Till My Tale Is Told: Women's Memoirs of the Gulag

374 Pages·1999·20.098 MB·English

by  Simeon Vilensky, John Crowfoot

TILL MY TALE IS TOLD
*
Indiana-Michigan Series
in Russian and East European Studies
Alexander Rabinowitch & William G. Rosenberg,
general editors
*
ADVISORY BOARD
Deming Brown
Jane Burbank
Robert W. Campbell
Henry Cooper
Herbert Eagle
Ben Eklof
Zvi Gitelman
Hiroaki Kuromiya
David Ransel
William Zimmerman
TILL MY
TALE IS TOLD
WOMEN’S MEMOIRS OF THE GULAG
EDITED BY
SIMEON VILENSKY
TRANSLATED BY
JOHN CROWFOOT, MARJORIE FARQUHARSON,
CATRIONA KELLY, SALLY LAIRD,
AND CATHY PORTER
ENGLISH EDITION PREPARED BY
SIMEON VILENSKY, JOHN CROWFOOT, AND
ZAYARA VESYOLAYA
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington & Indianapolis
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© 1999 by Indiana University Press
Abridged from Dodnes9 tiagoteet: Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy, compiled by
Simeon Vilensky (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989).
© 1989 Sovetskii pisatel’.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher. The Association of American University Presses’
Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception
to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information
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Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dodnes'tiagoteet. vyp. 1. Zapiski vashei sovremennitsy. English. Selections.
Till my tale is told : women’s memoirs of the Gulag / edited by Simeon
Vilensky ; translated by John Crowfoot... [et al.]. — English ed. prepared
by Simeon Vilensky, John Crowfoot, and Zayara Vesyolaya.
p. cm. — (Indiana-Michigan series in Russian and East European
studies)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-253-33464-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1936-1953. 2. Women
political prisoners—Soviet Union—Biography. I. Vilenskii, Semen
Samuilovich. II. Crowfoot, John. III. Veselaia, Zaiara. IV. Title. V.
Series.
DK268.A1D5613 1999
365'.45*0820947—dc21 99-24863
1 2 3 4 5 04 03 02 01 00 99
I write in the name of the living.
That they, in turn, may not stand
In a silent, submissive crowd
By the dark gates of some camp.
—Yelena Vladimirova, “Kolyma”
»
People today will tell me:
all that was over and done with long ago,
so there is little point in recalling it.
I know very well that the tale of these events
has indeed been long buried and forgotten.
Yet why, then, do they sometimes still rise
so vividly before our eyes?
Is it not because there was
something else in this tragic past,
apart from the tale,
that lies far from forgotten but,
to this day, continues to loom over our lives?
—Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, “Bygone Poshekhonie”
*

C O N T E N T S
Preface to the Russian Edition by Simeon Vilensky ix
Preface to the English Edition by Simeon Vilensky xi
1. Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey 1
2. Yelena Vladimirova, From “Kolyma: A Narrative Poem” 89
3. Bertha Babina-Nevskaya, My First Prison, February 1922 97
4. Nadezhda Grankina, Notes by Your Contemporary 111
5. Veronica Znamenskaya, To This Day 141
6. Vera Shulz, Taganka 151
7. Galina Zatmilova, A Part of History 171
8. Nadezhda Surovtseva, Vladivostok Transit 181
9. Yelena Sidorkina, Years under Guard 193
10. Zoya Marchenko, The Way It Was 201
11. Anna Barkova, Selected Poems 213
12. Tamara Petkevich, Just One Fate 221
13. Tatyana Leshchenko-Sukhomlina, Selections from “My Guitar” 229
14. Hava Volovich, My Past 241 ' > t' «.
15. Nadezhda Kanel, A Meeting at the Lubyanka 279
16. Zayara Vesyolaya, 7:35 287
Afterword by John Crowfoot 335
Important Dates 33 9
Glossary 343
Map 347
Index 349
Contributors and Translators 357

