to whom she could turn. Her mother’s sister lived in Khabarovsk, but only came to Vladivostok, where she had a dacha, in the summertime; her father’s family was in Leningrad. Zoia had enjoyed a sheltered childhood. Her mother did not work and had devoted herself to her only child. But now Zoia was forced to do everything for herself. She went to school. She cooked her meals on the little primus stove in the corridor of the communal apartment. With the help of her neighbours she sold off bits of the family inheritance (a gold watch, her mother’s silver ring, her father’s old binoculars and a camera, books and sculptures) to buy food and canteen meals in the factory near her house. Much of the money she raised this way was used to launch the appeal for the release of her father (accused of belonging to a ‘Trans-Pacific Counter-revolutionary Organization’), who sent her weekly letters from his jail in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky with complex instructions about obscure points of law and the recovery of bank accounts. Once a week she wrote back to her father with a report on his case; once a week she queued up overnight outside the jail in Vladivostok to hand in a parcel for her mother. Her father was impressed with the way she had grown up and responded to the family crisis. In May 1940, he wrote to his wife, who was by then in a labour camp near Iaia in Siberia:
I have received two letters from Zizika [Zoia]. I feel so bad for her but rejoice too over her success; she is flourishing and healthy – soon she will be seventeen, and she is completely independent. She is a clever girl and deserves praise for her bravery – she was not afraid to live entirely on her own at the age of fourteen. She has even come to enjoy it. I imagine her as a little mistress of the house, fully in command of her domestic and school affairs.17
Zoia Arsenteva, Khabarovsk, 1941
From Zoia’s perspective, coping on her own was not at all enjoyable. As she said years later, ‘One day Mama was arrested, the next day I began my adult life.’ In her letters to her parents she did not trouble them with the problems she faced. People posing as her parents’ friends tried to take advantage of her, offering to help her sell her precious items and keeping half the profits for themselves. In the spring of 1939, a genuine acquaintance of her mother, a secretary in the city Soviet, moved her things into Zoia’s room. She claimed that she was trying to protect her from having to share her living space with another family. But in fact, a few weeks later, the woman called for the police to arrest Zoia and take her to an orphanage, thus getting the room for herself. In the orphanage Zoia went on a hunger strike to protest against having been sent there. Eventually, through one of the workers in the orphanage, she made contact with her aunt from Khabarovsk, who had recently arrived to spend the summer at her dacha. Zoia stayed in the orphanage for three months, until her aunt managed to reclaim her room in the communal apartment and, on her sixteenth birthday, Zoia was allowed to return to it. She worked her way through the last year at school, studying at evening classes, and then attended the Railway Institute in Khabarovsk. In the winter of 1940, her father was sentenced to five years in a labour camp in Siberia, where he died in 1942. Her mother was released in 1944.18
Marksena Karpitskaia was thirteen when her parents, senior Party officials in Leningrad, were arrested on 5 July 1937. Marksena’s younger brothers were sent to different orphanages – the older Aleksei (who was ten) to a children’s home near Kirov, the younger Vladimir (who was five) to one in the Tatar Republic. Marksena was not taken to an orphanage because, like Zoia, she looked older than she was. Instead, she moved into a room in a communal apartment with her nanny, Milia, a simple peasant woman, who helped her and exploited her in equal measure. Like many children raised in Communist households in the 1920s, Marksena was brought up to be responsible from an early age. Her parents treated her as a ‘small comrade’ and put her in charge of her younger brothers. Now this training stood her in good stead:
Milia was with me, but I was in charge of everything, including the money. I paid Milia her salary, but then she began to steal from me, so I told her that I did not need her services any more. Still, I let her go on sleeping in my room, because she had nowhere else to stay.19
For a thirteen-year-old, Marksena was amazingly resourceful. She managed to survive by salvaging her parents’ personal possessions, which were sealed up in their flat on their arrest, and selling them through Milia in a commission shop, the last official remnant of the private market, where Soviet citizens could buy and sell their household goods. The key to this complex operation was the assistance of senior party official and family friend Boris Pozern (‘Uncle Boria’), at that time the Prosecutor for Leningrad Oblast, who had known Marksena since she was a little girl. Pozern sent a soldier to open up the flat so that Marksena could retrieve some money and take out things to sell: her father’s suit and shoes; her mother’s dress and a fur jacket; towels and sheets. ‘Uncle Boria’, who had risked his life to help the orphan girl, was arrested and shot in 1939.
