the mid-1930s, a period which has often been regarded as the calm before the storm of 1937–8 (the poet Anna Akhmatova called the middle thirties the ‘vegetarian years’). For those whose lives were devastated by the Great Terror, that view of the mid-thirties may be true. But for millions of people whose families were scattered in the Gulag’s labour camps and colonies, these years were as bad as any other.
Reading the letters of these prisoners to their relatives at home (letters that were written with censorship in mind), it is striking how the Gulag changed the values and priorities of so many of these prisoners – particularly the ‘politicals’, who had sacrificed so much for their ideals. Where before they might have looked for happiness in their career, or in the promise of a Communist utopia, years of living in a prison camp or exile forced them to rethink and place greater value on the family.
Tatiana Poloz (nee Miagkova) was born in 1898 to the family of a barrister in the Borisoglebsk region of Tambov province. Her mother, Feoktista, the daughter of a priest, was a member of the Social Democratic Party who sided with the Bolsheviks when they split with the Mensheviks in 1903; she encouraged Tatiana to enter politics. In 1919, Tatiana joined the Bolshevik Party and took part in propaganda work behind the lines of Denikin’s White Army on the Southern Front in the Civil War. It was there that she met her husband, Mikhail Poloz, a leading member of the Borotbists (Socialist Revolutionaries), the only Ukrainian party with a mass peasant following, who at that time was serving in the Military Council of the Ukrainian independent government. At the end of the Civil War, the Borotbists merged with the Bolsheviks, the Ukraine was brought under Soviet rule, and Poloz became the Ukraine’s political representative (
Three years later, Tatiana was exiled to Astrakhan, and then, in 1929, to Chelkar in Kazakhstan. She was accused of being an active oppositionist, with links to the Smirnov group, an important faction of the Left Opposition led by Trotsky until the expulsion of its leaders from the Party in 1927. In the autumn of 1929, Mikhail visited Tatiana in Kazakhstan. He pleaded with her to renounce her opposition politics for the sake of their daughter, who was then living with her grandmother. At one point, according to a fellow oppositionist who was also exiled in Chelkar, Mikhail whispered something in her ear: ‘It was some sort of secret information that left her utterly despondent and defeated.’ Perhaps Mikhail had told her that Smirnov and his group had been negotiating a capitulation with the Stalinist authorities in the hope of being reinstated in the Party. On 3 November 1929, an article by Smirnov appeared in
In 1930, the family moved from Kharkov to Moscow, where Poloz became Deputy Chairman of the All- Union Soviet Budget Commission, while Tatiana worked as an economist in the automobile industry. They lived with Tatiana’s mother, Feoktista, and a housekeeper, in a large apartment in the House on the Embankment, the prestigious block of flats for government workers opposite the Kremlin, although, as romantic revolutionaries who had always lived for their ideas, the family did not attach much importance to their privileged lifestyle. Tatiana kept to her Trotskyist position, against the wishes of both her husband, who insisted that opposition to Stalin was futile, and her mother, who was a convinced Stalinist. In 1933, Tatiana was rearrested, along with the rest of the Smirnov group, and sentenced to three years in a special isolation prison camp in Verkhneuralsk in the Urals. Mikhail was arrested a few months later, in 1934, convicted of attempting to establish a Ukrainian bourgeois government and sentenced to ten years at the Solovetsky labour camp. Evicted from the House on the Embankment, Rada and her grandmother moved to a furnished apartment in the outskirts of Moscow, where they were joined by Rada’s aunt Olga, whose husband had been arrested three years earlier, and their son Volodia. Feoktista ‘tried to teach me to respect and love my parents,’ recalls Rada.
But at the same time she expected me to love and respect Soviet power. It was not an easy task, but somehow she managed it. Grandmother sincerely believed that Stalin did not know about the scale of the arrests… She thought that there were so many enemies of Soviet power that it was hard for the authorities to work out which ones were guilty. In our house one often heard the expression, ‘You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.’122
The Poloz family, 1934: Rada is standing between her aunt Olga and her grandmother, Feoktista. The boy is Olga’s son Volodia
Between 1933 and June 1936, Tatiana wrote 136 letters to Feoktista and Rada, an average of one letter every week. This is one of the largest surviving collections of private letters from the Gulag.123 The early letters reflect Tatiana’s political preoccupations. She asks for Marx’s writings to be sent. She comments in detail on the latest political events. In June 1934, for example, Tatiana’s letters were full of praise for the crew of the
Pride in being a Soviet citizen was probably never as all-embracing and intense as it is today. Pride in the ‘good qualities’ of the Soviet people, in the fine Soviet aeroplanes, in the good Soviet scientists and sailors and all the rest, pride in Bolshevism, which showed the supreme power of its ideas and organization on those icebergs. And what power that must have for the education of children!
Rada’s political education was a constant concern in these letters. ‘Mama was always writing about how Communism should be built,’ recalls Rada.
She wanted me to become an engineer and a writer… And her letters had an influence on me. Although I was brought up by my grandmother, I liked to think that, through these letters, I was being brought up by my mother too.124
Tatiana wanted Rada to grow up as a Communist. She spilled a sea of ink on commentaries about her behaviour at home (which she said she had read about ‘in the newspapers’ to avoid revealing Feoktista as her source).
12 June 1935
And how are our household duties going, my little monkey? In the newspapers they write that you do your household chores without much pleasure and often forget what has to be done. But they also write other things. I read this telegram in
The longer Tatiana remained in prison, the more her letters were preoccupied by family relationships. Mikhail was not allowed to write to Moscow, but he was allowed to correspond with Tatiana, whose letters thus became the only means of information for Rada about her father, and for Mikhail about his daughter. Reflecting on her mother’s letters, Rada believes that they allowed Tatiana to maintain the family connections she needed to survive. They were ‘full of optimism’, Rada
Letter (extract) from Tatiana to Rada, 12 June 1935
writes in her memoirs; ‘she was always reminding us that time was passing, and was always looking forward to the happy time when the family would be together once again’. Many of Tatiana’s prison letters came with little gifts – rag dolls, toy animals and even clothes – which she had made for Rada in the prison camp.125
