Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [200]
In another home for kulaks’ children:
Children sleep on the floor, and don’t have enough shoes . . . sometimes there is no water for several days. They eat badly; aside from water and potatoes, they have no lunch. There are no plates and bowls, they eat out of ladles. For 140 people there is one cup, and not enough spoons; they eat in turns, or by hand. There is no light, only one lamp for the whole home, and it has no kerosene.71
In 1933, a children’s home near Smolensk sent the following telegram to the Moscow children’s commission: “Food supply of the home has been cut. One hundred children are starving. The organization refuses to give rations. There is no help. Take urgent measures.”72
Nor did much change over time. A 1938 NKVD order describes one children’s home in which two eight-year-old girls were raped by some of the older boys, and another in which 212 children shared twelve spoons and twenty plates, and slept in their clothes and shoes for lack of nightclothes. 73 In 1940, Natalya Savelyeva was “kidnapped” from her children’s home— her parents had been arrested—and adopted by a family who wanted to use her as a house servant. She was thus separated from her sister, whom she never found again.74
Children of arrested politicals had a particularly hard time in such homes, and were often treated worse than the ordinary orphans they shared them with. They were told, as was Svetlana Kogteva, age ten, to “forget their parents, since they were enemies of the people.”75 NKVD officers responsible for such homes were ordered to maintain special vigilance, and to single out the children of counter-revolutionaries, to ensure that they did not receive privileged treatment of any kind.76 Thanks to this rule, Pyotr Yakir lasted precisely three days in one of these orphanages, following his parents’ arrest. During that time, he “managed to get a name as a ringleader of the ‘traitors’ children” and was immediately arrested, at age fourteen. He was transferred into a prison, and eventually sent to a camp.77
More often, the children of politicals suffered teasing and exclusion. One prisoner remembered that upon arrival at the orphanage, children of “enemies” had their fingerprints taken, like criminals. The teachers and caretakers were all afraid to show them too much affection, not wanting to be accused of having sympathy with “enemies.”78 The children of arrested parents were teased mercilessly about their “enemy” status, according to Yurganova, who deliberately forgot the German language she had spoken in her youth as a result.79
In these surroundings, even the children of educated parents soon learned criminal habits. Vladimir Glebov, the son of the leading Bolshevik Lev Kamenev, was one such child. At the age of four, his father was arrested, and Glebov was “exiled” to a special children’s orphanage in western Siberia. About 40 percent of the children there were children of “enemies,” about 40 percent were juvenile delinquents, and about 20 percent were Gypsy children, arrested for the crime of nomadism. As Glebov explained to the writer Adam Hochschild, there were advantages, even for the children of politicals, to having early contact with young criminals:
My buddy taught me some things which helped me a lot in later life, about protecting myself. Here I have one scar, and here another . . . when people are attacking you with a knife, you need to know how to fight back. The main principle is to respond in advance, not to let them hit you. That was our happy Soviet childhood!80
Some children, however, were permanently damaged by their orphanage experiences. One mother returned from exile, and was reunited with her young daughter. The child, at the age of eight, could still barely talk, grabbed at food, and behaved like the wild animal that the orphanage had taught her to be.81 Another mother released after an eight-year sentence, went to get her children from the orphanage,