The Stalinist repressions were a severe ordeal for the children of repressed parents as well. Among the millions of such children was Lidia Kozlova, whose father was arrested in 1937. In 1939, she married the journalist and poet Mark Gluzberg. During the war, she was evacuated, first to Kharkov, then to the Stalingrad Oblast and Omsk. In 1946, she returned to Kharkov, where her husband’s parents lived. She graduated from the Kiev Textile Institute and worked as an engineer at the Kharkov Regional Department of Consumer Services. She came to the United States in 1997 and now lives in Sacramento.
I was born in April 1919 in Kiev and lived there until August 1941. In 1937, my mother and I went away for the summer to a village on the Dnieper River. When we returned to Kiev, we learned that the parents of several of my school friends had been arrested, including those of my best friend, Zoya Radchenko. Her father, Grigory Ivanovich Radchenko, an Old Bolshevik and a member of the Leninist underground, often came to our school on revolutionary holidays to talk about his work in the underground, the Bolshevik Party, how it was formed, and its significance for us, the rising generation of builders of communism. At the time in question, Grigory Ivanovich was the director of the large enterprise Dneprolesosplav.
I was shocked by the news of the arrest of this honest man, devoted to the Party, whom I knew very well personally, as I often visited their home. When I told my parents what had happened, my father reacted in a way I found very strange. He uttered this phrase: “When you don't eat garlic, there's no smell.”
It’s striking how many people believed the repressed were guilty until the repressions touched them personally. Such was the corrupting, stupefying influence of Stalinist propaganda, which used the full power of the state mass media to brainwash more than one generation of the Soviet people. And one must admit, they succeeded wonderfully at this, because to this day, even here in America, you can hear people say that under Stalin, only criminals were in prison—which is, in fact, what prompted me to take up my pen.
Thinking back to that terrible autumn and winter of 1937, I remember that every day, one or two of my classmates would come to school in tears, grief-stricken. The nighttime arrests were snowballing.
A couple of days before the end of 1937, there was a ring at our apartment door during the night. I woke up and heard a conversation in the main room. When I got dressed and went out there, I saw two men in military uniforms and two young men in plainclothes. One of the military men showed my father a warrant for his arrest and for a search. They conducted a search, found nothing, and told my father to follow them. As he got dressed, he kept repeating that my mother and I shouldn’t worry, that it was a misunderstanding, that everything would be cleared up in the morning and he would be home tomorrow. They led him away, and I never saw my father again.
Time passed, but nothing was cleared up. We went and wrote to so many places to find out his fate, but there was no answer.
Meanwhile, at school, our full-time Komsomol secretary called a Komsomol meeting and announced that he was raising the issue of expelling the children of “enemies of the people” from the Komsomol. But since a large part of our class had already fallen into this category, the meeting rejected the secretary's proposal on the grounds that our parents had not yet been convicted. Then, in early 1938, a decree was issued stating that children are not responsible for their parents, and we all remained in the Komsomol.
After my father’s arrest, my mother, along with several other women in the same sad predicament, went to Moscow to seek protection from Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. It is clear now how hopeless this endeavor was, but at the time, people clung to any hope they could find. Of course, they couldn't get to Krupskaya, as she was already under house arrest and no one was allowed to see her.
My mother returned with nothing, and a few days after her return from Moscow, she too was arrested. The wives of “enemies of the people” were given the standard charge of the time: “She knew but did not report it.” Without a trial or investigation, these unfortunate women were given ten years each and sent to the camps, where they died from grueling slave labor. Those who miraculously managed to survive the camp were sent into exile in Siberia.
Only after Stalin's death did my mother return to Kharkov, where I was living with my husband and children. She returned a complete invalid, both physically and mentally. All day long, she would sit on her bed, staring at a single point and not saying a word. A few months later, she died, having never said anything about her life in the camp.
In the spring of 1938, word got out that trains carrying “enemies of the people” were departing at night from the Kiev freight railway station, headed north. My classmates and I organized night watches at the station. Every night, a group of three (two boys and a girl) would see off the trains with the prisoners. We would walk alongside the cars, shouting the last names of our arrested parents. The guards would chase us away, but we kept coming back. And then one day, during my watch, Zoya’s father answered from one of the cars. He was very happy to see us and relayed a message for Zoya that he had been sentenced to 20 years. To me, he said, “Lida, don’t come here anymore. You won’t find your father!”
Fifteen years passed; it was now 1953. In the spring, Stalin died. Khrushchev, as the saying goes, denounced Stalin’s cult of personality at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, and only after that did the repressed begin to return.
Grigory Ivanovich, Zoya’s father, also returned. He was fully rehabilitated and received a nice apartment in the center of Kiev (his family had been evicted from their previous apartment immediately after his arrest). When I learned of his return, I went to Kiev, hoping to find out something, anything, about my father. Grigory Ivanovich told me that my father had been accused of espionage and that after one interrogation, he never returned to his cell. From cell to cell, the prisoners would pass on news about events in the prison by tapping on the walls. One day, a message came through this way that my father had been killed during an interrogation.
Soon, I received a response to my countless inquiries: I was summoned to Kiev for the hearing on my father’s rehabilitation case. I arrived at the appointed time. Everything proceeded like a court hearing. They called the head of the human resources department of the Ukrpoligraf trust, where my father had worked as chief engineer before his arrest. Before that, he had worked for many years as the director of the International Printing House, which printed books by foreign authors. My father had a great aptitude for languages; he knew several foreign languages. For example, when friendly relations were established with China, he taught himself Chinese so that he could read Chinese authors in the original.
At the trial, the following came to light. When the chief engineer of the Ukrpoligraf trust was arrested in the summer of 1937, my father, as an experienced specialist, was appointed to his position. The woman, the head of HR, said that while checking his file, she discovered that every month he visited the Latvian embassy and sent 100 rubles to his mother in Riga. She had instructions to report all such cases to the authorities, which she did, but she insisted she was not to blame for my father later being accused of espionage.
After the trial, the picture of my father’s death became clear to me. During the interrogations, the Chekists beat a confession out of him that he was a Latvian spy. Knowing his honesty and inflexibility, I understand that he would not have admitted guilt, and so, during one of the interrogations, they beat him to death. Many of the arrested who had a background in the underground, like Grigory Ivanovich, immediately signed their confessions to avoid torture, and some of them returned from the camps after Stalin’s death.
But my father had no connection to the Bolshevik Party and certainly no experience surviving in prison. He worked honestly at his job and naively believed that loyalty to the Bolsheviks and conscientious labor were a guarantee against unjust accusations. He paid for this with his life, like so many other innocently repressed people who were murdered in prisons or perished in the camps from starvation and exhausting labor. They don’t even have graves where one could go to commemorate them. All I have to remember my father and mother by is their photograph and my father's certificate of rehabilitation.
I decided to tell the bitter story of my parents because the other day on the news, I heard that there are plans in Russia to erect a monument to Stalin for the 60th anniversary of the victory over the fascists. It was terribly painful to hear that they are going to erect a monument in Moscow to such a monster—one who destroyed millions of people during collectivization and the mass repressions; who declared the soldiers and officers taken prisoner by the Germans to be traitors and sent them to Soviet camps; who demanded victory at any cost, regardless of human losses. What short memories these people have!
