From Privilege to Exile: Interview with Valeriia Mikhailovna Gerlin

Abstract

Valeriia Mikhailovna Gerlin was seven years old when her parents were arrested in 1937. She was an only child. Her father, Mikhail Gorb, was a former Socialist Revolutionary who had participated in terrorist acts in the revolutionary period. He joined the Bolshevik cause and rose to be a high-ranking officer in the security police, then called the GUGB, and worked in headquarters at the Lubianka in Moscow. Gerlin refers to the service as the GB, the initials for the Russian terms for state security, as in KGB. Her father was arrested in the Great Terror of 1937–1938. As a wife of an “enemy of the people,” Gerlin’s mother was arrested and sentenced to eight years of forced labor in exile, in conformity with an order issued in August 1937 on the arrests of wives of “enemies of the people” and the internment of their children in state orphanages.1 Prior to her parents’ arrest, Gerlin lived in a fine apartment opposite the Lubianka, with her own room, which she shared with a nanny. After her parents’ arrests, she avoided internment in an orphanage for children of “enemies of the people. ”A married couple (never named by Gerlin), who had worked with her parents in Kiev in the revolutionary movement before 1917, took her in, along with her nanny. When she left her parents’ apartment, young Valeriia Gerlin had to leave behind her pet cat, and learned only years later that the cat had been abandoned.