My mother got pneumonia repeatedly when she was little, including at least twice by third grade and again the following winter. Her parents were afraid it would become chronic and damage her lungs permanently, so they did what people in the Soviet Union often had to do: they pulled strings, bribed the right people, and got her sent south for the winter.
That is how, during fourth grade, she ended up in a sanatorium in Yalta on the Black Sea. Yalta had a warm climate, more like Southern California than Moscow, and Soviet doctors believed the sun, sea air, and rest would help fragile children recover. She did get some of that. There was good food. There was fruit in winter. There were vitamins, sun, physical therapy, and enough schooling that she did not fall behind.
But this was no picturesque health retreat.
She slept in a room with at least ten other girls. Then the lice started.
The nurses either could not handle it or did not care to. For a ten-year-old girl, the experience was horrifying: day after day living in that condition, learning the kind of lesson people under bad systems learn early—that a person can get used to almost anything, even things no child should have to endure.
She wrote home about it. Her parents knew it was bad. But when her mama and Babua finally saw her, they were shocked at how bad. They later told her that her whole head seemed to be moving.
Babua was a dental surgeon. Babua’s sister Lisa was also a physician, an infectious-disease specialist. They got to work immediately. The standard lice treatment at the time was kerosene. Yes, kerosene: fuel poured onto a little girl’s scalp because that was what Soviet medicine had available for the job.
It killed lice, but it also destroyed her hair. My mother had thick, coarse, curly hair, worn the way Soviet schoolgirls were expected to wear it: in two braids. In the 1960s, Soviet school rules for girls were strict and petty in the way communist regimes loved to be strict and petty. The uniform had to be exact. The collars had to be washed and reattached. The apron had to be right. The braids had to be right. Even hair was political.
After days of kerosene treatments, there was no saving the braids. Her hair had to be cut short.
So she returned to school without them.
Her teacher was furious. Not concerned. Not sympathetic. Furious. She declared my mother a disgrace to her classmates and to the young communists who had come before her. She was forced to sit alone in the back row so no one would have to look at her.
Then it got worse.
The next day the entire school was assembled. My mother was called onto the stage and displayed before everyone. The school mocked her. Then they held a vote to dishonor her. The charge, absurd and monstrous at the same time, was that she had become "a servant of the capitalist West."
That is one of the most Soviet details in the whole story. A sick little girl gets lice in a state institution, loses her braids after kerosene treatments, and the regime’s answer is not pity or shame but public humiliation and ideological accusation. The system could fail you completely, then punish you for bearing the marks of its failure.
Communism did not merely impoverish people materially. It trained people to worship appearances, enforce conformity, and turn cruelty into civic ritual. Even children were expected to participate.
My mother was ten years old.