This article originally appeared in Spanish on the website of Grupo Joven Fundación Libertad. You can find the original here.
I am sure that all of us, at some point, have studied communism. We study its philosophers, its leaders, we know its followers, and we boast of its failure. We have also discussed the model and its replicas in other countries, but it hurts to see the Cuban or Venezuelan reality. The truth is that it hurt me the most to hear the testimony of my colleague and friend Ludmila Mullova.
During the month of January of this year I participated in the first international seminar of 2020 of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Gummersbach, Germany. There I met many people, from all over the world, with whom I shared life stories. But Ludmila’s got me. It was not enough for me to hear about her childhood and adolescence under the communist regime in just 5 minutes of the coffee break, so I asked her to tell me in a short interview what she experienced in the Soviet Union.
Ludmila was born near Moscow and lived 22 years under communism. She left Russia when she met her husband. By the fall of the Berlin Wall she was 27 years old. She described her childhood as “gray.” She told me that when she was a girl, she didn’t wonder if she was happy or not, she only counted on the warmth of her family. She did not understand what was happening around her, but when she grew up she understood everything.
She told me that her childhood was ruled by the state. The women went to school and then had singing. When she got home, she had to help with the housework. Ludmila told me that she had to queue for 30 to 60 minutes to get bread, then another line to get butter, and on Sundays to wait for some milk too. In winter it was 20 degrees below zero and she, with less than 10 years, was forced to queue eternally in the open air for a piece of bread.
The state provided the basics, but many times they were left without. Families went out to look for food so as not to go to sleep with an empty stomach. If you wanted to eat something else, something more “sophisticated” as she defined it, you had to have connections with people from the state. “It was all based on connections, otherwise you didn’t survive,” she told me. Then she added “If you had connections and managed to get something nice on your table, it would make you happy.” She added that her mother, when she managed to get some meat, would get so happy that she would cry. I was very touched. Hearing from someone who lived through communism rejoice at eating something different, or simply having food on their table is chilling.
I asked her what life was like for women in the Soviet Union and she said it was very hard. “Women had no rights, just more obligations.” Women worked just like men but the whole family was on their shoulders. Cooking, cleaning, and washing was her routine. Also the living conditions were terrible. “We lived 6 in an environment. We did not have a refrigerator, my family met her when she was able to make some contact with someone from the State ”. “You had to have well-positioned friends.”
You had to buy the clothes from the state, but it was horrible, she told me. It was very basic and if you wanted to have something more beautiful you had to learn to sew or go to the black market. I asked her if it was dangerous and she said yes, but that it was the only way to get something different, be it food or clothes.
Ludmila learned about the gulags in America when she went to live with her husband. Books or diaries that showed reality were banned in Russia. In Russia it was a state secret, nobody knew why people disappeared at the time. The first time she heard about the social needs of these concentration camps and the atrocities that were taking place was from her husband. He read about the gulags when he found books in America. She explained to me that bookstores in Russia only sold communist party books.
I asked her, just for the record, what happened in the gulags. She told me that they began to function as soon as Stalin took power. In the middle of the night they would arrest and torture you. They were mostly political prisoners or people with different points of view. “They needed them to suppress those who thought differently or disagreed,” she told me. Many were executed. When she was born, the concentration camps were no longer operating, but her family suffered greatly.
She taught me a Russian joke: Two prisoners are detained and one says to the other, “What did you do?” He replies: “Nothing.” And the other answers “It can’t be, for doing nothing they give you a penalty of 20 years, they gave you the death penalty.” There’s nothing funny about that.
With regard to education, it was totally taken over by the government, full of propaganda and politicized. The books they studied with were from the communist party. It was a very authoritarian government and the regime of conduct was very strict. You had to follow the guidelines that the party gave to each subject
To close the interview, I asked her what the worst thing about communism is, she replied: “The worst thing about communism was not eating bread and butter, with that you can survive. The worst thing was living my childhood and adolescence with fear, I had to pretend that I lived well to live in peace ”. Then I asked her what she would say to a 20-year-old who proclaims communism. She paused for five seconds, and tears welled up in her eyes. “I don’t wish it on my enemy. There is no good communism ”. Then she continued: “You can idealize it, but when you have to live it …”. There was a cold silence in the room, then Ludmila repeated: “I do not wish it even on my enemy.”
For Ludmila, her childhood and adolescence under communism remains an open wound. And talking to her about this made her bleed. Ludmila closed with a broken voice and almost in tears: “Communism is the violation of the human mind.”