Tag #132362 - Interview #78789 (Ivan Barbul)

I remember the day of Stalin's death, how people cried. I was calm about it: I wasn't going to exhaust myself for this reason. The Twentieth Party Congress [22] in 1956, and the publication of the Khrushchev's [23] report, made me learn many new things. Like many others, I had no idea about the extermination of the leaders of the party, I didn't know about the number of camps [see Gulag] [24], and the number of prisoners or how many people perished there. It was a shock for me. It was a shock to learn that the people moving from Moldova [Romania] across the Dnestr to the USSR, who were communists, were taken to Stalin's camps. The situation in the country changed after the Congress, and I joined the Party in 1956.