Since the US is now running a tarrif trade war, mostly targeting China, it has been said that Xi told his people “eat bitterness” and that was interpreted as “absorb the pain”. It is well known, throughout the 5000 year history of China, its people have known great suffering. It is a large land mass, like Russia, and Russians too have known great suffering.

Since Russia is a huge country and Britain is a small one, I have chosen to read this book to educate myself about Stalin’s brutal treatment of these children:

Cathy Frierson was introduced to survivors through NGOs The Return and civil rights group Memorial. Since then:

Russian court orders oldest civil rights group Memorial to shut

• Published 28 December 2021 (BBC report)

Here is the introduction:

This book introduces ten people who were survivors of childhood trauma during the Soviet era and who were still living in Russia in 2005–2007. The Soviet government created their suffering when it orphaned them in the 1930s and 1940s by arresting one or both of their parents, whom the state then imprisoned, exiled, or executed. The children subsequently endured social, political, and economic stigmas as offspring of “enemies of the people” or “traitors to the motherland.” These categories excluded them for life from many opportunities their peers enjoyed as unstigmatized Soviet citizens. When World War II began in Poland in 1939, the horrors on the Eastern Front of Soviet-occupied territory made these fatherless, and sometimes motherless, children more vulnerable than others to hunger, exposure, violence, homelessness, and death. And yet they survived. They agreed to share their stories with me, believing that in doing so they would make an important contribution to the history of the Soviet Union, Soviet terror, and the Soviet network of penal institutions known as the Gulag. Unwittingly, they were also offering lessons in survival…..

…….I define the Gulag broadly here to include the entire network of detention facilities; transit prisons; long-term prisons; execution chambers and fields; forced labor camps; and “special settlements” run out of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), renamed the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in 1946 and the Committee of State Security (KGB) in 1954. The Gulag also includes the network of NKVD institutions for children: so-called child receiver-distributors, orphanages, and labor colonies. The youngest Soviet citizens who entered this vast network thereby became “children of the Gulag.”

Around 10 million of these children were orphaned when their parents were taken from them. From babies to age 16.

The author located people from 5 different cities:

Survivors in this volume lived in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Staritsa, Vologda, and Kotlas. Their parents ranged from peasants to leaders of the Bolshevik Party, from manual workers to intellectuals………

………..The very fact that they lived to tell the tale may encourage them to look for factors that contributed to their resilience and survival. This cohort of Soviet citizens was also the age group most thoroughly indoctrinated in mandatory gratitude to the Communist Party, the Soviet state, and Joseph Stalin. They had to read and repeat the expression “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for my happy childhood!” much as an American child has to repeat the Pledge of Allegiance.26 Classroom in Stalingrad, early 1940s (Private collection of Irina Dubrovina) Expressing gratitude was a well-practiced skill; these survivors transferred the object of their gratitude from the Party and Stalin to those who saved them from the Stalinist system. We might also explain these survivors’ positive memories as a product of this group’s peculiar perspective as a tiny minority of child victims of Soviet political repression who survived well into old age and recognized fully their exceptional good fortune in having done so.

When a nation creates laws which point the finger at children, even babies, there is something seriously sick with that nation’s lawmakers:

The Soviet state’s laws and regulations prescribed the punitive actions to be taken against individual men and their wives, children, and other relatives when they were deemed dangerous to the system. It was thus perfectly legal for state agents to target children as young as twelve months for separation from their families to be raised by the Soviet state, and to place teenagers in labor colonies for “correctional labor.”

And as we wonder about those thousands of Ukrainian children (730,000 by February 2024), kidnapped and being Russified in some place in Russia, let us hope they remember their roots and will return to Ukraine one day, in the not too distant future.

Meanwhile, whilst I am familiar with the stories told by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, I am not familiar with these stories of trauma suffered during the 1930s -1940s in Stalin’s Russia.

I will refer to this book in future blogs.