one’s stigma by demonstrating devotion to the Soviet cause. People lost themselves in this duality. The inner self was swallowed up in the public personality. As one man recalled, ‘I began to feel that I was the man I had pretended to be.’92
The young Simonov experienced something similar. Concealing his noble origins, he enrolled as a ‘proletarian’ in the factory school (FZU) in Saratov, where he studied to become a lathe-turner. Simonov had joined the factory school, against the wishes of his stepfather, who had wanted him to study at a higher institute or university – the educational trajectory typical of the old-world service class from which his parents came. But the teenage Simonov was excited by the vision of the new industrial society. He saw the proletariat as the new ruling class and wanted to join it. ‘It was the beginning of the Five Year Plan,’ recalls Simonov, ‘and I was swept along by its romantic spirit. I joined a club to discuss the Plan and its variants, which interested me far more than my studies at the secondary school. My stepfather was so cross that he barely spoke to me during my first year at the factory school.’93
The atmosphere at the factory school was militantly proletarian. Half the students came from workers’ families and the other half from children’s homes. As the son of a princess, Simonov was dangerously out of place, but he did his best to look the part, giving up the shorts and sandals of his early teenage years and donning a worker’s tunic and peaked cap in an effort to fit in. At the core of Simonov’s attraction to the proletariat was the notion of the independence of the working man: ‘The life of a fully grown man, as I saw it, only started on the day he began to work and bring money home. I wanted to be independent and earn my own living as soon as possible.’94 Of course, by joining the army of industrial workers, Simonov would also become independent from his family, whose noble background was sure to hold him back.
To support his studies at the factory school in Saratov, Simonov worked as an apprentice at the Universal Factory in the evenings. He assembled cartridges for the assault rifles produced by the huge munitions plant. By the spring of 1931, he was earning 15 roubles, a modest monthly wage, but an important contribution to the household budget, particularly after April, when his stepfather Aleksandr was arrested and Simonov became, at the age of fifteen, the sole breadwinner in the family.
Simonov ‘the proletarian’, 1933
The arrest was an orderly affair. The knock on the door came at ten o’clock in the evening. The family had already gone to bed, because Aleksandra had been feeling ill. Aleksandr would not let the police come into their barracks apartment until he had dressed. Konstantin awoke to find his stepfather reading the search warrant with a magnifying glass:
The search went on for a long time; they conducted it properly, going methodically through everything in both rooms, even looking at my factory school notebook on the technology of metals, at my notebooks from the seventh class, and leafing through my mother’s huge trove of letters – she loved to write a lot and liked all her relatives and friends to write a lot to her… When the men finished the search, tidied up the papers and letters and, it seems to me – though I may be mistaken – made some sort of list of the confiscated things, I thought that was the end of it. But then one of them took a paper from his pocket and handed it to Father. It was a warrant for his arrest. At that moment I did not think, though I later realized, that the arrest had been planned from the very start, regardless of the results of the search. It was hard to look at Mother. Although she had a strong character, it was clear that she was ill, she’d sat up all night with a high temperature and she was shaking all over. Father was calm. Having read the paper – again inspecting it with his magnifying glass, which he took out from the pocket of his vest – and having made quite sure that it really was an order for arrest, he briefly kissed mother, and told her that he would return when the misunderstanding had been sorted out. Without saying a word, he shook my hand firmly and left with the men who had arrested him.95
Like Aleksandr, Simonov believed that a misunderstanding had occurred. He must have known that many specialists had been arrested in Saratov, including several officers from the military school where his stepfather taught. But like most people who had lost a relative in the arrests, Simonov assumed that his stepfather had been arrested by mistake. ‘I thought that the others must be guilty of something, that they were enemies, but I did not connect them with my stepfather.’96 This distinction helped him to maintain his confidence in the Soviet system of justice, which was reinforced by the orderly behaviour of the OGPU officers, not just during the arrest of Aleksandr, but also during the arrest of his stepfather’s relative, Yevgeny Lebedev in Kremenchug, which Simonov had witnessed four years earlier.
On Aleksandra’s orders, Simonov informed his teachers at the factory school about the arrest. Not to report it would be cowardly, she said. Simonov was not expelled from the school, but he was advised to postpone his application to the Komsomol until his stepfather was released. Aleksandra and her son were evicted from their small apartment in the barracks. All their belongings were thrown on to the street – a table with some stools, two bookcases, a wardrobe, a bed and a trunk for officers from the First World War with a hammock in which Simonov had slept. It was pouring with rain. Neighbours took in Aleksandra, who was running a fever, while her son walked around the outskirts of Saratov, looking for a place for them to live. Having found a room to rent, he got a lorry- driver to help them move their things. All his life he would recall this day – when he took charge of his family – as the moment when he came of age.
I remember it without resentment, even with some measure of self-satisfaction, because I had proved that I could cope with anything. I had a sense of injury, but it was mainly for my mother… She could not forgive the people who were responsible for our eviction. No doubt it is because I felt her injury, when I was just a boy, that I still remember their names…97
Simonov’s response to his stepfather’s arrest was not to blame or question the Soviet regime, but to work even harder to support his family. Perhaps the arrest of his stepfather also reinforced his conviction that he needed to protect himself by strengthening his proletarian identity. Throughout that summer, Simonov continued to study in the day and to work by night at the factory. He was promoted to the second grade of apprentice workers and received a doubling of his wage, which was enough to support his mother and send two parcels every week to his stepfather in prison. Aleksandra earned some extra cash by teaching French and German at a secondary school. In the autumn Aleksandr was released from jail. ‘He hugged and kissed my mother. He even kissed me too, which was unusual,’ remembers Simonov. ‘Something in him had altered. At first I did not notice. But then I understood: his face was cold and white, not his usual sunburnt look.’98
Aleksandr did not speak about the tortures he had suffered in the jail. The only thing he would say was that all the charges against him had been withdrawn, because he had refused to confess, even under ‘severe pressure’. As Simonov recalls, the lesson that he learned from this affair was all about the need to remain firm:
Today [in 1978] I ask myself: did the events of that summer in Saratov leave any trace on my general approach to life, on my psychology as a fifteen– sixteen-year-old boy? Yes and no! With my stepfather things turned out as they should. He remained what he had always been – a model of clarity and conscientiousness – and the people who knew him were all convinced that he was innocent. And in those awful months, almost everybody with whom we had to deal was good to us – and that too was right, just what we would expect. Still, the story of my stepfather’s interrogation, which had ended as it should, because he was a very strong and solid person, left me with a feeling of unease, the feeling that a weaker person would have come out differently from this situation, because he would not have been able to withstand what he did. This alarming thought stayed in my mind… But above all, I sensed, perhaps unconsciously, that I had grown up, for I too had proved that I could cope in a crisis.99
The children of ‘kulaks’, no less than those of bourgeois or noble families, felt the pressure to conceal their social origins. They were widely banned from Soviet schools and universities, from the Pioneers and the Komsomol, from the Red Army and from many jobs. Their fear of exclusion was frequently reflected in a desperate urge to prove themselves as ‘Soviet citizens’ by distancing themselves from their families. In 1942, Wolfgang Leonhard, the twenty-year-old son of a German Communist who had come to Moscow in 1935, was deported to the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. He studied at a teacher-training college, where most of the students were ‘kulak’ children, who had been exiled to this semi-desert region in the early 1930s. They had suffered terribly as young children but had since been allowed to go to school. They were now about to become
