Читаем Gulag полностью

Little Eleonora, who was now fifteen months old, soon realized that her pleas for “home” were in vain. She stopped reaching out for me when I visited her; she would turn away in silence. On the last day of her life, when I picked her up (they allowed me to breast-feed her) she stared wide-eyed somewhere off into the distance, then started to beat her weak little fists on my face, clawing at my breast, and biting it. Then she pointed down at her bed.

In the evening, when I came back with my bundle of firewood, her cot was empty. I found her lying naked in the morgue among the corpses of the adult prisoners. She had spent one year and four months in this world, and died on 3 March 1944 . . . That is the story of how, in giving birth to my only child, I committed the worst crime there is.⁵⁵

In the archives of the Gulag, photographs of the type of camp nursery Volovich described have been preserved. One such album begins with the following introduction:

The sun shines in their Stalinist fatherland. The nation is filled with love for the leaders and our wonderful children are happy just as the whole young country is happy. Here, in wide and warm beds, sleep the new citizens of our country. Having eaten, they sleep sweetly and are certainly dreaming happy dreams . . .

The accompanying photographs belie the captions. In one, a row of nursing mothers, white masks covering their faces—proof of the hygienic practices of the camp—sits solemn-eyed and unsmiling on a bench, holding their babies. In another, the children are all going for their evening walk. Lined up in a row, they look no more spontaneous than their mothers. In many pictures, the children have shaved heads, presumably to prevent lice, which has the effect of making them look like the tiny prisoners they were in fact considered to be.⁵⁶ “The children’s home was also part of the camp compound,” wrote Evgeniya Ginzburg. “It had its own guardhouse, its own gates, its own huts and its own barbed wire.” ⁵⁷

At some level, the Gulag administration in Moscow must have known how terrible life in the camps was for children who lived in them. We know, at least, that the camp inspectors passed on the information: a 1949 report on the condition of women in the camps noted disapprovingly that of the 503,000 women then in the Gulag system, 9,300 were pregnant while another 23,790 had small children with them. “Taking into account the negative influence on the health and education of children,” the report argued for their mothers’ early release, as well as the early release of those women who had children at home, a total—when exceptions were made for recidivists and counter-revolutionary political prisoners—of about 70,000. ⁵⁸

From time to time such amnesties were carried out. But few improvements were made in the lives of those children who remained. On the contrary, because they contributed nothing to the productivity of the camp, their health and well-being ranked very low on most camp commanders’ list of priorities, and they invariably lived in the poorest, coldest, oldest buildings. One inspector determined that the temperature in one camp children’s home never rose higher than 52 degrees Fahrenheit; another found a childrens’ home with peeling paint and no light at all, not even kerosene lamps.⁵⁹ A 1933 report from Siblag said the camp lacked 800 pairs of children’s shoes, 700 children’s overcoats, and 900 sets of cutlery.⁶⁰ Nor were those working in them necessarily qualified. On the contrary, nursery jobs were “trusty” jobs, and as such usually went to professional criminals. Joffe writes that “For hours on end, they would stand under the stairway with their ‘husbands,’ or they would simply leave, while the children, unfed and unattended, would get sick and begin dying.”⁶¹