Tag #154063 - Interview #103439 (Boris Molodetski)

My friend Igor Chop told me that Misha tried hard to convince him to repudiate from his father who was imprisoned in 1937 [during Great Terror] 16, for his former service in the tsarist army as an officer. In our class no parents of schoolchildren were arrested, but in the parallel class there were about five children whose parents had been arrested. Our director Mr. Radzinski was a decent person. He supported these children. Igor Chop recently told me that director called him to his office to say words of support. Once on a Soviet holidays we were in the theater where a representative of Komsomol district committee greeted us with general phrases I said aloud: ‘Again propaganda for the Soviet power!’ Our history teacher was sitting beside me. She heard what I said and on the following day she called my mother to school and said ‘You are playing with fire when you allow yourself to talk dangerously in the presence of your child’. At nights people in our house didn’t sleep listening to booted steps in the yard: to which entrance they headed again? My father returned home late and sat reading a newspaper until very late. He was very concerned about the situation, but he kept silent about it. In 1937 few of my mother’s acquaintances suffered, but she didn’t discuss it with me, although I was already 16 years old. My mother was a law-obedient person. She strictly followed whatever orders issued by higher authorities.