Source: http://zagraevsky.com/memoirs2_engl.htm
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 00:19:38+00:00

Document:
Long time since we do not rattles.
We live in the living does not.
A paradox: I most of all “about life,” he told, whose views on life, I finally least, though, and carry his name. However, the influence of family unpredictable, who knows what and where does our subconscious... And talking about my grandfather on the maternal side, Mikhail Naumovich Zagraevsky.
This name, which is sometimes confused either with graphs, whether from the barons Zakrevskij belonged to my great-great-grandfather, a Jewish tailor, who moved from Poland to Odesa.
My great-grandfather, Naum Izrailevich, was born around 1880 and inherited his father's tailoring trade. He lived and worked in Pushkinskaya street Odessa, apparently, was not rich, but “strong” host, had a large family - his wife Faina, nee Greenstein, and at least three sons and two daughters.
My grandfather, as far as I know, was the “middle” son. About the prosperity and living standards of families said this first, that, like, none of the children in infancy is not dead. In those days it was rare, especially within the pale of settlement”.
Remember this national disgrace the Russian Empire? “Pale of settlement” took place somewhere in the border of modern Ukraine and Belarus, and live the rest of the Russian territory, the Jews could only under special permission. They were also forbidden to enter higher educational institutions. And the riots were not uncommon.
By the way, notice that all the time I have about the grandfather the family to speak in the style of “about,” “probably,” “appears, and information about the life of Russian Jews to draw from any source except a memory of Mikhail Naumovich? Indeed, from the huge number of hours I spent in childhood with his grandfather, he has not paid any of the story about her family. It was not that secret, but not a topic for conversation.
The fact that Mikhail N. was terrified of anti-Semitism and to avoid any “Jewish question. He, unfortunately, were the reasons for that, but in the end, the situation has reached the point of absurdity - “junk theme” for my grandfather was not even his family. Most of the ancestors of Mikhail Naumovich I learned not from him but from my grandmother and mother, though his own grandfather passed on to them.
All this would be ridiculous, when would not be so sadly.
The Soviet government worked so hard to cultivate cast off the old world”that I was dealing with all the grandparents, none of them (!) he could not know the date of birth of either of ancestors. Although in those days usually do not celebrate birthdays and name days, it now seems odd as it does not know when he was born his father? Or mother?
Mikhail N. was no exception and date of birth, his father Naum Izrailevich not know, and year too. Around 1880 - all that is known. About the same time great-grandmother was born and Faina.
He was born on April 15, 1906. Although it is known exactly.
Survived the grandfather and died in 1995, his younger sister, Sarah Naumovna was as baited anti-Semitism, but in old age has become more candid and told the following.
My great-grandfather, a native of Poland, may indeed have been Zagraevsky, but great-grandfather, the warden of the synagogue, converted the name of the Jewish way and became Zagraevskerom. And the old man from birth not only bore the name Zagraevsker, but the name is not Michael, and Moses.
Survivor after the pogroms of the civil war, all the children in the early Soviet time when you receive your passport changed the name to “Polish” fashion and again began Zagraevsky. Moreover, the grandfather changed his name. His sister Sarah - also, with the “fashion” - Zorya. And she began Zorya Zagraevsky, in the future - a journalist of some regional Newspapers in Yalta. And another sister, Mayor, became known in fashion-Mary. However, everyone called her “neutral” - Nice.
As for my grandfather, he became Michael, little has won, because anti-Semitism, vypracovani in bloody massacres of 1918-1920, then not that disappeared, but for a long time “went underground”.
My grandfather became active Komsomol worker, married, as expected, on betrothed parents Jew (the name of the first wife of Mikhail Naumovich story to me not reported), successfully graduated from the Institute of milling industry in Odessa and quickly moved to Moscow, where he began to advance on line item in the construction of feed mills. By the early thirties, he had already reached the level of chief engineer, and soon the chief of construction.
Not surprisingly, he then nationality only helped - think of “Lenin” CC. Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, Uritsky, Volodarsky, Voikov... All not listed.
The second time my grandfather was married about 1931 to Lidia Viktorovna Peter, my grandmother. Lidia Viktorovna - the man who I am, and my mom are obliged to all, and father of many, despite the endless conflicts with the mother-in-law.
The lady of the house, “iron lady” - but then, who survived the terrible time of Stalin, did not become an iron? Soft to the spineless grandfather Mikhail N. - and that by today's standards was Oh how difficult! And as his wife was not so much of iron and titanium. Life is made.
