Tag #155530 - Interview #90041 (Susanna Sirota)

It was a confusing period, but Stalin and Lenin were our faith, religion and god, if you want. I think that the first word any baby pronounced was Lenin and not ‘mama,’ so strong the ideology was. We didn’t have any doubts. I remember that our class tutor was arrested in 1937 [during the Great Terror] as a Ukrainian chauvinist, although she had nothing in common with them. Our teacher Pavel Yasinovski had a Jewish wife. She was sentenced to death, but nobody knows for what charges, and he followed her. The secretary of the district Komsomol committee and our teacher of drawing were arrested. It was a scaring situation, but we believed that innocent people could not be arrested and that if they were arrested, then it was the right thing to do. It was hard to believe that our favorite teacher, Maria Nikolaevna, was an enemy, but she was arrested as such. Well, then it meant that they truly did something against the Soviet power.