Gulag (51 page)

Outside, life for children born in camps did not necessarily improve. Instead, they joined the massed ranks of the children who had been transferred directly to children’s homes following the arrests of their parents— another category of child victim. As a rule, state orphanages were vastly overcrowded, dirty, understaffed, and often lethal. A former prisoner recalled the emotions and high hopes with which her camp sent a group of prisoners’ children into a city orphanage—and the horror they felt on hearing that all eleven had died in an epidemic.
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As early as 1931, at the height of collectivization, the heads of children’s homes in the Urals wrote desperate letters to regional authorities, begging for help in caring for the thousands of newly orphaned kulak children:

In a room 12 square meters, there are 30 boys. For 38 children there are seven beds, on which the “recidivists” sleep. Two eighteen-year-olds have destroyed the electrical installations, robbed the shop, and drink with the director . . . children sleep on the dirty floor, play cards which they have made from torn-up pictures of the “Leader,” smoke, break the bars on the windows and climb over the walls intending to escape.
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In another home for kulaks’ children:

Children sleep on the floor, and don’t have enough shoes . . . sometimes there is no water for several days. They eat badly; aside from water and potatoes, they have no lunch. There are no plates and bowls, they eat out of ladles. For 140 people there is one cup, and not enough spoons; they eat in turns, or by hand. There is no light, only one lamp for the whole home, and it has no kerosene.
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In 1933, a children’s home near Smolensk sent the following telegram to the Moscow children’s commission: “Food supply of the home has been cut. One hundred children are starving. The organization refuses to give rations. There is no help. Take urgent measures.”
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Nor did much change over time. A 1938 NKVD order describes one children’s home in which two eight-year-old girls were raped by some of the older boys, and another in which 212 children shared twelve spoons and twenty plates, and slept in their clothes and shoes for lack of nightclothes.
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In 1940, Natalya Savelyeva was “kidnapped” from her children’s home— her parents had been arrested—and adopted by a family who wanted to use her as a house servant. She was thus separated from her sister, whom she never found again.
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Children of arrested politicals had a particularly hard time in such homes, and were often treated worse than the ordinary orphans they shared them with. They were told, as was Svetlana Kogteva, age ten, to “forget their parents, since they were enemies of the people.”
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NKVD officers responsible for such homes were ordered to maintain special vigilance, and to single out the children of counter-revolutionaries, to ensure that they did not receive privileged treatment of any kind.
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Thanks to this rule, Pyotr Yakir lasted precisely three days in one of these orphanages, following his parents’ arrest. During that time, he “managed to get a name as a ringleader of the ‘traitors’ children” and was immediately arrested, at age fourteen. He was transferred into a prison, and eventually sent to a camp.
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More often, the children of politicals suffered teasing and exclusion. One prisoner remembered that upon arrival at the orphanage, children of “enemies” had their fingerprints taken, like criminals. The teachers and caretakers were all afraid to show them too much affection, not wanting to be accused of having sympathy with “enemies.”
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The children of arrested parents were teased mercilessly about their “enemy” status, according to Yurganova, who deliberately forgot the German language she had spoken in her youth as a result.
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In these surroundings, even the children of educated parents soon learned criminal habits. Vladimir Glebov, the son of the leading Bolshevik Lev Kamenev, was one such child. At the age of four, his father was arrested, and Glebov was “exiled” to a special children’s orphanage in western Siberia. About 40 percent of the children there were children of “enemies,” about 40 percent were juvenile delinquents, and about 20 percent were Gypsy children, arrested for the crime of nomadism. As Glebov explained to the writer Adam Hochschild, there were advantages, even for the children of politicals, to having early contact with young criminals:

