Tag #147102 - Interview #95251 (Moisey Marianovskiy)

I started a new life in a hospital in Moscow.  My ward was the ward of deadly wounded patients. Every day we were in the care of Zinaida Ordzhonokidze, a volunteer nurse and an exclusively nice person. She was very ill herself. She had swollen legs and hyper tone, but she never failed to enter our ward at 6 a.m.. Her husband was Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze. [Editor’s note: Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze (party pseudonym ‘Sergo’) 1886-1937: activist of the Communist party and Soviet Union. Red Army commander during the Civil War. After the revolution, Minister of heavy industry in the last years of life. He is thought to have been poisoned by murderers sent by Stalin.] Once it happened so that there were just the two of us in the ward. The rest of my companions in the ward had died. I said: Zinaida Andreyevna, I remember an obituary about your husband. It said that he died from a heart attack’. She looked down and relied: ‘I wish it had been true.’ I did not grasp the meaning of what she said! I believed what newspapers wrote and knew no details of the story. This was the first time it occurred to me that not everything newspapers wrote was true.