factory,’ Liza told Olga,
and our little girl Zoia would stand up and sing in her silk dress with her Pioneer’s tie, and my husband would say to me, ‘There’s not a girl in the world who is better than our Zoia. She’s going to be an Artist of the People when she grows up.’ Then I would remember how I had tramped from door to door as a child… and I loved our Soviet government so much that I would have given up my life for it.
Liza’s husband was arrested as a supporter of Zinoviev (‘If I had known that he had betrayed Lenin, I would have throttled him with my own hands,’ Liza said). Then she was arrested too. One day Liza got a letter from Zoia. It arrived late, on a Saturday, the day allotted for the prisoners to write, just as Liza was writing to Zoia:
Dear Mama, I’m fifteen years old now and I’m planning to join the Komsomol. I have to know whether you are guilty or not. I keep thinking, how could you have betrayed our Soviet power? After all, we were doing so well, and you and Papa were both workers. I remember how well we lived. You used to make us silk dresses and buy us sweets. Did you really get money from ‘them’ [‘enemies of the people’]? You’d have done better to let us go around in cotton frocks. But maybe you are not guilty after all? In that case I won’t join the Komsomol and I’ll never forgive them on your account. But if you’re guilty, then I won’t write to you any more, because I love our Soviet government and I hate its enemies and I will hate you if you are one of them. Mama, tell me the truth. I’d rather you weren’t guilty, I wouldn’t join the Komsomol. Your unhappy daughter, Zoia.
Liza had already used up three of the four allotted pages of her letter to Zoia. She thought for a moment and then wrote on the final page in big capital letters:
ZOIA, YOU ARE RIGHT. I AM GUILTY. JOIN THE KOMSOMOL. THIS IS THE LAST TIME I AM GOING TO WRITE TO YOU. BE HAPPY, YOU AND LIALIA. MOTHER.
Liza showed the correspondence to Olga, and then banged her head on the table. Choking on her tears, she said: ‘It is better she hates me. How would she live without the Komsomol – an alien? She would hate Soviet power. It is better she hates me.’ From that day, recalls Olga, Liza ‘never said a word about her daughters and did not receive any more letters’.144
For many children the arrest of a close relative raised all sorts of doubts. All the principles they had believed as ‘Soviet children’ were suddenly in conflict with what they knew of the people they loved.
When her father was arrested as a ‘Trotskyist’, Vera Turkina did not know what to believe. Her mother and grandmother both accepted Aleksandr’s guilt. There were reports in the Soviet press about the criminal activities of her father, who was a well-known Bolshevik in Perm. Wherever Vera went, she heard people whispering about her, the daughter of an ‘enemy of the people’, behind her back. ‘My father became a source of shame,’ Vera remembers.
People said to me that if he had been arrested, then he must be guilty of something. ‘There is no smoke without fire,’ everybody said. When my mother went to ask about my father at the NKVD offices, they told her: ‘Wait and see, he will confess to everything.’ I too assumed that he must be guilty. What else was I to believe?145
Elga Torchinskaia was a model Soviet schoolgirl. She loved Stalin, venerated Pavlik Morozov and believed in the propaganda about ‘spies’ and ‘enemies’. She still thought this way when her father was arrested in October 1937. A veteran Bolshevik increasingly opposed to Stalin’s policies, he had never talked to her about his political opinions. In the Torchinsky household in Leningrad, as in many families, politics was not a subject for discussion in the presence of children. Elga thus had no perspective on the mass arrests beyond the one she had learned in school – she had no other way to understand the reasons for the arrest of her father, no way of her own to question why it had happened. In 1938, two of Elga’s uncles were arrested. One of them returned from the labour camps in 1939 and told Elga awful stories about his torture by the NKVD. Even this could not shake Elga from her conviction that if someone was arrested, it ‘must have been for something he had done’. In 1939, when she turned sixteen, Elga applied to join the Komsomol. In her application she declared that her father was an ‘enemy of the people’, and falsely claimed that he was divorced from her mother. Her declaration was a renunciation of sorts, but, as Elga now admits, she was confused at the time, she was afraid to question anything and it was from ignorance that she rejected him. ‘We were all zombies – that is what I think. My God, we were just young girls. We had been educated by the Komsomol. We believed everything we were told.’146
The silence, the lack of any news or information, exacerbated a family’s uncertainty. Without word from the arrested person or anything to prove his innocence, relatives had nothing to cling to, nothing to oppose the public assumption of guilt.
