“Thank you, Stalin, for my happy childhood!”
It’s a jarring utterance to say the least, and the speaker is not unaware of that fact. Tatyana Bayeva is not someone who was taken in by the Soviet dictator’s cult of personality, but one of his victims. Though aware of the irony of her words, she still means them; when her father was sent with his family into internal exile in northern Siberia for being a member of a philosophical society, she was not old enough to realise the significance of what had happened to them. Back then, Norilsk, now a fairly large industrial city and one of the most polluted places on the planet, was a small village, desolate, but apparently strangely idyllic for the young Tatyana.
Hers is one of five accounts that flesh out part eleven of the BBC Radio Four series Cold War: Stories from the Big Freeze. Most of the other episodes focus on one or other of the countries that became proxy battlegrounds for the two superpowers, but this one takes a look at what happened in the USSR itself in the decade or so following Stalin’s death.
While these stories would still be intriguing in written form, there’s definitely something particularly compelling about hearing them directly out of the mouths of the people who lived through them. And at about thirteen and a half minutes, the running time is very manageable.
(Full disclosure: When I settled on what to call this post, I was under the impression that the programme described above would only be available for a short time; while that is true of the BBC IPlayer edition, apparently the podcast version will be available indefinitely. Still, given the way the Khrushchev Thaw turned out, I think the title remains pretty apt).
