Raisa Shulyakovskaya with her daughter Alvina Shevyolkina

This photo of me, Raisa Shulyakovskaya, and my daughter, Alvina Shevyolkina, was taken in 1953, when we were on holiday in Anapa, on the Black Sea coast.

My husband’s name was Fyodor Petrovich Shevyolkin, a Russian, who came from a village, a common fellow from Vologda region, born in 1907. My husband was a naval officer, he was a commander. I was a technologist-engineer by profession.
We got married in 1935, when I was a fifth-year student.

My daughter Alvina was born in Vladivostok in 1937. I left Vladivostok when Alvina was six months old. I ‘wanted to go to Europe,’ as it was called there, and left for Minsk. That was in 1938 and in 1939 I came back to Leningrad.

My daughter Alvina didn’t get married for a long time, until she was 27 years old, she turned everybody down, and finally she married a fellow from Vologda, similar to my husband.

Before she invited him home, I told her, ‘You wanted to find someone who is your intellectual equal.’ And she replied, ‘Well, he absorbs everything like a sponge, I will educate him.’ She bought him books on rhetoric, which taught him how to talk. Alvina graduated from the Medical Institute and worked on the artificial kidney project. She was very talented and spoke English fluently.