Tag #145679 - Interview #78177 (Larisa Gorelova)

I didn't like Stalin from the moment I understood what had been done to my father. My mother and all the elder Bunins, my aunts, understood perfectly, what kind of oriental-despotic state we happened to live in. After the husbands of the three elder Bunin sisters were arrested in 1937, all their illusions immediately changed into precise understanding of what really happened in Stalin's time. Everything they dreamed about in their youth, everything they strove for, a real life of equal rights, lost its true sense. When Stalin died, someone of the younger sisters tried to cry, but the elder sister Reizl [Rosa] said, 'It won't get any worse, such a despot should have died long ago.'

On 10th March 1953, the day of Stalin's funeral, I worked at the central plant laboratory of the 'Novator' plant located on Obvodny Canal. No one worked on that day, everybody listened to the funeral broadcast and watched, who cried more. A colleague of mine and I had not a single tear in our eyes, so we had to turn away to the window. I wet my finger with my own saliva in order to imitate tears on my cheeks. My friend saw it and began to laugh, but managed to hold it back. Suddenly the USSR anthem started to play and some optimistic program began, conducted by, I think, Molotov [35], who said that Stalin was dead, but life went on.