A FAMILY MARKED BY REPRESSION
Kharkiv & Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine ·
Montreal, Canada
I had read The Gulag Archipelago. I never thought that any of it would touch my own family.
When I was little, I knew nothing about it. Later, my grandmother told me what had happened to my grandfather. After that, I wanted to learn more, so I went to him and asked, “Maybe you could tell me what happened in 1937?” But he avoided the question.
No matter how many times I later tried to get him to talk about it, I never succeeded. Everything I learned came from my mother and my grandmother.
There was one story my grandfather did enjoy telling — about meeting Makhno in Huliaipole when he was a teenager. He would tell that story in detail. He and his brother were walking along the road when they came across one of Makhno’s patrols. Makhno asked them, “And who might you boys be? You’ve got nothing to do here! Off you go, back home!”
“Everything I learned came from my mother and my grandmother.”
That was interesting, and he was always willing to talk about it. But the moment I asked, “Tell me what happened during the repressions. How were you arrested?” he immediately avoided the subject.
I suspect there were two reasons. The first was that, until the very end, he believed it had all been some kind of mistake, that what had happened to him was purely accidental. Although perhaps, deep down, he did not really believe that himself.
The second reason was that he understood perfectly well that if he told me what had happened, I might come to hate the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. In other words, he might plant the seed of a dissident in me, and he did not want that. He knew what the consequences could be.
His name was Yevgeny Markovich Sloveychik, born in 1905. He joined the Communist Party in 1925 and remained, until the end of his life, a man who genuinely believed in the ideals of the Party and in the ideals of communism.
He firmly believed that Stalin had known nothing about what was happening. He thought there were “enemies of the people” around Stalin who had organized everything, whispered things in his ear, misled him — while Stalin himself supposedly knew nothing. It was a kind of naïveté.
And yet my grandmother was right there beside him, and she did not believe any of those stories at all. But he remained convinced.
My grandmother was not a Party member. She was a physician, head of a physiotherapy department, and chair of the military medical commission at the city military enlistment office. The whole city knew her, and she was highly respected. She did not believe in those ideals.
She was the only person who tried to open my eyes. But if my grandfather heard even a little of what she was telling me, he would become very upset and try to silence her, to stop her from talking to me about such things.
He never missed a single Party Congress. If it was being broadcast on television — whether Khrushchev or Brezhnev was giving a speech — he would sit in front of the television from beginning to end. That was the kind of communist he was: a genuine communist, not a fake one.
In 1937, my grandfather was head of technical supply for the Truba-Stal Trust in Kharkiv. It was a very senior and responsible position. He was building a successful career, and the family had an excellent apartment.
My grandmother was a physician, and they had two small children. At the time, my mother was six years old and my uncle, her brother, was four.
And then came 1937. It all began with an ordinary denunciation.
As the family later learned, someone from the trust had written an anonymous denunciation against him. He was immediately arrested. The infamous “Black Maria” came and took him away.
He was charged under Article 58. They accused him of being an “enemy of the people” and of carrying out acts of sabotage. It was nonsense, complete absurdity, and there was no evidence. They could not scrape together enough evidence.
That was what saved him from execution. He was sentenced to five years in the camps.
I do not remember all the places. I know for certain that Abakan was one of them. They moved the prisoners from camp to camp. It was not a single camp; there were many different camps over those five years.
The lack of evidence saved him from being shot. They could not assemble enough evidence to impose the harsher sentence they wanted under Article 58.
But in the end he still spent ten years away. He had been arrested in 1937, and then the war began. During the war, prisoners were not necessarily released even when their original sentences had expired.
So another five years were added. For nothing.
The only difference was that this second period was exile in a settlement rather than imprisonment in a camp.
That is how he escaped execution, although his health was completely destroyed.
My grandfather had been an exceptionally strong man. He could swim across the Dnieper and back — twice, on a bet. But what happened to him ruined his health. He died relatively young, after his fourth heart attack.
What happened to the families of so-called “enemies of the people”? What happened to my mother’s family — to my grandfather’s family?
He had had a large apartment in Kharkiv because of his senior position. As soon as he was arrested, accused, and sent to the camps, the apartment was taken away. The entire family was moved into a communal apartment because they were now considered the family of an “enemy of the people.”
Returning to the Soviet period, of course there was 1956 and the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, when the cult of personality was denounced. What had happened was acknowledged, and Stalin was blamed for all of it. I certainly agree that Stalin bore responsibility — but he was not the only one who should have been blamed.
After that, in 1956, a letter arrived — from the Kyiv Military District, as far as I remember — stating that my grandfather had been fully rehabilitated because no evidence of a crime had been found.
Of course, I had never doubted him. I knew my grandfather. He later became an honorary citizen of the city; his photograph hung on the board of honor.
What I could never understand was his blind faith in the ideals of communism, which remained with him until the end of his life.
That is the story of how repression directly affected my family.
And that is essentially how the whole family ended up in Kryvyi Rih instead of Kharkiv. When his term ended — I cannot remember exactly what year it was, perhaps 1953 or 1954... No, it must have been later, perhaps 1956 — he was not allowed to return to Kharkiv, his home city.
He was given a choice of several cities. He chose Kryvyi Rih, and that is how the whole family ended up there.
Later, when his full rehabilitation came in 1956, he was free to go wherever he wanted. But by then he had already settled in Kryvyi Rih and had a job there.
In Kryvyi Rih, he worked at an institute called Kryvbasproekt. He had graduated from an institute in Dnipropetrovsk and was an engineer-economist. He worked as an engineer-economist throughout his life.
Later, he worked for a civil construction trust. And the most interesting thing is that after I graduated from university, I went to work for the very same trust. For almost four years, I worked alongside my grandfather. He was already retired, but he did not want to stay at home, so he continued working.
That was a different generation. It is difficult to understand today. I did not understand it myself.
When Brezhnev came to power and Stalin gradually began to be elevated again — there was a period when this could be seen in films and elsewhere, when little portraits of Stalin even began appearing in cars — by then I already knew what kind of man Stalin had been.
How could I feel otherwise?
When I hear people say, “What you need is Stalin,” I feel furious, because these are people who did not suffer. They never experienced what it meant.
I did not suffer directly either. But my family did, and I saw what it led to.
Here was a completely healthy, exceptionally strong man who sincerely believed in the ideals of the Party, an honest man who worked hard — and this was what was done to him.
How can that be justified?
I believe there can be no justification for it.
It happened to my family, and I felt its consequences very deeply. Perhaps people simply do not know their own history. They should take another look at their own family trees.
But I will never understand people who speak that way.