Gulag полностью

For these children, the shock of the new situation would remain with them all of their lives. One Polish prisoner remembered that a woman in her jail cell had been accompanied by her three-year-old son: “The child was well-behaved, but delicate and silent. We amused him as well as we could with stories and fairy tales, but he interrupted us from time to time, saying, ‘We’re in prison, aren’t we?’”⁴⁶

Many years later, a child of deported kulaks recalled his ordeal on the cattle trains: “People became wild . . . How many days we traveled, I have no idea. In the wagon, seven people died of hunger. We got to Tomsk and they took us out, several families. They also unloaded several corpses, children, young people, and the elderly.”⁴⁷

Despite the hardships, there were also women who deliberately, even cynically, became pregnant while in the camps. These were usually criminal women or those convicted of petty crimes who wanted to be pregnant so as to be excused from hard work, to receive slightly better food, and to benefit, possibly, from the periodic amnesties given to women with small children. Such amnesties—there was one in 1945, for example, and another in 1948—did not usually apply to women sentenced for counter-revolutionary crimes. ⁴⁸ “You could ease your life by getting pregnant,” Lyudmila Khachatryan told me, as a way of explaining why women happily slept with their jailers.⁴⁹

Another woman recalled hearing a rumor that all women with babies — mamki, in prison slang—would be released. She deliberately became pregnant afterward.⁵⁰ Nadezhda Joffe, a prisoner who had become pregnant after being allowed to meet with her husband, wrote that her fellow inmates at the Magadan “wet nurse barracks” simply “didn’t have any maternal instincts,” and left their babies behind as soon as they were able.⁵¹

Perhaps not surprisingly, not all of the women who found they had become pregnant while in a camp wanted to remain that way. The Gulag administration seemed to be ambivalent about whether women should be allowed to have abortions or not, sometimes permitting them, sometimes slapping second sentences on those who attempted them.⁵² Nor is it at all clear how frequent they were, because they are so rarely described: in dozens of interviews and memoirs, I have read or heard only two accounts. In an interview, Anna Andreeva told me of a woman who “stuffed nails into herself, sat down and began to work on her sewing machine. Eventually she began to bleed heavily.” ⁵³ Another woman described how a camp doctor attempted to terminate her pregnancy:

Imagine the picture. It is night. It is dark . . . Andrei Andreevich is trying to cause me to abort, using his hands, covered in iodine, without instruments. But he is so nervous that nothing comes of it. I can’t breathe from the pain, but I endure it without a sound, so that no one will hear. “Stop!” I finally shout from unbearable pain, and the whole procedure is stopped for two days. In the end, everything came out—the fetus, with a great deal of blood. That is why I never became a mother.⁵⁴

But there were women who wanted their children, and tragedy was often their lot too. Against everything that has been written about the selfishness, the venality of the women who bore children in the camps, stands the story of Hava Volovich. A political arrested in 1937, she was extremely lonely in the camps, and deliberately sought to give birth to a child. Although Hava had no special love for the father, Eleonora was born in 1942, in a camp without special facilities for mothers:

There were three mothers there, and we were given a tiny room to ourselves in the barracks. Bedbugs poured down like sand from the ceiling and walls; we spent the whole night brushing them off the children. During the daytime we had to go out to work and leave the infants with any old woman who we could find who had been excused from work; these women would calmly help themselves to the food we had left for the children.

Nevertheless, wrote Volovich,