teachers. As Leonhard notes, this brought about a complete change in their political identity:
Most of my fellow-students used to go home at the weekends. That is to say, they used to go to one of the [special] settlements which lay in the inner or outer environs of Karaganda. When they came back, they often spoke indignantly about their parents. ‘They still don’t understand anything at all!’ I often heard them say. ‘I’ve tried so often to explain to them why collectivization is justified, but the old people just never will understand it!’
These sons and daughters of the kulaks who had been exiled here as small children had in fact become Stalinists with the passage of time.100
Many ‘kulak’ children ended up as ardent Stalinists (and even made careers for themselves by joining the repressive organs of the state). For some the transformation involved a long and conscious process of ‘working on themselves’ that was not without its psychic costs. Stepan Podlubny is an example. Born in 1914 to a peasant family in the Vinnitsa region of western Ukraine, Stepan and his mother fled to Moscow in 1929, after his father had been exiled as a ‘kulak’ to Arkhangelsk. Stepan found a job as an apprentice in the factory school of the
13.9.1932: Several times already I have thought about my production work. Why can’t I cope with it painlessly? And in general, why is it so hard for me?… A thought that I can never seem to shake off, that saps my blood from me like sap from a birch tree – is the question of my psychology. Can it really be that I will be different from the others? This question makes my hair stand on end, and I break out in shivers. Right now, I am a person in the middle, not belonging to one side nor to the other, but who could easily slide to either.
Podlubny was constantly afraid that his origins would be exposed, that he would be denounced at work (a ‘snake pit’ filled with ‘enemies’), leading to his sacking and possible arrest. Eventually his ‘kulak’ origins were indeed discovered by OGPU, which told him it would not take action, provided he ‘continued to do good work for them’. It seems likely that Podlubny began to inform on his work colleagues. In his diary he confessed to feeling trapped – he was repulsed by his public persona and he clearly longed to ‘be himself’.
8.12.1932: My daily secretiveness, the secret of my inside – they don’t allow me to become a person with an independent character. I can’t come out openly or sharply, with any free thoughts. Instead I have to say only what everyone [else] says. I have to walk on an uneven surface, along the path of least resistance. This is very bad. Unwittingly I’m acquiring the character of a lickspittle, of a cunning dog: soft, cowardly, and always giving in.
The news that a fellow student had not been punished after he had been exposed as the son of a ‘kulak’ was greeted by Podlubny as a ‘historical moment’, suggesting as it did that he no longer needed to feel so stigmatized by his social origins. He embraced this personal liberation with joy and gratitude towards the Soviet government.
2.3.1935: The thought that I too can be a citizen of the common family of the USSR obliges me to respond with love to those who have done this. I am no longer among enemies, whom I fear all the time, at every moment, wherever I am. I no longer fear my environment. I am just like everybody else, free to be interested in various things, a master interested in his lands, not a hireling kowtowing to his master.
Six months later, Podlubny was accepted as a student at Moscow’s Second Medical Institute. He had always dreamed of studying at a higher institute, but knew his ‘kulak’ origins would be a stumbling block. The fact that the Komsomol at the
For many ‘kulak’ children, the urge to be recognized as Soviet, to become a valued member of society, had less to do with politics or personal identity than with drive and industry.
Antonina Golovina was a bright girl, full of energy and initiative, with a strong sense of individuality which she took from her father, Nikolai. At Shaltyr, she was the leader of the school brigade. She taught the other children how to read. On her way back to Pestovo, where she joined her father in 1934, the eleven-year-old girl made a firm resolution to ‘study hard and prove myself’.102 At her new school she was taunted and abused by the older boys as a ‘kulak daughter’ (there were many ‘kulak’ children in the school in Pestovo) and picked on by the teachers. One day, when the children were told off for misbehaving, Antonina was called up to the front of the class for a special reprimand by one of the senior teachers, who shouted that she and ‘her sort’ were ‘enemies of the people, wretched kulaks! You certainly deserved to be deported, I hope you’re all exterminated here!’ In her ‘Memoirs’ (2001) Antonina recalls the incident as the defining moment in her life. She felt a deep injustice and anger that made her want to shout back at the teacher in protest. Yet she was silenced by an even deeper fear about her ‘kulak’ origins.
Suddenly, I had this feeling in my gut that we [kulaks] were different from the rest, that we were criminals, and that many things were not allowed for us. Basically, as I now understand, I had an inferiority complex, which possessed me as a kind of fear that the regime might do anything to us, because we were kulaks, that we had no rights, and we had to suffer in silence.
After the incident with the teacher, a classmate called Maria, whose father had been arrested as a ‘kulak’, whispered to Antonina: ‘Listen, let’s write a letter of complaint about the old witch for calling us all these things!’ Antonina was afraid, so Maria wrote the letter for them both. She wrote that as children they were not to blame that their parents had been kulaks, and pleaded for the chance to prove themselves by studying hard. The two girls decorated the letter by drawing a New Year’s tree.* Antonina hid the letter in a bundle of laundry (her mother did the cleaning and washing for the school) and delivered it to the headmaster’s door. The headmaster sympathized with the two girls. He called them to his office and told them that ‘in secret he agreed with us, but that we were not to say a word to anyone’. Evidently, the teacher who had been so harsh to them was spoken to by him, because she later softened her approach. She even gave the girls parts to play in the school drama, which was all about the suffering of a peasant nanny (played by Antonina) in the home of a ‘kulak’ (Maria). Antonina writes in her memoirs:
At the end of my final monologue I had to say the words: ‘You have sucked the life from me, I now see, and I do not want to stay with you. I am leaving you to go to school!’ – and with these words I left the stage. There was thunderous applause. I had stepped into the role to such an extent that my indignation appeared genuine.103
Antonina threw herself into her studies. She loved school and did very well, appearing several times in the list of outstanding students (
