The Littlest Enemies: Children in the Shadow of the Gulag

Deborah Hoffman. The Littlest Enemies: Children in the Shadow of the Gulag. Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2009. ix, 189 pp. Bibliography. $22.95, paper.

Deborah Hoffman begins her new book with the following sentence: "All translations involve choices, and this volume is no exception." It is not the translator's search for the right word or the appropriate sentence structure that is meant here. Hoffman made a drastic choice when she transformed the original Russian six- hundred page Deti GULAGa : 19181956 [Children of the Gulag] into a less-than-two-hundred-page collection. While Deti GULAGa contained many official documents concerning children, Hoffman made the decision to include only the first-person narratives of or about children. Treating "the narratives as personal experiences rather than academic texts," the editor hoped that it would "make them more likely to live on in the reader's memory and serve as a reference point, however slight, for future social, economic, or legislative policy discussions" (p. viii). The result is anon-academic edition: the "Brief Glossary" contains nine terms; there are no supporting references; and the bibliography is three pages in length.

All these figures aside, what do the first-person narratives of The Littlest Enemies offer? First of all, one has to point out the high quality of translation: children's words are rendered accurately and carefully. Mistakes in original Russian letters are conveyed inventively in their English versions, giving each little enemy his or her own voice. The material is divided into five unequal sections; each of them begins with abrief introductory comment. The first two sections, "Revolution and Civil War" and "The 1920s: Between Two Worlds" are quite short. The first contains four stories in total: two of them written by �migr� Russian schoolgirls and another two composed by besprizorniki (waifs, street children). The second section consists entirely of letters written by children to Krupskaya, Kalinin and other Soviet dignitaries. Contrary to the book's title, most of the authors of these petitions are not enemies of the Soviet state. They write to complain about utter poverty, about the lack of books, or about a butting cow.

An enormous concentration of suffering and desperation pervades sections 3 and 4, "Collectivization" and "From Famine to Terror". Many materials in these sections were collected by two Russian societies, "Memorial" and "Vozvrashchenie" [Return] in the late 1980s and 1990s. These personal accounts vary in size. Some are just a few lines long, describing the loss of a large family and wondering at the end "how was it possible to endure it all" (p. 126); others only a few pages long, but all painstaking in their rueful similarities - the parents' arrest, the children's anguish, and the squalid conditions of orphanages. The last section, "War and Its Aftermath" contains similar materials as well as stories of children seized in German and Soviet population resettlements.

What do these simple children's accounts add to the familiar picture of the suffering under Stalin's rule? Surprisingly, the most memorable narratives are those that defy the uncomplicated binary picture of the mighty totalitarian state punishing vulnerable helpless children. Maria Solomonik's family escaped from the places of exile and arrest several times (pp. 52-72); twelve-year-old Elda Fridman travelled alone for three months in order to reach her mother's place of exile (pp. 154-155); Mark Malyavko, the director of the Kardymovo children's home, managed to instill dignity and pride in his wards. In one of the most memorable of such stories, Aldona Volynskaya begins with the familiar scene of the parents' arrest, but her first children's home was disbanded because the older children shamed the younger ones for "playing and not thinking about how many people had been arrested" (p. 164). She was sent to another orphanage, where children were constantly hungry, and the director was stealing even their meagre personal possessions. For a short time, during the German occupation, children forgot their hunger: they were working, and nobody was robbing them. Volynskaya' s story does not have a happy ending, but at least she was not a typical passive victim: she and her friends were taken to Germany; three of them escaped, were captured, and ended up in a concentration camp. Volynskaya was liberated by Soviet troops and then rearrested as the daughter of enemies of the people. She managed to escape prison and get an education, constantly concealing her past from the authorities. She ended her story with the following: "Now I'm on first-category disability and completely alone (I was sterilized in the concentration camp). The desire to help others helps me to live" (p. 168).

Deborah Hoffman's book commands enormous human interest. It will be a captivating read for the general public, and its materials will be beneficial for undergraduate courses. Still, students of Russian history should be advised to read the original Russian edition, Deti GULAGa, which creates an intriguing juxtaposition between the constant droning of the government documents about "the speediest improvements" and the reality of children's suffering, or they should consult another recently published English translation, Children of the Gulag co-edited by Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky.

[Author Affiliation]

Elena Krevsky, University of Alberta