Gender and Survival in Soviet Russia

A Life in the Shadow of Stalin's Terror

Ludmila Miklashevskaya, Elaine MacKinnon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350246744
• eBook ISBN: 9781350139237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This first-hand witness account – originally written by Ludmila Miklashevskaya in 1976 and here translated into English by historian Elaine MacKinnon for the first time – tells the important story of one woman's persecution under Stalin. From Miklashevskaya's middle-class Jewish childhood in Odessa, to her life in exile as the wife of 'an enemy of the people' and false imprisonment in a labour camp for the attempted murder of NKVD leader Nikolai Yezhov, to her later attempts at rehabilitation, her memoir is a fascinating tapestry of Soviet artistic, intellectual, and political life set against the tumultuous backdrop of revolutions, wars, and repressive regimes. Accompanied by a translator's introduction and detailed historical explanatory notes, Gender and Survival in Soviet Russia sheds new light on the relationship between power, gender, and society in 20th-century Russia. This book is thus a vital primary resource for scholars of modern Russian history and gender studies, offering a compelling and personal route into understanding how the machinations of Soviet Russia destroyed everyday life, tearing families apart and leaving scars that never healed.

1

An Odessa Childhood

My memories begin with our life on Uspenskaia Street, in a building owned by the two elderly Shpringer ladies. It was the only place in Odessa where you could purchase the famous “Shpringer ointment” and “Shpringer plaster” used for boils and other types of sores. Our apartment was located inside the courtyard on the first floor, right across from the Shpringers’ back door, which served as their main entrance from the street. Ignat, the building’s caretaker, prepared the ointment on an open fire. The black goo boiled and bubbled in a large basin, filling the whole courtyard with the smell of tar. My two older brothers and I tried never to miss this procedure. Other children’s mothers did not allow them to be outside when it was going on, but ours believed it to be healthy. Odessa had frequent epidemics of childhood diseases, and she was positive that breathing in the vapors of this tar could kill all contagions. Our mama took other preventative measures as well. When scarlet fever was “on the move” in Odessa, we wore amulets filled with camphor crystals. During outbreaks of whooping cough and chicken pox, we hung little bags filled with crushed garlic around our necks. And, truth be told, we were rarely sick.

Twice we left Odessa and traveled with mama to visit our father in Tiflis, where he worked as an accountant for a mill after being transferred from Odessa. For the train trip, mama bought only one adult ticket, which allowed her one free children’s ticket. She gave it to Grisha and he sat next to her. My other brother Sasha and I had to pretend to be children of travelers who did not have kids with them. If there were not any childless adults, then we had to cram ourselves into the upper shelf of the compartment, barricaded behind baskets and packages. All we had to do was lie there quietly, not moving a muscle. People were always willing to help us. Once a man from the Caucasus who was traveling to Tiflis with his son covered me with his felt burka. But the cloak had a very strange smell, and I decided to make a tiny opening for air. In the process, though, I got all tangled up in it. Luckily the ticket collector was delayed in coming. It was very stuffy and scary for me lying there underneath this prickly, thick burka. I did not make a sound, but I tried to get myself out of it using the full force of my arms and legs. I managed to crawl out and dangled my legs down over mama’s head; fortunately, this was after the ticket man had already gone out into the corridor. Mama grabbed ahold of me and sat me on her knee. She straightened my dress, which was inside out and up around my head. Mama scolded me for not being patient and making an inappropriate spectacle of myself “in front of everyone.” She pointed out that the other little girls in our section were all behaving nicely. I retorted that maybe they were behaving properly because they did not have to hide in a burka.

I was 4 years old at this time. My brother Sasha was closest in age to me and he was 5. Wherever we went, he was everyone’s favorite. He was handsome and clever; he loved to recite poems and sing songs, and often presented his own literary creations. On the train people dragged him from compartment to compartment to perform. My oldest brother, who was already 7 years old, enviously accompanied him. He would prompt Sasha if he forgot a line of poetry, but Grisha always remained hidden in the shadow. I could only rejoice in Sasha’s success from afar. Mama would not let me go, and all I could do was look out the window.

