322 Elena Lebedeva with her granddaughters, Natalia and Elena Konstantinova, Ak-Bulak, 1940
323 Veronika Nevskaia and her great-aunt Maria, Kirov region, 1939
325 Inna Gaister with her sisters Valeriia and Natalia, Moscow, 1939
328 Oleg and Natasha Vorobyov, 1940
330 Left: Mikhail Mironov. Right: extract from a letter to his mother
332 Zoia Arsenteva, Khabarovsk, 1941
334 Marksena Karpitskaia, Leningrad, 1941
337 Girls from Orphanage No. 1, Dnepropetrovsk, 1940
346 ‘On Land and Sea and in the Sky’ gymnastic demonstration, 1938
351 Elizaveta Delibash, 1949
355 Physics teacher Dmitry Streletsky with schoolboys of the seventh class in the Chermoz ‘special settlement’, September 1939
357 Left: Zinaida Bushueva with her brothers, 1936. Right: Zinaida in the ALZhIR labour camp, 1942
359 Children at ALZhIR, 1942
361 Embroidered towel (detail) made by Dina Ielson-Grodzianskaia for her daughter Gertrud in the ALZhIR labour camp
365 Ketevan Orakhelashvili with Sergei Drozdov and their son Nikolai, Karaganda
370 Zhenia Laskina and Konstantin Simonov on their honeymoon in the Crimea, 1939
375 Valentina Serova, 1940
389 Natalia Gabaeva with her parents, 1934
391 Anastasia with Marianna and Georgii Fursei, Arkhangelsk, 1939
403 Serova and Simonov on tour, Leningrad Front, 1944
406 Aleksei and Konstantin Simonov, 1944
407 Simonov in 1941
409 Simonov in 1943
425 Ivan Bragin and his family, 1937
451 Antonina Mazina with her daughter Marina and Marina Ilina, Chimkent, 1944
456 The Bushuev ‘corner’ room in the communal apartment at 77 Soviet Street, Perm, 1946–8
474 Inna Gaister with two friends at Moscow University, 1947
476 Nelly and Angelina Bushueva, 1953
477 Leonid Saltykov, 1944
481 Valentina Kropotina and her husband, Viktor, 1952
483 Simonov in 1946
495 Fadeyev at the Writers’ Union, 22 December 1948
500 Aleksandr Borshchagovsky, 1947
504 Simonov at the Congress of Soviet Writers in the Belorussian Republic, Minsk, 1949
507 Simonov in 1948 (left) and in 1953 (right)
514 Samuil and Berta Laskin, Sonia Laskina, Aleksei Simonov and Zhenia Laskina circa 1948
517 Zhenia and Sonia Laskina at Vorkuta, 1952
524 Stalin’s body lies in state in the Hall of Columns, Moscow, March 1953
527 Mourning ceremony at the Gorky Tank Factory in Kiev, 6 March 1953
539 The Laskin family at their Ilinskoe dacha near Moscow, 1956
543 Valentin Muravsky with his daughter Nina, Karaganda, Kazakhstan, 1954
546 Marianna Fursei with Iosif and Nelly Goldenshtein, Tbilisi, 1960
551 Aleksandr Ságatsky and Galina Shtein, Leningrad, 1956
554 Fruza Martinelli, 1956
556 Left: Esfir and Ida Slavina in 1938. Right: Esfir in 1961
557 Liuba Golovnia after her return from ALZhIR, Moscow, 1947
564 Vladimir Makhnach, 1956
568 Elena Konstantinova, her mother Liudmila, her grandmother Elena Lebedeva, and her sister Natalia, Leningrad, 1950
569 Nina and Ilia Faivisovich outside their house, near Sverdlovsk, 1954
573 Sonia Laskina’s certificate of release from the Vorkuta labour camp
592 Simonov with his son Aleksei, 1954
600 Zinaida Bushueva with her daughter Angelina and her son Slava, 1958
602 The grave of Nadezhda’s father, Ignatii Maksimov, Penza, 1994
603 Tamara and Kapitolina Trubina, 1948
609 Simonov and Valentina Serova, 1955
617 Aleksei and Konstantin Simonov, 1967
620 Mother Russia, part of the Mamaev Kurgan War Memorial complex in Volgograd
627 Simonov in 1979
631 Ivan Korchagin, Karaganda, 1988
632 Mikhail Iusipenko, Karaganda, 1988
638 Norilsk, July 2004
640 Vasily Romashkin, 2004
642 Leonid Saltykov, 1985
643 Vera Minusova at the Memorial Complex for Victims of Repression near Yekaterinburg, May 2003
651 Nikolai and Elfrida Meshalkin with their daughters, Marina and Irina, Perm, 2003
655 Antonina Golovina, 2004
Note on Proper Names
