Tag #140023 - Interview #90530 (Ella Lukatskaya)

My father was working in the secret Department 1 of the Logistics Ministry. My mother told me that they were involved in grain storing up during the years of famine (1932-33) that was a risky activity. He was subject to numerous attacks in the country. Later he was involved in strategic food storage in Kiev. My mother, full of revolutionary ideas, also participated in this grain storing up that resulted in the famine of 1932-33. She left my older sister in my grandmother’s care and exposed herself to the fatal danger. The starving farmers brought to despair attempted to kill her, too, several times. Two years before I was born she was on one of these so-called business trips. She was on the 6th or 7th month of pregnancy, when some farmers beat her ruthlessly for taking away their last little bits of bread on behalf of the Soviet power, making their children starve to death[3]. She survived then, but her twins that she was pregnant with did not. My mother finally left this job and went to work as seamstress at a factory in Kiev. I was born in 1938. My birth and the fact that my mother left her Party work and the political arena rescued my mother from the repression of 1936-38. The majority of her Party colleagues were exterminated during those years. This repression touched our family as well. Few of my Uncle Max’s cousins living in Kharkov were arrested along with their wives and families. They lost their children. The children were sent to orphanages and disappeared there. Nobody ever found them. My mother’s thoughts about the repression were hard, but she remained a convinced Communist and she believed that everything in this country was done for the good of the people. She stayed faithful to the Communist ideas until her death in 1982. Se never accepted the public denunciation of the cult of Stalin.