In Tiflis, the door of our apartment opened out to a wooden balcony that ran along the entire second floor, forming a portico overlooking the courtyard. Like others, we had a table on the portico where we had tea and dined. A tall dark-eyed boy brought us hot lavash bread every morning. I would always run to meet him. How wonderful it was to breathe in the warm scent of the lavash and its golden crust. Papa showed us around Tiflis. The boys got to run ahead but papa held on to my hand. We came to an enormous hill that was covered in bright green grass. Papa told us that this was the hill of King David and that at the top was the grave of Alexander Griboedov.¹ I looked at the green grass and I longed to run through it, but papa held me firmly by the hand. “Grisha,” mama asked, “do you know who Griboedov is?” Mama was preparing Grisha for his first year preparatory class in school and had taken him and Sasha to the theater for a matinee performance. “I know,” answered Grisha, “he wrote a play that we saw at the theater.” “And what was the title of this play?” Mama continued to quiz him hoping that papa would appreciate how smart Grisha had become. But I interfered. “Woe about Fog,” I declared, in a hurry to show off my own knowledge. “What do you mean, what kind of fog?” Mama asked indignantly. “Well, the kind that causes trouble, probably a big thick fog.” Everyone laughed and I felt embarrassed. It seemed to make sense to me, since in Odessa we had thick fogs, and mama herself sometimes said, “Woe is me, it is the fog again.” We stayed with father for several weeks, but then returned to Odessa and waited for his letters. More truthfully, it was the beautiful postcards we eagerly anticipated. Papa sent them frequently, and mama gave us an album for them. The boys received ones with scenes of the roaring sea, sunken ships, battles, hunters, and various breeds of dogs while I got beautiful girls with dolls, flowers, birds, and butterflies.

My mother was beautiful, in fact the most beautiful of all women. All of our acquaintances praised her beauty, as did our neighbors, who ran the pharmacy on our street. I loved going there with mama. Mr. Antonovich, after wrapping up mama’s purchases, would always give me a beautiful little box, sometimes covered with silk, and said, “May you grow up to be as beautiful a woman as your mama.” Mama was also the best at playing the piano. We listened to music everyday and we could identify the nocturnes and waltzes of Chopin, the sonatas of Beethoven, or Mendelssohn’s “Songs without Words.” Mama usually played by ear without sheet music. Our mother also could speak French and German and checked out library books in these languages. People who knew her also considered her to have excellent taste and would ask her to help them buy a coat or a hat. On such occasions mama would usually take me with her. I found it torturous. In the market on Alexandrovskii, there were a number of small clothing stores known as “Konfeksion.” A friend would come from towns such as Nikolaev or Kherson and Mama would take her from one such shop to the next. At each one mama would have her try on all of the coats. To me, the person could have bought any one of them, but mama always insisted on dragging her friend to shop after shop. Then, finally, they would remember that in the first store, there had been a coat that suited best and was the least expensive. So we would go back. The coat would be purchased, packaged, and the store proprietor would send us off with a smile. Then once we were outside, mama would say that, actually, the coat was excellent, but the buttons were not so nice. Her friend should get different ones for it. So then we had to go to mama’s favorite tailoring shop, which was run by Dziubin,² who was the husband of her school friend Ida. The shop was small and poorly lit but had plentiful boxes of buttons, thumb tacks, buckles, and bundles of silk braid. Mama liked to buy here a special kind of lace called “brush lace,” which she used when hemming skirts. For me Dziubin always prepared a small box with different colored spangles and thin, bright circles (kruzhochki), which I collected along with silver five-kopek coins mama sometimes gave me.

Once inside, the coat would be unwrapped and the selection of buttons would begin. Dziubin would not offer any advice, but always deferred to my mother. After long consideration, the buttons were purchased and we left the shop. At this point I would refuse to go any further and beg to sit down on a bench. After several minutes, mama would cry out that we were right next to Ptashnikov’s shop,³ where you could buy the very best and the cheapest calico. So they would pull me along to Ptashnikov’s … Finally after much shopping, we would go home in a tram-carriage. Now this always cheered me up, for I liked riding in the carriage. It had three horses harnessed to it and a trace horse that would run on the side, and I could watch it the entire time. For such visits we would dine better than usual. At three o’clock there would be a soufflé made from egg whites beaten with cherry preserves. Mama used the yolks to make amazing, melt-in-your-mouth sesame seed cookies. This was one of our mother’s secret recipes. All of our friends raved over these cookies but no one knew how to make them. Sometimes, mother would reminisce with her friends about her youth (she had grown up in Nikolaev); she would tell her visitor sadly that her life had not turned out the way she had dreamed. Her father had been a wealthy man with his own office, and her older sisters had received fine dowries and married well. But then her father went bankrupt and died soon afterward. Mama had to give music lessons in order to support herself and her mother. Moreover, she was forced to marry an accountant and they were always economizing and counting every penny. Mama thought that we did not understand, but we knew very well what she was saying. We loved our papa and always waited impatiently for his postcards, but we began to sense there was discord within our family.

