarian nor an animal. I ask you to fortify yourselves, to be patient and to work. The liquidation of the kulaks as a class does not mean the liquidation of people, even less the liquidation of children…’ Later on there was the phrase: ‘… I cannot write to you… do not write to me.’
When this letter was read to Ivan’s mother, she
bowed her head and sat down on a bench, where she lost herself in thoughts, which she spoke out loud, although what she said was not for us, but for herself, to reassure herself of her son’s love and devotion.
‘I know, I feel, I believe… that it was hard for him,’ she said. ‘My son, surely, had no choice. Life is like a carousel. What can you do?’81
Two months later, in August 1931, Trifon took his youngest son Pavlik and ran away from Lialia, where the rest of the family remained. After a month they reached Smolensk and searched for Aleksandr at the House of Soviets, where they knew that he was working in the editorial offices. Trifon asked the guard to call his son:
I knew what he had written to us at Lialia, but I reasoned: he is my son! He might at least take care of Pavlushka [Pavlik]. What harm had the boy done him, his own brother? Aleksandr came out. God forbid, how can it be that a meeting with a son can be so frightening! I looked at him in a state of near panic: he was all grown up, slender and handsome! His father’s son! He stood there and looked at us in silence. And then he said, not ‘Hello, father’, but ‘How did you get here?’
‘Shura [Aleksandr]! My son!’ I said. ‘We are dying there! From hunger, illness, arbitrary punishments!’
‘So you ran away?’ he asked abruptly, not, it seemed, in his own voice. And his look was different too, it fixed me to the ground.
I remained silent – what could I say? Let it be that way – I was only sorry for Pavlushka. He was just a boy who had come in hope of his brother’s love, and it had turned out so differently!
‘I can only help by sending you back, free of charge, to the place where you came from!’ – those were Aleksandr’s precise words.
I realized that there was no point in asking, begging, any more. I simply asked him to wait while I went to a friend in Stolpovo, who owed me money, and then, when I returned, he could do what he liked with me. He was visibly shaken.
‘All right, go,’ he said.
At Stolpovo Trifon went to see his friend. They drank together, while Pavlik slept. Then at midnight, the police arrived to arrest Trifon. Aleksandr had betrayed him.82
Four years passed before Aleksandr saw or heard from his family again. During this time, Ivan believes, Aleksandr poured his guilt feelings into his unpublished poetry:
What are you, brother?
How are you, brother?
