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Millions were persecuted during the time Stalin ruled the Soviet Union
March 3, 2023
Updated 5 hours ago
When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, the entire Soviet Union seemed to have fallen into mourning. But behind this picture of sadness were mixed feelings about the leader under whom millions died of starvation or persecution. And millions more fell into poverty.
There was an episode where Stalin’s authority was challenged by three teenagers.
During the nearly three decades that he was in power, Stalin sought to project unchallenged authority by brutally cracking down on dissenting voices.
However, there were protests in the Soviet Union. They were not frequent or on a large scale, but they indicated that many did not agree with the totalitarian regime.
Credit, Corbis via Getty Images
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Joseph Stalin was not as uncontested in the Soviet Union as it seemed at the time.
One such confrontation took place in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city in the Urals, a mountainous region dividing European and Asian parts of Russia. There was a tractor factory in the town.
One day in the spring of 1946, three teenagers began putting up flyers downtown. Local residents queuing to buy groceries watched them wearily.
The boys had no glue, so they used bread soaked in water to stick sheets of paper torn from their exercise books to walls and poles.
“Hungry, rise up and fight!” read one of the leaflets, handscribbled by a student.
A woman in line read the flyer. “It was written by an intelligent person,” she commented.
Young people were Alexander (known as Shura) Polyakov, Mikhail (Misha) Ulman and Yevgeny (Genya) Gershovich. They were 13 then. Shura Polyakov was the leader of the group.
His family was from Kharkiv, Ukraine and he was brought to the Urals with his mother, grandmother, sister and aunt. His family of five shared a room. The city struggled to accommodate war refugees.
Shura’s father had been killed in the war. His mother now supported the family by working as a lawyer.
Credit, Polyakov Family Archives
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Alexander or Shura Polyakov, as an adult
Genya Gershovich also grew up without her father, but for a different reason. Born in Leningrad, in 1934 his father was arrested and falsely accused of belonging to an underground network plotting to overthrow the government.
He died without a trace.
To protect her two children, Genya’s mother moved to Chelyabinsk. Although her husband was considered an “enemy of the people”, she got a job as a high school teacher.
Credit, Gershovich Family Archives
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Yevgeny, also known as Genya, as an adult
Genya’s father had been executed before the war, but the family only found out about his death much later.
Like Genya, Mikhail (or Misha) Ulman was also from Leningrad. But her family stayed together. His parents moved to Chelyabinsk at the beginning of the war to work in the tractor factory, which at that time manufactured main battle tanks instead of agricultural equipment.
In Chelyabinsk, Misha’s family lived in a small room and had to share space with a stranger. The room was divided by a clothesline with a sheet hanging from it.
Credit, Ulman Family Archives
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Mikhail (Misha) Ulman, as an adult
The three boys went to the same school. Ulman and Gershovich even became tablemates in the classroom.
From the age of 13, the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin were part of the boys’ school curriculum. They learned from these books that accepting injustice was wrong.
They also carefully studied the text of the Internationale, a labor movement anthem written by a French revolutionary in the 1870s and sung by all fighting against social injustice.
The song served as the Soviet national anthem between 1922 and 1944. The boys couldn’t believe that the lyrics, which called on the masses to rise up against social inequality, weren’t banned in the Soviet Union.
The boys and their families faced severe economic hardship and lived on the brink of starvation on postwar food rations.
There was a popular joke in the Soviet Union at the time when the leaders of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union who met at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 towards the end of the war were debating what method should be used to defeat Hitler to execute.
According to the joke, Winston Churchill suggests hanging. Franklin Roosevelt proposes the electric chair. And Stalin says the most effective way would be to feed Hitler’s Soviet food rations. The other two agree that this would be the cruellest punishment.
But not everyone in the Soviet Union had to survive on meager rations. The three boys had a classmate whose father was a manager at the local factory.
