Gulag

We came to the settlement and on the second day they drove us to work we had to work from dawn to night. When payday came for 15 days 10 rubles was the top pay so that in two days it was not even enough for bread. People were dying from hunger. They ate dead horses. This is how my mommy worked and got a cold because she had no warm clothing she got pneumonia and was sick for 5 months she got sick December 3. April 3 she went to the hospital. In the hospital they did not treat her at all if she had not gone to the hospital maybe she would still be alive she came to the barracks at the settlement and died there was nothing to eat and so she died of hunger April 30, 1941. My mommy was dying and I and my sister were at home. Daddy was not there he was at work and my mommy died when Daddy came home from work then mommy died and so my Mommy died of hunger. And then the amnesty came and we got out of that hell.¹⁹

Bruno Bettelheim, commenting upon this particular collection of stories, unusual in their number and nature, tried to describe the special despair that they convey:

Since they were written soon after the children had reached freedom and security, it would seem reasonable for them to have spoken of their hope for liberation, if they had any. The absence of such statements suggests that they had none. These children were robbed of the freedom to vent deep and normal feelings, forced to repress them in order to survive for barely another day. A child who has been deprived of any hope for the future is a child dwelling in hell ...²⁰

No less cruel was the fate of another group of exiles, who were to join the Poles and the Balts during the course of the war. These were the Soviet minority groups, whom Stalin either targeted early in the war as a potential fifth column, or else fingered as German “collaborators” later on. The “fifth columnists” were the Volga Germans, people whose German ancestors had been invited to live in Russia at the time of Catherine the Great (another Russian ruler who cared deeply about populating her nation’s great empty spaces) and the Finnish-speaking minority who had inhabited the Soviet republic of Karelia. Although not all of the Volga Germans even spoke German anymore, nor all of the Karelian Finns Finnish, they did live in distinct communities, and had different customs from their Russian neighbors. That was enough, in the context of war with Finland and Germany, to make them figures of suspicion. In a leap of reasoning which was convoluted even by Soviet standards, the entire Volga German people were condemned, in September 1941, on a charge of “concealing enemies”: