The Whisperers Read online

  In the barracks, which are each meant to house 250 people, it is almost dark, with little window openings here and there that let in light only to the lower bunks. The inhabitants prepare food outside, on camp fires. The latrine – is just a fenced-off area. Water – there is a river below, but it is still frozen. The local residents lock the well (‘You will infect us; your children are dying’) and sell water in bottles.

  The ‘special settlements’ were not technically a form of imprisonment (the mass deportations were carried out by administrative directives beyond the jurisdiction of the courts) but from the spring of 1931 they were controlled by the organs of OGPU, which was responsible for the exploitation of their slave labour. The exiles in the ‘special settlements’ had to report once a month to the police. Matvei Berman, the chief of the Gulag system, said that conditions in the settlements were worse than in the labour camps. The men were employed in back-breaking work in logging-camps and mines, the women and the children in lighter work. They were given very little food (a few loaves of bread for a whole month). When they succumbed to illness and disease, they were simply left to die, as they did in their hundreds of thousands during the winter of 1931–2.41

  Shaltyr consisted of five two-storeyed wooden barracks built along a river bank. The population (about a thousand peasants) had been sent there from all over the Soviet Union, though Russians, Ukrainians, Volga Germans and Siberians were the largest groups. The men were sent to fell timber at a nearby logging camp, returning on Sundays. Yevdokiia’s son Aleksei Golovin was one of them, although he was just fifteen. On 1 September, her younger son Tolia and her daughter Antonina went to school – a single class for all the children of the settlement housed in one of the barracks. The girls were forced to cut their braids (traditionally worn by peasant girls before they were married) – as if to symbolize their renunciation of the peasant culture into which they had been born. To mark the start of the school year the Commandant of the settlement gave a speech in which he told the children that they should be grateful to Soviet power, which was ‘so good and kind that it allowed even us, the children of the kulaks, to study and become good Soviet citizens’. The ‘reforging’ (perekovka) of human beings who did not fit the mould of the ‘Soviet personality’ was an important ideological feature of the Gulag system in its early years, even in remote and isolated settlements like Shaltyr.

  Exiles in a ‘special settlement’ in western Siberia, 1933

  The first winter at Shaltyr was very cold. The snowfall was so heavy that it destroyed two of the barracks, forcing many of the boys, including Tolia, then aged ten, to live in dug-outs in the ground. There were no able-bodied men – they spent the winter at the logging-camp – so the schoolchildren were mobilized to clear the snow in the mornings. For several weeks the settlement was stranded by the snow. There were no food deliveries, so people lived off the few supplies which they had brought from home. Several hundred people were struck down by typhus; they were isolated in one of the barracks and left to fend for themselves, since there were no medicines. Yevdokiia was one of the typhus victims. Antonina writes in her memoirs:

  Every day we went to see Mama. We stood by the window, through which we could see her lying on her plank. Her head was shaved. Her eyes were wide open and wandering. She had lost her memory and did not recognize us. Tolia knocked on the window. He was in tears. He cried out: ‘Mama, Mama, don’t get ill, get up.’

  Yevdokiia survived. But so many of the typhus victims died that winter that the Commandant decided that there was no time to bury all of them. Their corpses were frozen in the snow until the spring thaw, when they were thrown into the river.

  The second winter was even worse than the first. The exiles were not given any food, part of a deliberate policy to reduce the population of the settlement by three-quarters, it appears. The exiles ate tree bark and the rotten roots of potato plants, which they mashed up into cakes. Their stomachs swelled, and many of them died. Everyone had dysentery by the spring. The Golovins were saved by a stroke of luck. One day, the Commandant was inspecting the barracks, when he noticed that Yevdokiia was reading the Gospel. He needed someone literate to deliver and collect the post from Tsentralnyi Rudnik, a Gulag mining settlement 12 kilometres away. He selected her. When she went to get the post, Yevdokiia would take a bucket of berries, collected by her children in the nearby woods, and sell them at the market in Tsentralnyi Rudnik to buy food and clothes. ‘The Commandant knew everything, of course, but turned a blind eye,’ recalls Antonina, ‘because there was no one else to collect the post.’ Once, a packet of potato seeds arrived in the mail. Yevdokiia was placed in charge of a work team to sow the seeds. Antonina recalls the joy of that occasion:

