Such photos were taken upon arrival in Itl for all convicted wives of enemies of the people. The happiest girl in the Soviet Union

IN Soviet time For obvious reasons, it was not customary to talk or write about the children of the Gulag. School textbooks and other books told more and more about grandfather Lenin children's parties, about the touching care with which domestic security officers and Felix Edmundovich personally welcomed street children, about Makarenko’s activities.
Slogan “Thank you to Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood!” was replaced by something else - “All the best goes to the children!”, but the situation has not changed.
Now, of course, everything is different: both the situation with information and the state’s attitude towards children. Problems are not hushed up; attempts are being made to somehow solve them. The President of Russia admitted that almost five million homeless or street children are a threat to the country's national security.
There are no universal recipes for solving this problem. It is unlikely that the experience of the security officers, who created only a few dozen model colonies, will help here; in reality, by the way, everything there didn’t look quite the same as in the film “A Start to Life.”
All the more unacceptable is the experience of Stalin’s struggle against street children using repressive methods. However, to know about what happened in the 1930s. with children who find themselves on the street or who have lost their parents (most often due to the fault of the state), of course, it is necessary. It is necessary to talk about children's destinies, distorted by the Stalinist regime, in school lessons.

In the 1930s There were about seven million street children. Then the problem of homelessness was solved simply - the Gulag helped.
These five letters have become an ominous symbol of life on the verge of death, a symbol of lawlessness, hard labor and human lawlessness. The inhabitants of the terrible archipelago turned out to be children.
It is not known exactly how many there were in various penitentiary and “educational” institutions in the 1920s-1930s. However, statistical data on some related age categories of prisoners have been preserved. For example, it is estimated that in 1927, 48% of all inmates of prisons and camps were young people (16 to 24 years old). This group, as we see, also includes minors.
IN Convention On the rights of the child, the preamble states: “A child is every human being under the age of 18.”
The convention was adopted later. But in the Stalinist USSR, other legal formulations were in use. Children who found themselves under the care of the state or sent by the state to atone for their guilt, mostly fictitious, were divided into categories:
1) camp children(children born in custody);
2) kulak children(peasant children who managed to escape deportation during the forced collectivization of the village, but who were later caught, convicted and sent to camps);
3) children of enemies of the people (those whose parents were arrested under Article 58); in 1936-1938 children over 12 years of age were condemned by a Special Meeting under the wording “family member of a traitor to the motherland” and sent to camps, as a rule, with terms ranging from 3 to 8 years; in 1947-1949 children of “enemies of the people” were punished more severely: 10-25 years;
4) spanish children; they most often ended up in orphanages; during the purge of 1947-1949. these children, already grown up, were sent to camps with sentences of 10-15 years - for “anti-Soviet agitation.”
To this list compiled by Jacques Rossi, one can add the children of besieged Leningrad; children of special migrants; children who lived near the camps and observed camp life every day. All of them were somehow involved in the Gulag...

The first camps on Bolshevik-controlled territory appeared in the summer of 1918.
Decrees of the Council of People's Commissars of January 14, 1918 and March 6, 1920 abolished “courts and imprisonment for minors.”
However, already in 1926, Article 12 of the Criminal Code allowed children from the age of 12 to be tried for theft, violence, mutilation and murder.
The decree of December 10, 1940 provided for the execution of children from 12 years of age for “damage ... to railways or other tracks.”
As a rule, it was envisaged that minors would serve their sentences in children’s colonies, but often children also ended up in “adult” colonies. This is confirmed by two orders “on Norilsk construction and the NKVD ITL” dated July 21, 1936 and February 4, 1940.
The first order is about the conditions for the use of “s/c minors” in general work, and the second is about the isolation of “s/c minors” from adults. Thus, the cohabitation lasted four years.
Did this happen only in Norilsk? No! Numerous memories confirm this. There were also colonies where boys and girls were kept together.

These boys and girls not only steal, but also kill (usually collectively). Children's correctional labor colonies, where minor thieves, prostitutes and murderers of both sexes are kept, are turning into hell. Children under 12 years old also end up there, since it often happens that a caught eight- or ten-year-old thief hides the name and address of his parents, but the police do not insist and write down in the protocol - “age about 12 years old,” which allows the court to “legally” convict the child and sent to the camps. The local authorities are glad that there will be one less potential criminal in the area entrusted to them.
The author met many children in the camps who looked to be 7-9 years old. Some still did not know how to pronounce individual consonants correctly.

From the history course we know that during the years of war communism and NEP, the number of street children in Soviet Russia increased to 7 million people. It was necessary to take the most drastic measures.
A.I. Solzhenitsyn noted: “Somehow they cleared away (and not with education, but with lead) the clouds of homeless youth who in the twenties besieged the city’s asphalt boilers, and since 1930 they all suddenly disappeared.” It's not hard to guess where.
Many people remember documentary footage about the construction of the White Sea Canal. Maxim Gorky, who admired the construction, said that this great way re-education of prisoners. And they tried to re-educate children who stole a carrot or several ears of corn from a collective farm field in the same way - through backbreaking labor and inhuman living conditions.
In 1940, the Gulag united 53 camps with thousands of camp departments and points, 425 colonies, 50 colonies for minors, 90 “baby homes”. But these are official data. We don't know the true numbers. They didn’t write or talk about the Gulag back then. And even now some of the information is considered closed.

Did it interfere with re-education? young residents Soviet countries at war? Alas, it not only did not interfere, but even contributed. Law is law!
And on July 7, 1941 - four days after Stalin’s notorious speech, in the days when German tanks were rushing towards Leningrad, Smolensk and Kiev - another decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council was issued: to judge children with the use of all measures of punishment - even in those cases when they commit crimes not intentionally, but through negligence.
So, during the Great Patriotic War, the Gulag was replenished with new “youngsters”. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the decree on the militarization of the railways drove through the tribunals crowds of women and teenagers who most of all worked on the railways during the war years, and who, having not undergone barracks training before, were most late and violated.”
Today it is no secret to anyone who organized the mass repressions. There were many performers, they were changed from time to time, yesterday's executioners became victims, and the victims became executioners. Only the main manager, Stalin, remained permanent.
All the more ridiculous is the famous slogan that adorned the walls of schools, pioneer rooms, etc.: “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!”
In 1950, when Norilsk, which was literally surrounded by barbed wire, opened new school- No. 4. It was built, of course, by prisoners. At the entrance there was a sign:

Warmed by Stalin's care,
Countries of Soviet children,
Accept as a gift and as a sign of greetings
You are a new school, friends!

However, the enthusiastic children who entered the school truly perceived it as a gift from Comrade Stalin. True, on the way to school they saw how “security guards with machine guns and dogs were taking people to and from work, and the column with its long gray mass filled the entire street from beginning to end.” It was an ordinary sight that surprised no one. You can probably get used to this too.
And this was also part of the state policy: let them watch! And they looked, and were afraid - and were silent.
There was another school, but without new desks, luxurious chandeliers and a winter garden. It was a school set up right in the barracks, where half-starved “youngsters” aged 13-16 only learned to read and write. And that's the best case scenario.

Efrosinia Antonovna Kersnovskaya, who was imprisoned in various prisons and camps, recalled the children she met along her Gulag path.

Who knows, I'm innocent! But children? In Europe they would be “children,” but here... Could Valya Zakharova, eight years old, and Volodya Turygin, a little older, work as ring workers in Suiga, that is, carry mail, walking back and forth 50 km a day - in winter, in a snowstorm? Children aged 11-12 worked in the logging area. And Misha Skvortsov, who got married at 14? However, these did not die...

Her journey to Norilsk was long. In 1941, Efrosinia Kersnovskaya found herself on the ship “Voroshilov” among the Azerbaijani “criminals”.

There are women and children here. Three completely ancient old women, eight women in the prime of life and about thirty children, if these skeletons covered with yellow skin lying in rows can be considered children. During the journey, 8 children had already died. The women wailed:
- I told the boss: children are going to die - he laughed! Why did you laugh...
On the lower shelves lay rows of little old men with sunken eyes, pointed noses and parched lips. I looked at the rows of dying children, at the puddles of brown sludge splashing on the floor. Dysentery. The children will die before reaching the lower reaches of the Ob, the rest will die there. In the same place where the Tom flows into the Ob on the right bank, we buried them. We - because I volunteered to dig the grave.
It was a strange funeral... For the first time I saw how they were buried without a coffin, not in a cemetery or even on the shore, but at the very edge of the water. The guard did not allow us to go higher. Both mothers knelt down, lowered and laid first the girl, then the boy, side by side. They covered their faces with one scarf, with a layer of sedge on top. The mothers stood, clutching bundles with the frozen skeletons of their children to their chests, and with eyes frozen in despair, they looked into this hole, into which water immediately began to fill.

Within Novosibirsk, Efrosinia Antonovna met with other “youngsters”, this time boys. “Their barracks were in the same area, but were fenced off.” However, the children managed to leave the barracks in search of food, “practicing theft, and, on occasion, robbery.” One can imagine that “such a program” of education made it possible to release already experienced criminals from the colony.
Already in Norilsk and once in the surgical department of the hospital, Efrosinia Antonovna saw traces of the joint detention and “education” of young children and repeat offenders.

Two wards were reserved for the treatment of syphilis. All the patients were still just boys and had to undergo surgical treatment of the anus, narrowed by healed syphilitic ulcers.

Young girls were also subjected to “education.” Here are lines from a letter dated 1951 from prisoner E.L. Vladimirova, a former literary worker at the Chelyabinsk Worker newspaper.

Staying in Soviet camps crippled the woman not only physically, but also morally. Human rights, dignity, pride - everything was destroyed. In all the bathhouses in the camps, male criminals worked; the bathhouse was entertainment for them; they also carried out the “sanitation” of women and girls; they were forced to resist.
Until 1950, men worked as servants everywhere in women's areas. Gradually, women were instilled with shamelessness, which became one of the reasons for the camp debauchery and prostitution that I observed, which became widespread.
In the village of “Bacchante” there was an epidemic of venereal diseases among prisoners and freemen.

In one of the prisons, A. Solzhenitsyn was next to children who had already received “education” from hardened criminals.

In the low semi-darkness, with a silent rustling, on all fours, like large rats, youngsters are sneaking up on us from all sides - these are just boys, there are even twelve year olds, but the code accepts even such, they have already gone through the thieves' process and are here now continue their studies with thieves. They were unleashed on us. They silently climb on us from all sides and, with a dozen hands, pull and tear from us, from under us, all our goods. We are trapped: we cannot rise, we cannot move.
Not even a minute had passed before they snatched the bag of lard, sugar and bread. Having risen to my feet, I turn to the eldest, to the godfather. The juvenile rats did not put a single crumb in their mouth, they have discipline.

Children were transported to the place of detention together with adults. Efrosinia Kersnovskaya recalls:

I look at my fellow travelers. Juvenile delinquents? No, still children. Girls are on average 13-14 years old. The eldest, about 15 years old, already gives the impression of a really spoiled girl. Not surprisingly, she has already been to a children's correctional colony and has already been “corrected” for the rest of her life.
The girls look at their older friend with fear and envy. They have already been convicted under the “spikelets” law; some were caught stealing handfuls and some even handfuls of grain. All are orphans or almost orphans: the father is at war; there is no mother - or they are driven away to work.
The smallest is Manya Petrova. She is 11 years old. The father was killed, the mother died, the brother was taken into the army. It’s hard for everyone, who needs an orphan? She picked onions. Not the bow itself, but the feather. They “had mercy” on her: for the theft they gave her not ten, but one year.

It happened in a transit prison in Novosibirsk. There, Efrosinia Kersnovskaya met many other “youngsters” who were in the same cell with repeat offenders. They no longer had sadness and fear. The “education” of juvenile delinquents was in good hands...

