Children of "enemies of the people": 5 famous actors whose parents were repressed

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The stigma of the "enemy of the people" in Stalin's times cost many of the smartest and most talented people of the era not only professional successes, but also their lives. Even high ranks close to the leader could not avoid repression. Children of "enemies of the people" often had to pay for the uncommitted crimes of their parents, and although many of them subsequently managed to overcome their fate and become famous actors, they preferred not to remember their past.

The famous actress Olga Aroseva was born into the family of a noblewoman with Polish roots and a writer, revolutionary Bolshevik, diplomat Alexander Arosev, a man close to Stalin. She spent her childhood in Paris, where her father worked as a secretary of the Soviet embassy, then the family lived in Czechoslovakia and Sweden.

When Olga was 5 years old, her mother left them, fleeing from Stockholm to Sakhalin to her beloved. This later saved the lives of her daughters: after returning to the USSR in 1937, the father was arrested and a year later shot, and the girls were sent to their mother. 8-year-old Olga wrote a letter to Stalin asking him to pardon her father and even received a response from the office promising to reconsider the case, but she soon learned that Alexander Arosev was "sentenced to 10 years without the right to correspond." Olga learned that this meant being shot as an adult. In the late 1930s. her older sister was forced to publicly renounce her father, an "enemy of the people," under the threat of expulsion from the Komsomol. Olga did not want to do the same and did not join the Komsomol. The father was rehabilitated in 1955 - "for lack of corpus delicti."

Actress Tatyana Okunevskaya was born into the family of a white officer who, after the revolution, decided to stay in the USSR. The girl was expelled from school twice, and later was not admitted to the architectural institute. Father's officer past was remembered in 1937, when he was declared an enemy of the people and repressed. Tatyana Okunevskaya did not see her father anymore, she only remembered his words forever: "".

Leonid Bronevoy's father Solomon Iosifovich also held a high position - he was a lawyer by training and worked in the economic department of the Ukrainian NKVD. In 1937, when Leonid was 8 years old, his father was arrested as an "enemy of the people." They were expelled from Kiev to the Kirov region with their mother, and were allowed to return back only in 1941. Father was sent to cut woods on the Kolyma for 10 years, and the family was no longer reunited - the mother divorced and even changed her son's patronymic. The road to the theater universities of the capital was closed to Leonid, and he entered the Tashkent Institute of Theater Arts - they did not require to fill out a questionnaire with information about relatives. Only after the death of Stalin, Leonid Bronevoy was able to enter the Moscow Art Theater School, where he was immediately admitted to the 3rd year.

Alexander Zbruev's mother had noble roots, and his father served as the head of the Main Directorate of the People's Commissariat for Communications and the Deputy People's Commissar of Communications of the USSR. In November 1937, he went on a business trip to America, was arrested upon his return, and six months later he was shot. Alexander was born two months before the death of his father and never saw him. "", - the actor admitted. The family of the "enemy of the people" was expelled from Moscow to the Yaroslavl region, and they were allowed to return only in 1943. Alexander Zbruev was able to get acquainted with the archives of the NKVD, where information about the interrogations of his father was kept, only after perestroika. As it turned out, the hearing of the case lasted only 15 minutes, after which a death sentence was passed.

The actors Oleg and Rostislav Yankovsky were also children of the "enemy of the people". Their father was arrested twice: in 1930 - for aristocratic origins, and in 1937 - for friendship with the disgraced Marshal Tukhachevsky, repressed in the "case of the military." Because of this, all documents that testified to his past were destroyed in the family, not even the Order of St. George, which Ivan Yankovsky was awarded during the First World War, was left. A few years later he was released, but he died soon after - the consequences of the difficult years spent in prison made themselves known.

They preferred not to talk about their past and descendants of nobles on Soviet screens: 5 actors who hid their aristocratic origins.