This photo was taken in Kartashevka in the middle of the 1940s, after my son was born. Here you see me, Rita Razumovskaya and my son Alexei Razumovsky. This photo has its own history. Somehow I found the portrait of Pushkin's daughter Natalia. And she looked like me! So I put a copy of her portrait on my pass to Hermitage and used it for many years. And on this certain photo of the 1940s I have the same face as Pushkin's daughter.
In 1945 besides studying I was working. Then the rector of Leningrad University was a certain Mr. Vosnesensky and he liked all kinds of pomp, and they announced on the local radio that university students repaired destroyed buildings. Really, we shoveled the fragments, sometimes we found hands, legs, even heads sometimes, and repaired the houses, and I was a plasterer of a very high qualification.
The mother of Alexander Guriev introduced me to her pal Nicolas Razumovsky, whom I married a bit later. the marriage took place on the same day, when Berlin was captured, on 2nd May 1945. Just after this event I moved in with my husband. He came to Leningrad with the Gorny Institute, he was a professor then. For two years we lived on the campus on Maly Avenue, my son was born there. Then we got an apartment on the Fifteenth Line, where thereafter our common family life took place.
My elder son Alexei was born in 1946 in Leningrad. He has only a high school education, and then he became a car mechanic. Of course, my children knew that they were Jews, from their very birth. I never lied to them or hid this fact from them. What for? My daughter Olga couldn’t apply for the university, and in the 1970s someone beat up Alexei, perhaps, not even thinking or guessing that he was Jewish. So at home we talked about it, we had such conversations, but I don’t remember that we ever mentioned Jewish traditions.