Lydia V. knew when she was born, up to a week at the orphanage date in the passport she wrote the rough. Based on the convenience of the birthday party at the weekend, it was considered that it happened around 7 November 1907 in the Cossack village of Ust-buguluk near Novocherkassk.
It's about his family talked a lot and willingly, but often some nonsense like that, like drinking tea. So I will focus only on the most key points, which I still managed to learn.
Grandma's father, Victor Peter (1877-1919), was a deacon, and has taught at school “Law of God”. His profession was hereditary: grandmother's grandfather, Nikolay Viktorovich, was a priest in the local Church and died in 1917.
My great-grandmother's name was Barbara-Mitrofanovna (maiden name of the mother, the grandmother forgot, but once mentioned that she was the daughter of a Rabbi, and therefore before the wedding had another name-surname). Years of life Barbara Mitrofanovna: 1884-1922.
What do they tell us their dates of death? Right, about the civil war, famine and typhus. At the same time the family had a few deaths: out of ten children Viktor Nikolaevich survived the civil war only five: Nicholas, Vladimir, Lydia, Nina and Galina.
It's just a dry word, but I'm not trying to give a literary character or the book or painting a continuous string of deaths in the home of Peter. My grandmother once told me that when his father died, his mother encouraged children to say goodbye and they all wept around his bed. More I do not know any details and no right to invent.
Children were dying one after another. The worst thing that fever - no more terrible from a medical point of view, the disease than any ordinary kind of flu. Yes, actually, as such it was. But now the flu die very weak or “bamuwamye” unit, and then from typhus killed thousands.
All my life, for example, thought that cropped head from typhoid patients - perhaps one of the ways of treatment, or prevention of hair loss. And just recently I got it: the hair was lice! It was almost the norm “heroic revolutionary times”. Where lice - there is an infection, and the patient primarily wanted rid of them. That shaved shaved.
For the fact that few children survive, I must say thank you to the eldest of them, Nikolai V. Petrovsky. He was in the twentieth sitting on a surviving plant in Novocherkassk (it seems to repair locomotives), was able to identify his younger brother and three sisters in the orphanage, where they grew up.
Who can imagine the lives of orphans in the midst of civil war, including hunger, filth and lice, let them try. I have not, despite the many art books on the establishment of Soviet power in General and on-don in particular.
Grandmother, of course, sixty years later blunted visual perception, and unpleasant it was once again remember the orphanage. She told only that they were collecting “cake” (in scientific - “meal”that is squeezed sunflower) and change it in a certain proportion of bread. And the older brother helped as he could. And after 1921, and the state is somehow helm. Perhaps the helm - is a strong word, but to die of starvation were not given.
And I remember my grandmother received a summons to the TB dispensary - she's in the orphanage, as most of the orphans had TB, it “was put on record,” and so, apparently, life she has this “account” stretched, time after sixty years it was found and offered to take the tests. We all headed grandmother, laughed a lot.
However, remember Novocherkassk orphanage with a kind word. And brother Vladimir (he disappeared in the years of Stalinist terror, and more about him has not heard), and all three sisters survived and were more or less acceptable secondary education.
In 1925, Lydia V. graduated from the orphanage school and soon enrolled in Novocherkassk Institute of agriculture. Knowledge and practical skills that school does not charge, up to the fact that the entire group of tests is absolutely officially handed over the elder. But at that time it was normal provincial higher education. I think that the agricultural universities in the district centers and in our time is not far away.
Being a senior in practice in some large farm near Novocherkassk, Lydia V. met a young specialist from Moscow, worked in the Central laboratory of the feed and came to control the construction of an Elevator or something like that.
You've probably guessed that it was Mikhail N. Zagraevsky. He was short and stout, but, judging by the photo, already had a specific “nomenclature” gloss - a view which boss turn the head, a jacket with shoulder strap and, of course, rations! In short, by analogy with the modern “new Russians” - “cool new Soviet.
But my grandmother even a “cool” could not fail to notice - it was a very interesting woman. And not on fat “kustodievskim” standards, but quite a modern tall, slim, thin, with thin straight nose and slightly protruding cheekbones, dark-haired, dark-eyed. Did postcard beauties of the twenties? Lydia V. it is quite consistent.
