Women of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives

Women of the Gulag

Women of the Gulag

Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives

Paul R. Gregory

HOOVER INSTITUTION PRESS

Stanford University . Stanford, California

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace

,

founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the thirty-first president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs. The views expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

www.hoover.org

Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 631

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, California 94305-6010

Copyright © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher and copyright holders.

For permission to reuse material from Women of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives, ISBN 978-0-8179-1574-2, please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of uses.

Efforts have been made to locate the original sources, determine the current rights holders, and, if needed, obtain reproduction permissions. On verification of any such claims to rights in the articles reproduced in this book, any required corrections or clarifications will be made in subsequent printings/editions.

Photo sources appear here.

Hoover Institution Press assumes no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

First printing 2013

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gregory, Paul R., author.

Women of the Gulag / Paul R. Gregory.

pages cm. — (Hoover Institution Press Publication ; No. 631)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8179-1574-2 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-8179-1576-6 (ebook)

1. Women political prisoners—Soviet Union—Biography. 2. Gulag NKVD. 3. Political persecution—Soviet Union. 4. Concentration camps—Soviet Union. 5. Prisons—Soviet Union. 6. Forced labor—Soviet Union. 7. Soviet Union—History—1925–1953. I. Title. II. Series: Hoover Institution Press publication ; 631.

DK268.A1G724 2013

365′.45092520947—dc23 2012045817

Digital Book Conversion by

www.metrodigi.com

Contents

Preface

1 Terror’s Human Face

2 Stalin: Struggles and Successes

3 Agnessa: Elite NKVD Wife

4 Maria: Portrait of the New Soviet Family

5 Evgenia: Luxury with a Beast

6 Adile: Princess Bride of Abkhazia

7 Fekla: Child of the Kulaks

8 Stalin: The Storm Descends

9 Agnessa: Crashing a Funeral

10 Stalin: Launching the Great Terror

11 Agnessa: The Purge Spreads Far and Wide

12 Maria: A Narrow Escape

13 Evgenia: Socialist Realist

14 Adile: The Master Will Not Abandon Us

15 Fekla: Becoming a Bolshevik

16 Stalin: The Master Needs a Scapegoat

17 Agnessa: New Year’s Eve with the Master

18 Maria: Wife of a Traitor of the Motherland

19 Evgenia: Losing Everything

20 Adile: Return and Arrest

21 Fekla: Face of the Future

22 Aftermath

Sources

About the Author

Index

Preface

The Video can not be reproduced

Women of the Gulag is my third book on political repression under Soviet socialism. My first, Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin (Yale University Press, 2009), analyzed how Lenin, Stalin, and their successors used the political police in a systematic way to repress the citizenry. But the faces of the victims became lost in the horrendous statistics and the incredible numbers of human tragedies. My second book was Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (Hoover Institution Press, 2010). In it, I used Stalin’s most prominent victims—Bukharin and his wife, Anna—to give human faces to his top political rivals.

Women of the Gulag is based on an often overlooked point: most of Stalin’s victims were quite ordinary people. Only a tiny percentage belonged to the political elite, like Bukharin. Women of the Gulag tells the stories of ordinary women and reveals how adversity can make ordinary people do extraordinary things.

To truly understand Stalin’s terror and its impact on Russian society and history, we must see the faces of the victims up close. We must follow a peasant girl growing up while confined to a special settlement tucked away in the remote Urals. We must observe the life of an engineer’s wife and family in Eastern Siberia as ordinary rail accidents somehow become acts of sabotage. We must sit with the teenage sister-in-law of a high party official in a Sukhumi mansion as the secret police close in on family and friends.

Not all the stories of Women of the Gulag are of ordinary women and their families coping with tragedy. Under Stalin, the dividing line between victim and executioner was razor-thin. More than a third of the leading executioners were executed themselves. We see repressors turned into the repressed as we visit the luxurious villas, dinner parties, literary salons, and vacation resorts of the wives of Stalin’s executioners, and we see their horror as they grow increasingly aware that they are about to cross that line.

