My mother's stories
chapter 24
The great famine of '47
Somehow listening to my mother's stories I have never
understood what it was for her to live in her village marked as “a
daughter of the enemy of the people”. I think she was too proud to
show me that it bothered her too much. It was not really strange, of
course, that she was so eager to leave the village, considering
poverty and hard labour. But it couldn't explain why my mother was so
determined not to set her foot there ever again. In contrast to her
grudge against her mother she was fond of her grandmother and aunt,
her father's sister. The latter didn't have children with her husband
and they treated my mother as their own child. Moreover she really
missed her beloved oak forest, where she used to spend so many happy
hours wandering with her granny. So why was the very thought of
coming back so hateful for her?
For a long time I believed it was my mother's hatred
towards her own mother that prevented her from visiting the village.
Yet, after putting together all the details, while writing my
memoirs, I began to think that the main reason was rather different.
It was her fellow-villagers' enmity that hurt her feelings even more
than her mother's dislike. It was them who couldn't forgive my mother
her proud demeanour, her flat refusal to bear her status of “the
daughter of the enemy” as a stain of shame. I imagine it was not so
easy for her to stand on her dignity because of the rural custom not
only to hiss accusations behind someone's back but to throw them
straight to their faces. So that was the time, I think, when my
mother developed a habit of using her pride as a shield against
everything and everybody, a trait that cost me so many inconveniences
in my childhood and irritated me so much in later years.
I don't remember exactly if my mother had ever had any
doubts as to her father's innocence. But I do recall clearly her tale
about some young Komsomol activists, members of Young Communist
League, who came to her house once. They explained to her that if she
meant to continue her education she had to join their ranks but
before that she had to sign a statement with - a renunciation of her
father.
My mother didn't think twice to say “no”, adding
mockingly at the end that Komsomol could easily do without her but
she couldn't do without her father. It was dangerous to joke like
that at that time and my mother was really lucky to get away with it.
Nevertheless, that refusal predetermined all her future life. The
doors of the college were closed for her after that in spite of her
good marks at school and all the hopes of a good career were now
lost.
Besides, my mother had to pay for that refusal when a
great famine of 1947 broke out in the country. I remember her looking
at my father with a mixture of light envy and amusement and telling
me with mild indignation that during the famine he got as much bread
as an adult in his orphanage, while they received half as much as
ordinary citizens being “the family of an enemy of the people”.
To my surprise my father reacted with good humour to her remark. He
just smiled reminiscently and said that he had even more than that –
there were one or two pieces of sausage floating in his soup on all
red-letter days. And what a joy it was for orphans to fish those
small delicious bits out of their festive broth!
At the same time my mother had to survive on their
miserable bread rations – she and the majority of the population,
that is, those who didn't belong to some strictly limited privileged
group. The others weren't in much better position than my mother's
family. Actually, they began to receive that poor help from the state
only after the field work began in spring. Before that, in autumn,
that very state grabbed most of the wheat that was grown on the
collective farms' fields, leaving peasants to survive with that grain
that they managed to grow on their personal plots. And it was not
much as it was a notorious year of great drought and bad harvest.
They say Stalin's regime never stopped trading in
grain. Even in 1933 and 1947, at the time of great famines, heavy
laden trains continued to cross our borders – exactly like in that
joke that was popular at the beginning of the Second World War when
the USSR was still happily trading with Germany. As my father told me
the narrators of the joke started with the question “Do you know
what our wagon wheels say when they go abroad and then on their way
back?” The answer, as for me, was simple and brilliant: going
abroad the wheels rattled “rye - wheat, rye – wheat” and coming
back they tapped “screws – bolts, screws – bolts”. The
narrators pronounced slowly the first pair of words, giving their
listeners the impression of heavy carriages full of grain. The second
pair, on the contrary, was pronounced in quick succession, creating
immediately the image of more than half-empty wagons with small piles
of iron produce somewhere at the bottom.
So that was the price for our industrialization. But
still I can't grasp why they continued to send grain abroad when
people were eating grass and swelling from starvation. I can accept a
wide-spread explanation that communists organized the famine of 1933
just to suppress peasants' rebellions and force them to enter
collective farms. How else could they make people work hard without
getting any money for their labour? But the famine of '47 was
different. It happened just after the war, when the country had been
rendered lifeless with heavy death toll. It seemed mad to organize a
new famine at the time like this, even if Stalin was afraid of new
rebellions. But then I remembered a phrase which was ascribed to
Stalin “No one is irreplaceable”. It inevitably
reminded me a well-known Russian proverb “Women are still giving birth” where the same thought was put into simpler words. I can only imagine how modern feminists
would react to such a statement. As for Stalin's words they
say nowadays that the great moustached leader never said anything of
the sort. But does it really matter? It's enough to know that it was the invariable motto of communists at the time of
Stalin's rule.
To be continued..
28. Why did they kill him?