Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews Page B

witches of ancient Russia illustrated by Ivan Bilibin - these were the places to which she would escape in her childhood imagination. The harsh, antiseptic, loveless world around her became more tolerable in the knowledge that somewhere, far away, was a better place to which she would eventually travel. Even when she grew into a woman and her crippled legs had finally healed, this powerful vision of another, magical life - and the sense that that life could be won by endurance and pure force of will was never to leave her.
     
    At the orphanage Lenina had a dream. She was wearing her white blouse and red Young Pioneer tie. Some children called out to her, 'Your father! They're bringing out your father!' She ran outside and saw her father from behind, being led by three men with rifles. They took him to the steep bank of the great Dniepr River, at the edge of the orphanage's grounds. He stood on the edge for a long time, as Lenina looked on, frozen in the paralysis of the dream. Then the three men fired their rifles into her father, silently. He fell, bouncing down the bank. It was the only time Lenina ever dreamt of her father.
    By the end of 1938 Lyudmila had recovered sufficiently to go to kindergarten, but was in and out of hospital for a series of crude operations to cut away more and more tissue. The bones of her right leg had been rotted by the tuberculosis and she walked with a heavy limp. Nevertheless she was a cheerful and intelligent child, devoted to her sister. The orphanage was the only world she could remember, and she attained a kind of happiness there.
    It was harder for Lenina, for her former life began to haunt her. She had been told by her teachers that her parents were 'enemies of the people', and were being punished. She should try to forget them. Uncle Stalin, whose portrait hung in the classroom, was looking after them now. Lenina chanted along with the other children, 'Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.' But she still never doubted that she would see her beloved father again. When the teachers talked about the 'bright future', Lenina pictured being reunited with her father.
    The steppes of the eastern Ukraine were flat and featureless, a land of giant skies as big as the whole world. In summer, Lenina would often go down to the Dniepr with the other children to bathe in the wide, slow-moving river, sliding on its muddy banks as they scrambled into the water. The stern rhythms of orphanage life left Lenina little room for reflection. And among hundreds of parentless children like themselves, the Bibikov sisters were more fortunate than most. They at least had each other.
     
    But the peace the sisters found at Verkhne-Dneprovsk was soon shattered in its turn.
    In the summer of 1941, Lenina was sixteen and Lyudmila seven. Lyudmila was looking forward to starting her first year of school, and Lenina was a senior member of the Young Pioneers, proud to wear the smart, starched uniform. Most mornings there was a parade, the various school classes dragooned into neat rows, with two older children acting as honour guards as the Soviet flag was run up the flagpole to a scratchy recording of the Soviet national anthem. Lenina and the older children sometimes sat reverently in front of a large Bakelite radio, listening to improving speeches and homilies on the children's programme of Soviet State Radio. Later, in private, the adults listened to the evening news of the war that Germany had unleashed on France and Britain. But the conflict seemed a distant thing, the death throes of the decadent capitalist world as it turned in upon itself. The Soviet Union and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact two years before. The war concerned other people, far from the Dniepr plains.
     
    It was a scorching summer. The steppe wind blew in clouds of dust from the dry fields, covering the orphanage buildings and the trees in the playground with a fine brown pall. For the children, life continued as normal