Vladimir Tarskiy's certificate of rehabilitation

My certificate of rehabilitation issued by the Moscow prosecutor's office in 1993. It states that citizen Vladimir Tarskiy, before the arrest an under age pupil of the 6th grade of school #170 Moscow, imprisoned in 1939 for an effort to cross the state border intentionally, was rehabilitated in 1991 according to the law of the Russian federation 'On rehabilitation'. When in 1936 the war in Spain began, the schoolchildren began to dream to fight on the side of the republicans. I was no different. 'It's important to go abroad!' - I thought naively. So I took a train to Rzhev from where several international trains were going to Riga. I got to Rzhev [about 200 km west of Moscow] and managed to get into an international railcar. It was empty and all doors to the compartments, but one, were locked. My heart was pounding. I got into this compartment: there were rolled mattresses on the third bench and I hid behind them. I woke up from the noise of slamming doors: a frontier man and the conductor were inspecting the railcar. They didn't notice me and the border was crossed easily. So all I had to do was stay quiet till the train reached Riga [about 680 km west of Moscow]; it was like a sentence to ten years in prison to wait that long. At the first stop I got out of the railcar and into an empty barrel without a bottom to spend the night. A janitor discovered me and took me to the local police who put me back on the train to transfer me to the transportation and road department of the Rzhev NKVD office. They searched me and discovered a compass, a map and the flyers with the false slogans of the Soviet power, about the absence of freedom and lines for bread. 'Who gave you these, boy and where were you going to take this anti-Soviet stuff?' 'I wrote them myself'. I spent the first month in a cell of t 4x1.5 meters and about 2.5 meters high. One day in early June the guard opened the door and said: 'Tarskiy, get your belongings and come out'. I was taken to a special black car with steel bars commonly called 'voronok' I was taken to a room where there was an officer whom I had never seen before. He offered me a seat and read the sentence of the special council of the NKVD USSR: 'The defendant charged under Article 58-10 part 1 and 84 of the CC of the RSFSR Tarskiy V.L. should be set free with the inclusion of the term of punishment into the term of his stay in the bull pen'. They asked me to sign under my obligation not to disclose the circumstances and materials of my case, gave me a ticket to Moscow and took me to the railway station in a car. I returned home. When my stepfather saw me thin with my head shaved, he demanded my certificate of release and burned it. ?That's it! Nobody knows about the jail. Don?t tell anybody and live your life as a free person?. In the 1960s I, a veteran of the war and former intelligence sergeant, addressed the KGB with a request for review of my case. The officers there were surprised: 'What do you mean, citizen! You crossed the Soviet border, didn't you? You did. This means, you are still a state criminal and you are not subject to rehabilitation'. Many years later, on 18th October 1991, the law of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic], 'Rehabilitation of the victims of political repression', was issued canceling all verdicts of the 'Special Council of the NKVD', and the 'council' itself was recognized as illegal. On 23rd June 1993 I finally received a certificate of rehabilitation.