Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

6. War

The barges drifted in the Dniepr’s slow stream all night. At dawn they ran aground near a village on the eastern bank of the river. The local peasants still had carts and horses, and the orphanage director arranged for the children to be loaded up and transported to the nearest railhead at Zaporozhiye. There, amid the tumult of a city preparing to be overrun by the Germans, Michnik passed his children into the care of the local authorities. He saw no more of them – except for a few who survived the war and came, as Lenina did, to visit, in curiosity and gratitude, as adults. At Zaporozhiye, the children joined a giant, chaotic stream of human flotsam fleeing before the German advance.

Lyudmila’s own memory of her evacuation through the chaos of the Red Army’s retreat in the autumn and winter of 1941 is a disjointed series of images. She remembers standing at a high window, looking out over a flat landscape, watching bombs falling in the distance with great white flashes, feeling the percussion through the floorboards. She remembers standing with the other orphanage children in a line by the side of a muddy road one rainy autumn day, holding out mugs of water for an endless stream of soldiers trudging by on their way to the front. She recalls spending nights in the forest, shivering under thin blankets and listening to the eerie woodland silence.

They were constantly on the move. Some nights there were searchlights and explosions. One day, Lyudmila remembers, she and other children travelled in a heavy peasant cart, with each child holding a branch to camouflage them from the aeroplanes which buzzed overhead. The horse was a huge lumbering thing, and its harness was also covered in branches. This is the image which has lodged, for some reason, most vividly in my mind’s eye – my mother, sitting in the bed of the cart among other children, hopefully clutching a branch like a talisman against the German planes, a small crippled child alone and frightened, trundling eastwards into the emptiness of the Volga steppes.

The children were evacuated in stages, deeper and deeper into the hinterland of Russia, spending a few days or weeks wherever their transport ran out, waiting for someone to take charge of them, to pass them to safety. Somewhere to the west of Stalingrad they got stuck, washed up by the stream of men and machines which filled the steppes. Lyudmila spent the harshest winter months billeted in a snowbound village, chewing dry ears of corn filched from the barns and fighting with the local children for food. In the early spring of 1942, someone remembered the beleaguered little party and moved them to a collective farm closer to the Volga. Mila remembers scavenging for berries in the quiet, cold woods and helping peasant women scrub floors in exchange for crusts of bread.

Somehow, in a small miracle of war, just as the German Sixth Army began its advance on Stalingrad, somebody managed to find the children places on a big American Studebaker truck, the luxury of luxuries. It drove them to the city, reaching the Volga just days ahead of the Germans. The date must have been shortly after 23 August 1942, the day Red Army sappers blew the bridges, because Lyudmila remembers crossing the Volga with the other orphanage children on a steel barge, packed to the gunwales with refugees. She saw the girders of the blown-up bridges dipping into the river at a crazy angle. The windows of all the schools and public buildings in the city were filled with wounded soldiers swathed in bandages. That image became one of Lyudmila’s most vivid memories of that time – ‘They stood there, all wrapped in bandages, so many of them, by every window.’

On the other side of the river, Lyudmila and the other children found themselves stranded once again. In the scramble to reinforce the city before the arrival of the Germans, and during the first, chaotic weeks of the battle, every available form of transport was needed to ferry men and supplies to the stricken city, and to bring back casualties.

The orphans were billeted in villages near the river. Lyudmila remembers crowds of refugees passing through her village on foot, sleeping in the fields when their strength failed, packing into barns and peasant huts so tightly that they couldn’t close the door. Their snoring made an eerie rumbling noise in the darkness, as though the earth itself was trembling. There were air raids at night, and Mila remembers running for safety into the tall grass of the steppe as the black bombs tumbled slowly out of the sky.

Day and night, horse carts trundled through the village full of horribly injured soldiers, covered in blood, some missing limbs. At night the river glowed red from the burning city, and when the wind blew eastwards it carried the heat and smoke of the great battle. She saw bodies and parts of bodies floating past in the water.

