several months, before returning to Moscow, where she lived with the children and their grandfather in a series of rented rooms in a working-class suburb of the city. She believed that it would be safer there than in the centre of the capital where they had lived previously. It was generally the case that workers were less interested in the political background of their neighbours (they were more likely to be hostile towards them on class or ethnic grounds).10 To protect her grandchildren Nadezhda adopted them and changed their names. Every week she wrote long letters to their father (in the Solovetsky labour camp) and their mother (in the Temnikovsky camps) with details of their everyday routines:
25 January 1939.
… Oleg is eager to go to school. Grandpa gets him up at half past seven in the morning – he only has to say it’s time and he gets up. We put on the electric kettle and make fresh sandwiches with egg, fish, salami, and he washes it all down with a hot chocolate, coffee, tea or milk before he goes to school. He is very fussy with his food and does not eat a lot: half a roll and a glass of milk and he’s full. He wants only half a roll to take to school.11
Few of the details were actually true (there was no egg, fish or salami, as far as Oleg can recall, only bread and sometimes butter) but the letters gave his parents the comforting idea that family life was continuing as normal in their absence and would be there for them when they returned.
Oleg’s father Mikhail was a senior engineer. Before his arrest he had worked in the Ministry of Defence in Moscow. In 1940, he was transferred from Solovetsky to the Norilsk labour camp in the Arctic Circle, where expertise like his was badly needed for the building of the huge industrial complex, which would soon become the country’s main producer of nickel and platinum. As a specialist, Mikhail was allowed to receive parcels and write home once a week. By corresponding with Nadezhda, Mikhail had a good idea of Oleg’s state of mind, so that he could write to him with advice on his studies, reading, hobbies and his friends. ‘His letters were a profound influence on me,’ Oleg recalls.
I was guided by these letters perhaps even more than I would have been guided by my father if he had actually been there while I was growing up. Because I longed for a father, I tried to behave in a way that I imagined he would have approved of, at least as I knew him from his letters.
Oleg was fortunate to have this connection with his father. Letters were written proof of a parent’s love, something in which children could believe and which they could read as a sign of their parents’ innocence. Sometimes they contained a drawing or a line of poetry, a dried flower or even fragments of embroidery, which expressed feelings and emotions that could not be conveyed by censored words. Relationships were built on these fragments.12
In all his letters Mikhail pressed upon Oleg the need to be a ‘little man’.
25 August 1940.
My dear son, why have you not written to me for so long? I understand that you are on holiday… but I urge you to write at least one letter every five days… Put your drawings in with the letter and let Natasha write a little too… Never forget you are her protector. She is still very little and sometimes capricious, but you should talk sense to her. I have written many times that it is your duty as a man to protect Natasha, Granny and Grandpa, to make sure that they are safe, until my return. You are my second-in-command. You are the head of our little family. All my hopes depend on you.
Oleg and Natasha, 1940. The photograph was taken to send to Mikhail in Norilsk
Although only ten, Oleg felt that he became an adult when he received this letter. He felt responsible for Natasha, which made him view the world no longer as a child. In his own words, ‘I grew up overnight.’13
2
The Bushuevs, the Gaisters and the Vorobyovs were the lucky ones – they were rescued by their relatives. But the arrest of their parents left millions of other children on their own. Many ended up in orphanages – intended for those under the age of sixteen – but others roamed the streets begging or joined the children’s gangs, which controlled much of the petty crime and prostitution at railway stations, markets and other busy places in the big cities. It was largely to combat the mounting problem of child criminality that a law was passed in 1935 to lower the age of criminal responsibility to twelve. Between 1935 and 1940, the Soviet courts convicted of petty crimes 102,000 children between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Many ended up in the children’s labour colonies administered by the NKVD.14
Some children slipped through the system and were left to fend for themselves. Mikhail Mironov was ten years old when his parents were arrested in 1936. They were both factory workers from the Ukraine, Red partisans in the Civil War, who had risen through the ranks of the Party, first in Moscow and then in Leningrad, before their arrests. Mikhail’s sister Lilia had already left the family home in Leningrad to study medicine in Moscow. So Mikhail was alone. For a while, he lived with various relatives, but he was a burden to them all, factory workers struggling to survive with large families of their own. In September 1937, Mikhail was accepted as a student at the drawing school established by the House of Pioneers in Leningrad. His aunt Bela, who had taken care of Mikhail in the previous months, saw it as an opportunity to be rid of him, and sent him off to live in the student dormitory attached to the House of Pioneers. Mikhail lost all track of his father (who was shot in 1938) and never heard from his sister, who was afraid that she would be expelled from medical school if she revealed her spoilt biography by writing to her relatives. His only contact was with his mother, and he wrote to her often in the labour camps of Vorkuta. He was isolated and lonely, without friends or family, and in desperate need of a mother’s love (his letters often end with such sentiments as ‘I kiss you 1000000000 times’). In the spring of 1941, Mikhail was excluded from the drawing school – for lack of talent – and enrolled instead in a factory school. Expelled from the dormitory in the House of Pioneers, he found a room in a barracks. ‘It is very boring for me,’ the fifteen-year-old boy wrote to his mother in July. ‘There is no one here. Everyone has gone, and I am on my own.’ In September, as the German troops encircled Leningrad, Mikhail escaped to Moscow, but by the time he arrived there, his sister had already been evacuated to Central Asia with her medical institute. None of his other Moscow relatives would take him in, so Mikhail ended up by living on the street. He was killed in the battle for Moscow in October 1941.15
Mikhail Mironov and his drawings (extract from a letter to his mother)
Maia Norkina was thirteen when her father was arrested in June 1937. A year later, when the NKVD took her mother too, Maia was expelled from her school in Leningrad. Maia had a number of aunts and uncles in Leningrad, but none would take her in. ‘They were all afraid to lose their jobs,’ Maia explains. ‘Some were Party members – they were the most afraid and refused outright.’ Everyone expected that Maia would be taken to an orphanage. But no one came for her. So she continued living in the three rooms that belonged to her family in a communal apartment conveniently situated in the centre of the city. Her relatives, eager to hang on to the precious living space, moved in one of her uncles and registered him as a resident, although in fact he was never there, because he lived with his wife and children in another part of the city. ‘I was living on my own, completely independently,’ recalls Maia. The fourteen-year-old girl would borrow books from her old school- friends. She’d travel for an hour to her aunt’s for meals, or buy food with pocket money from her relatives; neighbours in the communal apartment sometimes gave her scraps of food. Every day she would stand in queues at the NKVD headquarters in Leningrad, hoping to hand in a parcel for her father; the officials took the parcels for a while and then told her that her father had been sentenced to ‘ten years without rights of correspondence’ (meaning – though she did not find this out for years – that he had been shot). To get a parcel to her mother, in the Potma labour camps, was even more onerous: it required her to stand in queues for two whole days and nights. Maia went on living this way until August 1941, when she turned eighteen and joined the People’s Volunteers for the defence of Leningrad. She had no formal schooling and had little other choice.16
Zoia Arsenteva was born in 1923 in Vladivostok. Her father, the captain of a steamship, was arrested on a trip to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on 25 November 1937; her mother was arrested in her home in Vladivostok on the same day. Zoia was not taken to an orphanage: although only fourteen, she looked older than her years. She was left to fend for herself in the communal apartment where her family had lived since 1926. She had no other relatives
