My father, Mark Moiseyevich Mlotok -Davydov (Party nickname - Davydov). The photo was made in Kharkov in 1920-s.
My father, Mark Moiseyevich Mlotok, was born in 1893. He finished yeshiva - 4 classes. He had no other education. He educated himself. He read a lot. He also played piano. He was a very gentle man, but kept strict discipline. He did not go to university but got involved in politics. There were many revolutionary clubs at the time, so he got engaged with these activities and under the Soviet power he went to work in the Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counterrevolutionaries. He was in control of money and values confiscating from the rich. For many years he worked at the State Security Committee. He started his career in Cherkassy. There my father and mother got married. It was certainly not a traditional Jewish wedding, but a new, communistic, wedding, with no ritual, no chupah, but with simple registration - such was the fashion then.
Father was sent to different cities of Ukraine and he fulfilled the Party's orders there. He liked that work very much. He was an honest man: while other people got rich in similar positions, my father gave every penny to the state. When he had a lot of experience in that work, he came to Kiev and was highly appreciated by the People's Commissionaire of the Interior of Ukraine. (Many innocent people were killed because of him. In 1937 he was arrested and shot too). My father was made chief of the personnel department, which was a very prestigious office. In 1937 many people were arrested and my father was doomed to arrest too. But he was sent to the north instead. He was appointed the chief of the camp of political prisoners in Archangelsk, which was in the north with mosquitoes and permafrost. Prisoners of his camp floated logs there. It was a demotion. He did not get any more military ranks in his life, just a mayor. But praise God even for this, at least he was left alive. He worked in the GULAG system, then he was sent to Siberia - Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, where he was the chief of camps again. Then he was sent to Karelia-Finland, where he was the chief of the construction of a hydrosystem.
My father had wonderful organizational skills.
My father understood that these people were innocent, because many of our relatives suffered too. But he was unable to change the policy; it did not depend on him. However, he was a man of discipline, who had full trust in the Communist Party.
As a real member of the Security Committee since 1920 he had a double name. His party nickname was Davydov. In his documents he was Mlotok-Davydov.
my father got very ill. He had three heart attacks and also he had stenocardia, so he could not breathe well. He smoked a lot and was very nervous and he died in 1954. He was buried with honors. He was on the list of honored Communists. He did not spend a lot of time in Kiev; here he spent time chiefly in the hospitals. He died at the age of 62.