The second trip to Tiflis was intended to make mama happy. Papa had received a bonus and sent it to her to buy new dresses. He proposed a trip to Baku and Batum, for some wealthy Armenians who lived there wanted to meet mama. The dresses were ordered and arrived at our home one day before our departure. Our “all-purpose maid,” as we in Odessa used to call domestic servants, laid them all out in a traveling basket covered with oilcloth. The next morning we left. Our maid, who had been with us about a year, saw us off, crying bitterly. Mother was touched by her devotion. But when we arrived in Tiflis and opened the basket, she saw that all of the new dresses and the elegant scarf (mantilla) with velvet applique had been removed and replaced with logs. Nonetheless, we still went to Batum and Baku. What remains in my memory are the long sofas, the piles of pillows embroidered with woolen thread, and the endless time spent sitting at the table. My brothers got to go off and play with the sons of our hosts, but I had to stay next to mama. Once I left the table and settled myself on a couch. I began to examine and rearrange the pillows. I liked two small pillows so much that I ran with them to mama and said, “Look how beautiful these are!” So our hostess said, “Take them, they are yours.” Mama started to protest but father stopped her and later explained that the custom was to give a guest what he or she praised. We carried these pillows to Odessa where they lay on our oilskin couch as an ever present reminder of, as my mother put it, my poor behavior in someone else’s home.

At our home in Odessa, mama would do lessons after dinner with Grisha, who was already in the first class at the Iliadi Gymnasium. Then an hour of music would commence. Mama would play our favorite songs on the piano while we sang. Sasha was the best singer among us. Mama said that he had inherited his perfect pitch from her. I had the worst ear for music. I could tell immediately when Grisha sang out of tune, but I could sense that I too was not singing properly. It was around this time, when I was 5 years old, that I first discovered the advantages of lying. Mama played an incredibly sad song entitled “Little Dove, why do you sit so sadly?” The tragedy unfolded: “Someone has taken my nest and my family,” narrates the bird. Mama played, Sasha sang with much feeling, and Grisha joined in. Mama looked at Sasha so tenderly and approvingly. I just stood off to the left and started to cry, for I felt that everyone had forgotten about me. Mama loved only her Sasha because he was the musical one. But my crying made mama notice me and she tried to comfort me: “Do you feel sorry for the bird? You have such a good heart. But stop this. It is, after all, just a song.” I cuddled up to mama and said, “Of course I am sad, she lost her three baby birds in the nest …” But I knew that I was really crying because I felt sorry for myself, not for the baby birds. But mama wrote to papa about my good heart and told the story to friends.

My parents were not religious. They never went to synagogue, they did not know how to read or write in Yiddish, and we did not have Jewish books or newspapers. We did not cook or eat kosher. We laid out on our table tea sausages and ham, and now and then we even enjoyed Ukrainian country suet—pink and tender, the kind that melts in your mouth. Nonetheless, there was always matzo in our house at Passover. In the days leading up to it, all over Odessa large baskets seemed to float in the air, covered tight with white sheets; they were being carried, filled with matzo, on peoples’ heads. And one such basket would alight at our apartment. Aron, who had been a footman in my maternal grandfather’s home, would always bring it. Aron liked to recall my grandfather’s house at the height of its grandeur, when they had celebrated all holidays in grand fashion. They had special Passover dishes they kept in a special cupboard, for matzo was not to be put on plates that had ever held regular bread. Aron’s wife Lukeria was the cook who prepared the Passover meals. Aron loved my mother and he considered it his duty to make sure that we had matzo for Passover, although it horrified him to see that we spread butter on the matzo, placed tea sausage on it, and drank milk. He would turn away from the sight and sigh. Mama paid him well and always invited him to dinner, but he was very strict and never violated Jewish law, certainly not during Passover.

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, lived alone. Once a year she came to us, on the eve of my grandfather’s death. She was small in stature, taciturn, and came dressed in a black hat with a bouquet of silk violets over her forehead. She would look severely about the room, checking whether everything was in order. But she never ate anything at our house and would only drink tea with lemon. For this mama would take down from the top shelf of our pantry a beautiful glass with a glass saucer and say to her, “Mother, no one besides yourself ever drinks from this.” Grandmother would nod approvingly and sip several mouthfuls of tea. In the corner of our dining room stood a fat stearin candle that was nearly an arshin in length (nearly 71 centimeters), which on the day of her father’s death mama would light in the morning and it would burn for twenty-four hours. Grandmother’s visit was intended to check that her daughter was duly honoring her father.

