This story is from Inna Lokshin:
When I was in third grade, I got sick often, and at least twice it was pneumonia. I had also been sick the winter before. My parents were frightened that it would become chronic and that my lungs would never develop properly, so they decided that the next winter I had to be somewhere warmer.
They pulled strings and bribed the right people, and during the winter of my fourth-grade year I was sent to a sanatorium in Yalta, on the Black Sea. The climate there was something like Southern California. It is also the city that later became famous for the meeting of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at the end of the Second World War. I saw little of the city myself. This was no holiday.
I slept in a room with at least ten other girls, perhaps more. We did, however, have good food. We had fruit in winter, vitamins, sun, and physical therapy. I was even able to keep up with school classes, so I did not lose the year.
The bad thing was lice. We all got them, badly. The nurses either could not deal with it or did not want to. For a ten-year-old girl it was horrifying to live like that day after day, though, as with so many things in Soviet life, one gets used to almost anything.
I wrote letters home, and my parents knew about the lice, but when my mama and babula finally saw me, they said they had not imagined it was so bad. My whole head, they said, seemed to be moving.
My babula, who was a dental surgeon, and her sister — also a doctor, an infectious-disease specialist — got to work immediately. The standard treatment at the time was kerosene. Kerosene is fuel, somewhat like gasoline, though not quite as flammable. It smells worse than gasoline and is terrible for hair, especially coarse curly hair like mine.
In the 1960s in the Soviet Union, school dress codes were enforced with almost military strictness. All girls wore the same dark brown dress with a white collar that had to be washed and reattached each week, along with a black apron. Hair was supposed to be worn in two braids. Sometimes one braid was tolerated, but the rule was two. I too had two long braids.
After several days of kerosene treatment, my hair was in such condition that it was impossible to say where the hair ended and the lice and nits began. My braids had to be cut off. I returned to school with a short haircut.
My teacher was furious. She said I was a disgrace to my classmates and to all the young communists who had come before me. She made me move to the last row and sit alone so that no one would have to look at me.
The next day the whole school was called to assembly. I was brought onto the stage so everyone could stare and laugh. The school then voted to dishonor me. I was publicly labeled a servant of the capitalist West.
That is what Soviet dignity looked like in practice: a sick child sent away for treatment, humiliated first by neglect and then by ideology.