My mother Musia Krakovskaya and I in Puscha-Voditsa on the outskirts of Kiev. I am seven years old.
My mother worked from morning till night. I had a nanny. She was a very nice Ukrainian girl. Her name was Galia. She came from a village near Kiev. I have very good memories of her. Later I went to a kindergarten and Galia left us and got married.
In 1932 my mother left her Party activities and entered Kiev State University, the Faculty of History. I believe this saved her life during the repression of 1937. She was not a public person any more, perhaps, that was why they didn’t touch her. She graduated in 1939 and was offered a job at the university. She was a secretary of the Party bureau of the department and then the university. I don’t know how she survived in this meat-grinding machine.
The time of the Great Terror in 1937 touched me, too. I was six years old when I was interrogated at the KGB office. They asked me who visited us and what we discussed at home. My mother was sitting behind the door. The interrogation lasted six hours in a row. You can imagine how my mother was feeling all this time. My mother never told me that anything like this might happen, so I was not prepared. But they probably didn’t hear anything suspicious in my prattle and they left us alone. I went to the kindergarten at that time and recited poems about Lenin to them.