Russian names are spelled in this book according to the standard (Library of Congress) system of transliteration, but some Russian spellings are slightly altered. To accommodate common English spellings of well-known Russian names I have changed the Russian ‘ii’ ending to a ‘y’ in surnames (for example, Trotskii becomes Trotsky) but not in all first names (for example, Georgii) or place names. To aid pronunciation I have opted for Pyotr instead of Petr, Semyon instead of Semen, Andreyev instead of Andreev, Yevgeniia instead of Evgeniia, and so on. In other cases I have chosen simple and familiar spellings that help the reader to identify with Russian names that feature prominently in the text (for example, Julia instead of Iuliia and Lydia instead of Lidiia). For the sake of clarity I have also dropped the Russian soft sign from all personal and place names (so that Iaroslavl’ becomes Iaroslavl and Noril’sk becomes Norilsk). However, bibliographical references in the notes preserve the Library of Congress transliteration to aid those readers who wish to consult the published sources cited.
Northern European USSR
Southern European USSR
Western and Central Siberia
Eastern Siberia
The Soviet Union in the Stalin era
Introduction
Antonina Golovina was eight years old when she was exiled with her mother and two younger brothers to the remote Altai region of Siberia. Her father had been arrested and sentenced to three years in a labour camp as a ‘kulak’ or ‘rich’ peasant during the collectivization of their northern Russian village, and the family had lost its household property, farming tools and livestock to the collective farm. Antonina’s mother was given just an hour to pack a few clothes for the long journey. The house where the Golovins had lived for generations was then destroyed, and the rest of the family dispersed: Antonina’s older brothers and sister, her grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins fled in all directions to avoid arrest, but most were caught by the police and exiled to Siberia, or sent to work in the labour camps of the Gulag, many of them never to be seen again.
Antonina spent three years in a ‘special settlement’, a logging camp with five wooden barracks along a river bank where a thousand ‘kulaks’ and their families were housed. After two of the barracks were destroyed by heavy snow in the first winter, some of the exiles had to live in holes dug in the frozen ground. There were no food deliveries, because the settlement was cut off by the snow, so people had to live from the supplies they had brought from home. So many of them died from hunger, cold and typhus that they could not all be buried; their bodies were left to freeze in piles until the spring, when they were dumped in the river.
Antonina and her family returned from exile in December 1934, and, rejoined by her father, moved into a one-room house in Pestovo, a town full of former ‘kulaks’ and their families. But the trauma she had suffered left a deep scar on her consciousness, and the deepest wound of all was the stigma of her ‘kulak’ origins. In a society where social class was everything, Antonina was branded a ‘class enemy’, excluded from higher schools and many jobs and always vulnerable to persecution and arrest in the waves of terror that swept across the country during Stalin’s reign. Her sense of social inferiority bred in Antonina what she herself describes as a ‘kind of fear’, that ‘because we were kulaks the regime might do anything to us, we had no rights, we had to suffer in silence’. She was too afraid to defend herself against the children who bullied her at school. On one occasion, Antonina was singled out for punishment by one of her teachers, who said in front of the whole class that ‘her sort’ were ‘enemies of the people, wretched kulaks! You certainly deserved to be deported, I hope you’re all exterminated here!’ Antonina felt a deep injustice and anger that made her want to shout out in protest. But she was silenced by an even deeper fear.1