When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, it seemed the entire Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) fell into mourning.
However, behind the external pain, there were mixed feelings towards a character under whom millions of people had perished in purges and faminesand millions more endured poverty.
During his nearly three decades in power, Stalin tried to project unquestioned authority and brutally cracked down on dissenting voices.
However, in the Soviet Union there were protests. They were not frequent or on a large scale, but they indicated that many did not agree with the totalitarian regime. One of these protests was staged by three children.
born rebels
The events occurred in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city in the Urals, a mountainous region that separates the European and Asian parts of Russia. In the city there was a tractor factory.
One day in the spring of 1946, three teenagers fiton pamphlets in the city center. The neighbors who were queuing to buy food watched them tiredly.
The boys had no glue, so they used water-soaked bread to glue the sheets of paper, torn from their school notebooks, onto walls and light poles.
“Hungry people, rise up to fight!”one of the students had scribbled.
A woman in the queue read the paper. “This was written by an intelligent person”he commented.
The boys were Alexander (known as Shura) Polyakov, Mikhail (Misha) Ulman and Yevgeny (Genya) Gershovich. They were all 13 years old, and Shura Polyakov was the leader of the group.
Polyakov’s family was originally from Kharkov, in present-day Ukraine, and he had been evacuated to the Urals with his mother, grandmother, sister, and aunt. The five of them shared a room, while the city struggled to accommodate war evacuees.
Shura’s father had died in World War II and his mother supported the family by working as a lawyer.
Genya Gershovich also grew up without a father, but for a different reason. She was born in Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg), and in 1934 her father was arrested, falsely accused of belonging to a underground network that planned to overthrow the government.
The man perished without a trace.
To keep her two children safe, Genya’s mother moved to Chelyabinsk. Despite the fact that her husband was “an enemy of the people”, she got a job as a high school teacher.
Genya’s father was executed before the warbut the family only learned of his death much later.
Misha Ulman, like Genya, was also a native of Leningrad. But his family was intact, and his parents moved to Chelyabinsk at the beginning of the war to work at the local tractor factory, which at that time produced tanks and not agricultural machinery.
In Chelyabinsk, Misha’s family lived in exceptionally crowded conditions, forced to share a room with a stranger. The room was divided by a clothesline and a sheet that hung from it.
All three children went to the same school. Ulman and Gershovich even sat at the same desk in class.
Stalin inspired them to revolt
Although they were only 13 years old, the boys were already reading the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin himself as part of their school programme. From these books they learned that accepting injustice was a mistake.
They also carefully studied the words of “The Internationale”, a hymn of the labor movement written in the 1870s by a French revolutionary and later used by all those who fought against social inequalities.
The song was 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 differences, weren’t banned in the Soviet Union.
The boys and their families faced severe financial difficulties and lived on the brink of starvation on post-war food rations.
At the time there was a popular joke in the Soviet Union, which told about the moment when the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, meeting at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, discussed what method to use to execute to (Nazi leader Adolf) Hitler, when the war was over.
Churchill, then British Prime Minister, suggested hanging. Roosevelt, the American president, proposed the electric chair. And Stalin, the Soviet leader, believed that the most effective way would be to put Hitler on Soviet food rations. The other two agreed that that would be the cruelest punishment.
But not everyone in the Soviet Union was forced to survive on meager rations. The three boys had a classmate whose father was a factory manager.
That classmate’s lifestyle was completely different from theirs.: a driver took him to school, he ate much richer food for lunch and at his birthday party the boys were able to taste sparkling water and watch Charlie Chaplin movies, projected on a wall.
The house where the director’s family lived was spacious and comfortable, and they did not have to share it with any strangers. It looked like something out of a fairy tale.
War it made everything worse
The living conditions of the workers at the Chelyabinsk plant were harsh before the war: many lived in basements and trenches. With the start of the war, the city faced an influx of evacuees from the western regions of Russia, which worsened the situation.
In December 1943, the factory management discovered that up to 300 workers slept at the plant, on the floor of the workshop, since they had nowhere to go. Some said that they did not have winter clothes, others that they did not have shoes and that is why they could not leave there.
Although the people were willing to endure hardship during the war, when the war ended, their patience ran out. The citizens were happy about the defeat of Nazi Germany, but many in Chelyabinsk were fed up with the constant humiliation of living in misery.
The three boys listened to the adults complaining about the damp basements, the leaking roofs, the soup made from nettles, going four years without seeing a bar of soap, and many other problems.
Young people experienced extreme poverty and they felt they had very little to lose.
The adolescents grew increasingly angry with the injustice they observed and with the contrast between what Soviet propaganda claimed life in a socialist country was like and what they could see with their own eyes.
One day in April 1946, the boys tore a page out of a school notebook and wrote:
“Comrades, workers, look around! The government has been blaming our problems on the war, but the war is over. Have their conditions improved? No! What has the government given them? Nothing! Their children go hungry, yet they are told tales of a happy childhood. Comrades, look around you and understand what is really happening“.
At first, the boys only put up their posters at night, but after a few days they became more daring and stopped worrying about the consequences. They even asked some of their classmates for help.
The feared security services of the NKVD, later the KGB and now the FSB, quickly learned of the situation and soon discovered that the anti-government leaflets had been produced. for some schoolchildren.
The beginning of the hunt
Schools were faced with checks on each student’s handwriting to identify the culprits. Children from all over Chelyabinsk had to write words like “comrade” and “happy childhood”.
Yevgeny Gershovich was the first to be detained. Then Alexander Polyakov, and at the end of May 1946 Mikhail Ulman. His families were shocked and terrified.
The boys faced relentless interrogation by the security services, who were also trying to condemn them for sympathizing with the Nazis. Teenagers were outraged: how could devout Marxists also be Nazis?
Gershovich and Polyakov were tried in August 1946 and found guilty of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. The two were sentenced to three years in juvenile prison.
They later recalled that horrendous time, with the regular beatings and bullying of other young inmates, imprisoned for criminal offences.
ulman was lucky: as he had not reached the age of 14 at the time of his arrest, he was completely freed from punishment. His parents rushed back to Leningrad to stay away from the Chelyabinsk Security Services.
Gershovich and Polyakov also fared relatively well, being released at the end of 1946 with a suspended sentence.
The boys’ young age may have helped them escape much harsher punishment.
But it is also possible that the security services and the judges were surprised by the seriousness of the young rebels who, despite living in one of the most totalitarian regimes, they believed they could protest against social injustice and force the government to improve l the living conditions of the workers.
Later, both Ulman and Polyakov emigrated to Israel, where the latter continues to live with his wife and where the BBC was able to speak to him.
Ulman later moved to Australia, where he died in 2021.
Yevgeny Gershovich was arrested again in the late 1940s, shortly after being expelled from the university, suspected of having anti-Soviet leanings.
He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but was released shortly after Stalin’s death, along with millions of other victims of the repression. He died in the 2010s.
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