48 pages • 1-hour read
Sofia Petrovna
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Themes
Doublethink: The State Versus the Individual
Throughout Sofia’s ordeal there is an irreconcilable dissonance between her faith in her son and her faith in the Soviet system. She holds two conflicting beliefs—that Kolya is perfect, and therefore innocent, and that the state is perfect, therefore just: How, then, is Kolya innocent if his arrest is just? At first this inculcated faith in the state triumphs over Sofia’s faith in her son, and in Alik—she suspects one of them must’ve recklessly angered someone important. Only after Kolya is summarily sentenced to 10 years in a gulag does Sofia begin to, albeit circuitously, question the justness of his imprisonment.
Sofia has a deep faith in the Soviet system; even after Kolya’s arrest she continues to believe in its integrity. It’s not that she’s afraid to criticize the system; it’s that to do so is literally unthinkable. She encapsulates this unassailable faith when she says: “In our country innocent people aren’t held. Particularly not Soviet patriots like Kolya” (59). There is no room in her worldview for doubt; the state as she sees it is the embodiment of justice. Her faith is a product of ideological manipulation—propaganda. The threat of violence is all the more effective when combined with this ideological manipulation because it makes people like Sofia unwittingly support their own subjugation.
After Kolya is deported, Sofia’s faith in the system wavers. The news breaks the equanimous attitude Sofia maintained throughout the first weeks of his imprisonment: “She would not see Kolya for ten years! Why on earth? What hideous nonsense! It couldn’t be” (81). Though still incapable of criticizing the state outright, Sofia nonetheless doubts the justice of the sentence they give Kolya. However, in the end the state wins the ideological war because of its widespread ability to sow doubt in the smallest cracks. Sofia’s changing opinion of Zakharov’s arrest is a perfect example. Initially Sofia doesn’t believe her beloved Zakharov (it’s suggested that she is infatuated with him) could be guilty of “sabotage”—that cover-all crime of the Great Purge. However, her opinion changes when Natasha shows her a propagandistic article designed to defuse just such doubts about the arrests of apparent patriots.
The story about the patriot A. seduced by the spy S. works on multiple levels. It plays on Sofia and Natasha’s distrust and resentment of attractive, flirtatious women: If Sofia’s devoted husband could be seduced by their maid, then surely any man could be compromised by a trained seductress. With Zakharov’s integrity suddenly in question, it’s an easy jump to doubt everything about him. Natasha sums this up perfectly: “What do we know? […] We know he was director of our publishing house, but we don’t actually know anything more than that. Do we really know about his personal life? Can you really vouch for him?’” (41-42). Natasha’s argument persuades Sofia with its seeming reasonableness, but both of them fail to see that it rests on the unproven assumption that Zakharov is guilty. By using the article to argue against Sofia’s doubts, Natasha is unwittingly coopted into acting as an instrument of the state herself.
In the war between the USSR and the individual, the state has the power to undermine even the strongest feelings and convictions. As Chukovskaya writes in the afterword, “when people’s lives are deliberately distorted, their feelings become distorted, even maternal ones” (111). Kolya’s arrest forces Sofia into a state of cognitive dissonance where she believes both that the state is justified and that Kolya is innocent. However, since dissonance is an inherently unstable state, Sofia tries to resolve her turmoil in some way: She explains to herself that Kolya must’ve accidentally angered the wrong person, or, better, that Alik got Kolya in trouble. Eventually, the irreconcilable dissonance of this doublethink—that Kolya is innocent and the state is infallible—drives Sofia into a fantasy.
The False Promise of Stalinism
From the Russian Revolution onward, the ideal in the Soviet Union was the realization of a Communist utopia. However, after years of famine and the widespread, violent requisition of peasants’ crops (under the pretense of punishing hoarders), this ideal lost the sheen it had under Lenin. Nonetheless, the dream was still alive in some. Kolya and Sofia are two paragons of Soviet excellence who still support the Soviet project. However, Kolya and Sofia’s faith in Stalinism doesn’t insulate them from the purges.
With birthrates dangerously low in the Soviet Union, Stalin looked for a way to add people to the workforce. He reversed the feminist stance of Marxism-Leninism—which valued woman as equal members of the workforce—propagandizing a conservative view of a new Soviet woman, one whose primary responsibility was child-rearing. These pronatalist campaigns emphasized that women should work as well—burdening them with the expectation of two full-time responsibilities.