The labor of minor prisoners in Norillag has been known since 1936. These were the most difficult, unsettled, cold and hungry years in our area.
It all started with the order “on Norilsk construction and ITL NKVD” No. 168 of July 21, 1936 about the arriving labor force and its use:

6. When juvenile prisoners aged 14 to 16 years are used for general work, a 4-hour working day is established with 50% rationing - based on an 8-hour working day for a full-time worker. At the age of 16 to 17 years it is established
A 6-hour working day using 80% of the norms of a full-time worker - based on an 8-hour working day.
The rest of the time, children should be used: in school literacy classes for at least 3 hours daily, as well as in cultural and educational work.

However, as mentioned above, the isolation of children from adult prisoners began only in 1940. This is evidenced by the mentioned “Order for the Norilsk forced labor camp of the NKVD No. 68 of February 4, 1940 on the isolation of minor prisoners from adults and the creation of a completely suitable living conditions."
By 1943, there was a noticeable increase in the number of juvenile camp inmates. The order dated August 13, 1943 states:

1. Organize a Norilsk labor colony for minors at the Norilsk NKVD plant, subordinate directly to the NKVD department for combating child homelessness and neglect.

One of the zones for “youngsters” in Norilsk was located next to the women’s zone. According to the memoirs of Efrosinia Kersnovskaya, sometimes these “youngsters” staged group raids on their neighbors in order to get additional food. Efrosinia Kersnovskaya once became a victim of such a raid by boys of 13-14 years old. The security guard came to the rescue and raised the alarm.
The explanatory note to the report of the Norilsk labor colony for September-December 1943 testifies to how the colony lived and worked.

As of January 1, 1944, the colony contained 987 juvenile prisoners, all of them were housed in barracks and distributed into 8 educational groups of 110-130 people each. Due to the lack of a school and a club, there was no training for n/z [minor prisoners].
2. Labor use. Out of 987 people, up to 350 people are employed in the shops of the Norilsk plant. From the moment the colony was organized until the end of the year, up to 600 people did not work anywhere, and it was not possible to use them in any work.
Those hired to work in the workshops of the Norilsk plant do not undergo theoretical training; they are placed together with adult prisoners and civilians, which affects production discipline.
There are no premises: bathhouse-laundry, warehouse, dining room, office, school and club. As for transport, there is 1 horse allocated by the plant, which does not meet the needs of the colony. The colony is not provided with household equipment.

In 1944, the colony officially ceased to exist. But the policy of the party, which raised children in camps and prisons, has changed little. The memories of former political prisoners of Norillag have been preserved, who in 1946 were brought on ships to Dudinka along with the “young children”.

Our group from Usollag (there were many young children) arrived at the Norilsk camp in August 1946. They were delivered on a barge along with Japanese prisoners of war, like herring in a barrel. Dry rations - for three days, six hundred and fifty kilos of bread and three herrings. Most of us ate everything right away. They didn’t give us any water: the guards “explained” that there was nothing to scoop from overboard, and we licked the wooden paneling and our sweat. Many died along the way.

The Norilsk children's colony, as Nina Mikhailovna Kharchenko, a former teacher, recalls, was disbanded after the rebellion of the “youngsters” (for some it ended in death). Some of the children were transferred to a camp for adults, and some were taken to Abakan.
Why did the riot happen? Yes, because “the barracks resembled barnyards... they lived from hand to mouth.”

In the Gulag there were also baby's home. Including on the territory of Norillag. In total, in 1951, there were 534 children in these homes, of which 59 children died. In 1952, 328 children were supposed to be born, and the total number of babies would have been 803. However, documents from 1952 indicate the number 650. In other words, the mortality rate was very high.
The inhabitants of Norilsk infant homes were sent to orphanages in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. In 1953, after the Norilsk uprising, 50 women and children were sent to Ozerlag.

The children were not only directly in Norilsk. There was a punishment cell called Callargon several tens of kilometers from the village (they were shot there). The head of the camp could assign a prisoner there for up to 6 months. Apparently they couldn’t last much longer on the penalty ration - they “went to Shmitikha,” that is, to the cemetery.
In the hospital, E.A. Kersnovskaya cared for a minor self-mutilator from Callargon. He ended up there for a “terrible” crime: “he returned home without permission - he couldn’t stand the hunger.”
First, logging, then the second crime - forging a meal ticket and an extra portion of gruel. The result is Callargon. And this is surely death. The boy artificially caused deep phlegmon right palm, injecting kerosene into the hand with a syringe. This was an opportunity to go to the hospital. However, as a self-harmer, he was sent back with a passing convoy...
A seventh grade student from a Latvian gymnasium was also in the camp (Kersnovskaya did not remember either his first or last name). His fault was that he shouted: “Long live free Latvia!” The result was ten years of camps.
It’s not surprising that when he found himself in Norilsk, he was horrified and tried to escape. He was caught. Usually the fugitives were killed, and the corpses were displayed in the camp department. But with this boy it was a little different: when he was taken to Norilsk, he was in terrible condition. If he had been taken to the hospital right away, he could still have been saved. But he was thrown into prison, having first been beaten.
When he finally got to the hospital, the doctors were helpless. Apparently, he received a good upbringing, because for everything, be it an injection, a heating pad, or just a straightened pillow, he barely audibly thanked:
- Mercy...
He died soon after. At the autopsy, it turned out that the poor boy’s stomach was like it was made of lace: he had digested himself...

There were children on the so-called Uranium Peninsula- in “Rybak”, a special secret camp that was not even marked on special NKVD maps - apparently for purposes of secrecy.
Recalls L.D. Miroshnikov, a former geologist at NIIIGA (21st Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs).

Five hundred prisoners were brought in hastily towards the end of the polar night. No special selection was carried out before they were sent to the secret NKVD camp, so among the convicts of “Rybak” there were even teenagers - they talk about a certain guy named Prokhor, who ended up in the camp straight from school, after a fight with the son of the district committee secretary. Prokhor was serving a five-year sentence when he was pulled out of the camp and transferred to Rybak 20.

Prokhor was not destined to return home after serving his five-year sentence. It was impossible to stay alive after working at a secret facility. Some of the prisoners died from radiation sickness, while others were loaded onto barges and drowned at the end of their work...
The exact number of children who died in Norilsk is still unknown. Nobody knows how many children the Gulag killed. The already mentioned former teacher of the Norilsk children's colony, N.M. Kharchenko, recalls that a “burial place for colonists, as well as adult prisoners, was allocated - a cemetery behind a brick factory, half a kilometer from the quarry” 21.

In addition to the colonies, there were orphanages throughout Russia. All children separated from their parents were placed there. Theoretically, after serving their sentence, they had the right to take back their sons and daughters. In practice, mothers often did not find their children, and sometimes they did not want or could not take them home (usually there was no home, often there was no work, but there was a danger of a quick new arrest).
How the children of “enemies of the people” were kept can be judged from the recollections of eyewitnesses. Nina Matveevna Vissing is Dutch by nationality. Her parents came to the USSR by invitation and after some time were arrested. We ended up in Orphanage in the city of Boguchar through some kind of orphanage. I remember a large number of children in a strange room: gray, damp, no windows, vaulted ceiling.

Our orphanage was located next to either a prison or an insane asylum and was separated by a high wooden fence with cracks. We loved watching strange people behind the fence, although we were not allowed to do so.
In the summer we were taken outside the city to the river bank, where there were two large wicker barns with gates instead of doors. The roof was leaking and there were no ceilings. This barn could accommodate a lot of children's beds. They fed us outside under a canopy. In this camp we saw our father for the first time and did not recognize him, we ran into the “bedroom” and hid under the bed in the farthest corner. Father came to us for several days in a row, taking us for the whole day so that we could get used to him.
During this time, I completely forgot the Dutch language. It was the autumn of 1940. I think with horror what would have happened to us if my father had not found us?! 22

Unhappy children, unhappy parents. The past was taken away from some, the future from others. Everyone has human rights. According to Solzhenitsyn, thanks to this policy, “children grew up completely cleansed of parental filth” 23. And the “father of all nations,” Comrade Stalin, will make sure that in a few years his students will unanimously chant: “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!”
Some women were allowed to stay in prison with their children. In the first years of Soviet power, women could be imprisoned with a child or pregnant women. Article 109 of the Correctional Labor Code of 1924 provided that “when women are admitted to correctional labor institutions, at their request, their infant children are also admitted.” But this article was not always observed.
Pregnant women gave birth to children right there in the camp.
A woman always remains a woman. “I just wanted to the point of madness, to the point of beating my head against the wall, to the point of dying for love, tenderness, affection. And I wanted a child - a creature dear and dear, for whom I would not be sorry to give my life,” this is how former Gulag prisoner Khava Volovich, who received 15 years in the camps when she was 21, explained her condition, without knowing for what .
In the event of a live birth, the mother received several meters of footcloth for the newborn. Although the newborn was not considered a prisoner (how humane that was!), he was given a separate children's ration. Mothers, i.e. nursing mothers received 400 grams of bread, black cabbage or bran soup three times a day, sometimes with fish heads.
Women were released from work only immediately before giving birth. During the day, mothers were escorted by escort to their children for feeding. In some camps, mothers stayed overnight with their children.
This is how G.M. Ivanova described the life of newborns and small children of the Gulag.

Women prisoners, convicted of domestic crimes, and with children of their own worked as nannies in the mother's barracks...
At seven o'clock in the morning the nannies woke up the children. They were pushed and kicked out of their unheated beds (to keep the children “clean”, they did not cover them with blankets, but threw them over their cribs). Pushing the children in the back with their fists and showering them with harsh abuse, they changed their undershirts and washed them with ice water. And the kids didn’t even dare cry. They just groaned like old men and hooted. This terrible hooting sound came from children's cribs all day long. Children who were supposed to be sitting or crawling lay on their backs, legs tucked up to their stomachs, and made these strange sounds, similar to a muffled moan of a pigeon. It was only possible to survive in such conditions by a miracle.

E.A. Kersnovskaya, at the request of her young mother, Vera Leonidovna, had to baptize in the cell the grandson and great-grandson of admirals Nevelsky, who had done so much for Russia. It happened in a camp near Krasnoyarsk.
Vera Leonidovna's grandfather - Gennady Ivanovich Nevelskoy (1813-1876) - explorer of the Far East, admiral. He explored and described the shores
in the Sakhalin region, opened a strait connecting southern part Tatar Strait with the Amur Estuary (Nevelskoy Strait), established that Sakhalin is an island.
The further fate of his granddaughter and great-grandson is unknown. However, it is known that in 1936-1937. the presence of children in the camps was recognized as a factor reducing the discipline and productivity of female prisoners. In the secret instructions of the NKVD of the USSR, the period of stay of a child with his mother was reduced to 12 months (in 1934 it was 4 years, later - 2 years).
Children who have reached one year old, were forcibly sent to orphanages, which was noted in the mother’s personal file, but without indicating the address. Vera Leonidovna didn’t know about this yet...

The forced deportation of camp children is planned and carried out like real military operations - so that the enemy is taken by surprise. Most often this happens late at night. But it is rarely possible to avoid heartbreaking scenes when frantic mothers rush at the guards and the barbed wire fence. The zone was shaken by screams for a long time.

Among the residents of the Gulag there were also children of besieged Leningrad. E.A. Kersnovskaya remembers them.

These dystrophics are just children, they are 15-16 years old...
Tom Vasilyeva and Vera. They, together with adults, dug anti-tank ditches. During an air raid, they rushed into the forest. When the fear passed, we looked around...
Together with other girls we went to the city. And suddenly - the Germans. The girls fell to the ground and screamed. The Germans reassured us and gave us chocolate and delicious lemon cookies. When they let us go, they said: in three kilometers there is a field, and there is a field kitchen on it, hurry up. The girls ran away.
To their misfortune, they told the soldiers everything. They were not forgiven for this. It was terrible to look at these children exhausted to the limit.

