The plight of homeless children

The plight of homeless children becomes personal in Tania Bezocheredeva’s account of how she was separated from her mother during the Russian Civil War, passed into the care of strangers, and eventually set adrift among homeless children. Her story joins the large upheavals of war to the intimate losses of childhood: a child can be displaced not only by armies and trains, but by adults’ fear, secrecy, and decisions made without her understanding or consent.

Tania and the name that marks her

Tania is a laundry girl who had befriended Christina Orletsova at the front. When Misha Gordon and Innokentii Dudorov hear about her, they recognize a resemblance in her open, all-encompassing smile to Yurii Andreievich Zhivago’s; beneath her snub nose and high cheekbones, Gordon says, she seems attractive. The observation presents Tania not as an abstraction but as a particular person, encountered through the impressions and recollections of others.

Her surname, Bezocheredeva, sounds to Gordon like a harsh, barbarous nickname rather than a true family name. Tania explains that she was a bezprizornaia—a homeless child—of unknown parents. She thinks her original designation may have been Bezotchcheia, meaning “Fatherless,” a word later distorted by urban speakers into a name shaped by their own recent experience. The change in the word carries a history of its own: a child’s uncertain origins are compressed into a label, then altered again as it passes through other people’s mouths.

Separation from her mother

Tania’s account of her origins is uncertain even to her. She has heard, though she cannot tell whether strangers told her or she somehow remembers, that her mother, Raïsa Komarova, was married to a Russian cabinet minister called Comrade Komarov, who had gone into hiding in White Mongolia. Tania doubts that he was her biological father. She speaks instead from the firm knowledge of her childhood: she grew up an orphan, without either parent, and has had to make sense of scattered reports while asking her listeners to imagine her position.

The separation occurred in Siberia, near the Chinese border, after the Reds advanced toward the Whites’ chief town. Komarov ordered Tania’s mother and other families onto a special train to carry them away. Her mother was frightened and, in Tania’s understanding, did not dare act independently of him. Komarov did not know Tania existed: she had been born while her mother and he were separated, and her mother feared that he would learn of the child. Tania recalls that he hated children and shouted about the filth and worry they brought into a household. The child’s existence was hidden within an adult relationship already governed by fear.

As the Reds approached, Tania’s mother sent for Marfa, a signal woman at Nagornaia Station, three stations from the town. Tania later imagines that her mother knew Marfa because the signal woman may have come to town to sell milk and vegetables. But she suspects that the adults did not tell her mother the truth about the arrangement. Perhaps, she thinks, they said it would be temporary, lasting only a day or two until conditions settled. She cannot believe her mother meant to give her away forever. The account leaves the mother’s intention unresolved, while making clear that Tania experienced the separation as an abandonment she could neither understand nor prevent.

Childhood at Nagornaia

Tania remembers being coaxed toward Marfa with promises of gingerbread and assurances that the “Auntie” was kind. The invitation ended in a separation she describes as heartbroken and almost unbearable. As a small child, she wanted to hang herself and says she nearly went out of her mind. Her account does not soften the consequences of the transfer: whatever the adults intended, the child experienced the loss of her mother as an overwhelming rupture.

The station household had material resources. Its government-owned house stood beside the tracks, with a large farm, a cow, a horse, poultry, and ample land for vegetables; the household paid no rent. The trains themselves shaped Tania’s remembered geography: one climbed the steep hill from the direction of home, while the train coming from Russia descended so fast that it needed its brakes. In autumn, when the woods thinned, Nagornaia could be seen below as if set on a saucer. These particulars place her childhood within a working railway settlement, but they do not cancel its emotional insecurity.

Marfa’s husband, Vasilii, was the signal man. Tania called him Daddy. She remembers him as kind and cheerful, but terribly trusting, particularly when drunk; he would reveal everything about himself to strangers. The household thus offered Tania a substitute father and a place to live, yet her later account distinguishes that arrangement from the continuing bond she had lost. She also suspects Marfa received substantial money for her keep, another detail that leaves the exchange between adults opaque from the child’s perspective.

Flight and survival

Tania’s account reaches a violent turning point when an assailant raids the signal house. She stops a slowly moving train on a steep hill and calls to its driver, whom she knows, saying that the house has been raided and that there has been murder and robbery. Red Army men jump from the train to find out why it has stopped in the woods at night. Tania tells them what happened; they drag the murderer from the cellar and, after he pleads for mercy, tie him hand and foot to the rails and run the train over him.

The episode brings official movement, personal danger, and extrajudicial violence together at the railway line that has defined Tania’s surroundings. Afterward, she is so frightened that she does not return for her clothes. She asks to be taken along, and the soldiers put her on the train. Her departure from Nagornaia is therefore not a planned return to her mother or a secure rescue into a known home; it is an escape from immediate terror into further displacement.

Tania says that she then wandered across much of her own country and other countries with the bezprizornys, the homeless children. She remembers this wandering as bringing a freedom and happiness she had not known in childhood, but does not romanticize it: there was also much sin and misery. She leaves those later experiences for another time, so her story gives no account of their particular episodes. Likewise, what became of Marfa remains uncertain: some said she never recovered and died in a madhouse; others said she recovered and came out.

The force of the story

Tania’s history reaches Gordon and Dudorov as a spoken recollection, not as a complete record of her parents or of everything that followed. Its uncertainties—whether Komarov was her father, what her mother believed, and what happened to Marfa—are part of the account rather than gaps that can be resolved from it. The story lets Tania name what she knows while preserving what the upheaval and her childhood have left unknowable.

Her experience gives the term bezprizornaia a human scale. It describes more than the absence of a recognized family: Tania’s story connects uncertain parentage, a child handed over under unclear pretenses, a substitute home, a violent attack, and years of wandering. The railway carries her away from the station household just as earlier adult decisions had carried her away from her mother. In the end, Tania can call her wandering a form of freedom and still insist on the misery that preceded it. The distinction makes survival neither a simple redemption nor a denial of loss.