Tag #135153 - Interview #78011 (Evgenia Galina)

The arrests that began in 1937 [during the Great Terror] didn't have an impact on our family. Some of our acquaintances were arrested. My father was worried about them. He was smart and understood what was going on. I remember when my father's acquaintance, who was a pharmacist, was arrested my father kept saying, 'What did he do? What was his fault?' My father didn't like Stalin. I remember him saying that in the early 1920s Stalin was fighting with Lenin for 'the stool' to sit on and my mother was horrified to hear this. Of course, our parents tried to avoid discussing these subjects in the presence of children, but we lived in the same room and often heard such discussions. I didn't quite understand what it was about at that time, but I recalled them many years later.