On Mamayev Kurgan, a low, partly man-made hill in west Stalingrad, scene of some of the bitterest fighting, stands a monument to Mother Russia. It is a concrete statue 279 feet high depicting a woman brandishing a giant sword aloft, calling for vengeance, or victory. She is a young woman with strong arms and thighs, and she half-turns to call over her shoulder for her children to follow. She is Russia as a vengeful goddess, Russia as a consuming force of nature, demanding impossible sacrifices from her children as her right.
As the winter of 1942 closed in and the momentum of the German advance stalled in the ruins of Stalingrad, the authorities began rounding up the lost children and packing them into trucks heading north for Kuybishev, now Samara, on the Upper Volga. Mila was caught like the rest. She remembers a cold and crowded train, heading further north still, which delivered her and several thousand other lost children to a giant camp for orphans in Solikamsk, near Perm, in the foothills of the Urals.
Solikamsk was a world of human beings cast adrift by the war. The whole town, it seemed, had been swamped by orphaned children with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. The place was governed by what Lyudmila called ‘wolves’ laws’, the children fighting each other for survival. The older children would try to make the younger ones hide ten-gram pieces of meat from their lunchtime soup in their long knickers, and hand them over on the way out of the kitchens. If the younger children refused they’d ‘put you in the dark’ throw a blanket over you and beat you up. There were three shifts for lunch, the youngest children going first, with teachers patrolling to make sure the children ate their meat and didn’t hide it for the older ones. Lyudmila and the other children collected steppe grass, mixed it with salt and ate it. It helped their bodies’ craving for vitamins, and to stave off rickets. Mila’s stomach became distended from hunger, her legs thin as sticks.
There were moments of kindness. At the village school, the teacher would tell the village children not to eat their tiny fifty-gram pieces of lunchtime bread and to leave it for the orphans instead – even though the villagers were near starving too, living off bitter black radishes and tiny potatoes, the only crop the villagers could cultivate in the short Urals growing season.
When the summer of 1943 came, the children of Solikamsk were sent in their hundreds into the wild taiga, the marshes and forests around the town, to collect berries for wounded soldiers. Their quota was to collect half a bucketful each. Mila was terrified of falling into the deep, marshy water-holes concealed in the thick moss of the taiga. On one such expedition the children had to walk sixteen miles into the forests to find berrying areas which hadn’t been picked clean by the villagers. On the way back Mila, though only nine, led the huge crowd of children, hobbling in front despite her crippled leg and singing Young Pioneer songs. When they arrived back at the orphanage with their load of berries Mila’s eyes were deep red and filled with blood as a result of the physical stress. The wolves’ laws of Solikamsk had taught her one thing – that the only way for the physically weak to survive was to find a way of leading the rest by sheer force of character.
Dnepropetrovsk had fallen after a week’s battle. Lenina and the older orphanage children, just like her sister and millions of other refugees, made their way east by foot, in carts and trucks. Everywhere her work detachment stopped they dug fresh trenches and tank traps.
By early September of 1942, Lenina found herself in the Stavropol region, just beyond the furthest line of the German advance. Hitler had ordered that the push towards the Caucasus and the oilfields of Baku be suspended while all available forces were mobilized to the battle for Stalingrad, 300 miles to the north. Lenina was abandoned with a dozen other older children in a village and its neighbouring collective farm.
Lenina wasn’t much help on the farm because her hands were covered in sores, rubbed raw from digging and now painful and infected. One of the farm workers showed her how to drive a horse and cart full of produce from the fields to the barns, which was her job for the harvest season. One of the village women, an Armenian, offered Lenina extra food if she would scrub the wooden floors of her cottage clean with a brick of carbolic soap and a knife, and do odd jobs around the house. Lenina, as she told the story, cramped her fingers on her kitchen table to the length of the short, blunt knife the woman had given her to scrape the floor, and motioned rinsing her bandaged hands in the hot, soapy water.
As Lenina scrubbed and the woman cooked for her family, they talked. The woman told Lenina that she had been evacuated from Moscow. Lenina in turn told the woman her story, and how she too had relatives in Moscow. The housewife made Lenina an offer. If Lenina would go with her younger daughter to Moscow with some dried fruit for the market, she would buy the train tickets, which because of the war were only on sale to people with a Moscow registration stamp in their passports. Lenina, desperate to find her family now that she had been parted from Lyudmila, agreed. A week later, she and the woman’s daughter, loaded with eight bulging suitcases tied together in pairs with strips of cloth and stuffed to bursting with dried apricots, found space on a Moscow train and made their way, taking a detour far to the east of the Volga basin to avoid the fighting, to the capital.
At Kursky Station the girl’s Armenian cousins came to meet her and took the suitcases away from Lenina. They waved goodbye and disappeared into the Metro. Lenina walked the six miles to Krasnaya Presnya Street and found her grandmother’s old apartment from memory. It was empty. But some neighbours, who remembered Lenina from her last trip four years before, told her that her grandmother and cousins had been evacuated. They dug out the telephone number for where Lenina’s uncle Yakov was living and went to the public telephone in the street to call him. An hour later he arrived in his Air Force staff car and took Lenina to his apartment near Taganskaya Square.
Yakov was Boris’s elder brother. He shared Boris’s intense stare, his charisma, and his love of womanizing. In old age he became heavy set and jowly, but Yakov’s official retirement photograph, taken in 1969, shows a proud man, the chest of his Lieutenant-General’s uniform covered with medals. He looks a proud servant of the Motherland.
Like Boris, Yakov had excelled at school, been inspired by the Revolution and all that it stood for, and had become a committed Bolshevik. While his brother made a career in the Party, Yakov went into the fledgling Soviet Air Force. By the time of Boris’s arrest in 1937, Yakov was a Major-General, serving on the staff of Marshal Vasiliy Blucher, an old Civil War hero, commander of Russia’s Far East military district headquartered in Khabarovsk, near Russia’s Pacific coast. By October 1938 the Purge was spreading to the military. Blucher, an old comradein-arms of Trotsky’s, had a keen sense of how the political wind was blowing. He summoned his three deputies to his office and ordered them to go to Moscow at once, giving no explanation. Yakov went home immediately and, without stopping to pack, ordered his heavily pregnant wife Varvara on to the next train west.
Blucher was arrested a few days later, and died at the hands of the NKVD interrogators in the Lubyanka. Varvara gave birth on the train, but by leaving for Moscow the family successfully lost itself in the convoluted bureaucracy of the Purge. It was Stalin’s strange logic that millions of innocent family members of enemies of the people were arrested, while some of the Party’s top cadres survived the imprisonment of their closest relatives. The wife of Stalin’s Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, was sent to the camps, and the wife of the dictator’s personal secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev was shot. ‘We will find you a new wife,’ Stalin told his secretary nonchalantly.