Women of the Gulag tells the stories of five women and their families. By Gulag I mean more than the barbed wire, camps, and prisons which the term usually conjures up. Instead, the Gulag refers to a state of mind—to the knowledge that anyone and everyone could be shot, jailed, or exiled as the victim of mass insanity and hysteria originating from somewhere above. In this topsy-turvy world, a wrong word or association becomes a crime against the state punishable by the highest measure of social defense, execution. Neighbors and friends are potential informants. A false move at work becomes deliberate sabotage. The camp system into which enemies of the people poured was simply the end stage of the world of the Gulag, reserved for enemies who escaped the anonymous execution pits.

The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s made possible a new scholarly literature that is completing our understanding of the Gulag. This literature instructs us on the size and scope of the Gulag, as in Oleg Khlevniuk’s The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Yale University Press, 2004) and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (Doubleday, 2003). Its human costs are explored by Norman Naimark in Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton University Press, 2011) and its use as an economic institution is the subject of essays in The Economics of Forced Labor (Hoover Institution Press, 2003), which I edited with Valery Lazarev. Jörg Baberowski describes how Stalin and his henchmen used political repression to serve their ends in Verbrannte Erde: Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt (C. H. Beck, 2012) while Stephen Cohen delves into the impact on civilian society in The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin (PublishingWorks, 2010).

I use these archives to visit Stalin’s office, apartment, and dacha as he and his henchmen set terror in motion. We watch as they sit and draft decrees in the antiseptic bureaucratic language, such as first category enemies of the people, that condemns hundreds of thousands to prison or death. We use the archives to follow these Kremlin orders as they filter down to Stalin’s loyal executioners, among them the husbands of two of our women of the Gulag.

How political repression struck these unsuspecting women and their families can only be captured by first-hand accounts. Tragic experiences motivate those affected to write memoirs. During the Soviet period, these personalized accounts were hidden away or strictly confined to the family. Then organizations like Memorial and the Sakharov Museum rose up as valiant representatives of victims of political repression and as repositories of their memories. Their shelves and digital archives contain thousands of memoirs, taped interviews, and photographs. Many determined memoirists self-published their works; other memoirs are available in handwritten notebooks or crudely typed pages. Increasingly, victim accounts are being digitized by dedicated human rights advocates. They range from works of high literary value to a few paragraphs scribbled by an irate son or daughter seeking justice. These writers are united by the conviction that their stories must be told, even to a troubled society that prefers to put this shameful historical episode behind it.

Women of the Gulag joins a growing body of literature that personalizes the Gulag experience. Some authors have used diaries and family records to paint a picture of Soviet life during the worst years of Stalin’s reign. Examples include: Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930’s (The New Press, 1995); Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution On My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Harvard University Press, 2006); Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 (Polity Press, 2012); Anne Applebaum, Gulag Voices: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2011); and Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (Metropolitan Books, 2007).

My account distinguishes itself in four regards. First, I limit myself to only five stories so that we can become intimately acquainted with these women as their tragedies unfold. Their trials and tribulations become shared experiences. Second, I include the wives of two villains, half innocent, half guilty, as they come to grips with their Faustian bargains. They know their husbands are murderers, but they enjoy the benefits and privileges their spouses’ macabre profession bestows on them. Third, I interweave decisions taken at the highest levels with the stories of those suffering the consequences. As the Kremlin and the regions bargain for execution quotas, I tell the stories of the wives and families of those who become statistics counted toward fulfillment of the quotas. Fourth, this is a story about women.

Most belles-lettres on the Gulag, starting with the classic accounts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, explore primarily the travails of the men. Women are natural subjects because only in the rarest of cases did male victims of Stalinist repression outlive the Soviet system to tell their stories truthfully. Able-bodied male Gulag inmates were sent off to fight in suicidal labor battalions and expired at the front in World War II or did not live long after their release. Of the Stalin generation, women had a ten-year-longer life expectancy than men.

Second, women were often repressed, not for anything they had done or were supposed to have done, but for the supposed sins of their husbands. Once in the Gulag, they were subjected to particular kinds of sexual enslavement and violence that the men did not have to endure. However, women’s experiences as forced laborers—brutal hours, harsh cold, poor shelter, insufficient nourishment—were very much like the men’s. The Gulag was an equal-opportunity institution.

Third, the dynamics of women’s survival, family ties, and transition to normal life were unlike those of the men. Women returned to estranged sons and daughters raised in state orphanages, by foster parents, or—in fortunate cases—by relatives. Their children, who had been taught to regard their parents as enemies, had suffered discrimination and hardship as children of enemies of the people. The women’s return usually came after a decade or so of absence. They returned, to the embarrassment of their daughters, as hardened and rough women bearing little resemblance to the Mamas those daughters remembered.

