Abstract
This interview reveals much about life for a child of “ enemies of the people.” Both of Boris Faifman’s parents, Communist believers who chose to emigrate to the USSR, were arrested precisely because of their foreign origins. As was true for many children of “enemies,” as a small child Faifman became an orphan, and was treated as an enemy himself. Though he had few memories of his parents, he bore the consequences of their groundless arrests for his entire life. Bitter about the injustices he suffered, he bemoans the fact that he has several different death certificates for each of his parents, but not a single grave to visit.
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Notes
This is an expansion of the 1991 law “On Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression” (see Introduction). S. S. Vilenskii, A. I. Kokurin, G. V. Atmashkina, and I. IU. Novichenko, eds. and comps., Deti GULAGa 1918–1956. Dokumenty (Moscow: International Democracy Fund and Hoover Institution Press, 2002), 555–59.
Document reproduced in Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 169. According to one scholar, some 50,000 new orphans entered state institutions in 1937, the first year of the Great Terror.
Corinna Kuhr, “Children of ‘Enemies of the People’ as Victims of the Great Purges,” Cahiers du Monde Russe vol. 39, no. 1 (1998): 217.
According to NKVD figures, 681,692 persons were executed in 1937–1938; the figure is not broken down by gender. See Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag, 165, 288–91. Women made up 6.1 percent and 8.1 percent of the labor camp population in 1937 and 1940, respectively. By 1944, they accounted for 40 percent of the people prosecuted by the courts. J. Arch Getty, Gabor Rittersporn, and Viktor Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review vol. 98, no. 4 (1993): 1025.
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© 2011 Jehanne M Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck
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Gheith, J.M., Jolluck, K.R. (2011). Three Death Certificates but No Grave. In: Gulag Voices. PALGRAVE Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116283_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116283_8
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