  It was like a holiday! We were all so happy to be digging potatoes! Adults and children – we all worked so hard. We were true peasants, our ancestors had worked the land for centuries, and now we were allowed to work the land again. Mama was the brigade leader, and the Siberian, Snegirev, was the chairman of our collective. We were not allowed to form a kolkhoz, because we were kulaks. Mama was afraid that the potatoes would not grow without fertilizer – none of us had any experience of growing potatoes. But in the autumn we dug up a huge harvest, and no one died from hunger that winter. The potatoes had saved us.42

  Dmitry Streletsky and his family walked in snow for several days to reach their first place of exile, a large abandoned cellar in Kurgan, where several hundred ‘kulak’ families, including many of their distant relatives, were simply left, without food or water, to fend for themselves. They would have starved without the help of relatives and other people in Kurgan who brought them food. They were held in the cellar for a week, people sleeping as best they could on their baggage or on the bare floor, and then loaded into cattle trucks for the long train journey to Usole, north of Perm, from where they were force-marched by armed guards to the factory town of Pozhva, 150 kilometres away. There they were housed in a workshop, everybody sleeping on a cement floor. ‘Father was in agony,’ recalls Dmitry. ‘He aged overnight. He said that his life had been destroyed… Everybody felt the same. But even though they had no choice but to do as they were told, people tried to keep their dignity. They refused to be like slaves to the authorities.’ Dmitry’s father was sent to fell timber and build a ‘special settlement’ near Chermoz. The rest of the family was squeezed into a room above a joiner’s workshop with three other families. Six months later, they joined Dmitry’s father at the ‘special settlement’. There were ten barracks in the settlement, each with space for 500 people to sleep on plank beds. Encircled by a high barbed-wire fence, the settlement was located in the middle of a large pine forest, where the men were sent to cut down trees, returning once a week. With a daily ration of just 200 grams of bread, the death rate in the settlement was very high. But the Streletskys managed to survive through their peasant industry: the children gathered mushrooms and sold them in Chermoz; their mother went at night to steal potatoes from the fields of a kolkhoz; while their father struck a deal with the workers of a nearby slaughter-house, helping them to build their wooden houses in exchange for cattle blood (which, unlike meat and bones, would not be missed by the authorities). In the famine year of 1933, when the daily ration was cut to 50 grams of bread, half the population in the ‘special settlement’ died from hunger and disease, but the Streletskys managed to survive by drinking blood.43

  The Streletskys were fortunate in that they were able to remain together as a family. For many other people the experience of exile was synonymous with fragmentation. Klavdiia Rublyova lost touch with seven of her brothers and sisters after the arrest of her father in 1930. They were sent to various children’s homes, and she never heard from them again. Klavdiia and her younger sister Natalia went to live with their grown-up sister Raisa in Kansk, near Krasnoiarsk in Siberia. Klavdiia worked as a nanny in a doctor’s home, but then the passport system arrived in the Siberian town, and as a ‘kulak’ daughter she was forced to flee. Leaving Nat
alia with Raisa, Klavdiia went to stay with her uncle, a senior inspector of forest work in Cheremkhovo, near Irkutsk, where she was registered by the Soviet in her uncle’s name. In November 1933, her uncle received a letter from Klavdiia’s father, Ilia. Released from jail, Ilia was now living in a ‘special settlement’ somewhere in the region of Tashtyp, 2,000 kilometres away, not far from the border with China. Klavdiia travelled by train before hitching a lift to Tashtyp, which was deep in snow when she arrived in January 1934. For a long time she could not find any work. Without her father’s name on her registration papers, nobody would employ her, but as a ‘kulak’ daughter she was too afraid to reveal her identity. In the end she was taken in by the chairman of the Tashtyp Soviet, who employed her as a nanny and set her up with casual work in a clothing factory. One day, while talking to the chairman’s sister-in-law, Klavdiia showed two photographs, one of her two brothers, Leonid and Aleksandr, the other of herself with her two sisters.

