Selected text
I remember the Komsomol meetings conducted in the biggest conference hall of the College. They started after the lectures and ended at 2-3 at night, or at 6-7 next day in the morning. There were streetcars waiting at the entrance of the building. The main issue on the agenda was identification and denunciation of ‘enemies of people’. We had discussions of the following kind: one saw Ivanov talking with Sidorov and Sidorov was having beer with Petrov who met with an ‘enemy of the people’ Stepanov that was arrested later. Summary: Ivanov, Petrov and Sidorov didn’t report on Stepanov, which means that they were also ‘enemies of the people and were to be expelled from College and Komsomol. [Editor’s note: all names are fictive.] Decision of the meeting was sent to ‘competent’ NKVD authorities and nobody ever saw Ivanov, Petrov or Sidorov again. All these people were innocent victims of Stalin’s regime. They vanished in camps and exile. Nobody questioned what happened to them. There was a person and then he disappeared. Keep your mouth shut if you want to live – this was a rule of life.
I remember how the secretary of the Komsomol committee of the College was expelled from the Party. At the time when Kosarev was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Lenin Komsomol, the secretary of the college said a few good words about him not knowing that Kosarev would become an ‘enemy of the people’. He was repressed immediately after the meeting at the College. Going home late I saw people pushed into the cars that people called ‘Black Maria’ cars. The head of the Chair of Higher Mathematics, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR Kravchuk was repressed and so was the head of the Military Department of the College Kozko awarded with two Orders of the Combat Red Banner during the Civil War. People said that the reason for Kozko execution was his friendship with Yakir 20, Commander of Kiev regiment, who had been executed shortly before. Kozko asked me once about my patronymic of Henrikhovich thinking that it might be of German origin and whether my father was German [everything related to foreigners aroused suspicions in espionage]. I explained that my father was a Jew and change his Jewish name Genekh to Henry.
It was impossible to believe that people who had recently protected their country from fascism were traitors. Party and state officials and common people suffered from repression. My mother’s friend Grigori Sitnitski, a bank employee was arrested by a false report. He was incriminated acquaintance with his former supervisor, ‘enemy of the people’, ties with foreign intelligence agencies and some other nonsense. Grigori was ‘lucky’. After tortures in NKVD cells he became an invalid and was released for absence of corpus delicti. He had to sign confirmation that he would not disclosed what happened to him in prison for the fear of death penalty. He told it in secret to his wife and she told my mother after Grigori died shortly after he was released.
I was fortunate as well: since I wrote in all forms that I didn’t know my father I managed to escape the fate of the so-called ‘members of the family of an enemy of the people’ who perished in Stalin’s camps. I realized that I had to adjust to the system or it might destroy me.
I remember how the secretary of the Komsomol committee of the College was expelled from the Party. At the time when Kosarev was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Lenin Komsomol, the secretary of the college said a few good words about him not knowing that Kosarev would become an ‘enemy of the people’. He was repressed immediately after the meeting at the College. Going home late I saw people pushed into the cars that people called ‘Black Maria’ cars. The head of the Chair of Higher Mathematics, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR Kravchuk was repressed and so was the head of the Military Department of the College Kozko awarded with two Orders of the Combat Red Banner during the Civil War. People said that the reason for Kozko execution was his friendship with Yakir 20, Commander of Kiev regiment, who had been executed shortly before. Kozko asked me once about my patronymic of Henrikhovich thinking that it might be of German origin and whether my father was German [everything related to foreigners aroused suspicions in espionage]. I explained that my father was a Jew and change his Jewish name Genekh to Henry.
It was impossible to believe that people who had recently protected their country from fascism were traitors. Party and state officials and common people suffered from repression. My mother’s friend Grigori Sitnitski, a bank employee was arrested by a false report. He was incriminated acquaintance with his former supervisor, ‘enemy of the people’, ties with foreign intelligence agencies and some other nonsense. Grigori was ‘lucky’. After tortures in NKVD cells he became an invalid and was released for absence of corpus delicti. He had to sign confirmation that he would not disclosed what happened to him in prison for the fear of death penalty. He told it in secret to his wife and she told my mother after Grigori died shortly after he was released.
I was fortunate as well: since I wrote in all forms that I didn’t know my father I managed to escape the fate of the so-called ‘members of the family of an enemy of the people’ who perished in Stalin’s camps. I realized that I had to adjust to the system or it might destroy me.
Period
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Solomon Manevich
Tag(s)