This photo of me, Raisa Shulyakovskaya, and my husband, Fyodor Shevyolkin was taken in 1935, the year we got married, in Leningrad.
My husband’s name was Fyodor Petrovich Shevyolkin, a Russian, who came from a village, a common fellow from Vologda region, born in 1907. My husband was a naval officer, he was a commander. I was a technologist-engineer by profession.
We got married in 1935, when I was a fifth-year student. We had a common wedding in Krasny ugolok, danced a little bit and that was all. There were no guests, only our closest friends. We weren’t registered, every open marriage was considered legal. He submitted documents to the college, or rather wrote in the papers that he had such-and-such wife and they believed him. We didn’t need to register at that time. If a man left for the war, he wrote that he had a wife and everybody believed him, people were honest.
After we got married, we got a room in the dormitory. He lived at the college, I lived in the dormitory but we got a room on Krasnaya Street, in the Textile Institute dormitory. After the institute I could do without an assignment, as I was a wife of a military man. But we had our ideological principles and I agreed to be assigned. I was assigned to Chernigov, to the Kotoninnaya factory. The factory produced short spinning fiber, a chemical one, it’s not produced anymore. I worked less than a year and left for Vladivostok where my husband was assigned to. I found a job as head of laboratory at a plywood plant. A very stupid profession, but I had university education, so I could work. I was accountable to the Leningrad Laboratory.