Food was the only thing Mila thought about. The children ran wild, fending for themselves, begging for scraps from the streams of refugees, hunting in packs for wheat and barley stalks. Mila and the other children would gather up dry leaves and crumble them with the tobacco of cigarette butts they would find by the roadside. They would sell the mixture as makhorka, rough soldiers’ tobacco, to the lines of troops who passed every day, exchanging it for sugar cubes or lumps of bread. Many of the soldiers had flat, Mongolian faces. They had come all the way from Siberia, marching days from the nearest railhead and sleeping on the roadsides before moving in inexorable human waves into the city.

Half a century later, I witnessed the Russian Army in action myself. I stood on the Russian front lines in the northern outskirts of Grozny, Chechnya, as a mighty firestorm of artillery roared overhead and the rebel city burned around us. The city centre was obscured by a drifting pall of bittertasting gun smoke. All around were the jagged husks of buildings, nibbled by gunfire and then shelled and shelled again. Sukhoi fighter bombers screamed in fast and low every minute to deliver half-ton bombs, which fell with terrible grace towards their targets before exploding with a boom which seemed powerful enough to fell the whole city. The bombardment was so overwhelming it felt like a physical presence; it thundered under my feet like giant doors slamming deep in the earth.

I spent days with Russian soldiers in trenches dug out of the sandy soil, and slept side by side with snoring conscripts in bivouacs they’d made in the ruined houses. Their faces were filthy with smoke and dirt, and they swore and spat and laughed uproariously at the slightest joke. One evening as we ate bully beef from tins one young sergeant tossed a grenade to me across the room by the light of a hissing kerosene pressure lamp. The pin was out and the safety handle gone – for a moment I stared at the little steel egg in incomprehension before the room cracked up. It was a dummy.

They were just kids, delirious from danger and war. But when we went out on patrols, crunching house to house through broken glass and piles of bricks, they went silent and tense, as all infantrymen do in battle. Their technique was to move forward until they came under fire, then locate the shooter and call in artillery before scrambling back to their forward base as fast as they could move, praying that the Russian gunners weren’t drunk or ranged their rounds short. It was a tactic little changed since the street fighting of Stalingrad. As we settled in for the night the young soldiers would kick off their high pigskin boots and unwind the foot cloths which Russian soldiers wear instead of socks before plumping their fur hats into makeshift pillows. Outside, some other unit was coming under fire, and we could feel the roaring rip-riprip of multiple rocket launchers resonating through the concrete floor. The scene, down to the candle stubs and wooden matchboxes the kids carried in their top pockets and used to light their cardboard-filtered papiros cigarettes, could have been from their grandfathers’ war.

Today, the steppe country around Stalingrad is empty and silent. The collective farm fields stretch as far as the eye can see, ploughed with crooked furrows and punctuated by halfruined log cabins and long concrete barns. The far bank of the huge river is lost in the mist, and the slow grey water swells and falls as it laps the banks. It seems as though the giant fields and swaying trees are brooding on the strange convulsion which brought so many humans here, half a century ago, to spill their blood on the sandy soil.

I visited Volgograd, as Stalingrad has become, in the winter of 1999. A heavy, soul-sapping blandness covered the city like a dirty snowfall, oppressive as the winter sky which hung low over the landscape. It was depressingly similar to other provincial backwaters, a place where the bitter concentrate of reality withered the spirit like a pickle in a jar of brine.

On Mamayev Kurgan, a low, partly man-made hill in west Stalingrad, scene of some of the bitterest fighting, stands a monument to Mother Russia. It is a concrete statue 279 feet high depicting a woman brandishing a giant sword aloft, calling for vengeance, or victory. She is a young woman with strong arms and thighs, and she half-turns to call over her shoulder for her children to follow. She is Russia as a vengeful goddess, Russia as a consuming force of nature, demanding impossible sacrifices from her children as her right.

