Roman Barskiy

This is me at 9 months old in Kiev in 1936. The photo was taken because my parnts wanted to send a picture of me to my grandmother to Leningrad. They sent this photo and later my grandmother gave back it to me. My parents wanted to call me Ruvim after my great-grandfather, but changed their mind at the last moment and named me Roman. Roman was a more fashionable name at the time. I was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) on August 2, 1935. In 1934 the Ukrainian government moved to Kiev. Voenproject, where my father worked, also moved to Kiev in 1935. My mother came to Kiev from Leningrad and we settled down in a big communal apartment in 2 Pushkinskaya Street. The nobleman Rusakov, the former owner of this apartment, also lived in one of the rooms. He was an engineer and he socialized with my father. The rest of the tenants were a worker, two clerks, and a single mother and her son, who was a timorous, thievish teenager. We often visited Rusakov in his room. Later we were told that he left with Germans in 1943.