The classmate’s lifestyle was completely different from theirs: he was taken to school by a driver, he was given much tastier food in his lunch box, and at his birthday party the boys could taste sparkling water and watch Charlie Chaplin films projected onto them Wall.
Of course, the director’s family did not live in a room shared with a stranger, but enjoyed spacious and comfortable accommodation. All this looked like something out of a fairy tale.
The living conditions of the workers at the Chelyabinsk factory were difficult even before the war many lived in basements and shelters. With the outbreak of war, Chelyabinsk faced an influx of refugees from Russia’s western regions, worsening living conditions for everyone.
In December 1943, factory management discovered that up to 300 workers were sleeping on the factory floor as they had nowhere else to go. Some said they had no winter clothes; others, no shoes. They couldn’t leave the factory.
Although people were willing to endure the hardships of war, patience ran out after the conflict ended. Though content with the defeat of Nazi Germany, many in Chelyabinsk were weary of the constant humiliation of living in misery.
Credit, Chelyabinsk Archive
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Shortly after the war, a park was opened near the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, but living conditions were still harsh.
The three boys listened as the adults complained about damp basements, leaking roofs, nettle soup, a fouryear lack of soap, and many other problems. Living in extreme poverty, they felt they had very little to lose.
They were increasingly irritated by the injustice they witnessed on a daily basis, contrary to Soviet propaganda.
Credit, Chelyabinsk Archive
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Chelyabinsk regional conference of the Communist Party in the late 1940s
One day in April 1946, the boys tore a page out of an exercise book and wrote: “Comrades, workers, look around! The government blames the war for your problems. But the war is over. Have your conditions improved? No! What did the government give you? Nothing! Your children are hungry, but you need to hear stories about a happy childhood. Comrades, look around and see what is really happening!”
At first, the guys only distributed and pasted their flyers at night, but after a few days they became bolder and stopped worrying about the consequences. They even got some of their classmates to help them.
The feared agents of the NKVD which later became the KGB and is now the FSB quickly learned of the situation and soon discovered that the antigovernment leaflets were being produced by schoolchildren.
Schools checked each student’s handwriting to identify the culprits. Children in Chelyabinsk were forced to write words like “comrade” and “happy childhood”.
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The building where the Chelyabinsk Security Services had their headquarters in the 1940s
Yevgeny Gerzhovich was the first to be arrested. Then it was Alexander Polyakov, and at the end of May 1946 Mikhail Ulman. Their families were dismayed and frightened.
The boys were relentlessly questioned by the security services, who tried to convict them of Nazi sympathy. Teenagers were outraged: How can convinced Marxists also be Nazis?
Gershovich and Polyakov were tried in August 1946 and found guilty of spreading antiSoviet propaganda. They were sentenced to three years in juvenile detention.
As they grew up, they remembered that horrible time of beatings and harassment by other young inmates who were being held for crimes.
Ulman was lucky being under 14 at the time of his arrest, he completely escaped punishment. His parents quickly returned to Leningrad to escape from the Chelyabinsk security services.
Gershovich and Polyakov also escaped with relative ease, being paroled in late 1946.
Perhaps the boys’ young age helped them avoid much harsher consequences.
But it’s also possible that the security services and judges were surprised by the seriousness of the young rebels who, despite living under one of the most totalitarian regimes in history, believed they could protest social injustice and force the government to improve workers’ rights . Life.
As adults, both Ulman and Polyakov emigrated to Israel, where he still resides with his wife. There the BBC was able to speak to him.
Credit, Ulman Family Archives
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Mikhail Ulman, older
As an adult, Ulman moved to Australia, where he died in 2021.
Credit, Gershovich Family Archives
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Yevgeny Gershovich
Yevgeny Gerzhovich was arrested again in the late 1940s, shortly after being expelled from the university for antiSoviet leanings.
He was sentenced to ten years in prison but released shortly after Stalin’s death along with millions of other victims of repression. He died in the 2010s.