In the postwar effort to clean up the loose ends of Soviet society, the gypsies were by no means the only ones whom the authorities attempted to chasten. A few months after the Medvedevs came to Moldavia, in December 1947, the government devalued the currency in a sudden move to combat inflation before wartime rationing was ended. It was the peasants in places like Moldavia who were hardest hit. They had been free during the war to produce all the food they could and sell it on the open market. They had profited from the war and kept their bundles of rubles not in the banks but in their mattresses or some other spot at home where they thought they would be safe from confiscation. But now the old rubles had no value. The peasants were forced to turn them in at the rate of ten old rubles for one new one. Hardworking, industrious farmers were wiped out overnight. There was literally wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It was not the end of their troubles. Early one morning in the summer of 1949, Marina and her family were awakened by the sound of shrieking in the street. They ran out of doors to find women weeping and tearing their hair. “What kind of kulaks are we?” the women wailed. “Everything we had, we earned by our own sweat.” The Medvedevs did not know what happened. Then they learned that trucks full of Soviet soldiers had rumbled into the village during the night. Moving with unerring accuracy, the soldiers had stalked into the houses of the richer peasants; arrested all the men; seized the pigs, cattle, and household chattels; and told the women that the houses were no longer theirs. Some of the soldiers found it hard to carry out their orders in the face of so much misery, for they were from peasant families themselves. Marina heard one of them tell a weeping woman with sympathy in his voice: “Little mother, we’re not to blame. They told us to do it. We’re only following our orders.” However the soldiers may have felt, it was a fact that the long-dreaded dispossession of the kulaks, or rich peasants, had begun.
No one in Moldavia was unaffected, not even the Medvedevs. By this time they had moved to a bigger and better place, a solid house of stone with a wooden floor. Their landlord was a kulak. Both he and his son, the miller of Zguritsa, had been arrested and carried off in the night. Their house was converted into a health center for the district, their lands confiscated and turned over to a collective farm, or kholkhoz. To Marina it seemed unjust because she had loved their landlord and was sure the charges against him were untrue. Her mother agreed with her. The Medvedevs had to find another place to live, and Marina remembers that there was no gaiety in the village any more, only sadness.
She learned a lesson about another form of injustice in Zguritsa. The Russian residents of Moldavia, her own family among them, enjoyed privileges that were not granted to the natives. When Moldavia belonged to Rumania, everyone remembered life as rich and happy. Having seized the area on the eve of World War II, the Russians were there as colonists. They were on the top, and Moldavians were on the bottom. Nostalgia for the old order was keen and resentment of the Russian overlord deep.
The position of the Russians was less enviable than that of the Moldavians in only one way. They held most of the responsible jobs and were therefore much more exposed to political disaster. The fate of a Russian who fell out of favor was even more swift and brutal than the arrest and deportation of the Moldavian kulaks. A neighbor or a friend might suddenly disappear for no apparent reason. Some were exiled, some were shot in the rising tide of political purges of the late 1940s, just as the nightmare memories of the war were beginning to fade.
To the eyes and ears of a child, it was very puzzling. It had to do with “politics,” Marina learned at a very early age, and politics was something that was discussed only in whispers. If a child ran into the room during talk with even the faintest political overtones, he was told to go out and play. No one dared to take a chance of being overheard. Even the most innocent rumors could spell arrest and exile. In Archangel Marina had listened to angry words between her grandmother and her Uncle Ilya about politics. There was something mysterious, something political, about her stepfather’s past and the family’s move to Moldavia. Now she witnessed the unjust treatment of the Moldavians and saw Russian friends and neighbors sent to prison—all for politics. She grew to fear and hate the very word.
In one respect only were the horrors of politics mitigated, and that was because they were living in a provincial backwater. When someone was caught in the cruel fate—arrest, exile, even execution—that was becoming a more and more common occurrence, the rest of the community, far from shunning the children and relatives of the victim, pitched in and did what they could to help. The atmosphere of fear that was causing a kind of numbness among educated people and Communist Party professionals in the larger cities had not seeped down to out-of-the-way places like Zguritsa. Each time the blind mechanism of terror struck, the first thought was not, as it tended to be in the cities, “Next time it may be me.” People did not turn their backs out of fear of contamination. They were still human to one another, very often in touching ways. And whenever such misfortunes did occur, Marina’s mother was one of the kindest and most decent.
Marina was not yet six when she also became aware of injustice in her own home. Perhaps because of his old troubles in the army, or simply because he found life difficult, Alexander Medvedev started to drink. And his attitude toward Marina changed. She was expected to take care of Petya while her parents were at work, and one day she took him by the hand and led him to the kindergarten she was to attend that fall. The teacher allowed them to stay, and Klavdia was frightened when she came home to find her children missing. She soon traced them to the kindergarten, but that night Alexander struck them both as punishment. Marina remembers it as the first time Alexander ever hit her, and the last time he was to treat her equally with her brother.
Alexander grew increasingly critical of Marina. If she toyed with her food, he said harshly, “Who do you think you are—a princess? You’ll eat what’s set in front of you!” When she fell ill with whooping cough one winter, Alexander, annoyed by her constant bark, would snap: “For God’s sake, stop that.” They all slept in the same room, and when Marina coughed at night, Alexander scolded: “Be quiet. You’re not letting anybody get any sleep.” Alexander was afraid she would infect Petya, who shared the bed with her, and Marina at last realized that her father was drawing a line between her and Petya. For some reason that she did not understand, Petya meant more to him. And when Petya finally did catch whooping cough, Alexander made no secret of his anger. “You gave it to him,” he accused Marina.