The saga of Gelya

Ardan Markizova was the People’s Commissar for Agriculture of the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Province in the U.S.S.R in the 1930s. He took his daughter Engelsina Sergeyevna Markizova (Gelya) to a meeting at the Kremlin with Joseph Stalin in 1936. What occurred at the meeting would change Gelya and her family’s life for better and for worse.

During the meeting, Gelya got bored with the endless speeches about agricultural holdings (as most of us would), and walked up to Stalin. The gesture stunned Stalin, but he picked her up and put her on the table he was sitting at and took the bouquet of flowers she offered and a hug. Journalists were at the meeting and they immediately started taking pictures of this event. Stalin gave Gelya a gold watch and a Phonograph (record player) for her family.

They published the photo of the iconic hug on the front page of Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party. The image went viral, and Gelya became a little rockstar. The image was posted in kindergartens, hospitals and schools across the Soviet Union. Georgi Lavrov even turned the image into a sculpture. Because of the fame, Gelya started receiving preferential treatment in schools and communist meetings.

1n 1937, Ardan was taken from his family home by secret police agents. They accused Ardan of being a Japanese spy and a Trotskyite (follower of Leon Trotsky ideology that clashed with Stalin’s vision of Communism). Gelya’s mother made appeals to Stalin through Gelya to spare her father’s life, to no avail. They executed Ardan in July 1938 on the trumped-up charges of being a Japanese spy, terrorist and plotting against Stalin. Gelya was now the daughter of an enemy of the people. She started being shunned by her classmates and people on the street. Gelya’s mother was also arrested, imprisoned for a year, and deported to Kazakhstan. She “mysteriously” died in 1938 as well. They deemed the official cause of death an “accident”. Gelya was now officially an orphan.

Soviet government officials had a dilemma on their hands. Stalin cant be seen in pictures hugged up with a daughter of an enemy of the people, but there were also too many copies of the picture in circulation to destroy them all. The Soviets erased Gelya’s identity from the picture and attribute it to a new “fictional” girl. The new girl in the picture is now Mamlakat Nakhangova, a Tajik girl who had earned the Order of Lenin by working as a cotton picker. 

Stalin died in 1953, the picture finally disappeared after his death. Gelya grew up to become an Orientalist scholar. She finally learned the full extent of Stalin’s rule after his death. Georgi was imprisoned in Stalin’s labor camp for 17 years.

Mistakes were Made:

In the movie, The Man who shot Liberty Valance, a reporter is getting a background story on a national hero. This exchange of dialogue takes place: “Ransom Stoddard: You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott? Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the Legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The meaning of this line is when fiction becomes fact, print or keep the fiction.

Most people don’t know the history behind government propaganda pieces, we just take whatever the government says about something as the truth. In 1930s Soviet Russia, citizens weren’t questioning the changing of the background information about the cute little girl on the poster. Even bringing up questions about anything with the Stalin government would lead to one’s death. Gelya was just a prop in the Soviet’s propaganda machine and when her circumstances changed, they just kept the pictures and changed her background and no one blinked an eye. Stalin was still the loving, caring, fatherly figure shown in the picture to most citizens. Privately he had both of Gelya’s parents killed and many others, but the propaganda and fear made people think Stalin was an outstanding leader.

I hope this story makes people question government propaganda pieces, that we intake daily or that have been etched in our minds since childhood. Question the origins of the pieces, or whether they are really what they claim to be. Current day United States is not Soviet era 1930s by any means, yet some of us just take what the government says as the gospel. Ideas like the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Trump with fraud,  big corporate government bailouts are good for our country or that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction are just taken as the truth. Use those wonderful minds someone gifted us all with and don’t just take what the government says as the gospel.