Sofia embodies the Stalinist ideal of the new Soviet woman. After devoting herself to raising Kolya, Sofia enters the workforce following her husband’s death. She’s quickly promoted because she’s industrious and, more importantly, “conscientious and discreet” (3). Her superiors value her input, and the publishing union thanks her for her work with a card and basket of flowers. Despite her age and busy work schedule, Sofia still cares for Kolya, supporting his studies and readying him for work in Sverdlovsk. Sofia epitomizes the self-sacrificing mother-worker of Stalin’s propaganda.
Kolya embodies the ideal of the new Soviet man: hale, industrious, and principled, he works tirelessly to further the Soviet project. Sofia’s description of him sounds like a description of one of the soldiers in the patriotic movies she sees at the cinema:
Her son had become handsome, with his gray eyes and black brows, tall, and more confident, calm, and cheerful than Fyodor Ivanovich [her late husband] had been even in his best years. He had a sort of military way about him always, tidy and energetic […] What a good-looking young man, and healthy, too, he didn’t drink or smoke, a good son and loyal Komsomol member (19).
Indeed, Kolya becomes a poster boy of Soviet excellence after inventing a novel method for manufacturing a cogwheel, making the front page of Pravda. Kolya is also a dogmatic Stalinist, defending official policies to Sofia at every turn. By making Kolya a mouthpiece for Stalinism, Chukovskaya demonstrates that even the staunchest patriots suffered the Great Terror.
For their faith in the system Kolya and Sofia receive no reward; instead, Kolya suffers arrest, abuse, and imprisonment, and Sofia ostracism, despair, and loss. In a country that idealizes self-sacrifice for the common good, stalwarts like Sofia and Kolya are nonetheless objects of its terror.
Isolation and the Culture of Fear
During the Great Terror, fear isolated people, making it seem as though their predicaments were abnormal, not the product of a systematic campaign of persecution. As Chukovskaya writes in the afterword, “each person was cut off from anyone else experiencing the same thing by a wall of terror” (112). Isolation makes this suffering all the more unbearable, pushing people to the limits of what they can tolerate. Natasha’s suicide and Sofia’s break from reality show two possible fates for people subjected to such psychological pressure.
From Kolya’s arrest to his sentencing, Sofia remains isolated from others facing similar predicaments by her belief that Kolya alone is innocent. “I can imagine how awful it must be for a mother to learn that her son is a saboteur,” Sofia thinks in the prison line (50). The irony of her thought is that she doesn’t have to imagine it: She’s living it. Everyone and no one is a saboteur; the prisoners are guilty because they’re in prison, not vice versa. Only after Kolya is summarily sentenced to 10 years in a gulag does it dawn on Sofia that she is no different from the hundreds of people she sees every day in the lines at the prison, prosecutor’s office, and information center.
For some time Sofia commiserates with Alik and Natasha, finding in them the support that many other prisoners’ relatives lack. Together this trio forms a bubble somewhat insulated from the pervasive atmosphere of fear. However, after Natasha dies by suicide and Alik is imprisoned, Sofia loses that support, and her loneliness and despair grow. Fear of the NKVD isolates Sofia even further, dissuading Mrs. Kiparisova and Mrs. Zakharovna from associating with Sofia lest the NKVD connect their husbands’ cases with Kolya’s. During this period Sofia notices that the women in the endless lines all have a similar expression of “exhaustion, resignation, and perhaps, a certain secretiveness” (73). Fear drives these women to secrecy, isolating them from their compatriots suffering the same thing all around them.
In the final chapter Sofia’s isolation and despair become total. With both Mrs. Kiparisova and Mrs. Zakharovna deported, she no longer has even the small comfort of those tenuous connections. Stalin’s campaign of terror drives Sofia into such extreme isolation that she tries to escape into a fantasy world in which Kolya is free, engaged, and on vacation. In this fantasy Sofia is completely alone: “She was happy and excited, she even walked faster. And she wanted to go around telling people all the time: ‘Kolya’s been released. Did you hear? They’ve released Kolya!’ But there was no one to tell” (103). The culmination of this culture of fear comes in the final lines, when, fearing further persecution, Sofia burns Kolya’s letter. With this act, she severs her last meaningful connection, and her isolation becomes absolute.
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