But to promote an affair with a successful engineer was still a matter of technique. To keep this a successful engineer “with a” was, of course, more difficult, but my grandmother was and is. Grandfather had divorced his first wife (they were not), they, with Lydia quickly got married and soon moved to Moscow, Mikhail Naumovich obtained in the 13-meter room in a “communal”.
This house stood on Novinsky Boulevard, i.e. on the Garden ring. I almost wrote “on the corner of Novy Arbat”, but remembered in time that he was then and there was no trace. His “trial” in the early sixties, the charming old quarters around the “Dog ground” (absolutely the official name of the dead space). Then demolished the house, and now in its place - a huge globe (in the Soviet era era Aeroflot advertised, and now all sorts of banks).
For non-resident couples to get in early thirties room in Moscow was a luxury, even such as in the songs of Vysotsky: “thirty-eight rooms of the only one toilet.
Queries were different. The country also continuously build something, and promised the citizens of a very bright future. “Communal flats” were “temporary” phenomenon, and then Stalin was about whether to give each family a separate apartment, whether to expand living space by the conquest of Europe.
Could Mikhail N. and Lidia Viktorovna in 1931 to think that they will have to live in this room more than thirty years? Hardly. They were devout members of the Komsomol, believed the party, government and personally “the genius of all times and peoples”.
Sometimes grandparents went to Odessa to the “old” Zagraevsky but it soon stopped last grandmother disliked. My grandmother paid to the father-in-law of reciprocity and with already a huge impact on the spouse, dissuaded him from traveling. There was not time to go to the parents nomenklatura, who worked day and night.
And lived a young, relatively prosperous “somawansa” family.
In 1932 my grandfather sent a long trip in the city of Saratov chief of the construction of an enormous, or flour, or feed mill. Mikhail N., of course, immediately became a notable person in the city, had a “personal”gig, great service apartments and other “nomenclature good”. So significant that neither he nor grandmother noticed the terrible famine, raging then in the Volga region.
Perhaps, however, and noticed, but I would not tell. But on a personal cart to tell a lot and love - it was the peak of a career grandfather. He was only twenty-six years, but he never held such a serious post: anti-Semitism gradually entered into its own. A good example: in the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee (the then CPSU(b)) to the mid - thirties was the only Jew-Lazar Kaganovich.
But still continued “Saratov Paradise”, and grandmother, determined to have a child who came to bear it in there. She successfully gave birth on may 20, 1933.
This is the birthday of my mother, Inna Mikhailovna Zagraevsky.
As far as I know, Mikhail Naumovich in the education of the child took minimal participation - not before it. The plant is cracked Foundation Elevator, things had already been considered as sabotage, but my grandfather was lucky - he was not “nice guys from the iron gates of the GPU”, “only” the Prosecutor's office investigators. Since the last time it was possible to “agree”, and this mission, barely recovered from childbirth, assumed grandmother. Grandfather, paradoxically, was unable to establish the “informal” relations, in addition to the purely Soviet drinking.
I understand that the money (or “Borzoi puppies”) found, grandmother took on the role of conduit, and the case was closed. Cracks patched, Elevator grandfather survived and, I think, still stands today.
The plant in Saratov safely built. Usually, such large-scale construction projects construction chief automatically became Director of the plant, but my grandfather did not. His drive to become a kind of “villages and hamlets, then a chief engineer, then chief of the construction of some feed factories of local importance. Began a nomadic life, and whether her grandmother did not have any desire to share with father, or grandfather's family shackled, whether with a small child to ride it hard.
Lydia V. daughter returned to Moscow. My grandmother had to get a job, and as she did not own any profession, then settled down to the lab Peskov, a famous Professor of chemistry. However, the work was “dust-free, and labor specialist with some none, but still higher education before the war is very valued.
The yard was in the late thirties.
However, the rapid appointment to the vacant after the arrests of senior positions grandfather never got it. Nationality... This is not Marshal Zhukov, who during 1937-39 years took off, if I am not mistaken, from the divisional commander to commander.
But Mikhail Naumovich survived, thank God. Sometimes he came to Moscow, was walking with her daughter on Gogol Boulevard, read her mediocre verses type Apukhtin (grandfather was a very romantic), and everything was more or less normal.
I don't know, did Mikhail Naumovich in the famous meeting, demanding the execution, “cursed hybrid foxes, pigs” Bukharin and others like him, were signed whether the relevant collective letters, “handed over” whether at fault builders in the NKVD... It's a mystery, and he took with him to the grave. I think what he was doing and then the second and the third, moreover, without any worries and scruples.
