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This is my father's cousin brother Leonid Ledovskiy. This photo was taken in Odessa in 1935.
In 1937 my father's cousin brother Leonid Ledovskiy was arrested. His real surname was Krikshtein and Ledovskiy was his Party nickname. He and his wife were underground Bolsheviks. Her Party nickname was Krasnen'kova. They had two children. Their son was born shortly after Dzerzhinskiy died and was named Felix after him. They named their daughter Ivstalinka after Stalin and his initials I.V. In 1937 Leonid was arrested at night. We were horrified that he turned out to be an enemy of the people being an old underground Bolshevik. Nobody heard from him for a long time. Later militia called his wife. They offered her to repudiate him as an enemy of the people. They threatened to arrest her and send to GULAG and send their children to a children's home for children of enemies of the people. It was a tragedy for her to refuse from her husband, but to save her children she had to repudiate from her husband. Leonid was in exile at the construction of Belomor-Baltic channel [Editor's note: Bertha must be wrong here since the Belomor-Baltic channel connecting the White Sea with the Onezhskoye Lake was inaugurated in 1933]. Prisoners worked on this channel manually with spades. He came back home shortly before the war. He had lost his teeth having scurvy. When the war began he went to the front where he perished. During Khrushchev rule in the 1950s Leonid's case was reconsidered and he was rehabilitated posthumously.