Were in the Gulag and spanish children. Pavel Vladimirovich Cheburkin, also a former prisoner, spoke about them.
Cheburkin recalled how in 1938 a young Spaniard was brought to Norillag, taken from his parents. Juan was baptized into Ivan, and his surname was changed in the Russian manner - the Spaniard became Ivan Mandrakov.

When the Spanish Civil War ended with Franco's victory, Republicans began to leave their homeland. Several steamships with the Spaniards arrived in Odessa. The last of them had to stand at the roadstead for a long time - either the places of distribution throughout the Union allotted for visitors had run out, or fraternal republican solidarity had dried up...
Be that as it may, when the unfortunates were brought to Norilsk, many of them died from the camp “hospitality”... Juan, rebaptized Ivan Mandrakov, due to his age, first ended up in an orphanage, from where he fled. He became an ordinary street child, stealing food from the market...
He was assigned to Norillag, from where there was no escape.

A. Solzhenitsyn also writes about the children of Spanish Republicans.

Spanish children - the same ones who were taken out during Civil War, but became adults after World War II. Brought up in our boarding schools, they equally melded very poorly with our lives. Many were rushing home. They were declared socially dangerous and sent to prison, and especially persistent ones - 58, part 6 - espionage for... America.

There were many such nimble children who managed to grab Article 58. Geliy Pavlov received it at the age of 12. According to the 58th, there was no age minimum at all! Dr. Usma knew a 6-year-old boy who was in prison under Article 58 - this is an obvious record.
The Gulag accepted 16-year-old Galina Antonova-Ovseenko, the daughter of the USSR plenipotentiary representative in Republican Spain. At the age of 12, she was sent to an orphanage where the children of those repressed in 1937-1938 were kept. Galina's mother died in prison, her father and brother were shot.
The story of G. Antonova-Ovseenko is reproduced by A. Solzhenitsyn.

Difficult-to-educate teenagers, the mentally retarded and juvenile delinquents were also sent to this orphanage. We waited: when we turn 16, they will give us passports and we will go to vocational schools. But it turned out that he was transferred to prison.
I was a child, I had the right to childhood. So who am I? An orphan whose living parents were taken away! A criminal who did not commit a crime. I spent my childhood in prison, my youth too. One of these days I will turn twenty.

The further fate of this girl is unknown.

Children of special settlers also became inhabitants of the Gulag. In 1941, our interlocutor Maria Karlovna Batishcheva was 4 years old. At this age, the child usually does not remember himself. But little Masha remembered the tragic night for the rest of her life.
All the inhabitants were herded like cattle into one place: screams, crying, roaring animals - and a thunderstorm. From time to time she illuminated the horror that was happening in the center of the village.
What was their fault? All of them were Germans, which means they automatically became “enemies of the people.” Then the long road to Kazakhstan. Maria Karlovna doesn’t remember how she survived in Kazakhstan, but life in the special settlement is described in the book “The Gulag: Its Builders, Inhabitants and Heroes.”

The mortality rate among children was enormous. We do not have general information, but many specific examples reveal this terrible picture.
In the Novo-Lyalinsky district, for example, in 1931. 87 children were born and 347 children died; in Garinsky, 32 were born and 73 children died in two months. In Perm, at the K plant, almost 30% of all children died in two months (August-September).
Due to the high mortality rate, homelessness has also increased. In fact, information about street children in the early years of kulak exile was not centrally recorded.
In the first year and a half of exile, the issue of education for children from among the migrants was practically not resolved and was relegated to the background.
Against this background, there was a decline in morale among the special settlers, the abandonment of many traditions, encouragement of denunciations, etc. Special settlers were practically deprived of their civil rights.

Maria Karlovna proudly talks about the fact that her grandfather was a participant in the First World War and was wounded. In the hospital, one of the princesses - the emperor's daughters - looked after him. She gave her grandfather a Bible. This relic is now kept by my brother in Germany.
Returning to the front, my grandfather fought bravely, for which he received a personalized watch from the hands of Nicholas II. He was struck with two St. George's crosses. All this lay for a long time at the bottom of the chest.
Maria, the granddaughter of the Knight of St. George, became the daughter of an “enemy of the people” for 16 years. Until the age of 20, she was expelled from everywhere - from school, from college, looked at askance, called a fascist. The passport had a stamp: special resettler.
Maria, exhausted by incessant persecution, once, already in Norilsk, threw her hated passport into the fire, hoping in this way to get rid of the mark of civil inferiority. Having reported the loss of her passport, she waited with fear for an invitation to the department. She withstood everything that the representative of the authorities shouted at her - the main thing was that there was no stigma.
She cried all the way home. Clutching her new passport to her chest, Maria was afraid to look at the new document. And only at home, having carefully opened the passport and not seeing the page with the stamp there, she sighed calmly.
Maria Karlovna Batishcheva still lives in Norilsk, is raising her great-grandson and gladly responds to invitations from schoolchildren to talk about themselves on the day of remembrance of victims of political repression.
The fate of Maria Karlovna is similar to the fate of another woman - Anna Ivanovna Shchepilova.

My father was arrested twice. In 1937 I was already six years old. After my father’s arrest, our torment began. In the village we were not allowed to live or study, considering us “the children of enemies of the people.”
When I became a teenager, I was sent to the most hard work into the forest - to cut wood just like grown men. Even my peers weren’t friends with me. I was forced to leave, but they didn’t hire me anywhere either. My whole life was spent in fear and torment. Now I have neither strength nor health! 33

The Gulag also had other children - those who lived next to the prisoners, but were still at home (although home most often was a barracks closet), and studied in a regular school. These are the children of the so-called Volnyashek, civilians.
Tamara Viktorovna Pichugina in 1950 was a first-grade student at Norilsk secondary school No. 3.

We were ordinary restless children, we loved to jump into the snow from roofs, slide down the slide, and play house. One day me, Larisa and Alla were playing next to the platform. Having decided to arrange our future “home”, we began to clear the platform of snow. Soon we came across two corpses. The frozen people were without felt boots, but in padded jackets with numbers. We immediately ran to the PRB [production and work block]. We knew this block well: “our prisoners” were there. Uncle Misha, Uncle Kolya... they took these corpses, I don’t know what happened next.
In general, we treated prisoners like ordinary people and were not afraid of them. For two winters, for example, after school we ran to “our” block of the PRB. We’d run in, and it would be warm there, the stove was made from a barrel, the guard with the rifle was asleep. Our “uncles” warmed themselves there and usually drank tea. So, Uncle Misha will help us take off our felt boots, put our mittens by the stove to dry, shake off our shawl and seat us at the table. Having warmed up, we began to tell homework.
Each of them was responsible for some subject. They correct us, add, they told us so interestingly. After checking the lessons, they gave each of us 2 rubles. 25 kopecks for a cake. We ran to the stall and enjoyed the sweets.
Now I just understand that, probably, our “uncles” were teachers, scientists, in general, very educated people; perhaps they saw us as their own children and grandchildren from whom they had been separated. There was so much fatherly warmth and tenderness in their relationship with us.

Alevtina Shcherbakova, a Norilsk poetess, remembers. In 1950 she was also a first-grader.

The female prisoners who worked plastering the already built houses on Sevastopolskaya Street were from the Baltic states. Unusual hairstyles with curls and rolls above the forehead made them look like otherworldly beauties in children's eyes.
Women and children are inseparable from each other in any conditions, and the guards often literally turned a blind eye when slaves called children in just to talk to them and caress them. And only God knows what was going on in their hearts and souls at that moment.
Children brought bread, and women gave them preserved beads or unusual buttons. Alka knew how such meetings ended - the beauties cried.
Mom didn’t encourage this communication (you never know), but she didn’t particularly prohibit it either.

It happened that real tragedies played out in front of the children. Little Tamara (Tamara Viktorovna Pichugina) witnessed such tragedies more than once.

We lived on Gornaya Street, block No. 96. For drinking water we had to go to the water pump. Next to our block there were two lagoon departments - the fifth and the seventh.
So, I’m standing in line for water and, as usual, looking around. At this time, a man came out of the bathhouse from the side of the zone in only his shorts, stood on the railing and, as soon as he jumped on the barbed wire, tore off his entire body. Then the guard shot from the tower and hit the man in the thigh, then the Vokhrovites jumped out, handcuffed the wounded man and led him to the camp.
I don’t remember that this picture shocked me much, I remember that I felt sorry for my uncle: he must be very cold, I thought.
Another case. I see it like now: in the winter a column of prisoners is walking, and suddenly a man comes out of its ranks, undresses to his underpants or shorts and sits down, huddled right next to the road. They did not lift him up, one guard remained with him, but the entire column calmly moved on. Then reinforcements arrived, and he was taken to another camp compartment.
We knew well: this man was lost at cards. But they said that it happened that no one took such poor fellows away; they remained by the road and sat until they froze. When they were covered with snow, tubercles formed, and sometimes children found these tubercles and “rolled them away” from the road.

M.M. Korotaeva (Borun) shares her memories:

A festive concert was announced at the school. They promised Musical Theatre, and, of course, our school amateur performances.
But we were waiting for the artists! We were excited, put on our best clothes, the hall was packed. Behind a closed curtain, instruments were being tuned, something was being moved, something was being nailed down. We waited patiently, transfixed with happiness.
And finally the curtain opened. The stage shone, glowed, glittered with lights, flowers, some wonderful decorations! We stood frozen and listened to excerpts from operettas, operas, and scenes from plays.
The actresses were in magnificent dresses, hairstyles, beautiful jewelry, men - in black suits, in snow-white shirts with butterflies - all beautiful, cheerful. The orchestra is small but very good.
At the end of their concert, we sang our favorite “Yenisei Waltz” together with the artists. I really didn’t want to let the artists go, so we clapped and clapped. And somehow I no longer wanted to watch our amateur performances.
We suddenly decided to run, look at the artists up close, and see them off at least from afar. Running along the corridor of the second floor, then the first, we heard voices in one of the classrooms and realized that they were there, artists. Quietly, on tiptoe, we crept up to the door, which was slightly open.
Nina Ponomarenko was the first to look in - and suddenly recoiled, whispering in horror: “These are not artists, these are prisoners!”
I looked in next and also couldn’t believe my eyes - in the acrid, thick tobacco smoke I saw figures of people sitting on desks, walking around the classroom, and these really were prisoners. We knew them - they cleared roads, dug out houses after a snowstorm, built houses, dug the earth, all the same - in gray padded jackets, gray earflaps, with unkind eyes. We were afraid of them. So why are they here, what are they doing?
And then I saw something that immediately sobered me up - bags, boxes, from which something bright and beautiful could be seen. Yes, these are the costumes and instruments of our artists. It's them, they!
Confused and frightened, we stood at the door until we heard voices in the corridor - someone was walking towards the class. We rushed away and saw gray figures coming out, taking out suits and walking towards the exit. There were no women, no men - all equally gray, dull, silent.
There was a gray covered truck parked outside the school where people loaded up and drove away. We understood: into the zone. And we all stood there, unable to comprehend what we had seen and understood, with a perplexed question in our heads - why is this happening? Why?
We didn’t return to the hall, we couldn’t. When I sing “The Yenisei Waltz” now, I always remember that distant concert and the tragedy of the soul that we, the children, experienced.

