Wise parents stopped talking when their children came home from school. When both parents were arrested, their children were sent to NKVD orphanages, where they learned the consequences of being the sons and daughters of “enemies of the people.” A future Soviet dissident, Yelena Bonner, remembered how her nine-year-old brother innocently accepted the guilt of their father, arrested in 1937. “Look what those enemies of the people are like,” he told his sister. “Some of them even pretend to be fathers.” Yelena Bonner’s father was shot, and her mother sent to the camps.16
