I heard the other day that Olga Korbut is selling her medals. The four-time Olympic champion gymnast, the most famous female athlete of the Soviet Union, put up her hard-won golds for auction in February.
Korbut, known affectionately as the “miracle with pigtails”, was the darling of the USSR. But soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she emigrated to the US together with her husband and son. In 2000, she was granted US citizenship.
The move was not easy. Korbut was detained by American police in 2002 when she was caught stealing $20 worth of food. This was over two decades ago, but last month’s auction suggests that the star gymnast’s financial problems have not disappeared.
Though the thirty-two items of Korbut’s Olympic memorabilia sold for over $300,000, the initial asking price for some of her medals was a meagre $250.
Reading about the auction, I was reminded of my own family’s award-winning streak, living in the Soviet Union.
My grandmother on my mother’s side gave birth to ten children. This feat earned her the Mother Heroine title, and a medal. In the Soviet Union, this title guaranteed you certain benefits. The opportunity to buy a car without signing on to the endless queues. Invitations to events as the special guest. And the honor of wearing a Soviet medal – a big deal for a simple provincial woman.
The Mother Heroine order was established in 1944 by the Supreme Soviet. The Second World War had decimated the male population, and the state and the economy demanded their stock of workers and soldiers be rapidly replenished. Soviet women had to be encouraged to have more babies. And since government benefits and social security were in short supply, moral superiority had to be conferred on the women who did.
The medal itself was made of 4.5 grams of gold and 11.5 grams of silver. But it bore a much greater significance. The title equated prolific mothers to heroic Soviet fighters who had come face to face with enemy fire, during a time when heroism had taken on a particularly emotive quality, against the backdrop of a war that had left the Union in a state of financial and emotional crisis. It was worn by around half a million Soviet women.
The title was abolished in 1991. When the Soviet Union fell apart, the medal’s symbolic power evaporated, and so did all the advantages it conferred, the respected status, honor and feeling of pride. It turned back into 4.5 grams of gold and 11.5 grams of silver, at whatever price had been decided by the market.
My eldest uncle sold my grandmother’s Mother Heroine medal to help with his financial problems, which in and of themselves were likely to be the result of his having grown up in a family of ten children. It meant he had not received a normal education, and so had not managed to find a good job or build himself the life he wanted.
So, too, all the other children must have struggled, born into the half a million Mother Heroine families, where resources were divided between ten, eleven, twelve children. They must have been exploited in the same way, sent to herd cows and sheep, with no opportunities ahead of them and no way to envisage a life that was not that of a laborer, cotton worker or shepherd. All of that struggle for just 16 grams of colored metal, soon to be sold on as scrap.
When Olga Korbut sold her medals, I was acutely aware of what it meant: that the symbols of the Soviet Union held their value and power only for as long as the Union itself was alive. Once it was gone, so too was the heroism, whether the heroism of having ten children, of reinventing Olympic gymnastics, or of sacrificing your life for the Union in times of war. Once an empire falls apart, the symbols of its heroism are sold as exotic trinkets at tourist markets.