We tried to look at the lives of children who were sucked into the camp whirlpool. Of course, not all Soviet children lived this way, but many did. And the point here is not in quantitative indicators, not in percentages.
Of course, someone in the Stalinist USSR really had a happy childhood - although it was unlikely that the leader should be thanked for this. In the wild, children went on hikes, sang songs around the fire, and relaxed in pioneer camps, and not in others. A lot of wonderful songs were composed for them, their parents loved them, they wore beautiful shoes...
But we must not forget about those children whom party judges sentenced to three, five, eight and ten, twenty-five years in the camps, to death. They were born on the floor of dirty calf-cars, died in the holds of overcrowded barges, and went crazy in orphanages. They lived in conditions that established courageous people could not stand.
“The young children,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “were “thieves’ pioneers,” they learned the precepts of their elders. The elders willingly guided both the worldview of the youngsters and their training in theft. It’s tempting to learn from them, but not to learn is impossible.”38
Stalin’s “laws on juveniles” lasted for 20 years, “until the decree of April 24, 1954, slightly relaxed: it freed those juveniles who had served more than one-third of the first term - what if there were five, ten, fourteen of them?” 39
What happened in the Gulag was infanticide in the literal sense of the word. All archives have not yet been opened. But even when they are opened, we will not learn from the documents about all the tragic fates of children. Something, of course, can be restored from the memories of eyewitnesses, but, alas, there are not so many of them left.
It is unlikely that it will be possible to describe the fate of every person who was subjected to repression, every child who was deprived of a father and mother, everyone who wandered as a street child around the country, everyone who died of hunger in Ukraine, from backbreaking labor in the camps, from the lack of medicine and care in orphanages, from the cold in the trains of special settlers... But everything possible should be done so that the terrible pages of our history are filled not only with question marks, but also with evidence.

GARF. F. 9416-s. D. 642. L. 59. 36 Right there. pp. 4-5.
37 About time, about Norilsk, about myself. pp. 380-381.
38 Solzhenitsyn A. Decree. op. T. 6. pp. 282-283.
39 Right there. P. 286.

Lyubov Nikolaevna Ovchinnikova is a teacher at gymnasium No. 4 in Norilsk.
A student of this gymnasium, Varvara Ovchinnikova, participated in the preparation of materials intended for study in class.
Drawings of former Gulag prisoners were used.

My father, Oscar Arkadyevich Leikin, was arrested in Khabarovsk in 1937. He then worked as the head of the regional communications department. He was convicted in 1938 and died, according to the registry office, in 1941. The mother, Polina Isaakovna Akivis, was arrested at the same time and sent to Karlag for eight years.

I was placed in a children's home in Khabarovsk, where we, the children of the repressed, were kept together with juvenile delinquents. I will remember the day of our departure for the rest of my life. The children were divided into groups. Little brother and sister getting into different places, cried desperately, clutching each other. And all the children asked them not to separate them. But neither requests nor bitter crying helped...

We were put into freight cars and driven away. That’s how I ended up in an orphanage near Krasnoyarsk. It’s a long and sad story to tell how we lived under a drunken boss, during drunkenness, stabbings...

Ramenskaya Anna Oskarovna, Karaganda.

Our family consisted of seven people: father, mother, five children. Father, Bachuk Joseph Mikhailovich, worked at the Kharkov Locomotive Plant as a shop foreman. In November 1937, my father was taken away by a Black Raven car at four o'clock in the morning. Many years later it became known that he worked on the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, where he died. The mother, Bachuk Matryona Platonovna, a forty-nine-year-old housewife, an illiterate woman, was arrested six months later. Then we somehow found out that my mother was sent to Kazakhstan for five years.

As a minor, I was taken to a detention center in the city of Kharkov, where I was kept for three months on a starvation diet, in a camp regime. We were taken with dogs under escort as children of political “enemies of the people.” Then I was sent to an orphanage in the Chernigov region. At school I was expelled from the pioneers as the daughter of “enemies of the people.” My brother was also expelled from the Komsomol in the eighth grade, and he dropped out of school and went to the Donbass, where he got a job somewhere. No one maintained contact with each other, no one was allowed.

After finishing school, I decided to go to the prosecutor's office to find out something about the fate of my parents. With great difficulty I found out the address and went secretly to my mother. Subsequently, we were never able to get together (except for the middle brother). This is how our large, honest, hardworking, devoted family, the family of a simple worker, not even a party member, was broken.

Stolyarova Lyubov Iosifovna, Zhitomir.

I, Maria Lukyanovna Novikova, want to know where our father, Luka Aristarkhovich Novikov, died, where he was buried. We don’t have any documents except his birth certificate: he was born on June 9, 1897. And they took him in 1937, at 12 o’clock at night on September 20, straight from work. He worked continuously: during the day he carried water for people and cars, and at night he was on guard; in general, he never came home at all.

But first I will write how we were dispossessed. In 1929, at that time I was four years old, my father had seven of us. The local authorities, the village council, persecuted our father, mocked us as much as they wanted and for no reason. They will take him, tie his hands back and drive him eighteen kilometers to the Bolshetroitsk police station. They themselves are on horseback, and they drive him and flog him worse than cattle. And then they’ll figure out that there’s no reason for it, and they’ll let him go. And so the bullying continued until 1935. And then they convicted him and gave him seven years of free exile. He agreed to this, he gave the documents, but they did not give the documents to him, they transferred this conviction to a year in prison. He served six months and returned. At this time, the foreman came to him and said: “Lukyan, submit an application, now you will be accepted into the collective farm...” And immediately my father was sent to work, harvesting timber. What a joy it was for our entire family that we were accepted into society! But they didn’t rejoice for long: in 1937 he was taken away...

And our mother, all these years, together with us, has endured so much suffering! She took us to other people's houses, naked, hungry and suffering from the cold. They took everything from us and drove us out of the hut naked, throwing us out like kittens. During all our years of wandering, three children died... When children died, the mother would remove the deceased and cross herself: “Glory to you, Lord, I have suffered...” - she would remove the deceased, and put the little one in that place. I thought that she would get sick and die, but she, God willing, is still alive. And how hard it was for us to live every day! Mother will get some money somewhere, cook for us, and if we don’t have time to eat, then they pour out the cast iron and say: “You, kulak children, should not live, you will die anyway!” They even turned out their pockets and shook out crumbs so that they wouldn’t get it...

In 1933 there was such a case. In the closet we had only wealth - a chest, as the common wooden box used to be called. Two of our fellow villagers came, threw torn rags out of the box, and saw that there was nothing to take there. And the mother was dressed in a fur coat made of sheep skins, the kind of clothing she used to have, and the scarf she was wearing was warm, but they began to forcibly undress and uncover her. Then we see that the mother is being tormented so much, and we rushed to her and started screaming. They started stomping on her and shouting at her: “What have you taught the children!” - but still they didn’t strip us, our defense worked. In general, you can’t write everything, but if you write everything, you’ll end up with a big book.

And now we ask you if you can find the place where your father was buried, died or was killed. When they took him, he was in Belgorod prison. My mother went and took permission from the NKVD to deliver food. And when he comes there, they stood in line for weeks, there was so much to the world, passion! And then they sent him from Belgorod, we received the first letter from him: Amur Railway, he asked for money. We receive a second letter: the money has arrived, it is kept near me in the cash register, but they are not giving it to me. And then we received a third letter - the city of Svobodny, and wrote: the court was not seen or heard, but they said that for ten years...

And then he writes, I went through all the commissions, they declared me healthy, they selected us such people, they are preparing them to be sent, but we don’t know where they will send them. There are rumors about Franz Joseph Earth, and there was not a single letter anymore. What they did with him, where they put him - we don’t know anything. There are five more of us, his children, three daughters and two sons. Although we ourselves will soon die, we want to know where he laid his head. On the night he was taken away, five people were taken from our village. Of these, a friend sent word to one that he had died, two returned home ten years later and died at home, and our father was taken to no one knows where.

I myself was born in the 25th year, I remember all our terrible torment from beginning to end. When they flogged me, I was four years old, and I remember everything from the age of four, how and what they did to us, and you will probably never forget this. For eighteen years we walked from apartment to apartment and even walked on the ground with caution; there were a lot of stupid people. You’re walking, and he meets you and says to your eyes: “What, little fist, are you walking?” – and we behaved as quietly as we could. You meet your villain, bow to him and call him by name and patronymic, otherwise it’s impossible... We are enemies! And so to judge: what kind of kulak is our father, even if he was illiterate and was a great hard worker, worked, did not spare himself?..

Novikova Maria Lukyanovna, Belgorod region, Shebekinsky district, Bolshetroitskoye p/o, village. Osipovka.

We lived in Magnitogorsk. Dad - Vorotintsev Grigory Vasilyevich - worked at the Magnitogorsk plant as a laborer. On August 22, 1937, he was arrested. I was not present during the arrest. I didn’t see my dad’s last minutes at home, I didn’t hear his farewell words. And on November 13, 1937 they came for my mother. Dad was accused of being a Japanese spy (according to his death certificate, he died in 1941), and his mother, Anastasia Pavlovna Vorotintseva, was accused of hiding her husband’s espionage activities. She was sentenced to five years in the Karaganda camps with free labor there.

My brother and I were taken to the NKVD club. Thirteen children were gathered during the night. Then they sent everyone to an orphanage in Chelyabinsk. There were about five hundred children there and somewhere else there were toddlers...

We lived in the orphanage for two weeks, and six of us children were taken to Kazakhstan. Our group was brought to Uralsk. The NKVD sent a “black raven” for us, since they had no other cars, and it was cold. They brought us to the village of Krugloozerny. We were met by the director of the orphanage, I think his last name was Krasnov. Before working in the orphanage, he was the commander of the Red Army in Far East. The orphanage had a plantation where children worked. They grew watermelons, melons, tomatoes and other vegetables, providing themselves all year round. The educational work was good. And this director was arrested by the NKVD...

A very good teacher worked in the orphanage; he was also arrested. He lived with a very old father who was left without a livelihood. And while we lived in Uralsk, we secretly took food from the dining room and went around feeding him...

After finishing seventh grade, I entered a vocational school in Magnitogorsk and worked as an electrician in the coke and chemical shop of a metallurgical plant. My mother, who had served her sentence by this time, was not registered in Magnitogorsk; she was told to leave the city within 24 hours. She left for Verkhnekizilsk, there were no passports there. When they started giving us passports, my mother received them and came to me. All the “wolf documents” were sewn into her pillow, she was so afraid. I found them after her death, they all almost turned into dust. I am sending you what little I have left...

Razina Valentina Grigorievna, Sverdlovsk

My brother, Leonid Mikhailovich Trakhtenberg, born in 1924, was arrested in 1938 as a seventh grade student and spent more than six months in solitary confinement by the NKVD. The reason is that the brother’s name was on the list of activists in the regional library, compiled by a library worker who turned out to be a “Trotskyist.” Fortunately, the father of Oleg Vyazov’s friend, who was arrested along with his brother, [...] turned out to be knowledgeable in legal affairs and achieved consideration of the case in the Supreme Court of the RSFSR. On March 8, 1939, the Definition appeared Supreme Court, which canceled the decision of the Ivanovo Regional Court of February 5, 1939, accusing O.E. Vyazov. and Trakhtenberg L.M. under Article 58-10, paragraph 1 of the Criminal Code, since “at the beginning of their criminal actions they had 13 years each and could not be charged with a counter-revolutionary crime in accordance with the law of 7/IV–1935.” The boys were released. Transferred to different schools. Everyone was threatened to keep quiet.

Life and school returned... In 1941, suddenly on the second day of the war, my father was arrested. Soon the mother is kicked out of work. We all feel the need to fight back against adversity. And at the same time – the family of the “enemy of the people”. On September 13, my brother disappears from home. Only after three painful days we received a note from him by mail: “Mommy, I’m sorry. I'm going to the front. I hope that dad’s business will turn out favorably.” They wrote to Stalin, he was from the front, his mother was from here. We managed to receive a message from my brother that he had received our news about his father’s return from the camp. (My father, who was terminally ill, was hospitalized in 1943. Two years in Vyatlag turned him, a kind, healthy and cheerful person, into a depressed and frightened invalid. He did not live to see the end of the war for two months.) My brother was wounded, the front was again. He died and disappeared on September 13–15, 1943 during our breakthrough north of Bryansk, commanding a detachment of machine gunners.

I dare to think that my brother was one of those sons of the earth who are called to preserve it and lead it to the light.

Trakhtenberg R.M. 01/02/1989.

