Dancing Under the Red Star Read Online Free Page A

entire country with widespread arrests and executions. During the ensuing Great Terror, millions of innocent Soviet citizens were sent off to labor camps or executed in prison.
    In Russia, this time from 1937 until mid-1938 was called Yezhovshchina, or the Yezhov Affair, the most severe stage of Nikolai Yezhov’s great purges, when more than ten million lives were lost in the jails and labor camps that sprang up like wild mushrooms all over the country. Situated primarily in the Far North—in Siberia or central Asia, where the climates were most severe—these camps were filled with multitudes of free laborers, peasants, and poor people, all unable to defend themselves. To the Soviet regime, human beings were only the means of production—numbers, items, things to count—expendable.
    Countless fathers and mothers of my friends were suddenly and savagely arrested under trumped-up charges, taken from their homes in front of their parents and children—even during their evening meals—and never heard of or heard from again. And this country-wide brutality didn’t seem to distinguish nationality or ethnic origin; it had no bias, no favorites. No one was exempt. I don’t even think the Stalinist agenda was particularly anti-Semitic at its root; the Jews were certainly victims, openly targeted perhaps more than the rest of the population. But the fear was universal. Families in untold numbers, of all ethnicities, were irreparably devastated at the snap of a finger, the signing of another false arrest warrant.
    Betrayal in its most primitive form was a common way of life during this period in 1930s Russia, even among family members. Mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters routinely and sometimes falsely informed on one another to the police. I suppose it was a last-ditch effort to survive. The pervasive fear of arrest undermined everything. One day you saw your friends, you spoke with them, and the next day someone asked you where they were. It was as if they had suddenly vanished from the planet. “What happened to so-and-so?” was an all-too-regular occurrence. Your neighbor was here one day, gone the next, and no one knew anything about it.
    Personal suffering at the very core of the human spirit swept the community like wildfire, and not many were able to escape. The whole world of human experience was driven by pain and fueled by fear. I thought, If there’s really a devil… I mean if he really exists, then surely this has got to be it; he must live here in Russia!
    By the time the terror subsided in 1939, Stalin had managed to bring both the party and the public into complete submission to his rule. Soviet society was so atomized and the people so fearful of reprisals that mass arrests were no longer necessary, but that had not happened yet—not today, not on June 29, 1938, not in time to save my father.
    In the summer of 1938, this was my life: my father ripped away from me, my mother’s husband gone, a good man taken from his family. Just like that, it was all over. Dreams shattered and hopes forsaken in one strangely beautiful but wicked Gorky summer day. Now Mama and I were left in this country that was not our own…with no way out. We never wanted to come here in the first place, and now our future was nothing but a matter of Mama’s blind faith.
    Thus began the darkest time in our lives. We suddenly had to find a way to go on without Papa, who until this black day had provided us with a better-than-average way of life, at least by Gorky’s simple standards. We had no support or financial means, no savings and no protection. Though I felt a full-blown anger taking control of my heart, I was also hit by a physical sense of hopelessness and despair. They walked in uninvited, as if they were people or something I could actually touch. And right behind them came a powerful new fear.
    My sleep that night was anything but peaceful; it came in agonizing increments when my mind was too tired to think. I slept only