As I wrote these intimate accounts of these five women, I began to feel a personal kinship with them. My curiosity piqued, Natalia Reshetova and I began a detective search to see if they or their children were still alive. We knew this was unlikely given that these events occurred in the mid- to late 1930s. To our amazement, two of my primary characters are still alive, albeit in poor health and of extremely advanced age. They still live in the same locations where the action takes place. Two adult children, old enough to bear witness to their mothers’ repression, were found.

You can imagine my excitement and emotion when, after many attempts, I spoke by telephone with the now eighty-six-year-old woman whose condemned father entrusted her younger sisters to her care at the age of eleven and a half, as he spoke to her through a cellar window from his prison in a Urals town in 1938.

Armed with this information, I teamed up with Marianna Yarovskaya, a talented young Russian filmmaker trained in Hollywood, to tell the story of Women of the Gulag as a documentary film. As I write these words, Marianna is in Russia filming what will become a feature-length documentary. We are working with a sense of urgency. The story must be told before it is too late.

These contacts with our subjects and their children, nieces, nephews, and even great-grandchildren provided valuable new information for this book. Through telephone conversations, e-mails, and filmed interviews, we were able to fill in a number of missing elements in our stories. We wish to thank Adile Abbas-ogly, Fekla Andreeva, and their family members who generously assisted us in our efforts. We wish particularly to thank Leila (now living in Sukhumi), daughter of Adile; Ekaterina (Katya) Karpova (Kamensk-Uralsky) and Klavdia Poderina (Ekaterinburg), sisters of Fekla; Olga Ignatkina and Natalia Belova (Saint Petersburg), daughter and granddaughter of Maria Ignatkina; Yury Dorfman (Chita), great-grandson of Maria Ignatkina; Agnessa (Agulya) Korovicheva (Saint Petersburg), adopted daughter of Agnessa Mironova-Korol; Professor Josef Feigenberg (Jerusalem), nephew of Evgenia Ezhova; Alexander Taraday (Kharkov), great-great-nephew of Evgenia Ezhova; and Memed Dzhikhashvili, Sariya Lakoba’s nephew (Batumi).

Women of the Gulag does not require any special knowledge of Russian history. I have limited the number of names and places, and I identify recurring characters with memorable nicknames wherever possible. We transliterate Russian names and places with a simplified system that will not satisfy purists, but we use standard transliteration in the list of Sources for specialists.

I wish to thank the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and its director, John Raisian, for supporting this project and for fostering its magnificent Hoover Institution Library and Archives. I used a number of its collections for the chapters that take place in the Kremlin and in district offices of the political police. I wish to thank the many professionals of the library and archives for their assistance, especially Linda Bernard, Carol Leadenham, and Lora Soroka, without whom this work would not have been possible. I benefited from the wisdom and advice of colleagues at Stanford and the Hoover Institution, such as Stanford historians Amir Weiner and Norman Naimark and Hoover Fellow and Oxford historian Robert Service. My unsung heroes are the many lay readers who volunteered to read earlier versions of the book. Although I received enthusiastic encouragement from them, they also pointed out where I was striking false notes. For this valuable service, I am indebted to them.

This book also would not have been possible without the exceptional and dedicated assistance of Dr. Natalia Reshetova, who uncovered, organized, and remembered so many of the details that capture the sights, sounds, and smells of Russia of the 1930s. Natalia spent many late nights tracking down our Women of the Gulag survivors.

A final debt of gratitude goes to Jeff Jones, Jennifer Presley, and Barbara Arellano of the Hoover Institution Press. As usual, Jennifer Navarrette designed the compelling cover, which captures the essence of this book. Barbara Egbert navigated the manuscript with insight and skill through the editorial process, from which it emerged much improved.

Terror’s Human Face

A remark often attributed to Stalin is, A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

This is the story of five such tragedies. They are stories about women because, as in so many cases, it was the wives and daughters who survived to tell what happened.

These five women put a human face on the terror of Stalin’s purges and the Gulag in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. They show how the impersonal orders emanating from the Kremlin office of the Master brought tragedy to their lives. They cover the gamut of victims. Two are wives and daughters in ordinary families unable to comprehend why such misfortune has overtaken them. A third is a young bride living in the household of a high party official. The last two are wives of the Master’s executioners. These stories are based on their memoirs—some written by themselves, others by close friends or by their children.

