<i>Silence Was Salvation: Child Survivors of Stalin’s Terror and World War II in the Soviet Union</i>. By Cathy A. Frierson. Annals of Communism Series. Edited by William Frucht.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+268. $65.00.<i>Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War</i>. By Julie K. deGraffenried. Modern War Studies. Edited by Theodore A. Wilson.Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014. Pp. xvi+248. $34.95.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsSilence Was Salvation: Child Survivors of Stalin’s Terror and World War II in the Soviet Union. By Cathy A. Frierson. Annals of Communism Series. Edited by William Frucht.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+268. $65.00. Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War. By Julie K. deGraffenried. Modern War Studies. Edited by Theodore A. Wilson.Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014. Pp. xvi+248. $34.95.Rebecca ManleyRebecca ManleyQueen’s University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreInna Shikheeva-Gaister was twelve years old when her parents were arrested as enemies of the people, and sixteen when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In an interview with historian Cathy Frierson conducted in 2005, she remarked that “in my life the two most important points were the repressions and the war” (66). The works reviewed here attempt to recover what these “watershed moments” meant for Soviet society’s youngest members, its children. With the exception of Inna, the eldest of the child subjects included, the two volumes focus on the same broad cohort, Soviet citizens born between 1927 and the end of World War II. As children, they experienced incredible hardship and loss. The books under review make important contributions to a small but growing body of literature on the nature and meanings of their childhoods.Sacrificing Childhood, by Julie K. deGraffenried, sets out “to write children and childhood into the war’s narrative” (1). It is at once a social history of children’s experiences of the war and a cultural and political history of the way the state’s expectations of children changed in the wake of the German invasion. Children’s lives were indelibly marked by the war, as deGraffenried demonstrates in the book’s first chapter. Drawing on a wide range of mostly published sources, including government reports, eyewitness accounts, letters, and memoirs, she surveys children’s lives under enemy occupation, on the front lines, and in the rear. DeGraffenried paints a harrowing picture of the way the war ravaged children’s bodies, minds, and families. In addition, she advances an argument that reverberates throughout the book, namely, that the Soviet state “orphaned” Soviet children, both literally and figuratively, abandoning them in their moment of need and bringing an end to their “childhood innocence” (47).The state occupies a central place in this work, shaping children’s lives not only through neglect, but also through new expectations. Chapter 2 addresses the state’s attempts to mobilize children during the war. While the participation of children on the front lines has been documented by Olga Kuchernko in Little Soldiers, deGraffenried covers important new ground in her discussion of the mobilization of children for labor in agriculture and factories, and in activities such as grave tending. She demonstrates that the Soviet state’s mobilization of the citizenry and expectation of sacrifice extended to society’s youngest members. These expectations were particularly pronounced in Soviet wartime children’s culture, as DeGraffenried shows in subsequent chapters. The rituals and activities of young pioneers, the focal point of deGraffenried’s archival research, were recast to emphasize heroic contributions to the war. Images of children fulfilling active roles proliferated in children’s cultural media, such as magazines and film. At the same time, state propaganda deployed images of children menaced by the enemy to generate outrage and mobilize support among the country’s adult population. While children might figure as victims in need of protection in state propaganda, lamentably few protections were in fact put in place to ensure that this sector of the population was spared the suffering of war.DeGraffenried’s argument is that the “happy childhood” paradigm described by Catriona Kelly in her landmark study of Soviet childhood, Children’s World, was interrupted by the war and replaced by what deGraffenried refers to as the “sacrificing childhood” paradigm. As a study in cultural forms, the argument is convincing. But deGraffenried seems to suggest that war brought an end not only to a narrative of childhood innocence, but to a corresponding reality. Her story of innocence shattered by the war papers over the extensive hunger, hardships, and repression that characterized many children’s lives in the decade preceding the war. It is telling that the terms “gulag” and “deportation” do not appear in the book’s index. Their absence underscores both the book’s problematic assertion of prewar childhood innocence and its neglect of children’s experiences of wartime repression. DeGraffenried’s presentation of wartime casualties among children, moreover, is deeply misleading. She writes that “fourteen million Soviet children lost their lives in the Great Patriotic War” (157). In fact, this number reflects not only the children who lost their lives as a result of the war (which the source she cites puts at 2.8 million), but also those who were not born: it is based on the decline in the number of children by war’s end, and