My mother, while still very young, working in a printing house in Tashkent, did not join the Komsomol on time (during collectivization they were “dispossessed”, and all the large family came to live in Tashkent). A case was opened against her, which ended in her arrest. Then stage-by-stage work activity on the White Sea Canal, in Norilsk, and her last place of stay was Kazlag, namely the Karaganda region, the village of Dolinskoye. I was born there in 1939. Naturally, I did not live with her, but not far from the zone, in an orphanage for children of political prisoners. I never had to say the word “dad” in my life, since I didn’t have one. The memory of childhood, the years spent in the orphanage, are very clearly imprinted. This memory has haunted me for many years. In our orphanage there lived children from infancy to school age. Living conditions were difficult, we were poorly fed. I had to climb through garbage dumps and feed myself with berries in the forest. Many children got sick and died. But the worst thing is that we were mocked there in the full sense of the word. They beat us, forced us to stand on our knees in the corner for a long time for the slightest prank... Once, during a quiet hour, I could not fall asleep. Aunt Dina, the teacher, sat on my head, and if I had not turned around, perhaps I would not be alive. I lived there until 1946, until my mother was released from prison (she spent 12 years in the camps)...

Nelya Nikolaevna Simonova

On June 15, 1938, within one hour (this happened at night), I became an orphan at six years and seven months old, and my sister Aella at eleven years old, since my mother was also arrested as the wife of an “enemy of the people.” My mother was arrested... after my father was shot... My father was arrested on December 13, 1937 while on vacation in Sochi, transferred to Butyrka prison in Moscow, and on April 26, 1938 he was sentenced to death and killed.

My sister and I were sent to the Tarashchansky orphanage in Ukraine... Our “happy childhood” began. When I went to school, and it was outside the orphanage and children from the city studied there, I realized that they were “home”, and we were “official” (orphanage). What did the future hold for us? Work in plants and factories from the age of 14 (older children were not kept in orphanages) or graduation from the Federal Educational Institution, since we, the children of “enemies of the people,” were not allowed to enter either technical schools or institutes.

The Great Patriotic War began. The city of Tarasha was occupied by the Germans, it was surrendered in a few hours. We crawled out of the trenches that we ourselves dug in the orphanage garden, and found ourselves completely abandoned to the mercy of fate, since the teachers and other adult workers of the orphanage went to their families, and we, the children, began an independent “new life” under the “new order.” " Boys and girls who turned 14 years old were immediately taken to Germany by the Germans. Jewish nationality They shot us before our eyes... There were very few of us left. Those who were a little stronger were hired as farm laborers, but no one needed extra mouths to feed, so there were few such “lucky” people. And we, the kids, were left in one building to die out naturally...

Milda Arnoldovna Ermashova, Alma-Ata.

On November 14, 1937, at night, a bell rang in our apartment in Leningrad. Three men with a dog came in, they told dad to get dressed, and they began to search him. They rummaged through everything, even our school bags. When they took dad away, we cried. He told us: “Don’t cry, children, I’m not guilty of anything, I’ll be back in two days...” This is the last thing we heard from our father. So he never returned, we know nothing about his fate, we have not received any letters.

The day after my father was arrested, I went to school. In front of the whole class, the teacher announced: “Children, be careful with Lyusya Petrova, her father is an enemy of the people.” I took my bag, left school, came home and told my mom that I wouldn’t go to school anymore.

My father, Petrov Ivan Timofeevich, worked as a worker at the Arsenal plant in Leningrad. Mother, Agrippina Andreevna, worked at a factory. On March 27, 1938, she was also arrested. My brother and I were taken away together with my mother. They put us in a car, dropped my mother off at the Kresty prison, and we were taken to the children's reception center. I was twelve years old, my brother was eight. First of all, they shaved our heads, hung a plate with a number on our necks, and took our fingerprints. My brother cried a lot, but they separated us and didn’t allow us to meet or talk. Three months later, we were brought from the children's reception center to the city of Minsk, to the Kalinin orphanage. There I received the first news from my mother. She said that she was sentenced to ten years and is serving her sentence in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

I was in an orphanage before the war. During the bombing, I lost my brother, I looked for him everywhere, wrote to the Red Cross, but never found him.

Petrova Lyudmila Ivanovna, Narva.

As I only later learned from documents, my mother in 1941 “expressed distrust in press and radio reports about the situation in the country and in the occupied territory.” After my mother’s arrest in 1941, my brother and I were sent to the NKVD reception center, and then in 1942 they were taken from besieged Leningrad to the Yaroslavl region. They told me about my parents that they died of hunger; I didn’t even look for them. But somehow I was alarmed by the fact that I was in the NKVD distribution center.

It turns out that the mother was given 10 years under Article 58-10. She died in Leningrad in prison in February 1942. I don’t know anything about my father yet.

I correspond with those with whom I was in the orphanage. Orphanage workers remember how dystrophic children approached the prison camp in Yaroslavl region and begged them for at least some clothes so as not to become numb from the frost, because we were expelled from Leningrad practically in what our mother gave birth... They remember how the doctor took the padded jackets off the dead and gave them to the children. After all, orphanages were practically colonies for minors.

Lidia Anatolyevna Belova. 1990

My mother was taken away in front of me, I remember in 1950 I was 10 years old. I was sent to the Danilovsky detention center, and from there to an orphanage. In the Danilovsky reception center they beat me and said that I should forget my parents, since they are enemies of the people.

Svetlana Nikolaevna Kogteva, Moscow. 4.07.1989.

My mother, Anna Ivanovna Zavyalova, at the age of 16–17, was sent with a convoy of prisoners from the field to Kolyma for collecting several ears of corn in her pocket... Having been raped, my mother gave birth to me on February 20, 1950; there was no amnesty for the birth of a child in those camps was. This is how my life in general and the life of “ZK” began in the children's barracks, where mothers went to feed their children at the allotted time. This was the only joy of communication. My mother did not give me up to be raised by the camp director’s wife, who did not have children of her own and very much asked to give me up, promising my mother various benefits.

ON THE. Zavyalova. 11/10/89.

On March 30, 1942, I was in an orphanage, now I don’t remember exactly this village, it is a suburb of Baku. It was hungry, so after a meager breakfast many went to beg. And what they brought was divided among everyone. On March 30, 1942, I decided to try my luck. He left and never returned. Escaped? No, completely different. At the Sabunchi station (there was an electric train at that time), a military man approached me and asked: “Where did you come from like that?” I told him everything: where I came from and about the orphanage. He asked: “What, ran away?” - "No!" Then a new question followed: “Do you want to eat?” Yes, I really wanted to eat. “Then come with me.” There was a black car parked outside the station garden; there was no driver. So we went, and he brought me to the internal prison of the NKVD. On the way, he kept asking me: where was he born, where was he baptized, are there any relatives or acquaintances in Baku? The answer was no. There really weren't any. Upon arrival, I was immediately taken to the basement, where, without seeing daylight, I spent [more than] a year. At that time I was not even 15 years old. I came out of there, or rather, they carried out, in April 1943, a patient with swollen legs (scurvy, pellagra), with the mark of the Special Meeting, five years in prison as a socially dangerous element, Art. 61-1 of the Criminal Code of the Azerbaijan SSR. Moreover, one year was added to the years. They transported me to Kishly, there was a transfer there, where I ended up in a prison hospital, I received a little treatment, and a transfer to Krasnovodsk, then a Tashkent transfer. In November, the patient, in addition to tropical malaria, was succumbing...

S.A. Mashkin, Krasny Sulin, Rostov region. 08/12/1993.

My father, Leonid Konstantinovich Zagorsky, an economist, and my mother, Nina Grigorievna Zagorskaya, a telephone operator, were arrested in 1937. The father died in prison, nothing was reported about the mother.

My parents were brought to Sakhalin, but from where, I don’t know, somewhere in the late 20s. At that time, Sakhalin was the second Solovki, a lot of people died there. My father was involved in accounting work, and my mother worked there as a telephone operator since 1936 and was a housewife before her arrest. My sister and I ended up in the orphanage in 1938 at the age of three and a half and four and a half. I lived there until 1943, and then I ended up with a childless couple and was taken to the Volgograd region. in 1946

In the orphanage I lived all the time in a preschool group of children.

Orphanages for children like us were mainly located in small Gilyak villages on the river. Amur. Our village, where we first arrived, was called Mago... The houses were long wooden barracks. There were a lot of children. The clothes are bad, the food is poor. Mostly soup from dry smelt fish and potatoes, sticky black bread, sometimes cabbage soup. I didn’t know about any other diet.

The method of education in the orphanage was fist-based. Before my eyes, the director beat boys older than me, with their heads against the wall and with fists in the face, because during a search she found bread crumbs in their pockets, suspecting them of preparing crackers for their escape. The teachers told us: “Nobody needs you.” When we were taken out for a walk, the children of the nannies and teachers pointed their fingers at us and shouted: “Enemies, they are leading enemies!” And we, probably, actually were like them. Our heads were shaved bald, we were dressed haphazardly. The linen and clothing came from the confiscated property of the parents...

In 1940, I was five years old, and my sister was six, when we received a message about the death of our father. And three years later, in 1943, an unfamiliar woman brought me to her home, then she said to her husband: “Here, I brought a prisoner. Now you will live with us, but if you don’t want to, you will go back to the orphanage, and from there to prison.” I cried and said that I wanted to live with them. So people took me as their daughter. At that time I was already eight and a half years old. And my sister and I were separated. There was no need to see each other again. I searched for her for many years, contacted various authorities, but no one helped me...

Savelyeva Natalya Leonidovna, Volgograd.

On October 13, 1937, my father sent me to the store to buy groceries. When I returned, we were being searched. They found nothing because there was nothing to look for. They took Lenin’s book, put my father’s passport in it and took him into the city. He told us his last words: “Children, don’t cry, I’ll be back soon. I'm not to blame for anything. This is some kind of mistake...” And that’s it, since then we haven’t known anything else about him.

And at the end of April 1938, my mother and I wrote a letter to Stalin. And on May 8, they came and arrested my mother, and we were taken to an orphanage, three children. I was the eldest, I was fourteen years old, another brother was twelve, and the third was six. I still cannot remember this tragedy without tears. We were in orphanage No. 5 in the city of Kuznetsk. There were a lot of children from Moscow there: Alexandra Drobnis (her father was a member of the Politburo), Karl Chapsky, Felix Demchenko, Yuri Logonovsky, Wanda Balkovskaya, Viktor Volfovich. Some were already fourteen years old and had to join the Komsomol, but we were told: if you renounce your parents and report it on the radio, we will accept you. But only one did it... Shura Drobnis said: I’d rather become a cleaner, I’ll survive all the hardships, but I won’t give up on my parents!

I studied at a railway school. They really looked at us as enemies, and the pioneer leader always said: “The apples don’t fall far from the tree...” These words cut to the heart like a knife.

My further life path... Participant of the Great Patriotic War. I reached Konigsberg. She found her brother, her mother (she took her from the camp, she served eight years).

Belova Alexandra Yakovlevna, Kuznetsk.

My father, Kulaev Alexander Alexandrovich, a Tatar by nationality, was arrested in the spring of 1938 in Vladivostok. I remember that he went to work and never returned. Later, in August 1938, the mother, Galina Fedorovna Kulaeva, Russian, was arrested. She was twenty-seven years old at that time. There were four children in the family: I was the eldest, born in 1929, the next was Anatoly, six to eight years old, then Vladimir, probably five years old, and Vitya, an infant... We were all taken to prison together. I very clearly see my mother, almost naked, with her hair down, on the scales. And when a man was leading the three of us past along a narrow corridor, she screamed terribly and rushed towards us. They dragged the mother away and took us out. I remember there were cradles for children, and little Vitya was probably in one of them.

I never saw my mother again. For some reason, the three of us were placed in a school for the deaf and dumb. Then it was disbanded... It so happened that I ended up in the hospital, and when I returned, the brothers were no longer there. I was told that Tolya and Vova were sent to the Odessa orphanage. After that, I was in a reception center and somewhere in 1939 I ended up in an orphanage in the city of Petrovsk-Zabaikalsky, Chita region.