My buddy taught me some things which helped me a lot in later life, about protecting myself. Here I have one scar, and here another . . . when people are attacking you with a knife, you need to know how to fight back. The main principle is to respond in advance, not to let them hit you. That was our happy Soviet childhood!
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Some children, however, were permanently damaged by their orphanage experiences. One mother returned from exile, and was reunited with her young daughter. The child, at the age of eight, could still barely talk, grabbed at food, and behaved like the wild animal that the orphanage had taught her to be.
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Another mother released after an eight-year sentence, went to get her children from the orphanage, only to find that they refused to go with her. They had been taught that their parents were “enemies of the people” who deserved no love and no affection. They had been specifically instructed to refuse to leave, “if your mother ever comes to get you,” and they never wanted to live with their parents again.
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Not surprisingly, children ran away from such orphanages—in large numbers. Once they found themselves on the streets, they fell very quickly into the criminal netherworld. And once they were part of the criminal netherworld, the vicious cycle continued. Sooner or later, they would probably be arrested too.

At first glance, the 1944–45 annual NKVD report from one particular group of eight camps in Ukraine show nothing out of the ordinary. The report lists which of the camps met the Five-Year Plan, and which did not. It praises inmate shock-workers. It notes sternly that in most of the camps the food was very poor and monotonous. It notes more approvingly that an epidemic had broken out in only one camp, during the time period surveyed— and that that was after five inmates had been transferred there from the overcrowded Kharkov prison.

A few of the report’s details, however, serve to illustrate the precise nature of these eight Ukrainian camps. An inspector complains, for example, that one of the camps is short of “textbooks, pens, notebooks, pencils.” There is also a strict note about the propensity of certain inmates to gamble their food away, sometimes losing their bread rations for many months in advance: the younger denizens of the camp were, it seems, too inexperienced to play cards with the older ones.
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The eight camps in question were the eight children’s colonies of Ukraine. For not all of the children who fell under the jurisdiction of the Gulag belonged to arrested parents. A portion of them found their way into the camp system by themselves. They committed crimes, were arrested, and were sent to special camps for juveniles. These were run by the same bureaucrats who ran the adult camps, and they resembled the adult camps in many ways.

Originally, these “children’s camps” were organized for the
besprizornye
, the orphans, waifs, and dirty street children who had gotten lost or run away from their parents during the years of civil war, famine, collectivization, and mass arrest. These street children had become, by the early 1930s, a common sight in the train stations and public parks of Soviet cities. The Russian writer Victor Serge described them:

I saw them in Leningrad and in Moscow, living in sewers, in billboard kiosks, in the vaults of cemeteries where they were the undisturbed masters; holding conferences at night in urinals; traveling on the roofs of trains or on the rods below. They would emerge, pestiferous, black with sweat, to ask a few kopecks from travelers and to lie in wait for the chance to steal a valise ...
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So numerous and so problematic were these children that in 1934 the Gulag set up the first children’s nurseries within the adult camps, in order to prevent the children of arrested parents from roaming the streets.
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Slightly later, in 1935, the Gulag decided to set up special children’s colonies as well. Children were picked up off the streets in mass raids, and sent to the colonies to be educated and prepared to join the workforce.