As the winter of 1942 closed in and the momentum of the German advance stalled in the ruins of Stalingrad, the authorities began rounding up the lost children and packing them into trucks heading north for Kuybishev, now Samara, on the Upper Volga. Mila was caught like the rest. She remembers a cold and crowded train, heading further north still, which delivered her and several thousand other lost children to a giant camp for orphans in Solikamsk, near Perm, in the foothills of the Urals.

Solikamsk was a world of human beings cast adrift by the war. The whole town, it seemed, had been swamped by orphaned children with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. The place was governed by what Lyudmila called ‘wolves’ laws’, the children fighting each other for survival. The older children would try to make the younger ones hide ten-gram pieces of meat from their lunchtime soup in their long knickers, and hand them over on the way out of the kitchens. If the younger children refused they’d ‘put you in the dark’ throw a blanket over you and beat you up. There were three shifts for lunch, the youngest children going first, with teachers patrolling to make sure the children ate their meat and didn’t hide it for the older ones. Lyudmila and the other children collected steppe grass, mixed it with salt and ate it. It helped their bodies’ craving for vitamins, and to stave off rickets. Mila’s stomach became distended from hunger, her legs thin as sticks.

There were moments of kindness. At the village school, the teacher would tell the village children not to eat their tiny fifty-gram pieces of lunchtime bread and to leave it for the orphans instead – even though the villagers were near starving too, living off bitter black radishes and tiny potatoes, the only crop the villagers could cultivate in the short Urals growing season.

When the summer of 1943 came, the children of Solikamsk were sent in their hundreds into the wild taiga, the marshes and forests around the town, to collect berries for wounded soldiers. Their quota was to collect half a bucketful each. Mila was terrified of falling into the deep, marshy water-holes concealed in the thick moss of the taiga. On one such expedition the children had to walk sixteen miles into the forests to find berrying areas which hadn’t been picked clean by the villagers. On the way back Mila, though only nine, led the huge crowd of children, hobbling in front despite her crippled leg and singing Young Pioneer songs. When they arrived back at the orphanage with their load of berries Mila’s eyes were deep red and filled with blood as a result of the physical stress. The wolves’ laws of Solikamsk had taught her one thing – that the only way for the physically weak to survive was to find a way of leading the rest by sheer force of character.

Dnepropetrovsk had fallen after a week’s battle. Lenina and the older orphanage children, just like her sister and millions of other refugees, made their way east by foot, in carts and trucks. Everywhere her work detachment stopped they dug fresh trenches and tank traps.

By early September of 1942, Lenina found herself in the Stavropol region, just beyond the furthest line of the German advance. Hitler had ordered that the push towards the Caucasus and the oilfields of Baku be suspended while all available forces were mobilized to the battle for Stalingrad, 300 miles to the north. Lenina was abandoned with a dozen other older children in a village and its neighbouring collective farm.

Lenina wasn’t much help on the farm because her hands were covered in sores, rubbed raw from digging and now painful and infected. One of the farm workers showed her how to drive a horse and cart full of produce from the fields to the barns, which was her job for the harvest season. One of the village women, an Armenian, offered Lenina extra food if she would scrub the wooden floors of her cottage clean with a brick of carbolic soap and a knife, and do odd jobs around the house. Lenina, as she told the story, cramped her fingers on her kitchen table to the length of the short, blunt knife the woman had given her to scrape the floor, and motioned rinsing her bandaged hands in the hot, soapy water.

As Lenina scrubbed and the woman cooked for her family, they talked. The woman told Lenina that she had been evacuated from Moscow. Lenina in turn told the woman her story, and how she too had relatives in Moscow. The housewife made Lenina an offer. If Lenina would go with her younger daughter to Moscow with some dried fruit for the market, she would buy the train tickets, which because of the war were only on sale to people with a Moscow registration stamp in their passports. Lenina, desperate to find her family now that she had been parted from Lyudmila, agreed. A week later, she and the woman’s daughter, loaded with eight bulging suitcases tied together in pairs with strips of cloth and stuffed to bursting with dried apricots, found space on a Moscow train and made their way, taking a detour far to the east of the Volga basin to avoid the fighting, to the capital.