Together, they put a human face on what author Robert Conquest termed The Great Terror.

AGNESSA

Agnessa Argipopulo was born in 1903 in the small town of Maikop, in far southern Russia, near the Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk. She and her older sister, Lena, exemplified the mixed heritage of the people of the Russian South: a blend of Greek, Russian, and Mongol blood which made them the acknowledged beauties of Maikop. The Red and White armies traded control of the town during the Russian Revolution. While the sisters were both still in their teens, Lena married a White Guard officer . . . Agnessa a Red. But Agnessa’s fate was settled when she left her first husband for a rising star in the NKVD, the Soviet secret police force that carried out Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.

MARIA

Maria Senotrusova was born in 1904 in the isolated village of Tolbaga, in Eastern Siberia. This former czarist dumping ground for exiles and revolutionaries was opening up to the world thanks to the Trans-Siberian Railway. When a spur line was built to nearby coal deposits, Maria joined the local work force and met her future husband, the engineer in charge of the work. They married and raised three children in a hard-working, well-educated family that exemplified everything the USSR wanted and needed in the New Soviet People who would build the socialist paradise. But Stalin’s purge destroyed their lives as it did the lives of hundreds of thousands of other innocents.

EVGENIA

Evgenia Feigenberg, born in 1904, had no intention of remaining in her hometown of Gomel, Belorussia, close to Poland and Ukraine but far from the European capitals where she was sure she belonged. Nor did she intend to follow the normal life course for the daughter of a rabbi: an early marriage and many children. Her first marriage took her to Odessa. She left her husband for a better catch, who took her to Moscow and to the Soviet Embassy in London. But it was her third partner who took her with him as he climbed ruthlessly to the highest levels of Soviet power—only to doom them both to destruction when Stalin tired of his purges and looked for a scapegoat for the Great Terror.

ADILE

Adile Abbas-ogly, born in 1920, was only fifteen when she was literally swept away by a handsome older man who was a member of the Lakoba clan, the leading family in Sukhumi, in the Abkhazian portion of the Soviet Union. Adile’s father was Persian, and her family, while Muslim, celebrated the Christian holidays. Her choice of a husband appeared inspired: his brother-in-law was Nestor Lakoba, the head of the powerful Lakoba clan and a close associate and personal friend of Stalin. Nestor had led the Bolshevik takeover of the region and appeared solidly in charge. But Lavrenty Beria, his rival for power, set out to destroy the Lakobas and everyone associated with them.

FEKLA

Fekla Andreeva was born in 1926 in Suvory Village in the Ural Mountains. Her pleasant childhood ended early in 1930 when Stalin ordered the dekulakization of the Soviet countryside. Her family’s relative prosperity—they owned a small farm and some livestock and could afford to hire help to bring in the harvest each year—put them into a group which Stalin wanted liquidated as a class. Stripped of all belongings, the family was eventually sent to a nearby settlement, where they and other kulaks built crude barracks and worked in mines and fields on starvation rations. Fekla and her sisters went to school where they strived to be good Soviet citizens and learned to revere Stalin. But far worse was yet to come at the hands of the Master.

Stalin

Struggles and Successes

Who was this man of diminutive stature but outsized ambition who had clawed, bullied, and assassinated his way to the pinnacle of power in the new nation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?

Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in 1879 in the mountains of Georgia, in the Caucasus region of the Russian Empire. An early convert to the Bolshevik cause, he assumed the name Stalin, man of steel. He took on a series of low-level leadership positions under Vladimir Lenin after the Russian Revolution, quietly finding ways to gain power. When Lenin, the Old Man, died in 1924, few of the Old Guard expected Stalin to come out on top in the power struggle that followed. However, the man who would become the Master had a game plan and would do anything to win.

Lenin suffered a series of strokes beginning in May 1922 that eventually left him mute and bedridden. Until then, the Old Man had handled details like medical care, leaves abroad, and housing—for example, Lenin gave Stalin a bigger Kremlin apartment. After the Old Man’s incapacitation, the Master made sure he decided such things. The others could not be bothered. Only Stalin realized the power it gave him.

As the Old Man’s health deteriorated, Stalin chose his doctors and nurses and procured his medications. The Master’s