was somehow wrong to join. She remembers feeling a sense of guilt towards her parents, as if she had betrayed them, although, as it turned out, she was not called upon to renounce them. Still, she felt awkward about taking part in Komsomol propaganda, and, as she recounts, ‘only made a show of singing in praise of Stalin, mouthing words I did not quite believe’. At the root of her discomfort was her instinctive sense that her parents had been wrongly arrested (she even wrote to Stalin to protest in 1939), a conviction that conflicted with the political identity she had to adopt to survive and advance. As a member of the Komsomol, Maria was able to enroll at the Polytechnic Institute of Leningrad, a leading science university seldom attended by children of the ‘enemies of the people’.34
Millions of children grew up in the grey area between the Soviet system and its ‘enemies’, constantly torn by competing loyalties and contradictory impulses. On the one hand, the stigma of a tainted biography reinforced their need to prove themselves as fully equal members of society, which meant conforming to Soviet ideals, joining the Komsomol and perhaps the Party too. On the other, these children could not help but feel alienated from the system that had brought such suffering on their families.
Zhenia Yevangulova had mixed emotions following the arrest of her parents in the summer of 1937. She was nineteen years old, she had just finished school, and now her chance of going on to study in Moscow was dashed. Instead she went to live with her father’s uncle, a retired professor of metallurgy in Leningrad, who helped her to get into the Workers’ Faculty (
There were moments when she struggled to break free of her parents, to enjoy herself with the other students, to move on with her life. But these brief moments of happiness were always followed by feelings of guilt when she recalled her parents in the camps. Shortly after the arrest of her father, Zhenia had had a dream in which her father reappeared as an aggressor. It continued to haunt her:
My father appeared from the mist of an adjoining room, pressed his pistol to my heart and shot. There was no physical pain, only the sensation that I had failed to stop him… And then I noticed that my chest was soaked in blood.
While at the institute, she went skating with her friends one evening and felt happy for the first time in many months. But that night she again saw her father in the dream and the next morning she awoke with a ‘heavy feeling of depression’.35
Looking back on their teenage years, many of these ‘strange orphans’ recall that there was a moment – a moment they had all hoped for – when the stigma of repression was at last lifted and they were recognized as ‘Soviet citizens’. This desire for social acceptance was felt by nearly all the children of the ‘enemies of the people’. There were few who turned their backs on the Soviet system or became opposed to it.
For Ida Slavina, that moment of acceptance came in the summer of 1938, shortly after the arrest of her mother (her father was taken in 1937). She was invited by her physical education teacher to take part in a school parade. Ida was an athlete, tall and fit. She had participated in school marches as an athlete and gymnast since the age of fourteen, but after the arrest of her father she had been excluded from the parade team. In her memoirs (1995) she recalls her joy on being readmitted to the parade team as a gymnast- parachutist for a demonstration on the theme ‘On Land and Sea and in the Sky’ to celebrate the achievements of Soviet sport:
‘On Land and Sea and in the Sky’ gymnastic demonstration, 1938: Ida is in the middle of the back row
I remember the surprise of my interviewers,* when they recognized me in a photograph among a group of athletes at the parade. How, they asked, could I bring myself to go on a parade when my mother had only just been sent to a labour camp? Thinking back, I recognize the egoism of youth, of course; I was sixteen, I couldn’t stand to be unhappy, I longed for happiness and love. But there was more to it than that. Joining the parade was also an expression of my deep desire to feel whole again in my shattered world. To feel again the sensation of being part of an enormous ‘We’. Marching in columns, with everybody else, singing the proud song, ‘We Have No Borders’, it seemed to me that I was indeed a fully equal representative of my Motherland. I was filled with the belief [in the words of the song] that we would ‘carry our Soviet banner over worlds and centuries’. I was with everyone! My friends and teachers once again believed in me – and that meant, or so I thought, that they must also believe in my parents’ innocence.36
For most teenagers it was their admission to the Komsomol that symbolized their transition from children of an ‘enemy of the people’ to ‘Soviet citizens’. Galina Adasinskaia was seventeen when her father was arrested in February 1938. Galina’s parents were active oppositionists and there was no expectation that she would become a member of the Communist youth organization. Exiled with her mother from her native Leningrad to Iaroslavl, Galina felt acutely the stigma of repression and tried to overcome it by applying to the Komsomol nonetheless. She wrote to the Komsomol committee at her school, asking them, as she put it, to ‘look into my case’ (i.e. to examine her appeal to join in the light of her father’s arrest). There was in this, as she admits, a conscious element of self- purging, an open declaration of her ‘spoilt biography’ in the hope of forgiveness and salvation by the collective. At the Komsomol meeting to discuss her appeal, the leaders ruled that Galina ‘should be disqualified from membership as an enemy of the people’. But one of her classmates protested, and threatened that all the students would leave if Adasinskaia was excluded. ‘The Party instructor became red with rage,’ recalls Galina:
He sat there on his stool and began to shout: ‘What is this? A provocation! Lack of vigilance!’ But I was allowed to join the Komsomol. I was even elected as the class organizer and our organization took first place [in the socialist competition] at school.
For Galina this was the moment she was brought back into the collective fold. When she herself was arrested in 1941, she recalls, ‘my investigator’s eyes practically fell out when he saw my Komsomol record’.37
The renunciation of family traditions and beliefs was usually the sacrifice required for entry into Soviet society. Liuba Tetiueva was born in 1923, the fourth child in the family of an Orthodox priest in the town of Cherdyn, in the northern Urals. Liuba’s father, Aleksandr, was arrested in 1922 and held in prison for the best part of a year. After his release he was put under pressure by OGPU to become an informer and write reports on his own parishioners, but he refused. When his church was taken over by the
Growing up in Solikamsk, Liuba was brought up to ‘know her place’.
Mama constantly reminded me that I was the daughter of a priest, that I should be careful not to mix with people, not to trust them, or to speak with them about my family. My place was to be modest. She used to say: ‘Others are allowed but you are not.’
The family was very poor. Klavdiia worked as an instructor in