P R E F A C E -------
TO THE RUSSIAN EDITION
The women whose memoirs are included in this book (with the exception
of Veronica Znamenskaya) were imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or exiled
sometime during the Soviet era. After the Twentieth Congress of the Com­
munist Party in 1956, they were declared innocent of the crimes for which
they had been sentenced and were rehabilitated. Almost all of the selec­
tions, most of which are excerpts from longer memoirs, had not been pub­
lished previously. The manuscripts were given to me with the consent of
their authors, or, in the case of posthumous publication, with the consent of
those to whom the authors had entrusted them. I myself was among such
custodians.
A word of explanation is necessary with regard to the writings pub­
lished here posthumously. Uncertain how long they would live, the authors
often gave their unfinished manuscripts to friends or relatives for safekeep­
ing. Later, some of the authors expanded and edited their texts, and the
revised manuscripts were also handed on, either to their previous custodi­
ans or to new keepers. Some were retyped, either in part or in full. Except
during the brief Thaw under Khrushchev, works that depicted aspects of
life that would not pass the censorship were officially classified by the puni­
tive organs as “slandering the Soviet system,” with drastic consequences for
those found in possession of them. In such situations the proscribed works
suffered various fates. Some of them came to exist in many variants in al­
most folkloric fashion. For this reason there may well be discrepancies be­
tween the texts published here and those in the possession of others.
Almost all of the authors of the memoirs included in this book were ar­
rested in the 1930s. They write about themselves, but they have much more
to say about the fates of their comrades in the prisons and the camps. And
it is this compassion, in resistance to a heartless and dehumanizing system,
that gives their writings an undeniable moral force.
“It seemed as if the monstrous Stalinist regime had given birth to a new
type of human being,” writes Vera Shulz in her memoirs, “a submissive, in­
ert creature, mute and devoid of initiative. So it is important that our con-
X / PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN EDITION
temporaries hear the voices of the surviving representatives of another gen­
eration of women, born at the beginning of the century, who through the
nightmare of false accusation, torture, humiliation, hunger, and unspeak­
able deprivation, bring to us the ideals of true humanity.”
Unfortunately, it was impossible to publish the memoirs in their entirety:
in a single book there would have been room for the full-length texts of
only two or three unknown authors. But there are many such unknown
authors, and one of my aims in planning this book was that publication of
fragments from their larger texts would draw attention to their writings. In
deciding which passages to include, I have been guided largely by my own
experience of Stalin’s prisons and camps. Each memoir is prefaced by a note
about its author, usually written by a close friend who did not share this
fate. Their reminiscences further expand the horizons of this book.
A quarter of a century ago I first attempted to publish an anthology
that included writings by people who had been repressed. In 1963 a collec­
tion entitled For the Sake of Life on Earth was published by a press in
Magadan. At the last minute, an order came to exclude works by authors
who were “not officially resident in Kolyma,” which meant, among others,
those whose remains repose in the camp graveyards of that vast region. The
editor of the volume, Nikolai Kozlov, then secretary of the Magadan branch
of the Writers’ Union, suffered a nervous breakdown. He was brought to
Moscow to be treated for his “manic struggle for justice.”
The authors represented here embrace almost the entire Gulag Archi­
pelago. The works were written long ago, free of internal censorship and
without any hope of prompt publication. From the unlocked cells of the so­
cialist wing in Butyrki Prison, where Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists,
and Mensheviks were held in 1922, through peasant victims of dekulaki­
zation, to Bolshevik Party activists, themselves despatched in the late 1930s
to Kolyma where they perished—each has its own history and prehistory.
The memoirs describe the endless procession of those designated “en­
emies of the people” and “socially dangerous” elements by the Soviet re­
gime and condemned to imprisonment, labor camps, and exile. Many of
these memoirs were begun, and some were even completed, in secrecy, be­
hind barbed wire. The price for them was life itself.
Simeon Vilensky
Moscow, 1989