Pavel Mikov Recalls Childhood and Mother from Orphanage
Pavel Mikov was the children«s rights ombudsman, and later — the human rights ombudsman
Pavel Mikov, whose death was announced today, grew up in an orphanage. When he became the children«s rights ombudsman in the late 2000s, this experience helped him better understand people coming for help. We recall what Pavel Mikov himself told about his childhood.
Pavel Mikov was born in 1976. From the age of six, he was raised in the Suksun Children«s Home. He graduated from the history department of Perm State Pedagogical University. He worked as a teacher in schools and universities. From 2008 to 2017, he was the children»s rights ombudsman in Perm Krai, and from 2017 to 2022 — the regional human rights ombudsman.
A photo from his school years taken at the Artek camp, where Pavel Mikov visited in the early 1990s
Pavel Mikov«s mother served multiple prison terms: he openly talked about this himself. A native of Gubakha, she could not (or perhaps did not want to) raise three sons, so they were sent to the Suksun Children»s Home. First, Pavel and his brother Andrei were brought, then the youngest child in the family, Vladimir.
As children«s ombudsman, Pavel Mikov repeatedly emphasized that children from the same family should never be separated and sent to different institutions. In personal conversations, he cited his own story as an example. Pavel Mikov noted that in Soviet times, there was no strict requirement not to separate children. And he was glad that he and his brothers were lucky — they ended up in the same children»s home and maintained a connection with each other. Although all three barely knew their own mother.
“After her second term, after being released from prison, she (mother. — Ed.) came to Suksun, met with us. And took us away… We lived in the same Gubakha barracks,” Pavel Mikov shared with his followers on VKontakte this spring. “A week later, police came looking for me, but my mother hid me at the neighbors«. I was lying under the sofa, in the dust, cat hair, but they found me. We drove back from Gubakha to Suksun with Tatyana Anatolyevna — a young and beautiful teacher from the children»s home. Mother was imprisoned.”
Pavel Mikov was friends with another famous Perm native who grew up in an orphanage — actor Albert Makarov of the Theater-Theater (he is on the left)
In the children«s home, Pavel Mikov worked part-time — he took care of animals. Several years ago he told 59.RU that he earned his first 50 rubles (about $1 at current rates) by cleaning a pigsty. “We were taught that an honest kopeck is better than a stolen ruble,” the ombudsman explained then.
The next meeting with his mother occurred during such part-time work.
“I was sitting near my rabbit hutch in the children«s home, studying tickets for the German language exam, telling them to my rabbits. Suddenly, a woman in a gray downy shawl, [dressed] not at all for May, enters the gate of our yard,” Pavel Mikov wrote in the same post. “I hid. I locked myself in the rabbit hutch. We never talked. But that year in 1993, she was allowed to take my brothers Andrei and Vova on vacation.”
The last time Pavel Mikov saw his mother was four years later. She had just been released from the colony on Proletarka and came to visit her student son in the dormitory.
“What did we talk about? She cried, said that she regretted her life, that everything would be different, asked about my brothers,” Pavel Mikov shared. “Later, when I became the human rights ombudsman in Perm Krai, I found out that Lyubov Pavlovna Mikova was buried at the Northern Cemetery in Perm in 2011. She was imprisoned six times.”
Earlier we published a detailed profile: we told about Pavel Mikov and his life.