Remorse arise when there is an alternative to the psychological, and my grandfather it was not until the end of days. He was a sincere Communist totally conformist beliefs, and Stalin had ceased to love only when he is ordered party.
However, many years later, my memory, soft character of Mikhail Naumovich never let him come in arguments with me to extremes such as: “you are All anti-Soviet, you must deal with the KGB”... He often went away from the conversation - too much love me, and was getting a little aged. But my father at once got.
I think that in Stalin's political beliefs such people were much more seamless. Although no - behavior Lydia Victorovna during the infamous anti-Semitic campaign in 1952 says that “Orwellian” unanimity still was not pervasive.
Stop, we ran too far ahead. About the year 1952, we will talk again, but until that “tomorrow was the war”.
War... a Man of my generation are acquainted with it well enough. And movies, and eyewitness accounts, and even some psychological atmosphere of acute sympathy - after all it was not in 1812, and relatively recently. And the very fact that the word “war” is still not in need of clarification - what speaks volumes.
Humming a long established path.
Attacks and the heroism of the soldiers had exhibited, of course, to the first plan, but was much less mass than the great national sorrow, before which even the dim collectivization and Kolyma.
And even the perception of the front line is primarily a smell of burning. All fights took place among the continuously burning towns and villages.
However, each perceives their experiences in their own way.
When the war began, my mother was eight years old. She recalled the following: on this day, grandmother, Lydia V. bought the chicken (not alive, but osobennuyu) and was going to cook the soup, and mother this chicken was sorry and put in the doll crib, she'd get well. Happened all the communal kitchen, and when my grandmother came from a baby chicken select something announced by loudspeaker and all at once somewhere fled in a terrible panic.
Statistics can calculate any “millions killed by the cheap”. Twenty million died in the war or thirty - terrible number, but sky-high and difficult for the human psyche.
To calculate, for example, the size of the crowd of people usually come from how many people can fit on a square meter, then find the area - and, it seems to be easy. Ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million - is understandable.
I was told about a curious directing the course in some American film: he starts as a standard action, and the main character, as expected, one machine-gun fire killed dozens of attackers. But at the time of death of each of these “bad people”, the action stops, and we show that the weeping wife, the grief-stricken mother, the unfortunate orphan children... And then becomes truly frightening.
And if you try to imagine twenty million dead, then is nothing but a calculation of the altitude of the mountain, which could lay the bodies, we did not succeed. But everyone thought he loved, he lived... Our imagination gives to the unimaginable arithmetic.
I sunk into the soul of another figure that is probably true, since not taken from one or another propaganda, and from dry practice at the military Department of the Institute: in the second world war, the ratio of those killed in the army and among the civilian population was approximately 1:1.
Also seems to be arithmetic, but let us ponder: soldiers armed, dressed, fed, more or less knows what goes into battle (guns in the back were not always and not everywhere), and, finally, just a Mature and strong man - that is what the concept of “military age”.
But near the death of each soldier is death of a woman, child or old man.
In my family it occurred to Nahum Izrailevich Zagraevsky, his wife Faina, daughter Mereu-Cute (with small children) and all their relatives from generation great-grandfather.
Naum Izrailevich refused to be evacuated from Odessa, as it was believed that the Germans - people cultural, as in 1918, during the occupation of Ukraine), they behaved very decently. This misconception killed in 1941-43 the years hundreds of thousands if not millions of Jews who lived during the reign of Tsar within the pale of settlement” and not moved during the Soviet regime in the Central region of the country.
Great-grandfather, great-grandmother and all their family were executed in the first weeks of the occupation - they lived in the centre of the city, and my grandfather had a tailor's workshop (the official Soviet standards he was a craftsman-alone without motor). Turned out that Villa at zagraevsky were in plain sight, and the house on Pushkin was necessary to the Germans under the headquarters and offices.
And only then I realized: in the Warsaw ghetto was not only women, children and old people, but young men. As in Odessa, and Kiev Jews “military age” is simply not there, they were called up into the army immediately after the war. Who was fighting?
Yes, and what? In Poland, people were very poorly armed, and in the USSR, Stalin made sure in advance that people have not left anything even remotely resembling a weapon. Even the radio (not to be confused with “loudspeaker”, configured solely on “Soviet radio”) had to be recorded, and as a result almost no one did not have them - a Soviet man volunteered to go “light” bodies?
