From Panait Istrati’s excellent book The Confession Of A Loser, also published as Russia Unveiled: 1927 – 1930.
★
One evening, I had a long conversation with an intelligent Bessarabian peasant woman (Bessarabian or Greek, I don’t want to say, because I could have them sent to Siberia). This woman gave me the longest version of how a Soviet mother can dispose of her children, who remain with her all her life:
“We are not communists – she tells me – because, to be honest, we don’t know what that means. In our village, the communists are intriguers. Politics is everything. Woe and sorrow to those who don’t think like them.
From the beginning I have been with the Bolsheviks. My husband fought in the civil war, was part of the first Soviet, and died of wounds. For my part, I am only a mother who wants to raise her children – the boy and the girl over there – as honestly as possible. No one here is an opponent of the regime or an adherent. No one can hold a grudge against us. And yet, we are deprived of any possibility of earning a living. Why? Because I tell my children that they should not join the Communist Youth and they are of the same opinion. Because these Komsomols [members of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, a political youth organization in the Soviet Union] go by singing and spitting in the windows of their parental homes, insulting the elderly and conspiring among themselves, more than grown-ups.
Is this what being a communist means?”