I never saw any of my relatives again and I don’t know anything about them. Maybe they are alive? If not father and mother, then brothers? Any of them? After all, it shouldn’t be so that there’s not a single one left on earth besides me. loved one?

Barambaev Georgy Alexandrovich, Verbovyi Log farmstead, Rostov region.

My father was arrested in 1936 or 1937, his further fate is unknown to me. I know that before that he worked as an accountant in the Kemerovo region. After my father’s arrest, my mother and I went to her brother’s place and there we were afraid that they would take us away too. Mom kept going around asking about my father, but no one gave any information. Due to hunger in 1942, my mother died, and I was left alone, twelve years old... At that time I was very hungry and undressed. I went to the shops to beg, and they gave me a piece of bread, whatever they could. Strangers noticed me and saw how I suffered. They helped send me to an orphanage, where I lived for five years. I was so scared that in the orphanage I said a different surname: instead of Ulyanova - Borisova... It remained that way.

Borisova Tamara Nikolaevna, Serpukhov.

My father Fabel, Alexander Petrovich (Estonian by nationality), during the revolution was the commissar of the surveillance and communications service of the Onega-Ladoga region, the head of the surveillance and communications service of the Baltic Fleet (Kronstadt). In 1934–1935 served in Sevastopol as assistant to the head of the communications school of the Black Sea Fleet. Colonel. He was arrested in 1937, shot in 1939, and subsequently rehabilitated. The mother was sentenced to eight years and served time in the Temnikov camps. We were three children: older sister- thirteen years old, I am eleven and my brother is eight.

We all ended up in the NKVD children's detention center in Sevastopol. We were offered to give up our parents, but no one did this. In December 1937, we were transferred to an orphanage for children of “enemies of the people” in Volchansk, Kharkov region.

The children of “enemies of the people” from different cities of the Soviet Union gathered in the orphanage: Sevastopol, Simferopol, Kerch, Odessa, Kiev, Smolensk, Moscow, Minsk, Leningrad... We gradually began to love our director Leonty Eliseevich Litvin. He was very strict. But we were not offended or insulted. But we weren't that good. Everyone was offended, offended, angry, did not understand why our parents suffered, angry... In September 1938, he was transferred to another orphanage, where it was necessary to restore order. Another director came to us. We demanded that we be sent to Leonty Eliseevich. And our orphanage in Volchansk was disbanded: the older ones were sent to him in the village. Giyovka, Kharkov region, and the rest of the children were sent to other orphanages. Leonty Eliseevich did for us what hardly anyone else did. He gave us the opportunity to finish 10th grade in the orphanage before the war. Before the war, not every child in the family could receive a secondary education, and in orphanages, after the seventh grade, everyone was sent to work. [...] The school was at the orphanage, the teachers came to us. I graduated from school in 1941 - on June 14 I passed my last exam, and on the 22nd the war began. I even managed to enter Kharkov University medical school- this is an orphanage girl, the daughter of an enemy of the people. And all thanks to Leonty Eliseevich.

I want to say that at that terrible time not all people were cruel, indifferent, cowardly. On my way I came across people who helped me a lot, even saved me from death. And the first was Leonty Eliseevich. In 1939, when we joined the Komsomol, he vouched for me. I was very proud of this, and all the girls were jealous of me.

The war has begun. We, tenth graders, had already been released from the orphanage, had passports, and some became students. He was proud of us, since he himself was from a simple peasant family, graduated from a pedagogical school, and we were already more literate than him. In terms of his human qualities, he was smart, even wise, strict and kind. He realized long ago that we are just ordinary children, there is nothing hostile about us.

And so the orphanage began to be evacuated. Leonty Eliseevich did not leave any of us to the mercy of fate, he took us along with the orphanage.

In the Stalingrad region (Serafimovich), where they brought an orphanage, he got us all jobs (there were five of us girls, the boys went to the front immediately after school. No one returned). When the Germans approached Stalingrad in the summer of 1942, he promised to take us with him again if the orphanage was evacuated. But I voluntarily joined the army; True, I was sent back as “the daughter of an enemy of the people”...

Grabovskaya Emma Alexandrovna, Odessa.

Mom was taken away long before dawn... There was a knock on our door. Mom opened it. A man in uniform came in, with a revolver at his side. He ordered his mother to get dressed and follow him. He himself did not deign to go out while my mother was getting dressed. My brother and I started crying, but my mother said that it was not her fault, that there They'll figure it out and she'll come back.

Hungry and cold days began for us. A few days later, some people started visiting us frequently. They made an inventory of the property. What was there to describe if we lived in a walk-through room, all our belongings were located in a chest. Pillows were carelessly thrown out of the chest, feathers flew around the room. And so for several days in a row, the same thing. During this time, no one asked us what we were eating. Because of the cold, mushrooms grew in the corners of the room.

After several days of absolute hunger, our neighbors brought us a plate of stew. Realizing that our mother would not return, they continued to support us. Our neighbor, Uncle Andrei, returned from the front without a leg, received some meager rations, and he and his wife shared with us. Then the same Uncle Andrei walked on crutches to the authorities so that they would take us to an orphanage. When they brought me to the orphanage, there was a decorated Christmas tree...

In 1948, I was sent to Glinsk, where my brother was. It was here that I learned that I was the daughter of an “enemy of the people.” In all my actions there was a resemblance to my mother, and I did everything with special intent to harm. And even our organized escape, which ended unsuccessfully, was regarded as a planned meeting with spies (I was in 3rd grade at the time). In Glinsk, my mother wrote us two or three letters at large intervals. In each one she wrote that she was sick and was in the hospital. These letters were re-read by the director and teachers.

When Stalin died, I was told that my mother should be released, since I was 14 years old. But I didn’t know that my mother had been gone for a long time.

L.M. Kostenko

My father, Dubov Alexander Grigorievich, worked as the head of the military construction department in Batumi. He was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to to the highest degree.

The mother was arrested at the same time as ChSIR and given eight years in camps, which she served in Potma and other places.

I have been disabled since childhood. When my parents were arrested, I was in Yevpatoria, in the bone-tuberculosis sanatorium “Red Partisan”. The doctors defended me and kept me until I recovered and I began to walk. Although there was a letter telling me to immediately send me to an orphanage, since the children of “enemies of the people” cannot use our sanatoriums. But the head physician replied that according to our Constitution, children are not responsible for their parents. I was eleven years old. Thanks to him, I was cured!

Dubova Isolda Alexandrovna

My father, Semenov Georgy Dmitrievich, head of the Lenzolotoflot radio station, was arrested in the village of Kachug Irkutsk region in 1938. That's all I know about him. I was two years old. A mother, pregnant with her second child, stood for days near the KGB prison on Litvinova Street in Irkutsk. The child was born sick, with a congenital heart defect, this is my sister Faina. She lived very little. We went through an orphanage, since our mother was also arrested, and our old grandparents (he died soon) could not support us. Grandfather swelled from hunger and died. Now these horrors are a thing of the past, but they have terribly crippled our lives.

I don’t know anything about my father, who he is, where he’s from, whether he has any relatives, and therefore neither do I...

I am alone like a finger in this world, which has always been so angry with me, although I sang songs in the children’s choir praising the “leader of the peoples” and danced the Lezginka with ecstasy. And they sewed a suit for me in the orphanage with braiding, and I, a little girl, was proud, screaming: “Assa!”, and the audience applauded. This terrible memory burns the heart with an evil shard.

Margarita Georgievna Semenova. 1989

Archive of NIPC "Memorial".

In April 2013, the sixth volume in the “Line of Fate” collection series was published. These books with memoirs of children of “enemies of the people” were published on the initiative of the State Legal Department Nizhny Novgorod region and a commission under the Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Region to restore the rights of rehabilitated victims of political repression.

In a small room of the Museum of Local Wars, which is located in school No. 31, elderly people are sitting in front of a screen on which documentary footage of their lives as repressed people is shown. Their faces are marked with bitter memories, many have tears in their eyes. These are the children and grandchildren of people who were thrown into prison or shot under anti-Soviet charges as “enemies of the people.” Music sounds and youthful voices talk about the fate of each of the twelve repressed, the memories of whose children were included in the sixth collection of the “Line of Fate” series. Here are some of them.

Vladimir Leonidovich Ponomarev

“I was born into a family that unconditionally accepted Soviet power,” recalls Vladimir Leonidovich. - My father, Leonid Ivanovich Ponomarev, was a member of the party. In 1927, he was the director of the pedagogical technical school in Lyskovo, Nizhny Novgorod region. And three years later he is in charge of the city administration in Nizhny. In the same year, the People's Commissariat of Education instructs him to organize an engineering and pedagogical institute in Sormovo. He successfully copes with this and works there as director until 1934. In 19434, after the 17th Party Congress, where 300 delegates spoke out against Stalin, a purge of party ranks began. Arrests began at the Gorky Pedagogical Institute. The reason was the distribution of Lenin's letter (testament) to the party congress with an unflattering characterization of Stalin.

Then a serious accusation arose: organizing the assassination attempt on Comrade Stalin during the May Day demonstration on Red Square. The security officer Igor Kedrov (who was later shot) wrote to the Central Committee about the impossibility of physically fulfilling it, but common sense was not taken into account: it was necessary to carry out the plan against “enemies of the people.” Leonid Ponomarev was arrested in 1936 and held in Butyrka prison on death row for a year and seven months, after which he was executed. Vladimir Ponomarev says that he has a photograph of his father, taken from the investigation file]: on it is the face of a man completely exhausted by torture. “I soon realized,” says Vladimir Leonidovich, “that there are two different concepts: the Motherland and the state.” He went to study at the Civil Engineering Institute because it was the only one that accepted without restrictions, including children of “enemies of the people.” Now Ponomarev is 80 years old. He listens to the schoolchildren's performance with tears in his eyes.

Photo by Elfiya Garipova

Natalya Romanovna Dolgacheva (Wagner)

“I was lucky to be born into a wonderful, intelligent family,” says Natalya Romanovna in her memoirs. - My grandfather, Yegor Egvrovich Wagner, was known throughout the world as an outstanding chemist; many encyclopedias write about him. And dad, Roman Egorovich Wagner, headed the organic department of the Industrial Institute in Nizhny Novgorod. I was surrounded by love and warmth.

Everything collapsed the day the doorbell rang and my father was taken away. It was July 3, 1941. He was accused of either counter-revolutionary activities or “espionage.” Dad, after a year of imprisonment and “investigative actions,” died in prison. They say that he once expressed the opinion that Russia should not have concluded the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. That was his “fault.” My mother and I began a “walk through torment.” There was no money. Mom couldn't find a job. We were very hungry. For me, the daughter of an “enemy of the people,” and even with a German surname, it was sometimes very difficult. At the dental clinic, where I went with unbearable pain, the doctor, looking at my last name, asked:

-You are German?

“No,” I answered. Then she nodded to her neighbors.

-Come here, look! Here is a typical German woman! - and turned to me again. - We have no medicine! All!

So I left without healing the tooth, and for many years I could not bring myself to go to any other clinic...”

Natalya Romanovna Dolgacheva (Wagner) taught for many years at music school No. 1 in Gorky. She is now 91 years old. Because of her age, it is not easy for her to move, so her grandson receives the book and CD with the presentation.

Inna Anatolyevna Kirpichnikova (Kelmanson)

Inna Anatlyevna’s father was deputy chairman of the State Planning Committee of the Kazakh SSR for industry, and oversaw the metallurgical industry of Kazakhstan. “In December 1936, my father was arrested right at work,” recalls Inna Anatolyevna. - The investigation “established” that Anatoly Izrailevich Kelmanson is an active participant in the anti-Soviet Trotskyist organization, a spy for many foreign intelligence services (“Why does an ordinary Soviet person need knowledge of the five foreign languages?). In addition, specialists from America worked at the plant (Mr. Foster, Mr. Alish). Guided by Article 58-2, 7, 8, 11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, on October 3, 1937, he was sentenced to death. On October 17, the sentence was carried out. And in February 1938, without trial or investigation, my mother was convoyed to a camp, which the prisoners dubbed ALZHIR (Akmola camp for wives of traitors to the Motherland).”