Another point: in Warsaw and other major Polish cities, Jews were shot immediately, but organized the ghetto and taken away to concentration camps gradually. The remaining had time to realize what was happening. And in the Babi Yar primarily driven all they could, and destroyed totally unexpected, and then one by one the survivors were caught. The same thing happened in Odessa, and in the other occupied Soviet cities.
In England and America, Jewish communities were relatively small - from England Jews were expelled in the XVI century, and in America, the mass emigration has not started yet. Historically, the most “Eurasianism” were Germany, Austria, France, Poland, Czech Republic and the Russian Empire within the pale of settlement,” that is, Ukraine and Belarus.
All this was captured by Hitler. Those Jews who have time to understand what awaits them, and managed to emigrate from Germany in the mid-thirties, often traveling in the same Poland or France, where before they “got” a little later.
Hence the figure of 6 million dead. Let the rough, even killed five million or seven - what value are they now “arithmetic subtlety? No, the stories, of course, have, but the scale of the crime of Frankfurt this will not become any less or more.
This figure, whatever it was, including my great-grandfather Naum Izrailevich with my grandmother Faina and a large Jewish family.
“Lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more” (Jeremiah 31:15).
Mikhail N. Zagraevsky saved by the fact that he fought. However, he was chief of nomenclature, and the work he is in the army was “creative”.
It consists in the fact that his grandfather was a member of a certain group of specialists who retreated together with the red Army sappers and showed how to blow up the company, so they do not get to the enemy. The task was a minimum of explosives to destroy the enterprise for a maximum period, and for this needed engineers to put crosses on the most important shops and units. And then skedaddle on” (thus, purely in Odessa, expressed grandfather).
Sometimes our army “skedaddle” so quickly that engineers ahead, and they fled from the Germans ' gardens”.
So they came to Moscow, and my grandfather began to mine the capital of our Motherland. Blow up, thank God, did not.
Generally speaking, my grandfather was a character not just quiet, and income to indifference (or rather, to the modern “indifference”). My grandmother, for example, could not forget how, during the memorable criminal case in Saratov grandfather offered nothing to make and rely on the fact that “maybe take out the curve”.
It's funny - what “native Russian” traits in full-blooded Jew from Odessa!
Something similar took place in Moscow in the winter of 1941. My grandmother and mother were evacuated to Altai, and my grandfather lived alone on Novinsky Boulevard. Moscow at this time bombing every day, and very thoroughly - in the early nineties in the centre were vacant at the place of buildings destroyed in the war.
That such a character. Grandfather “getting through” something was extremely difficult, and I believe that he really could sleep under the bombs. Perhaps this “attitude” was not even natural, but a kind of psychological protection. Too many terrible things presented the life of even the relatively well-off burghers.
In 1942, my grandfather went through a similar “blasting operations” with enterprises in the North Caucasus, and when the Germans stopped and was sent to Fergana (Uzbekistan) to build a flour and feed mill industry. He built it years that way until 1946.
Abandoned the family, that is, Lydia V. eight-year-old daughter, was in Altai. And here grandmother for the first time after the orphanage knew what a life it is necessary to struggle seriously, with no one but herself, she will not help.
And if the vast majority of evacuees terrible distress, my grandmother managed to get an agronomist in a farm. You have not forgotten that she was graduated from Novocherkassk Institute of agriculture?
As far as I understand from my grandmother before the evacuation was the same agronomist, as, for example, an astronomer or a mechanic. But the diploma of higher education, plus an incredible ability to perceive the knowledge, plus no less incredible diligence... It bore fruit: she not only managed to get an agronomist, not just a couple of years to work on this post, but go to another farm, with an increase - senior agronomist. And it meant the planning of crop rotation, crop distribution, implementation plan and other “aerobatics”.
Collective farms, of course, were simply no (what to expect from Altai), but still!
I no longer doubt the abilities of Lydia Victorovna, when she was a dozen years later determined to understand how a computer works, and after an hour conversation with her grandson (i.e. me) it is quite possible. And my grandmother was not less than eighty years of age.
It is therefore not surprising that she was young to learn fast, if life makes.
A national currency is stable and never could be -- all the warring parties to actively filled each other's economy counterfeit money with the purpose to undermine. However, Stalin's government didn't struggle: first, it was useless (fake rubles were printed in German state mint and were indistinguishable from the real thing), and secondly, the distribution and rationing system of money is almost no role.