At Kursky Station the girl’s Armenian cousins came to meet her and took the suitcases away from Lenina. They waved goodbye and disappeared into the Metro. Lenina walked the six miles to Krasnaya Presnya Street and found her grandmother’s old apartment from memory. It was empty. But some neighbours, who remembered Lenina from her last trip four years before, told her that her grandmother and cousins had been evacuated. They dug out the telephone number for where Lenina’s uncle Yakov was living and went to the public telephone in the street to call him. An hour later he arrived in his Air Force staff car and took Lenina to his apartment near Taganskaya Square.

Yakov was Boris’s elder brother. He shared Boris’s intense stare, his charisma, and his love of womanizing. In old age he became heavy set and jowly, but Yakov’s official retirement photograph, taken in 1969, shows a proud man, the chest of his Lieutenant-General’s uniform covered with medals. He looks a proud servant of the Motherland.

Like Boris, Yakov had excelled at school, been inspired by the Revolution and all that it stood for, and had become a committed Bolshevik. While his brother made a career in the Party, Yakov went into the fledgling Soviet Air Force. By the time of Boris’s arrest in 1937, Yakov was a Major-General, serving on the staff of Marshal Vasiliy Blucher, an old Civil War hero, commander of Russia’s Far East military district headquartered in Khabarovsk, near Russia’s Pacific coast. By October 1938 the Purge was spreading to the military. Blucher, an old comradein-arms of Trotsky’s, had a keen sense of how the political wind was blowing. He summoned his three deputies to his office and ordered them to go to Moscow at once, giving no explanation. Yakov went home immediately and, without stopping to pack, ordered his heavily pregnant wife Varvara on to the next train west.

Blucher was arrested a few days later, and died at the hands of the NKVD interrogators in the Lubyanka. Varvara gave birth on the train, but by leaving for Moscow the family successfully lost itself in the convoluted bureaucracy of the Purge. It was Stalin’s strange logic that millions of innocent family members of enemies of the people were arrested, while some of the Party’s top cadres survived the imprisonment of their closest relatives. The wife of Stalin’s Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, was sent to the camps, and the wife of the dictator’s personal secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev was shot. ‘We will find you a new wife,’ Stalin told his secretary nonchalantly.

So Yakov survived, and by 1942 had been made a Lieutenant-General. He lived in a large apartment in a handsome building for senior military officers. Varvara and her young child were hostile to the new arrival. Their reaction was perhaps a rational one. Harbouring the daughter of an executed and disgraced Party member put them in terrible danger. Nevertheless, Yakov insisted that his niece stay, and Varvara was grudgingly grateful for extra help with household chores. Lenina became a kind of unpaid servant, but she was at least comfortable and with her family. Yakov told Lenina about her uncle Isaac’s death. He also told her he’d had no news of Boris or Martha, and sternly warned her not to talk to anyone about what had happened to them. As the brother of a traitor, only good luck, and the war, had saved Yakov himself from a similar fate.

Lenina told the family how she had lost touch with her sister Lyudmila in the chaos of retreat. Varvara told Lenina, meanly, that she should not give herself any false hopes of ever finding her sister again.

Yakov secured Lenina a job as a radio operator at the Khodinskoye airfield in the suburbs of northern Moscow, where test pilots would fly the new Yak fighters rolling off the production lines of the Dynamo factory, where Isaac had once worked, as well as from the Lavochkin Construction Bureau, where Yakov was in charge of military procurement. She was good at the job, and the pilots liked her. They would sing duets with her over the radio waves as they flew their test flights. To the end of her life, she remembered her call sign – 223305 – and got indignant if anyone suggested she’d forgotten it. ‘I’ll forget my own name before I forget my call sign,’ she joked. In the evenings, with her uncle’s help, Lenina wrote requests for information about Lyudmila and delivered them by hand to the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment, responsible for the Soviet Union’s orphanages. But there was no news.