  She [the sister-in-law] said immediately: ‘Lenka [Leonid], I know him!’ I was astonished that she knew my brother. ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ I asked, trying to control myself… At that time I was afraid of every word I said, in case I revealed that my father was in exile.

  Klavdiia found her brother in Tashtyp. Through him, she discovered that her father was living in a ‘special settlement’ attached to the Kirov mine in Khakasin. He had begun a new life with a second wife, as Klavdiia recalls:

  The photographs that Klavdiia showed. Left: Leonid (the older brother) with Aleksandr, 1930. Right: Klavdiia is standing on the right, Natalia in the middle, and Raisa on the left with her husband, Kansk, 1930

  I went to visit them. When I arrived in the evening, they were just coming back from their work at the mine. They were bringing in their cow. They were not afraid or surprised to see me. My father greeted me as if he had just seen me the day before. I sat with them for a few minutes outside the barracks where they lived. Then I left.44

  That was the last time Klavdiia saw her father. He was rearrested and then shot in August 1938.

  Many ‘kulak’ families fled the ‘special settlements’ and took their chances living on the run. According to OGPU sources, by the summer of 1930, escapes from the ‘special settlements’ had become a ‘mass phenomenon’, with tens of thousands of ‘kulak’ runaways. The escapes reached their peak during the famine. In 1932–3, OGPU counted a staggering 422,866 ‘kulaks’ who had fled from the ‘special settlements’, and only 92,189 who had subsequently been caught.45

  The Ozemblovskys were a minor noble family of Polish origin. After 1917, they lost their land in Belarus, but remained in their village, Oreshkovichi in the Pukhovichi region of Minsk province, where they continued farming on a level with the peasantry. Aleksandr and Serafima had four children, two boys and two girls, the oldest born in 1917 and the youngest in 1928, the year when the kolkhoz in Oreshkovichi was organized. Aleksandr gave all his livestock and tools to the kolkhoz, keeping just one cow to feed his family, but he refused to enter the kolkhoz. He wanted to emigrate to the USA or France, as many other Poles in the area had done, but Serafima argued: ‘Who will touch us? What have we done wrong? We gave away all our property!’ Aleksandr was arrested in the spring of 1930. A few days later they came for the family. ‘Get your things. You and the children are going into exile,’ the OGPU soldier said. Serafima wrapped some clothes in blankets and managed to conceal some gold items, before she was bundled with her children into carts and taken to a church, where several hundred ‘kulak’ families were already held. A few days later, they were rejoined by their men and were loaded into wagons for the 3,000-kilometre journey to a remote settlement in the Komi region of the North. There they were told to ‘make themselves a home’ in an empty barn. ‘There was nothing for us there – no planks for beds, no knives or spoons,’ recalls Sofia. ‘We made mattresses out of branches we collected in the woods.’

  Gradually, the exiles built a settlement of wooden huts, one for every family, as they had once lived in their own villages. With the gold that they had brought with them, the Ozemblovskys bought a cow. Family life began again. But then came the famine, and their existence returned to being unbearable. The Ozemblovskys hatched an escape plan. Because their youngest son was already ill, they decided that the women should escape, leaving Aleksandr to look after the boys and run the risk of rearrest. Serafima and the two girls, Sofia, then aged nine, and Elena, five, walked by night and slept by day in the forest. They lived mainly from berries. Serafima had several gold teeth. She would pull one of them to buy a lift in a peasant cart or to bribe an official. Eventually, she and the girls made it back to Belarus. They hid for a week in the Pukhovichi house of Serafima’s parents, who were so afraid of being arrested for hiding her that they advised their daughter to give herself up to the police. Serafima went to the police in Pukhovichi, who listened to her story of escape and felt so sorry for her that they told her to run away again and offered to give her twenty-four hours before coming after her. Serafima left Elena with her parents and went to the nearby town of Osipovichi, where she and Sofia rented a room from an old couple. She put Sofia into school. Then she returned to the Komi region to try to find her husband and her sons. ‘Mama left without a word – no goodbye, no advice about how I might survive,’ recalls Sofia.

