According to the law – there was this law where children when they turned three, were taken away and brought to an orphanage. To a special orphanage in Arkhangelsk. By the way, that’s where they sent Irochka, the daughter of Galina Stepanovna Wolf. She was later able to take her away from there herself.

So they, all of these children, they weren’t even three yet – they were still really little. They were accompanied, along with escorts, by Voitolovskaya. We called each other by phone later but she, unfortunately, passed away a long time ago. She wrote a book about it, where these children are mentioned. She brought them to Arkhangelsk. They were brought by steamship on the sea. Along the Pechora River, then by sea…

In Arkhangelsk they were met by staff from the orphanage and intelligence services. The children, of course, didn’t want to get off, she writes, it was “a new situation”, the children grabbed them by their skirts, they couldn’t pull them away from themselves. There were 11 children in all.

For a long time, no one knew what happened to them, since there was no mail from there. They  wrote letters, made inquiries, but no one knew anything. Later a letter came saying that all 11 of the children had died. That there was some sort of epidemic. What kind of epidemic and why - no one knows. And that's how it remained - a secret and a riddle.

There was a practice of changing children's names, so that they wouldn't know anything about their parents. And that's that. I later spoke with Voitalkovsky by phone but didn't manage to learn anything, there wasn't a trace. And so we still don't know whether it was true or not. 

The Soviet government looked after neglected children and orphans – and there were many of them since the beginning, after the Civil War – giving them shelter, food, a profession and a start in the world. The children knew only that the authorities were taking care of them. But they never guessed that they were left orphans because of that very same caring government, since if there hadn’t been the revolution, the parents of these little thieves and vagrants would not have died.

Later, when mass arrests began, children whose parents were targeted by the repression were taken away to an orphanage if no close relatives were willing to take them in. More often than not, no relatives were found – it was dangerous, and there were additional expenses. These special orphanages were almost like prisons, with bad food and bad tutors and supervisors. Of course, under such conditions, the children suffered, they did not receive any love or care. Many who weren’t able to handle the constant pressure began to believe that their parents were enemies and disavowed their unfortunate mothers and fathers, genuinely feeling a sense of guilt for their “crimes.”

For many years, they tried to earn the government’s forgiveness. Very young children were given new first and last names and were raised along with other “clean” Soviet children. This was the appearance of Soviet humanism. The parents, if they were able to stay alive and be released, were then unable to find their child…

The “Children of the Gulag”, (GULAG = Russian abbreviation for the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, Labor Settlements and Places of Detention) include several generations of not only Russians, but also Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Latvians, Tatars, Germans, Armenians, Jews, Poles and other nationalities, who in one way or another influenced the fate of Russia. These “sons of enemies of the people” sometimes personally experienced the many burdens of exile and imprisonment during the Soviet period of Russia's history.

The difficult conditions of being imprisoned alongside ordinary criminals, hard labor, hunger and separation from loved ones were just some of the hardships they lived through, but overcoming those difficulties made people all the stronger in their love for what's dear to them and their faith in God. And therein lies one of the biggest paradoxes of that era: people, who spent considerable parts of their lives imprisoned or exiled, who lost their families and friends, nonetheless preserved their humanity. Former political prisoners do not hate their jailers, and childhood spent in places like Kolyma, where winter temperatures can fall as low as -60 degrees Celsius, for all were happy.