Marksena stored these items in her room in the communal apartment. Piece by piece, if not sold off, they were gradually stolen by the neighbours in the other rooms. Then Milia moved her boyfriend into the room, until Marksena found the courage to kick the couple out and put a lock on the door. For the next three years, Marksena lived in the communal apartment on her own. She sold her last possessions through an aunt, who had barely dared to talk to her after the arrest of her parents, but who now jumped at the opportunity to help Marksena sell her property. The communal apartment where Marksena lived was situated in a deeply proletarian area of Leningrad; all her neighbours were factory workers. They knew that she was living on her own – an illegal situation for a minor to be in – but none reported her to the police (apparently, they were more interested in keeping her near so they could steal from her). Bullied at school by one of the teachers as the daughter of an ‘enemy of the people’, Marksena transferred to a different school, where the headteacher was more sympathetic and helped her to conceal her spoilt biography. In 1941, at the age of seventeen, Marksena graduated with top marks in all subjects. She enrolled as a student in the Faculty of Languages at Leningrad University. When the university was evacuated, in February 1942, she remained in Leningrad, working in the Public Library. Until the city was cut off by the German troops, she kept writing to her brother Aleksei in his orphanage. Aleksei returned to Leningrad, deeply damaged by the orphanage, in 1946. Her younger brother Vladimir disappeared without a trace.20
The Great Terror swelled the orphan population. From 1935 to 1941 the number of children living in the children’s homes of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine alone grew from 329,000 to approximately 610,000 (a number which excludes the children ‘lent out’ by the orphanages to Soviet farms and factories).21 Most children’s homes were little more than detention centres for homeless juveniles and runaways, young ‘hooligans’ and petty criminals, and the ‘strange orphans’ (as the writer Ilia Ehrenburg described them), who had lost their parents in the mass arrests of 1937–8. Conditions in these homes were so appalling that dozens of officials were moved to write to the authorities to express their personal distress at the overcrowding and the dirt, the cold and hunger, the cruelty and neglect, to which the children were systematically subjected. Children of ‘enemies of the people’ were singled out for harsh treatment. Like Marksena’s younger brothers, they were often sent to different children’s homes as part of a policy of breaking up the families of ‘enemies’. They were told to forget their parents and, if young enough, were given different names to forge a new identity. They often suffered bullying and exclusion, sometimes at the hands of the teachers and caretakers, who were afraid to show them tenderness, in case they were accused of sympathizing with ‘enemies’.22
After the arrest of their parents, Inessa Bulat and her sister Mella were sent to different children’s homes. Inessa, who was three, was taken to a home in Leningrad, while Mella, eleven, was sent to one near Smolensk. Both girls were constantly reminded that they were the daughters of ‘enemies of the people’ – their parents having been arrested in connection with the trial of Piatakov and other ‘Trotskyists’ in January 1937.* Inessa has no recollection of her childhood prior to the orphanage. But what she recalls from the two years she spent there left a deep scar on her consciousness:
Conditions there were terrible – I could not even go into the toilet: the floors were covered ankle-deep in liquid shit… The building faced a big red-brick wall. It felt like being trapped in a kind of hell… The head of the home would always say to me: ‘Just remember who your parents are. Don’t make any trouble: just sit quietly and don’t stick your spy’s nose into anything.’… I became withdrawn. I shut myself away. Later, I found it very difficult to lead a normal life. I had spent too long in the orphanage, where I had learned to