Little Inna remained in the care of her aunt and knew nothing about her mother’s fate for two years. He and Aunt Olya were evicted from the apartment. Fortunately, they were sheltered by the mother of the “enemy of the people” professor, who allowed them to occupy the storeroom. Inna met her own mother only eight years later and took a long time to get used to her and to life in Karlag, where she went to live with her mother. “The prisoners there worked in the administration, hospital, pharmacy, and as gardeners,” recalls Inna Anatolyevna. - And the janitor in the department was Bluchersha (the wife of Army Commander Blucher).

Repressed people also worked at the school. When Stalin died, there was a mourning meeting at school. I stood in the guard of honor at the portrait, and tears flowed down my cheeks. Teacher Zinaida Ivanovna approached from behind.

“Innochka,” she called everyone by name, “you should be happy, not cry.”

I decided that she had mixed everything up out of grief, and my mother asked me in the evening not to tell anyone about it.” Inna Anatolyevna worked at the polytechnic institutes of Barnaul and Almaty, received the title of associate professor in the department of physics. In 1997, she and her husband moved to Nizhny Novgorod, closer to their daughter and grandchildren.

“From the example of the destinies of these outstanding people, the younger generation can learn courage, fortitude and the ability to preserve themselves even in the most difficult life situations,” explains Inga Favorskaya, Chairman of the Commission under the Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Region for the restoration of the rights of rehabilitated victims of political repression and one of the organizers of the book presentation.

Today everything or almost everything is known about the terrible time of the Great Terror. We have been talking loudly about his cruel morals for a long time, realizing that memory is the most effective vaccine against the repetition of that nightmare.

Today we will remember those who became the most innocent victims of repression - the wives of executed “enemies of the people.” Their main “crime” was that they were just wives... More precisely, widows, who were destined for painful torture of hunger, cold, loss of children, complete isolation and hard labor in the Kazakh steppes.

The worst thing is that all this had nothing to do with politics or any logic: it was paranoia, coupled with the despotism and oriental cruelty of the Kremlin leader.

To the root!

To understand what was happening then in the USSR and specifically in Belarus, let’s read the operational order of People’s Commissar Yezhov No. 00486 “On the operation to repress the wives and children of traitors to the Motherland” dated August 15, 1937.

The People's Commissar demanded the immediate arrest of the wives and ex-wives of those convicted of espionage, “traitors to the Motherland” and members of right-wing Trotskyist espionage and sabotage organizations. For each family of the “traitor,” a detailed card was compiled with a name list of dependent relatives (wives, children, elderly parents, and others). Separate characteristics were written for children over 15 years old - they were recognized as “socially dangerous and capable of anti-Soviet actions.”

A museum has now been built on the site of the Karaganda forced labor camp.

The wives were ordered to arrest everyone, with the exception of pregnant women, the elderly, “severely and contagiously ill” and those who themselves informed on their husband - they were given a written undertaking not to leave. Activities regarding “parents and other relatives” were determined by the heads of the republican, regional or regional bodies of the NKVD.

“Simultaneously with the arrest, a thorough search is carried out. During a search, the following are confiscated: weapons, ammunition, explosives and chemical substances, military equipment, duplicating equipment (copiers, glass printers, typewriters, etc.), counter-revolutionary literature, correspondence, foreign currency, precious metals in bars, coins and products, personal and monetary documents, says top-secret order No. 00486. - All property personally belonging to the arrested (with the exception of necessary underwear, outer and underwear, shoes and bedding that the arrested take with them) is confiscated. The apartments of those arrested are sealed." After the arrest and search, the arrested wives were to be escorted to prison.

And lastly, punishment: “The wives of convicted traitors to the Motherland are subject to imprisonment in camps for periods depending on the degree of social danger, no less than 5-8 years,” the order prescribed. The operation to repress the women of the ChSIR (members of the families of traitors to the Motherland) was to be completed no later than October 25, 1937.

Such photos were taken upon arrival at the ITL for all convicted wives of enemies of the people

Historians explain Stalin’s logic of repression against the wives of “traitors to the Motherland” in different ways. From the point of view of the leader of the peoples, the women repressed by order No. 00486 were not just the wives of “enemies of the people.”

These were the wives of the “main enemies” - the “right-wing Trotskyist conspirators.” Speaking in simple language, these were the wives of the elite: party and Soviet leaders, industrial leaders, prominent military, public and cultural figures. The same elite that emerged in the first two decades of Soviet power and which Stalin (not all of it, of course, but a significant part of it) by the mid-1930s considered either as ballast or as a constant source of conspiracies against this very government and against him personally .

His own experience of observing the family life of underground revolutionaries at the beginning of the century suggested: the wives of his former comrades and supporters, both old and younger, whose paths diverged from his own, should be on the side of their husbands. According to Stalin's logic, this did not mean that they directly helped them in their “counter-revolutionary activities.” But they knew about it, they could not help but know. And this knowledge, and perhaps even sympathy, made women in his eyes accomplices of their husbands. This kind of idea, apparently, formed the basis of the fatal blow to the wives.

The fate of the Belarusian Plato

The biography and personal history of the famous Belarusian writer and public figure Platon Golovach, by the standards of that time, can be called ideal, exemplary. Born into a poor peasant family, he was orphaned early. An organizer of the Komsomol movement in the volost, in 1920 he created a Komsomol cell in his native village of Pobokovichi, Bobruisk district. He fought against the illiteracy of the peasants and opened a reading hut with like-minded people.

The abilities of an active Komsomol member were noticed and began to be promoted - his career was rapidly going uphill: in 1922 - 1923 he studied at the Minsk Party School, and in 1926 he graduated from the Communist University.

In 1922 - 1923, Platon Golovach was already actively publishing and working first as an instructor, and then as the head of the organizational department of the Borisov district Komsomol committee. From 1923 to 1928 he headed the literary organization “Molodnyak”, after its reorganization he became a member of a new structure - the Belarusian Association of Proletarian Writers.

In 1927-1930, Golovach was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus, from 1928 - first secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol of Belarus, in 1927-1935 - a member of the Central Executive Committee of the BSSR, from 1929 to 1930 - deputy people's commissar of education of the republic.

In 1934, Platon Golovach became a member of the USSR Writers' Union - and all this at the age of 31! It was he who was entrusted to be the editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Chyrvonaya Zmena” and the literary magazines “Maladnyak” and “Polymya”. His novels, collections of stories and essays have been translated into Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Yiddish and other languages.

It all ended in an instant - on August 11, 1937, when he (like most of the former “young people”) was arrested in his Minsk apartment on suspicion of organizing a terrorist group and conducting Nazi activities. Convicted by the visiting military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and sentenced to death with confiscation of property. The sentence was carried out on October 29, 1937 in Minsk. Platon Golovach was rehabilitated 20 years later, on July 25, 1956.

And a couple of weeks after the execution, according to order No. 00486, they arrested the widow Nina Vecher-Golovach, drew up a report, sent it to Moscow and received an answer. The first step was to take her to Orsha, to a transit prison. From there - to the Karaganda camp, to A.L.Z.I.R. Eight years of imprisonment lay ahead of her.

With a stroke of the pen

The KGB Central Archives gave us the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with this case. The Committee takes an open line regarding the repressions of the 1930s-1950s, declassifying archives that only yesterday seemed inaccessible.

In front of me lies an old yellow folder with a black inscription in the title: “NKVD of the Belarusian SSR.” Below is the inscription: “Case No. 32092 on the charge of Nina Fedorovna Vecher-Golovach.” The documents that are neatly folded in this 1937 folder look as if they were written yesterday: every letter, every number and signature is visible. That is why all the events that are revealed to the reader evoke such strong sensations.

Here is a certificate with the seal of the military prosecutor, which states that Nina Vecher-Golovach has two children and lives in Minsk at the address: st. Moskovskaya, 8/1. It is also written here that she is the wife of the executed enemy of the people, Golovach Platon Romanovich, and is subject to arrest. Here is a warrant ordering her to be arrested and searched.

House number 8 on Moskovskaya Street has survived to this day: it’s easy to imagine how a car stopped at one of its entrances on the evening of November 4, 1937...

From the search report we learn: Nina Vecher-Golovach’s passport, union card, various identification documents and correspondence were confiscated. In the questionnaire of the arrested person, Nina Fedorovna provides her personal information: born in the village of Mashitsy, Slutsk district in 1905, from peasants, non-party, secondary technical education, hydraulic engineer, among close relatives she lists sisters Vecher Tamara Fedorovna, Vecher Ksenia Fedorovna, father-in-law Golovach Roman Kondratovich ( 80 years old, disabled), daughter Galina 6 years old and son Rollan 1 year 5 months. Three receipts indicate that 37 rubles 34 kopecks, bonds and a pocket watch were confiscated from the arrested person.

In the resolution on the selection of a preventive measure, which is dated November 12, the following is stated as a proven fact: “Evening Nina Fedorovna was sufficiently exposed that, being the wife of the exposed enemy of the people, Golovach Platon Romanovich, she knew about her husband’s counter-revolutionary activities.” And therefore he will be kept in custody in the Minsk NKVD prison.

From the interrogation report:

Question: Which of your relatives was repressed?

Answer: On August 11, 1937, the NKVD arrested my husband Golovach Platon Romanovich.

Question: Do you know why your husband was arrested?

Answer: Don't know.

Question: Tell us what you know about your husband’s counter-revolutionary terrorist activities?

Answer: I knew nothing about the counter-revolutionary terrorist activities of Golovach’s husband Platon.

Question: You are telling lies. The investigation knows that you knew about Golovach’s counter-revolutionary work.

Answer: I didn't know anything.

Question: You have been charged under Art. 24–68, 24–70 and 76 of the Criminal Code of the BSSR. Do you plead guilty?

Answer: No, I don't admit it.

This concluded the investigation.

The indictment in case No. 32092 of Nina Vecher-Golovach says: “CHARGED with the fact that, being the wife of a executed enemy of the people, she was an accomplice in his counter-revolutionary crimes.”

And finally, the last two documents that drew a clear line between the former and future life of Platon Golovach’s wife. In an extract from the minutes of the Special Meeting at the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR dated November 28, 1937, the following is printed in narrow typewritten font: “EVENING Nina Fedorovna, as a member of the family of a traitor to the Motherland, should be imprisoned in a correctional labor camp for a period of EIGHT years, counting the term from November 5, 1937.”

The certificate from the eighth department of the GUGB briefly states: “the convict should be sent with the first departing stage to the city. Akmolinsk, at the disposal of the special department of KARLAG NKVD. Confirm the departure date by January 13, 1938.”

Hard labor

While Nina Vecher travels in a crowded freight car to a high-security steppe camp, we will remember the meaning of some abbreviations.

What is Karlag? Karaganda forced labor camp, one of the largest branches in the NKVD GULAG system. It was supplied by two railway lines, its length was 300 by 200 km, in different years Between 38 and 65 thousand prisoners served their sentences here. Karlag was liquidated only in 1959, after the debunking of the cult of Stalin, but the terrible rumor and ghosts of thousands of innocent victims of that time will survive it for decades...

After the release of Order No. 00486, it became obvious: it was necessary to create a separate camp for repressed widows of enemies of the people. So, on August 15, 1937, A.L.Z.I.R. appeared southwest of Akmolinsk (now Astana). - Akmola camp for wives of traitors to the Motherland.

Officially it was called the 17th women's camp department of Karlag. Unofficially - “point 26”, since it was located in the 26th labor settlement. Today we can say with confidence: A.L.Z.I.R. was the largest Soviet women's camp, one of the three "islands of the archipelago" of the Gulag.