  For the next year, Sofia lived with the old couple, who turned out to be very cruel. ‘They cursed me, called me the daughter of an enemy of the people and threatened to kick me out onto the street, if I did not do what they said. I cried all the time. I had no money of my own, and nowhere to go.’ Sofia became so miserable that she ran away to her grandparents, who took her in with Elena, although they themselves had been evicted from their Pukhovichi home and were now living in an old bath-house.

  The Ozemblovsky family. Left: Aleksandr and Serafima on their wedding day in 1914. Right: Serafima with Sasha (left) and Anton (right) on their return from exile in 1937

  Meanwhile, Serafima had arrived at the Komi settlement, only to find that Aleksandr was no longer there: he had been arrested the day after her escape and sentenced to three years in the nearby Kotlas labour camps. Their elder son, Anton, had been recruited as an informer by the police (he was trained to eavesdrop and report on the conversations of the settlers and was paid in bread for each report). Their younger son, Sasha, still very sick, was being cared for by the schoolteacher. Within days of her arrival, Serafima was arrested and taken to Kotlas. But again she managed to escape, running from the convoy on the way back from work and disappearing deep into the woods. Again she made the 3,000-kilometre trek back to Pukhovichi, where she was reunited with her two daughters. They settled in a small house in Osipovichi, bought for them by relatives, and lived off what they grew in the small garden, where they kept a goat and pigs. In 1937, they were joined by Sasha and Anton (who continued to work for the police in Belarus). Two years later the family reunion was completed by the return of Aleksandr, recently released from the Kotlas camps. Sofia recalls the moment of return:

  Mama ran out to meet him and threw herself into his arms. Papa said: ‘Mother, where are the children?’ Mama answered: ‘Don’t worry – the children are alive and well, all four of them.’ Papa collapsed to his knees and began to kiss her hands and feet, thanking her for saving us.46

  The story of the Okorokovs is even more remarkable. In May 1931, Aleksei Okorokov was deported as a ‘kulak’ from his village Ilinka in the Kuznetsk region of south-western Siberia. Exiled to the North, he escaped from his convoy, walking for a month to return to his village, 900 kilometres away. When he got there he found out that his wife Yevdokiia and their two daughters, Maria, then aged seven, and Tamara, nine, had been exiled with his parents to a ‘special settlement’ near Narym, 800 kilometres to the north-west. With forged papers, Aleksei travelled day and night to reach the settlement, from which a few days later the family departed with a whole brigade of ‘kulak’ runaways, including children and grandparents, which Aleksei org
anized. They walked by night – Maria on her mother’s back and Tamara carried by her father – so that they would not be seen by the patrols that searched the taiga for ‘kulak’ runaways. For ten nights they walked, sometimes ending up in the same place from which they had started out, for it was difficult to navigate in this terrain, until they ran out of food and water and the old collapsed from exhaustion. On the eleventh night, they were surrounded by a patrol, which shot at them, wounding Aleksei in the stomach. The soldiers took them off in a large cart with other runaways to a nearby village, where they were held in a bath-house. The runaways were sent back to Narym, although the elderly were left behind, including Aleksei’s parents, who did not see their family again.

  Once again the Okorokovs managed to escape. While the convoy to Narym was preparing to depart, Yevdokiia bribed a villager to get the patrol drunk, allowing her to run away with Aleksei and their daughters. They headed towards Tomsk, hiding by day (when they could see the guards and their dogs in the distance on the road) and travelling by night (when bears and wolves were the main danger). After several nights of walking without bread or anything to eat, they came across a settlement of the Kerzhaki tribe that had been struck down by smallpox: all the children were already dead. The headman offered to trade some bread, a jar of honey and a boat in exchange for Tamara, who was old enough to work in the tribe. He threatened to inform the police if Aleksei did not agree. Reluctantly, Aleksei consented. Yevdokiia became hysterical, but he would not give in to her entreaties. ‘We stayed with the Kerzhaki for a week to gather our strength,’ recalls Maria.

  Mama would not stop crying, and my sister began to understand that something was wrong. On the day of our departure, Papa took my sister into a separate room and locked her up in it. Then he led away Mama, who was half-dead with grief, and placed her with me and the provisions in the boat. Then we rowed away.