CHILDHOOD

Khabarovsk, Tomsk and Kemerovo regions

We went to the river in the summer when it was warm. In the winter there were some sledges. There was no special entertainment for children. In the summer, children made so-called scooters, once called a kickboard. The elders made it for children: a board, and another board, wheels — then the bearings, large and metal, there was no problem with this. And since there was a lot of swamp areas, they made the wooden sidewalks raised above the swampy soil. Then the children rode on those scooters on those wooden sidewalks because it was impossible to ride in the swamp. It was such fun, and it was very popular.

Although the Soviet directives on mass deportations referred only to adult family members, in practice children, including infants, were also affected. In some echelons, they accounted for almost half of the deportees. As of July 15, 1949, there were 24,400 children under the age of 16 at the special settlement, and at the beginning of 1953 — there were 40,247 of them. They were had grow up in extremely difficult conditions. All children were on the so-called family register, and after reaching the age of 16, each had a separate registration file. In 1952, an action was held to send to families in special settlements those children who stayed in Ukraine, for various reasons, and who reached adulthood. Children under the age of 16 were the first to be deregistered, albeit more than a year after Stalin’s death. However, even after that they were discriminated against.

The group photo, taken against the background of the barracks, gives a lot of information about the life of the people who were deported. We see curtains on the window and a few pots (or rather tin cans) with plants on the windowsill. The leaves of one of the plants resemble a begonia. The quality of the photo allows you to see that some women wore earrings. The clothes of the people in the group look very different: we see girls in beautiful dresses and a boy in very torn clothes. One of the women is holding an embroidered piece (might be the sleeves of the future embroidered shirt?). Another woman is wearing braided lace, a collar, or a napkin. The boys are holding a lotto, and one of them is holding a knife which he may have just used to carve something. We can see that the composition of the photo was carefully well-thought and all participants were preparing for the photo shoot.

Other photographs in this section are no different from other images of children that could be taken anywhere and do not reveal the difficult conditions in which the photographed children were. This is another example of the limited ability of a photographic medium to be a representative of historical events.In one of the photos, by the way, we can see a man in a woman’s jacket again.