And it was here, starting from the end of 1937, that the wives of repressed government officials and public figures. Only in 1938, together with Nina Vecher, 4,500 female prisoners from the ChSIR (members of the families of traitors to the Motherland) ended up here.

In just 16 years, through A.L.Z.I.R. More than 16,000 prisoners passed through. Among them were the sister of the executed Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the mother of Maya Plisetskaya, the wives of Mikhail Kalinin, Boris Pilnyak, Nikolai Bukharin, the mother of Yuri Trifonov and many, many others.

This is what one of the prisoners, Galina Stepanova-Klyuchnikova, recalled in her memoirs: “Below us, on the lower bunks, Rakhil Mikhailovna Plisetskaya was sleeping.

Three times a day she ran to the children's barracks to breastfeed her son... In the corner of the barracks, the wives of Belarusian poets were quietly whispering to each other - Evening, Astapenko, Taubina. Opposite, Lydia Gustavovna Bagritskaya, the wife of the poet Bagritsky, was crocheting something with a homemade crochet. After his death, she remarried, but still received eight years in the camps. Next door was Olya Chukunskaya, the wife of the USSR naval attaché in England and Italy.”

A terrible picture awaited those who arrived at the camp in the winter of 1938. Six barracks made of adobe bricks in the middle of the steppe, three rows of barbed wire around the perimeter and sentry towers. They were taken out of the heated cars, like dangerous repeat offenders, at gunpoint, to the deafening barking of shepherd dogs.

According to the documents, the women held in the Akmola special department were considered especially dangerous criminals, so the conditions were harsh. They slept on bunks in several tiers. There was a roll call twice a day; every day they went to the frozen lake located on the territory to harvest reeds. It was used to heat homemade stoves in frozen barracks, and in the summer it was used as construction material.

Meager food (a ration of black bread, a scoop of gruel and a cup of gruel) and the piercing cold led to hungry fainting and frequent frostbite of the extremities. Prisoners were forbidden to read or keep notes; there was no talk of visits or sending them from outside.

Letters from the Mist

Despite all this, prisoners of A.L.Z.I.R. they worked conscientiously, exceeding the plan and not giving the slightest reason for penalties. No, they did not think about escaping. They spent their nights sewing batches of military uniforms for the front and dreamed of only one thing: to be released and be useful to their country in this difficult time.

In case No. 32092 we find 3 handwritten letters from Nina Fedorovna, addressed to Moscow, personally to People's Commissar L.P. Beria. The first is dated 1939, the second - 1942, the third - 1943. She writes that she knew nothing about the “subversive” activities of her husband Platon Golovach, and asks for a review of the case in order to be able to raise her young children herself:

“Being here in the labor camp, from the first day I have been working honestly, giving all my strength and knowledge, for which I have repeatedly received gratitude, which is entered into my personal file, as well as bonuses. I ask you to reconsider my case and remove from me the shameful stain that I absolutely do not deserve. Give me freedom to work with tenfold energy to defeat the fascist beast and for the good of my dear beloved Motherland.”

In all three cases she was denied, and until the end of 1945, nothing changed in her fate, as in the fate of thousands of widows of “enemies of the people.” Although the eight-year term of their imprisonment by that time was formally completely exhausted.

At the beginning of 1946, liberation began, but prisoners A.L.Z.I.R. No one was in a hurry to release. Here's why: the garment factory in the camp had to fulfill its five-year plan. But it did not provide for the reduction of prisoners.

Liberated wives were not allowed to live in the zone; there were no residential settlements near the camp. All around is bare steppe. The camp administration found a rather original solution: it moved the barbed wire and towers with guards deeper into the area, so some of the barracks were outside the zone. The liberated women were settled in them. Now they seemed to be free, but they went to work at the factory in the zone as civilian employees.

Obviously, Nina Vecher-Golovach also lived in one of these “conditionally released” barracks for several years after the war. The Akmola camp department officially existed until June 1953 and was liquidated by order of the USSR Ministry of Justice.

On the site of the former camp, the Akmolinsky state farm was formed, and later a village grew here. But what happened to Nina Fedorovna?

Found not guilty

In March 1953, Stalin died, and a radical change occurred in the fate of all those innocently repressed - rehabilitation. Already in the next letter dated June 2, 1956 addressed to the military prosecutor of the Belarusian Military District, Nina Vecher writes: “Due to the fact that an investigation has now established the complete innocence of my husband, who devoted his entire life to the cause of the Party and was a true communist and a patriot, I ask for your intervention in my case in order to review it and completely rehabilitate me. You considered the issue of my husband’s rehabilitation in May of this year.”

That's all. The ring of history closed, and justice still triumphed... almost 20 years later. By this time, daughter Galina was already 25 years old, son Rollan was 20.5, and the widow of Platon Golovach herself was 51.

The life of this woman acquired a new starting point, essentially starting with clean slate. There, in Akmolinsk, she tried with all her might to leave memories that were sticky like steppe days and brittle like dry reeds.

Until recently, the village in which A.L.Zh.I.R. was located in the 1930s - 1950s was called Malinovka. In 2007 it was renamed Akmol.

In the same year, on the initiative of the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, a museum and memorial complex was opened here, dedicated to the memory of those who passed through A.L.Z.I.R. women, victims of political repression and totalitarianism.

A museum in the shape of a mound, the Arch of Sorrow, a heated carriage, a watchtower with a sentry and a recreated adobe barracks - the exhibition brings tears to everyone who comes here. The names of more than 7,000 prisoners of the camp are engraved on the black granite slabs of the Alley of Memory.

If you find yourself here, be sure to look for the inscription EVENING N.F. and bow your head as a sign of respect and sorrow. This memory, carved by descendants on granite slabs, conjures us decades later: “Never again!”

The previous post aroused the justified anger of FB users and was deleted. In a link to a LJ post about camps for repressed children of the USSR, an unknown author used photographs of malnourished children from other…

gee pages of the history of Soviet power (in particular, the famine in the Volga region and the siege of Leningrad. Let’s leave aside the question of whether the famine in the Volga region is a consequence of the actions of the authorities. I will not ask questions about the blockade. Not because there are none, but because I foresee an additional holivar ). The question arose: isn’t this a slander against Comrade Stalin? Maybe there were no camps for children? And the children were not imprisoned for political reasons? Where are the facts? I answer.

In the midst of the great “Yezhov” terror, instructions appear on how to behave with the families of “enemies of the people” - operational Order people's commissar Internal Affairs of the USSR Yezhov No. 00486 dated August 15, 1937. We read.

13) Socially dangerous children of convicts, depending on their age, degree of danger and possibility of correction, are subject to imprisonment in camps or correctional labor colonies of the NKVD, or placement in special regime orphanages of the People's Commissariat of Education of the republics.”

We can say that during the cycle of terror of 1936-1938, children were convicted under political charges. (I wonder how many children went straight from orphanages to a colony for “socially dangerous” behavior? The stigma of being a son/daughter of an enemy of the people, presumably, is not very conducive to healthy social behavior. Unfortunately, such statistics have not yet been found).

The comments to the order contain a clarification, humanistic for those times, that, following their parents, only children who had reached the age of 15 were supposed to be judged as enemies of the people. Moreover, developments for the entire family, including children, should have been carried out before the arrest. Apparently, even then it should have been clear how “dangerous” the child was. What fits into the general logic of repression: first, placing an order on a person, then extracting a confession on a given topic, since according to Vyshinsky, “confession is the queen of evidence.”

Nevertheless, in the memoirs of prisoners there are stories about younger children convicted under a political article. (As for Article 58, it had no age restrictions).

What is important is that the children were kept in camps for adults, enduring all the hardships and hardships adult life. Hunger, humiliation, hard labor. In Norilsk, for example, children's colonies began to be separated from adults only in 1940.

It is also worth noting that even children who were not formally repressed were kept in camps for adults with their mothers, practically as prisoners. (in 1936-1937, the stay of children in the camps was recognized as a factor reducing the discipline and productivity of female prisoners. The official period of stay of a child with his mother was reduced to 12 months (in 1934 it was 4 years, later - 2 years).

In the memoirs, children from a family of kulaks, dispossessed back in 28-29 and sent into exile in 33, actually lived with their parents in camp barracks in conditions close to camp ones. De jure these children were not repressed, but de facto who were they and how did they live?

Now, as for convicted children in general - not under political charges. I believe that we should not forget about the introduction of the death penalty for children from 12 years of age in accordance with the Resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of April 7, 1935. The range of execution offenses is wide - from theft to murder. I do not have figures on how many children were shot, and although it can be assumed that this measure was not widely used, it nevertheless indicates the situation with the “protection of childhood” in the USSR.

What can you say to those whose grandfather, say, was repressed, but whose mother was not touched? Not only weren’t they imprisoned, but they weren’t even taken to an orphanage? Yes, not all children fell into this mechanism. To a certain extent, the decision on the fate of the children was left to the discretion of the NKVD officers leading the case.

“children left unattended after their mother’s arrest are placed in orphanages,
“if other relatives (not repressed) wish to take in the remaining orphans
at your full expense - do not interfere with this,” - directive of the NKVD in pursuance of the Order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Yezhov No. 00486 dated August 15, 1937.

Can you imagine NKVD officers calling relatives with the question: “Would you like to take your children with you?” Of course, no one asked the relatives anything. We managed to pick up the children after the parents were arrested - good. If they didn’t have time, the guys in uniform might send craters for the children, or they might forget. Or score.

Nevertheless, only in the period from August to October 1937, “The Administrative and Economic Department did the following work: In total, 25,342 children were removed throughout the Union. Of these: a) 22,427 people were sent to the orphanages of the People's Commissariat for Education and local nurseries. Of these, Moscow - 1909 people. b) Transferred to care and returned to mothers. 2915 people.”

I will give an example from the memoirs of the wife of the “enemy of the people,” the daughter of K.I. Chukovsky, Lydia Chukovskaya (“Dash”).

L.Ch. I noticed that the wives of those who were given 10 years without the right to correspondence in the years 36-38 (which in reality secretly meant execution) were arrested. And they were sent to colonies for the wives of repressed people. Next or in parallel they came for the children. Chukovskaya believes that this happened within the framework of the unspoken doctrine of “revenge,” which stated that the families of the repressed would definitely take revenge, so “for prevention” it is better to isolate them. But! If women left and hid their children, no one would look for them. That is, there was a certain glitch in the system, a loophole - the system did its main bloody work and was not distracted by the search for secondary citizens - “traitors to the motherland”. Lidia Korneevna left St. Petersburg, the children were taken by relatives - thus they avoided the most bitter fate. (Although they came for her and the children, they only found an empty room). If the husband was given less than 10 years, women and children most likely were not touched at all. Chukovskaya made this conclusion based on observations of the families of those arrested. The text of Yezhov’s secret order and the subsequent directive with clarifications was, of course, unknown to her. But, as is now clear, her observations turned out to be correct.

Jacques Rossi, a French political scientist and linguist who came to the USSR on a Comintern voucher, spent in Stalin’s camps, prisons and exile from 1937 to 1961. In his extensive work “Handbook of the Gulag,” Jacques Rossi notes groups of children who found themselves in the Russian Gulag: 1) camp children (children born in custody); 2) kulak children (peasant children who managed to escape deportation during the forced collectivization of the village, but who were later caught, convicted and sent to camps); 3) children of enemies of the people (those whose parents were arrested under Article 58); 4) Spanish children; they most often ended up in orphanages; during the purge of 1947-1949. Some of these children, already grown up, were sent to camps with sentences of 10-15 years - for “anti-Soviet agitation.”

If we talk about crimes against childhood, to this list compiled by Jacques Rossi, we can probably add children who were not themselves imprisoned, but experienced similar experiences of deprivation, hunger, and camp life. These are the children of special settlers; children who lived near the camps and observed camp life every day. All of them, in one way or another, were involved in the Russian Gulag...

If there are any clarifications, welcome.