On the contrary, ironically, Stalin could say Hitler thanks to the abundance of “excessive” money inevitably led to inflation, which invalidated a low salary and has additionally bound the people to PICUM and cards, that is to manufacture.
At the end of the war “found” Mikhail N. Zagraevsky. He built the plant is no longer in Ferghana, and in Margilan (too Uzbekistan) and the family missed only year to 1945 mu. He designed the “invitation” for wives and daughters (this is required even for travel within the home country), they came to him in Margilan, and then the war ended, and soon they returned to Moscow, 13-metre room on Novinsky Boulevard.
She recalled that they are more a month traveling in a “boxcar” - at that time it was almost the norm. The stations have tanks of boiling water, and even sold some no food.
The reality of these lines Mandelstam was fully relevant to the late forties.
The mother began to go to school in Moscow. Her condition was very weak (due to some illness, she even missed a year of study, and at the entrance of the children were asked Lidia Viktorovna alive any more ina). But, nevertheless, she was an exemplary student and later Zolotodolinskaya. Lidia V. in order to give her daughter a good education, and so achieve their goals, she was like no other.
And Mikhail Naumovich continued to build animal feed plants, but already in the near suburbs. The chief engineer, the chief of construction... he Became an exemplary family man, also was surprised to find “ready” smart and charming daughter, and more or less fell in love, even though my memory a particularly warm relations were not.
But there was a grandmother, and she's the daughter loved! A husband simply commanded, and literacy, enabling them to make decisions as to yourself.
This is completely merged “model Soviet family”. My grandfather worked, the grandmother was engaged in the house, mom was finishing school. The future seemed bright.
These words of Alexander Galich we will often recall.
The campaign of anti-Semitism started not so sharply, as we can imagine: I wrote in the newspaper “Pravda” Dr. Lydia Timashuk that doctors Jews allegedly poisoned patients - and off it went! No, everything was spread out in time and in the life of every individual Jew was reflected in different ways.
Father saved by the fact that he was a business executives, and began to press it on the line. If the “doctors-killers was easier, slandered and bye, in order to “dig” under construction Manager, was required to turn over a mountain of documentation with the involvement of professional investigators obkhss (Department of struggle against theft of socialist property, if anyone even remembers this sinister Soviet acronym).
It took time, but it was not. The day of Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, we still remember more than once.
But Stalin took the case seriously. In 1934 in the far East was established Jewish Autonomous region, and in 1952 it was all ready for the forcible resettlement there hundreds of thousands of Jews, the benefit was gained wide experience in relation to Crimean Tatars and several of the Caucasian peoples.
The funny thing is that the Jewish Autonomous still exists. I wonder how many now in its capital, Birobidzhan, Jewish lives?..
Notably behavior Lydia Victorovna after learning about the impending relocation of Jews in Birobidzhan. She Orthodox Communist herself on her mother was Jewish, panicked and demanded from his grandfather that he... went to Church to be baptized, then, they say, not evicted.
Dead reasonably said that if they want, then evicted anyway, and if I had still not evicted, then stain the membership card. Don't know what the outcome of the dialogue, but my grandfather, of course, the Church went.
Stalin died, but his cause has not die immediately, and died there?
We will not comment on Stalin's legacy - frantic attempts of Russia to keep the unity of the Empire at the turn of the Millennium. We are talking about anti-Semitism, and he certainly did not die with Stalin.
Mikhail N., thank God, no time to sit down, but from the range of left and never returned. He was appointed head of a certain “group of experts” in the “Centroamerica” of the Ministry of defense, where he finalized until retirement.
In this post, my grandfather finally lost the ability to make independent decisions (from the head of construction is sometimes still needed), and its natural softness and caution had reached an extreme degree. Hence, the panicky fear of anti-Semitism.
And life began to oppress: daughter grew up, it had to dress-Shoe, while the civilian Ministry of defence salary was more than modest. In the end, Lidia Viktorovna again had to go to work. Before her forty-five years there was a question that is often given in sixteen: whom to be?
Professionally Lidia Viktorovna little that she could. More precisely, she could not do. Moscow is not Altai, here grandmother had nothing to do with the Novocherkassk agricultural education and several years of intermittent work experience of unpredictable professions. We had to start from scratch.
Lydia V. decided to recall the chemistry. The attitude is, as we remember, it had to, though very indirect: in the late thirties worked in a lab assistant Professor Peskov. It helped my grandmother to attend graduate school at the Mendeleev Institute.
