"... Let Our Mother Go"

“Dear comrade Zemlyachka… we ask you to let our mother go.“

(F.R5446. Op.56. D.5. L. 53,53ob.)

A heart-wrenching letter written in 1942 to Rosalia Zemlyachka (then deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR) from a teenage girl, Nadezhda Sakharova, who lived in the regional Moscow on the Bekasovo state farm near the town of Naro-Fominsk.

The girl, who lived with her 12-year-old brother, asks Zemlyachka to release her mother from prison, since her father is fighting at war, and her sister has also volunteered for the front.

Nadya explains that her mother, “not knowing the laws and as an acquaintance,” helped someone have an abortion (a criminal offense since 1936). The Sakharov brother and sister were left all alone.

Nadya writes that she has “no help from any side“, she toils on earthworks and has a bad cold since winter, when “she worked barefoot, naked and hungry in the snow“.

“Dear comrade Zemlyachka, if you have children, you will believe how hard it is for us to live without mom“, Nadya writes and apologizes in the last lines “for an ill-considered and stupid letter“.

The resolution on Nadya Sakharova’s message is “Without consideration“