Tag #144112 - Interview #94880 (Yefim Volodarskiy)

Of course, I was a Komsomol member. In 1937 I understood that Stalin was a bastard after they arrested my childhood friend for the only reason that he was Polish. They sent him to Siberia and nobody saw him again. I knew that these arrests and sentences [Great Terror] [20] were wrong. I knew it, but I didn’t tell anyone, of course. I knew that one little thing said – and they would know. I kept my tongue behind my teeth. I thought that Lenin [21] was a genius and Stalin was a usurper, he grabbed the power. I was very happy when he died in 1953, but I kept these emotions to myself.