During our walks, our nanny often took us into a church. She would go down on her knees, cross herself, and bow toward the icons while we stood off to the side. It was very beautiful inside, but it was also stuffy and a little frightening. Once, as we were leaving the church, nanny bought us pieces of coconut and said we must not ever tell mama that we went there. It had to be our secret. However, I did spill the beans. This happened because of that enormous candle in the corner of our dining room. I asked one day, “Mama, why is our candle so big, when in churches the candles are so much thinner?” She immediately asked me how I knew what it was like inside a church. Rather than betray our nanny, I said that I had seen inside a church once when we passed by and the doors had been open. Mama stared at me, but said nothing more. We were standing by the burning candle, and mama’s face looked very sad. “This candle has to burn for an entire day, because no one knows when my Papa’s soul will fly here.” This startled me and I asked why he would come. Mama answered, “Papa loved me very much, and he wants to see whether or not I am remembering him.” It seemed dreadful to think that a soul would fly into our home in order to check that a candle was burning. I tried to imagine the soul of my long dead grandfather, whom I knew only from photographs. Although it was irrational and scary, I wanted to see what this spirit looked like. Mama, to be sure, said that it was impossible to see grandfather’s soul, but it was obliged to come, and we should not be too close to the candle. So I waited until mama went out to give her music lessons, Grisha was at school, Sasha was playing outside, and nanny was in the kitchen. I climbed up onto the couch and sat on one of the Armenian pillows while holding the other in front of me as I watched the tall flame of the candle. Suddenly it flared up, and along the base of the candle ghostly tears rolled down. I froze, then I hid my head behind the pillow. This, of course, was my grandfather’s spirit flying in and weeping because mama was not here. If only it had not seen me. Was it still here or had his soul flown away? I could not crawl down and run to nanny, nor could I cry out, because this would alert my grandfather’s soul that I was there. I shrank into a ball and trembled in fear. But soon nanny came in, rushed over to me, and grabbed me by the arm: What is wrong my little fish? I could only utter one word: soul … soul … Nanny did not understand. She felt my forehead and carried me to bed. Then mama came home. She took my temperature. I did not have a fever but I flatly refused to eat supper and stayed in bed until the next morning. Since mama had spent the evening in the dining room, I decided that the soul would have gone to her there and had no need to come into my room. This was my first real fright.

At last our father finished his work in Tiflis and returned home. We met him at the harbor. In recent months he had been working in Novorossiysk and so he came to Odessa by steamer. There was a thick fog that day and the sirens were blaring through the harbor. Because of the weather, the steamer was late. The boys got to run around the whole time, climbing up the gangplanks leading to the enormous black ships and returning with postage stamps. They always begged people for stamps whenever they could. Mama held me by the hand and I had to go with her. The fog finally began to lift, and far off in the distance a black spot appeared on the horizon. We went to check in the harbor office to see if this was papa’s ship, and they said that it was. At the wharf, we watched as the black spot grew larger and larger until we finally saw our father standing on the deck, waving his bowler hat. We rode home in a cab, my first ride in a droshky carriage through Odessa. The boys sat on the folding bench and I sat opposite, between mama and papa. The carriage shook as we went across the cobblestone bridge. The boys could barely hold on to the narrow bench, so papa told them to grasp hold of his cane, which was black and stout with silver inscriptions on it from various friends and coworkers. Papa was very proud of it.

Papa’s return livened up our home. Every day there were guests, and mama baked her famous cookies and pretzels. The smell of vanilla and almonds filled our apartment. Papa must have told new guests at least a dozen times about the terrible storm his ship had encountered after leaving Novorossiysk. “I looked death right in the eye” is how he would finish his narrative. Our most frequent visitor was Mama’s friend Ida and her son Edia, who was the same age as Grisha and liked to play chess. Edia played silently, knitting his thick dark eyebrows. His face would have seemed sinister, if it were not for his eyes, which always...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents Page
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 An Odessa Childhood
• 2 Growing Up during War and Revolution
• 3 A New Life in Petrograd
• 4 Gathering Clouds: Marital Storms and Emigration
• 5 Homecoming and a New Start in Moscow
• 6 Love and Marriage in Leningrad
• 7 Motherhood in a Time of Terror
• 8 Into the Vortex of Suffering: Ten Years in the Gulag
• 9 Release, Exile, and Rehabilitation: The Bittersweet Taste of “Freedom”
• Notes
• Further Readings
• Index
• Copyright Page