A dozen of small peoples of the USSR were deported by the USSR authorities in 1944-1949. They deported them along with the children and the elderly. But there also was another category of children who were subjected to repression in that country. This is ЧСИР - Член семьи изменника Родины - ChSIR - a member of the family of traitors to the motherland. Such a label was given to children of parents convicted under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR - the article provided for punishment for
counter-revolutionary activities.
This category included a very wide range of charges.
In other republics of the USSR there were similar articles - for example, in the Ukrainian SSR it was 54 article of the Criminal Code.
From 1921 to 1953, 3,777,380 people were convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes in the USSR, including 642,980 people sentenced to be shot. In fact, there were more shot people, since periodic executions of people sentenced to deprivation of liberty were held from time to time in some Gulag camps.
Members of the convict's family under article 58 often received the label of the ChSIR. With this label the wives of the prisoners were sent to a concentration camp. And what about their children?
According to data for April 1941, in the prisons of the NKVD there were 2,500 women with young children, in camps and colonies there were 9,400 children up to four years old. In the same camps, colonies and prisons there were 8,500 pregnant women, about 3,000 of them in the ninth month of pregnancy.
In the
manger (ясли - jasly for children approx. of 0-3 years the young) the children were there while mothers were working. For feeding the mothers were taken under escort, most of the time the babies were supervised by nannies - women convicted of domestic crimes. They usually had their own children. The visits of nursing mothers with children were short - from 15 minutes to half an hour every four hours.
The death rate of children in the Gulag was high. According to archival data collected by the Norilsk society "Memorial", in 1951 534 children were in the baby's homes in Noriltal territory, 59 of them died. In 1952, 328 children were to be born, and the total number of babies would be 803. However, in the documents of 1952 the number of 650 is indicated - that is, 147 children died.
In 1934, the period of stay of the child with the mother was 4 years, later - 2 years. In 1936-1937 the stay of children in the camps was recognized as a factor that reduced the discipline and productivity of prisoners' labor, and this term was reduced to 12 months by the secret instruction of the NKVD of the USSR.
After this age the child was sent to a closed orphanage. On the direction of the child in the orphanage, a note was made in the personal file of the mother, but the address of the destination was not indicated there. In a report to the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs of the USSR Lavrenti Beria, the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR Vyacheslav Molotov on March 21, 1939 reported that the convicts confiscated from their convicted mothers were given new names.
G. Rykova studied at school, when her father's was arrested (article 58). She recalls that soon after arrest of the father she was summoned to the Children's Department of the NKVD with their sister, where they brought to Danilovsky children's detention center (детприемник
for juvenile offenders. In the receiver we were photographed in full-face and in profile, attaching some numbers to the chest, and fingerprints were taken off. We did not return home again.
And that's what Lyudmila Petrova recalls from the city of Narva.
"The day after my father's arrest, I went to school. Before the whole class the teacher announced: "Children, be careful with Lucy Petrova, her father is the enemy of the people." I took the bag, left the school, came home and told my mother that I would not go to school anymore. "- After the mother was also arrested, the 12-year-old ...., along with her 8-year-old brother was in the children's receiver. There they were shaved, stripped of fingerprints and separated, individually sent to
children's homes - a sort of NKVD orphanages.
What did these closed orphanages look like?
"There are 12 square meters in the room. There are 30 boys; for 38 children 7 beds, on which the children-recidivists sleep. Two eighteen-year-old inmates ..... the
technician woman, robbed the store, drank with the manager, the guard bought up stolen goods. "
"The children are sitting on dirty beds, playing cards that are cut from the portraits of the leaders, fighting, smoking, breaking the bars on the windows and chipping the walls to escape." "There are no dishes, they are eaten from scoops. For 140 people - one cup, spoons are missing, one has to eat by turns and hands. Illumination is not present, there is one lamp on all children's home, but also it without kerosene ". These are quotes from the reports of the management of the Ural
children's homes - orphanages - written in the early 1930s.
As of August 4, 1938, 17,355 children were confiscated from repressed parents and another 5,000 were planned to be withdrawn.
Most of the stories and figures - from the article in Russian:
https://zona.media/article/2014/26/09/gulag-dlya-samykh-malenkikh
Photo in the museum of the correctional colony of special regime No. 1 in the village of Sosnovka in Mordovia. Caption: Thanks to Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood
In 1935, under the label "top secret" was issued "Clarification of prosecutors and chairmen of the courts," which stipulated that all measures of criminal punishment including shooting could be applied to children from the age of 12.
