Early in the summer of 1941 my great-aunt Tamara, a young doctor recently graduated from Kharkov Medical Institute, was sent to work in the Ukrainian village of Dubovyazovka, not far from Kiev. She went with a child in tow. Tamara’s husband (the first of many) had died in the Finnish War of 1939–1940, and so it was just the two of them now – the self-assured, outgoing, remarkably well-dressed young ‘specialist’, and her two-year-old daughter, Vera. My grandmother, Faina, joined her sister in the country soon after. Faina was pregnant with the child who would turn out to be my mother, and tailed by her own toddler, three-year old Lina (Lenina). Summer at Dubovyzovka meant fresh air, sun, coveted cow’s milk, and fruit and veg on tap – and as everyone knew, these things, so wanting in the city, made for much healthier kids.
 
Faina was older than Tamara by four years, and not like her at all. My grandmother was much less inclined to hold court than her sister; she dressed modestly and was skilled at deflecting the spotlight. She was attentive and kind, and took care of things when no one was looking. There was not one showy bone in her body. Both Faina’s daughters would inherit her attentiveness to others, and her distaste for publicising their own good deeds, even though they would belong to a much more emancipated generation of young women. (The drama queens only started appearing in my family when my sister and I came along.)
 
While Faina and Tamara, with two and a half kids between them, were in Dubovyazovka, my grandfather Iosif, who was senior assistant to Kiev’s Public Prosecutor, remained at work. Between my grandmother and grandfather existed an unspoken but unambiguous marital contract. Just as there were criminals and prosecutors, whose worlds only overlapped when the former were caught and prosecuted by the latter, so the clearly defined domains of men’s and women’s work were only meant to intersect in extraordinary circumstances. Ninety-nine percent of the time child-rearing fell to women’s jurisdiction, together with cooking, cleaning and laundry (all the good stuff!). Men’s work was as you would expect, to ensure the wellbeing and security of the family. The irony was that, just like most of the young women around her, my grandmother did all the women’s work as well as ‘work’ work – she was an economist by training – which meant that most of the time she was preoccupied and exhausted.
 
It was in the sun-filled Dubovyazovka that Tamara and Faina learned about the start of the war, from the round mouth of a radio perched in the middle of the square near the office of the obligatory village council:
 
Today at 4 a.m., … without a declaration of war, German troops attacked our country, attacked our borders at many points and their aeroplanes bombed our cities, Zhitomir, Kiev, Sevastopol, Kaunas and some others, killing and wounding over two hundred persons. … This unprecedented attack upon our country is treachery unparalleled in the history of civilised nations.
 
The announcement, made at noon on 22 June by the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, came as a total shock, not only to the two women but to the entire community. Today it may be hard to understand why, especially if you are looking at history from the other side. By that stage the war had been raging in Europe for close to two years. But the Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill would famously draw attention to in 1946 had in fact already descended, blocking or distorting most of the news from the Western front. All most Soviet citizens knew was that in August 1939 Molotov had signed the Non-Agression Pact with Germany, and the fact of this pact, coupled with people’s belief in the all-seeing and all-knowing Stalin, meant that most of them were utterly unprepared for Molotov’s announcement of Germany’s treacherous attack on our ‘sleeping nation’.
 
As to the secret protocol within the non-agression pact which divided the spheres of influence in Europe between the two signatories, its existence would only be officially admitted by the Soviet Union in December 1989 (just as we were leaving). The West learned about it during the Nuremberg Trials, but my grandmother and others of her generation died without the slightest idea of all the political machinations which helped produce the defining experience of their lives. No one but a handful people at the very top knew about the secret agreement, which gave the Soviet Union control over parts of Poland as well as Romania, Finland and the Baltic States, while allowing Germany to have a free hand in the rest of Europe. Certainly, the war in which the Soviet Union invaded neighbouring Finland (and in which Tamara’s husband died) was completely dissociated from the larger European conflict. It was widely believed – in the public mind, anyway – to be a conflict between two parties, provoked by Finnish reactionaries in turn backed by British and French imperialists, and in no way a reflection of the larger forces at play. The ordinary Soviet population did not have a clue what was going on, not in 1941, and not for decades to come.
 
And so it was on that June afternoon in the middle of Dubovyazovka square, surrounded by others in a similar state of shock (adults mainly, many kids were said to be initially excited by the news of the war) that Tamara and Faina had to take in all this indigestible news in one massive gulp. Their country was at war. Their home town was bombed. All connection with it was lost. There was no way back to Kiev, and that meant they would have to join the massive exodus of war refugees across the European part of the Soviet Union, all moving east to parts of Russia around the river Ural (the traditional border between Europe and Asia), or to the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. It also meant that my grandmother and grandfather would be separated for years.
 
←