is thus a product not only of deaths, but also (and more importantly) of a dramatic decline in the birthrate. The mistake is particularly regrettable given its prominence as the first sentence of the book’s epilogue (and the first statement on the book’s jacket, where the publishers, using this number, erroneously present children as having constituted the majority of victims of the war in the Soviet Union, fourteen of twenty-four million). This mistake notwithstanding, this is a solidly researched if rather slender monograph on an important topic. Ultimately, Sacrificing Childhood has most to say about the state’s construction of childhood. Less attention is devoted to how the meaning of childhood changed within the family, and children’s own voices are muted, although not entirely absent.These voices are the centerpiece of the other work under review here, Silence was Salvation, by Cathy Frierson. A collection of interviews with men and women whose parents were repressed during the Stalinist terror, this book offers poignant testimony to the tragedies experienced by a generation whose childhoods were marked by terror and war. Frierson conducted the interviews in Russia between 2005 and 2007, while working with Semyon Vilensky on Children of the Gulag, which featured excerpts of the interviews. Here, Frierson presents ten translated interview transcripts in their (near) entirety, making them available for students and specialists to interpret themselves.The introductory essay provides a brief but essential discussion of the context of the repressions and a lengthier, thoughtful discussion of the problem of memory and oral history. Each interview is preceded by a few words about the context in which it took place, alerting readers to the subject’s state of mind, composure, and concerns at the time of the interview. Helpful maps document the incredible journeys made by the interviewees and their families as a result of exile, deportation, arrest, and wartime evacuation. Key terms, people, and events mentioned in the interviews are explained in short, clear footnotes, ensuring that the interviews are easy to follow and making the volume well suited to use in the classroom.Frierson’s questions are intended to illuminate both how the arrest of parents was experienced and remembered by children, and how the stigma and material consequences continued to reverberate in their lives. Taken together, the transcripts permit us to view the Stalinist terror from a new vantage point, from the perspective not of its adult victims, but of the children who were often left behind. A few of the subjects’ stories have been told before, albeit mostly in Russian (Frierson cites the Russian memoirs, but makes no mention of the translated works, which include parts of Muravsky’s correspondence with his sister, published in Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile, and excerpts of Shikheeva-Gaister’s memoir, published in In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War). Some of the stories featured here, moreover, are familiar. The first three interviewees in this volume issued from an intelligentsia milieu that is overrepresented in the extant survivor literature. To be sure, their situations were not identical: one family was not affiliated with the party, another was composed of devoted communists, and the third were members of the left opposition. But their cultural values were in many ways similar. They grew up surrounded by books, and despite their parents’ arrests, they were, in the words of Zakgeim, “sincere member[s] of the Komsomol” (30). All three interview subjects aspired, moreover, to study at one and the same place, Moscow State University’s prestigious department of physics (while the eldest, Shikheeva-Gaister, was admitted, her younger sister was refused admittance as a Jew after the war, Zakgeim was denied on similar grounds, and Vorobyov was discouraged from even applying as the son of enemies of the people).If the first few subjects belong to a familiar milieu, subsequent interviews introduce us to voices that appear all too rarely in the existing literature. Among them are a survivor of the Polish national deportations who discovered the truth about her origins only in 2002, a member of the provincial nobility, and the daughter of workers with roots in the countryside arrested on charges of wartime treachery. These interviews, conducted in provincial cities, are particularly valuable, and offer an arresting portrait of childhood poverty and hardship. Perhaps the most moving account, however, is the interview with Maya Rudolfovna Levitina, not least because of her raw emotion in revisiting her past, deftly conveyed by Frierson’s transcription. The daughter of non-Russian Bolsheviks, Levitina lost her father to arrest; her mother, sent into exile with her two young children, soon died from disease; and although Levitina was subsequently cared for by her mother’s best friend, neither could prevent Levitina’s younger sister from dying of diphtheria during the war. Levitina’s heart-breaking story underscores the childhood traumas that resulted from both Stalinist repression and the war. Her account and that of the other interviewees constitute a rich source for the historian interested in childhood under Stalin not as it was constructed by the state, but as it was negotiated, experienced, and remembered by those who lived through it. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 89, Number 1March 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690186 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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