In 1935, the Soviet authorities also passed a notorious law making children as young as twelve liable to be charged as adults. Afterward, peasant girls arrested for stealing a few grains of wheat, and children of “enemies” suspected of collaborating with their parents, found their way into juvenile prison alongside the underage prostitutes, young pickpockets, street children, and others.
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According to an internal report, NKVD agents in the 1930s picked up a twelve-year-old Tartar girl who spoke no Russian and had been separated from her mother at a train station. They deported her, alone, to the far north.
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So numerous were the Soviet Union’s child criminals that the NKVD created children’s homes with a “special regime” in 1937, for children who systematically broke the rules in the ordinary children’s homes. By 1939, mere orphans were no longer sent to the children’s camps at all. Instead, these were now reserved for child criminals who had actually been sentenced by courts or by the
osoboe soveshchanie
, the “special commission.”
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Despite the threat of harsher punishment, the number of juvenile delinquents continued to grow. The war produced not only orphans but runaways as well, unsupervised children whose fathers were at the front, and whose mothers were working twelve-hour days in factories, as well as whole new categories of child criminals: underage workers who had run away from their factory jobs—sometimes after the factories had been evacuated, away from the children’s families—thereby violating the wartime law “On Unauthorized Departure from Work at Military Enterprises.”
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According to the NKVD’s own statistics, children’s “reception centers” collected an extraordinary 842,144 homeless children in the years 1943 to 1945. Most were sent back to their parents, to children’s homes, or to trade schools. But a sizeable number—52,830, according to the records—were assigned to “labor-educational colonies.” The phrase “labor-educational colony” was nothing more than a palatable description of a children’s concentration camp.
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In many ways, the treatment of children in juvenile camps hardly differed from the treatment of their parents. Children were arrested and transported according to the same rules, with two exceptions: they were meant to be kept separately from adults, and were not to be shot in the case of attempted escape.
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They were kept in the same kind of jail as adults, in separate but equally poor cells. An inspector’s description of one such cell is depressingly familiar: “The walls are dirty; not all prisoners have bunks and mattresses. They don’t have sheets, pillowcases, or blankets. In cell No. 5, the window is covered by a pillow, for lack of a windowpane, and in cell No. 14, one window does not close at all.”
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Another report describes juvenile prisons as “unacceptably unsanitary,” with shortages of hot water and elementary necessities such as mugs, bowls, and stools.
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Some younger prisoners were also interrogated like adults. After his arrest in an orphanage, fourteen-year-old Pyotr Yakir was first placed in an adult prison, and then subjected to a full adult interrogation. His interrogator accused him of “organizing a band of Anarchist cavalry, whose aim it was to be active behind the lines of the Red Army,” citing as evidence the fact that Yakir was a keen rider. Afterward, Yakir was sentenced for the crime of being a “Socially Dangerous Element.”
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Jerzy Kmiecik, a sixteen-year-old Polish boy who was caught trying to cross the Soviet border into Hungary—this was in 1939, following the Soviet invasion of Poland—was also interrogated like an adult. Kmiecik was kept standing or sitting on a backless stool for hours on end, fed salty soup, and denied water. Among other things, his questioners wanted to know “How much did Mr. Churchill pay you for providing information.” Kmiecik did not know who Churchill was, and asked to have the question explained.
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Archives have also preserved the interrogation records of Vladimir Moroz, age fifteen, who was accused of conducting “counter-revolutionary activity” in his orphanage. Moroz’s mother and his seventeen-year-old elder brother had already been arrested. His father had been shot. Moroz had kept a diary, which the NKVD found, in which he decried the “lies and slander” all around him: “If someone had fallen into a deep sleep twelve years ago, and suddenly woken up now, he would be shocked by the changes which had taken place here in that time.” Although condemned to serve three years in camp, Moroz died in prison, in 1939.
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These were not isolated incidents. In 1939, when the Soviet press reported a few cases of NKVD officers arrested for extorting false confessions, a Siberian newspaper told the story of one case involving 160 children, mostly between the ages of twelve and fourteen, but some as young as ten. Four officers in the NKVD and the prosecutors’ office received five- to ten-year sentences for interrogating these children. The historian Robert Conquest writes that their confessions were obtained “with comparative ease”: “A ten-year-old broke down after a single night-long interrogation, and admitted to membership in a fascist organization from the age of seven.”
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Child prisoners were not exempt from the relentless demands of the slave labor system either. Although children’s colonies were not, as a rule, usually located within the tougher northern forestry or mining camps, in the 1940s there was a children’s
lagpunkt
in the far northern camp of Norilsk. Some of its 1,000 inmates were put to work in the Norilsk brick factory, while the others were put to work clearing snow. Among them were a few children of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, with the majority fifteen or sixteen, the older juvenile prisoners having already been transferred to the adult camp. Many inspectors complained about the conditions in the Norilsk children’s camp and it was eventually moved to a more southerly part of the USSR—but not before many of its young prisoners fell victim to the same diseases of cold and malnutrition as their adult counterparts.
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