Gradually she overcame her fears. Having been accepted by the Komsomol, Elizaveta gained confidence. ‘For the first time in my life, I no longer felt like a black sheep,’ she recalls. She excelled in her studies, which gave her genuine authority among her schoolmates. She became an activist – the elected secretary of her Komsomol at school and then the secretary of the Komsomol in the district where she lived in Leningrad. Looking back, Elizaveta thinks that her activism saved her, granting her some measure of control:
When I joined the Komsomol and became one of ‘us’, when I mixed with my contemporaries and became their leader, I was no longer so afraid. I could go and fight their cause, negotiate for them with the authorities. Of course, I was also fighting for myself, because, by appearing strong, I could keep my own fear in check.39
For ‘kulak’ children, who grew up in ‘special settlements’ and other places of exile, embracing the Soviet cause was the only way to overcome the stigma of their birth. By the late 1930s, many of the children exiled with their ‘kulak’ parents had reached the age of adulthood. The NKVD was inundated with petitions from these teenagers asking to be released from exile and rehabilitated into Soviet society. Some wrote official statements renouncing their families. During the early 1930s, only a very few appeals were successful: some ‘kulak’ daughters were allowed to leave their places of exile to marry men with the full rights of a Soviet citizen, but otherwise the view of the government was that the return of ‘kulak’ children would contaminate and demoralize society. However, from the end of 1938 there was a change of policy, with a new emphasis on the reforging and rehabilitation of ‘kulak’ children. At the age of sixteen they were now allowed to leave their places of exile and regain their civil rights – provided they renounced their family.40
Dmitry Streletsky was one such ‘kulak’ child. Born in 1917, in the Kurgan region, he was exiled with his family to a ‘special settlement’ near Chermoz in the northern Urals during collectivization. Growing up in the settlement, Dmitry felt the stigma of his ‘kulak’ origins acutely. ‘I felt like an outcast,’ he recalls. ‘I felt that I was not a complete human being, that I was somehow blemished and made bad because my father was exiled… I did not feel guilty, like an enemy, but I did feel second-rate.’ Education was his way out: ‘“Study, study, children!”, Father always said. “Education is the one good thing that Soviet power can give you.”’ And Dmitry studied. He was the first boy from the settlement to complete the tenth class at the school and was rewarded for his industry by being admitted to the Komsomol in 1937. ‘Proud and happy’ to be recognized at last as an equal, he soon became an activist. Dmitry identified his own progress with the ideals of the Party. He saw the Party as a higher form of community, a ‘comradeship of fair-minded, first-rate people’, in which he could find his salvation. On his father’s advice, Dmitry paid a visit to the NKVD commandant of the ‘special settlement’ and asked for help to continue his studies at a university. Commandant Nevolin was a decent type. He felt sorry for the bright young man, whose success at school was already known to him, and he clearly saw him as someone worth helping. Nevolin gave Dmitry a passport and 100 roubles, more than twice the monthly wage in the ‘special settlement’, and sent him to Perm with a letter of recommendation from the NKVD, which enabled him to enrol as a physics student at the university.
Dmitry never tried to hide his ‘kulak’ origins. He declared them in the questionnaire he filled out on entering the university and as a result he was bullied by the other students. He finally left, thinking that the farther he ran the more likely he was to find a place where he could study without being held back by his past. First he enrolled at the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute; then he moved even further east to Omsk, where he became a student at the Agricultural Institute. But here too his origins came back to haunt him. Six weeks into the first term, Dmitry was called in by the dean and told he had to leave the institute: they had received orders to expel the children of ‘kulaks’, priests and other ‘alien social elements’. Despondently, he resolved to return to the Kurgan region, where he still had some relatives. Other than returning to the ‘special settlement’, he had nowhere else to go. Dmitry went to see his old teacher in the village school where he had studied as a boy, before being sent into exile. The teacher remembered him and invited him to work as a physics tutor in the school. Dmitry had no degree from a higher institute, but in truth the only qualification he really required was a sound knowledge of Stalin’s history of the Party, the
Physics teacher Dmitry Streletsky (seated far right) with schoolboys of the seventh class in the Chermoz ‘special settlement’, September 1939. The director of the school, Viktor Bezgodov, is standing on the right
Despite all his suffering at the hands of the Soviet regime, Dmitry was a Soviet patriot, he believed fervently in the justice of the Party’s cause, and wanted desperately to become a part of it. ‘I dreamed of joining the Party,’ he explains.
I wanted to be recognized as an equal human being, that is all I wanted from the Party. I did not want to join for my career. For me the Party was a symbol of honesty and dedication. There were honest, decent people who were Communists, and I thought I deserved to be counted among them.
It was a huge disappointment when he was turned down for Party membership in 1945 (recounting the episode sixty years later, his hands shake and he finds it hard to speak from emotion). But after 1956, when the Party tried to attract members from the groups which Stalin had repressed, he was at last admitted to the comradeship of equals he had yearned to join for over twenty years.41
4
Zinaida Bushueva was sentenced to eight years in the ALZhIR Labour Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland near Akmolinsk in Kazakhstan. After five years in the camp she was transferred from the inner prison zone to the surrounding settlement, where conditions were better, and families could sometimes join the prisoners. Zinaida wrote to her mother in Molotov. Although she was desperate to be reunited with her two daughters, Angelina and Nelly, Zinaida did not want to ‘spoil their lives’ by subjecting them to the hardships of camp life. In Molotov, however, there were chronic shortages of food. It was a city overcrowded by evacuees from the war-torn Soviet territories, and families like the Bushuevs, ‘enemies of the people’ who had no food ration or allotment, were in dire straits. Zinaida’s mother decided it was best to reunite the girls with their mother. She could not imagine that conditions in the camp could be any worse than they were in Molotov.
To get the children to ALZhIR they first had to be given to an orphanage: once they had been made wards of the state, Zinaida could appeal for their transfer to the labour camp. After three months at the orphanage, Angelina and Nelly were collected by their grandmother and taken on the train journey from Molotov to Kazakhstan, arriving in Akmolinsk late one January evening. Zinaida came to meet them at the station, where she found them sitting on the platform sheltering themselves from a snowstorm. She was dressed in a quilted jacket, trousers and felt boots, the standard winter clothes of a prisoner. When Nelly, who was nine, saw her mother, she ran up to her and flung her arms around her neck. But Angelina, who was only two when she had last seen her mother, was too young to remember her. She recoiled in fear. ‘That’s not my mama,’ Angelina said. ‘That’s just a peasant uncle (
Left: Zinaida with her brothers, 1936. Right: Zinaida (centre) in ALZhIR, 1942. A rare private photograph of Gulag prisoners, it was taken to send to relatives. The three women were photographed together to reduce the costs
ALZhIR was the largest of the three labour camps in the Gulag system exclusively for female prisoners