Lenina spent the next two years with Yakov’s family. Like the years in Verkhne-Dneprovsk, it was a sort of peace. The tide of the war had turned after Hitler’s Sixth Army was surrounded and destroyed at Stalingrad, and the Red Army was beginning to advance westwards.

In the summer of 1944, as the fighting crossed into Poland and the Allies landed in Normandy, Yakov told Lenina he had a job for her. A colleague of Yakov’s, also a general, had heard that his son, with whom he had lost touch when the child was evacuated along with thousands of others from besieged Leningrad, was in a camp for displaced children in the Urals. Lenina was to fly to the camp with the necessary paperwork and bring the boy back to Moscow.

A week later Lenina was on a military flight to Molotov, now Perm, with the Russian crew of a Lend-Lease American Douglas transport plane. She wore her Air Force uniform, with her fore-and-aft pilotka cap jauntily perched on the back of her head. It was the first time she had ever flown.

In Perm the director of the local aircraft factory, a personal friend of Yakov’s, had arranged for an old twoseater Polikarpov fighter to take her to the displaced children’s camp to pick up the general’s son. The camp’s name was Solikamsk.

The battered little Polikarpov bounced to a halt on a makeshift airfield on the outskirts of the town, and Lenina and the young pilot walked together through the muddy streets to the main orphanage, an ornate pre-revolutionary red-brick building surrounded by a low wall. In the playground hundreds of ragged children were running around. As Lenina walked through the gates and up to the front door of the building she noticed a lame child lopsidedly running towards her.

‘Tak tse moya sestra Lina!’ shouted the child, in Ukrainian. ‘That’s my sister Lina!’

Lyudmila was toothless, her belly distended by hunger. As Lenina fell to her knees to embrace her sister, Lyudmila started crying and asking for food.

‘Yisti khoche! Yisti khoche!’ – ‘I want food!’

Lenina couldn’t speak. The pilot looked on in amazement, not understanding what had happened. Unable to separate the two sobbing sisters, he hustled them both inside and into the director’s office.

The director, a woman, broke down in tears when Lenina told her she had found her sister. She released the four-year-old boy Lenina had come for, but they had to wait agonizing hours as the pilot put a call through to his boss in Perm to ask him to call Moscow for permission to take Lyudmila back to Moscow. Someone reached Yakov by phone – no mean feat in wartime Russia – and he pulled strings. Permission was granted. Lenina flew back to Perm with two vomiting children squeezed on her lap in the gunner’s seat of the plane.

They stayed the night with a colleague of the aircraft factory director, who lived in one room of a communal apartment. Lenina noticed that the children kept getting up in the night to go to the toilet. In the morning she was woken by sounds of outrage from the communal kitchen. The children had eaten everything from the neighbours’ food cupboards, including a huge pot full of chicken and rice. Even as they left for the airport to catch a transport plane back to Moscow, Lyudmila and the boy began a massive bout of diarrhoea. Their malnourished bodies couldn’t cope with so much rich food.

Back in Moscow there was no room in Yakov’s apartment for the sick child, but he made sure that Lyudmila was sent to a centre for displaced Party members’ children in the Danilovsky Monastery. All the food was Lend-Lease aid from America, an unimaginable luxury. There was tinned Campbell’s tomato soup, corned beef, tuna and condensed milk. Most impressive of all were giant cans of Hershey’s chocolate powder, which Mila found so beautiful that she still remembers them fondly. Inside the tin lid was a seal of gold foil, which she would watch the hospital cooks reverently cut open. Nestling in the dark brown chocolate was a Bakelite spoon for measuring out the portions. Lyudmila felt deep wonder at seeing packaging so perfectly designed – and the idea of a disposable spoon was simply incomprehensible. To her it seemed that such a tin of chocolate could only come from the magic other world of her dreams.