Nina Kosterina was the daughter of a long-time Bolshevik. She had a model Soviet childhood, joining the Komsomol at the end of 1936, just as the first tremors of the Terror began to register on her political consciousness. When her uncle was arrested, Nina struggled to make sense of the event. She wrote in her diary on 25 March 1937:
Something frightful and incomprehensible has happened. They say that Uncle Misha was involved with some counter-revolutionary organization. What is going on? Uncle Misha – a member of the Party from the very first days of the Revolution – and suddenly an enemy of the people!
When their landlord was arrested, Nina wondered how she would react if the arrests came closer to home:
Something strange is happening. I thought and thought, and came to the conclusion: if my father also turns out to be a Trotskyist and an enemy of his country, I shall not feel sorry for him! I write this, but (I confess) there is a gnawing worm of doubt.
In December 1937, Nina’s father was expelled from the Party and dismissed from his official position. Anticipating his arrest, he wrote to Nina to warn her: ‘you must be sure that your father was never a scoundrel… and has never blemished his name by anything dirty or base’. The letter played a crucial role: although confused and in despair, Nina was able to cling to the belief in her father’s innocence when he was finally arrested, in September 1938. As she noted in her diary:
September 7
What an ominous darkness has shrouded my whole life. Father’s arrest is such a blow… Until now I have always carried my head high and with honour, but now… Now Akhmetev [a classmate] can say to me, ‘We’re comrades in misfortune!’ And just to think how I despised him and despised his father, a Trotskyist. The nightmare thought oppresses me day and night: is my father also an enemy? No, it cannot be, I don’t believe it! It’s all a terrible mistake!
Nina’s father spent two years in prison waiting for his ‘trial’ by a troika, which sentenced him to five years in a labour camp as a ‘socially dangerous element’. In November 1940, he wrote his first letter home. Nina was touched by the beauty of the letter, in which she felt the spirit of her father, his ‘strength and freshness’, despite the hardships of the camp. But her mother was annoyed and merely asked: ‘Is he guilty, or is he not guilty? If he’s innocent, why doesn’t he appeal against the sentence?’ The next letter effectively answered her mother’s question. ‘There is nothing more to be said about my case,’ Nina’s father wrote. ‘There is no case, only a soap bubble in the shape of an elephant. I cannot refute what is not, was not, and could never have been.’147
The disappearance of a father and a husband placed enormous strain on families. Wives renounced husbands who had been arrested, not necessarily because they thought their spouses might be ‘enemies of the people’, although they may have had that thought, but because it made survival easier and gave protection to their families (many husbands for this reason advised wives to renounce them). The state put pressure on the wives of ‘enemies’ to renounce their husbands publicly. Failure to do so could have serious consequences. Some women were arrested as the ‘wives of enemies’ and sent to labour camps, with or without their children. Others were evicted from their homes, dismissed from jobs, deprived of rations and civil rights. Financial pressures were applied as well: salaries were docked, savings frozen and rents raised. To encourage women to renounce their husbands, the cost of a divorce, which normally would set a couple back 500 roubles, was reduced to just 3 roubles (the price of a canteen meal) in cases of divorce from a prisoner.148
It took extraordinary resilience, and not a little bravery, for women to resist these pressures and stand by their husbands. Irina and Vasily Dudarev had been married for nearly fifteen years when Vasily was arrested in