She was lucky with the supervisor ('t remember the name, but the name Elizaveta Mikhailovna grandmother uttered with awe). She gave “dissertabelnuyu” theme, and now everything depended on the most Lydia Viktorovna.
Still don't understand how Lidia Viktorovna have managed to complete a postgraduate course and defend a thesis. Discipline, perseverance, ability to competently apply themselves, and even apply a coat supervisor... the Latter is not a joke, my grandmother told me this quite seriously, and I did not raise a hand to throw a stone at her for such “subservience”. Rather, knowing her incredibly strong character, I can only conclude that absolutely reckless pursuit of this goal.
So, in the mid-fifties grandmother he defended his thesis and got in the Mountain Institute, first as an assistant and then associate Professor of chemistry (candidates of Sciences was awarded the title of associate Professor is very fast).
At the same time still had to raise a daughter. And it was more and more difficult. My mother, Inna Mikhailovna Zagraevsky to the mid-fifties began to form its own character and its a difficult fate.
The child's mother was, frankly, greenhouse and absolutely non - self-love Lydia Victorovna to daughter knew no borders, no action. But the greenhouse had a positive side - discipline, diligence and ability to learn.
You can arbitrarily many laugh “crammer. But in my childhood, when laying down the basic amount of knowledge required, and Woe to those parents who do not understand. If the child is avidly read books, instead of walk and let in a pool of boats - not scary. Grow up - walking can catch up. As unread and unlearned in childhood is not made up.
Lydia V. realized this, and held her in the “iron hand”. Learn, learn and learn... the gold medal in the school says a lot - Inna got it in 1951, despite nationality.
It would seem, what value could have nationality in receiving the gold medal, when we need only to study for two years on all five and have exemplary behavior? But let's face it: not perfectly know all things. On the one hand, zolotorudnaja - a kind of “nomenclature” school, reporting, honor, and glory, and therefore a potential medalist on a number of items “pull”.
I think this behavior is all especially angered because the mother went to her grandmother, that is was very good. Little growth (this is, however, rather in his grandfather), black-eyed, black-browed, like a Gypsy, lively and cheerful.
Mother of a young Lieutenant of the NKVD was sorry and raised on the truck. Glory To God.
Now, despite the passionate love of the mother to the Soviet regime and personally Stalin, her graduation given this characteristic, which is not something that a decent job, " as they say, in prison would not have taken. She was and “antisocial elements”, and “asocial”and “refuse to support friends”, and so on and so on and so forth.
In the work to take, of course, were required - the distribution, and the “red diploma”... But work work strife, and Inna “to correct” (as was said in the distribution!) caught in the worst place - engineer in shop on manufacture of dyes Dorogomilovskaya chemical plant.
This plant is still spoil Moscow ecology in the area Dorogomilovskaya promenade, although, of course, and the equipment has become more sophisticated, and any filters set.
And can you imagine what he was dyeing mill in the mid-fifties! Huge open (!) the vessel where seethe reagents and young professionals on debt service obligation in the day to look at it and take samples. And dryers for these dyes, which hangs the smallest chemical dust, but which also have to constantly call.
Actually it passed through all the workers in the chemical industry. Man perebolela, body-generated appropriate antibodies, the employee has returned to chemical plant and, if lived before retirement, leaving her totally disabled.
But then, in the mid-fifties, “Inna” also waiting for the fate of aunt Zina. And here Lidia Viktorovna once again showed what he is capable of.
In our family there was a legend romantic content. I suspect that the authorship belongs to the mother is that she, in any case, it told me.
I have already said that my grandmother before the war he worked for Peskov, a Professor of chemistry. Now, it was thought that his grandmother was a Professor at a novel (perhaps Platonic). Sands was very old, but in every way helped.
During the war, Professor allegedly disappeared from sight, and his grandmother was “found” when I decided to go to graduate school, that is, twelve years so later. Sands was, accordingly, the more the old, but grandma helped to do and get “dissertabelnuyu” theme.
And when the daughter as the distribution was to Dorhimzavod, grandmother again went to the sand, he has used his connections, “otkazal” young chemist from the distribution and arranged in the same graduate school at the Mendeleev Institute.
Indeed, without some kind of “hairy legs” to reverse the relentless karma distribution seemed impossible. Even in my memory, in the mid-eighties, it was almost insoluble problem, but in the fifties, quite reminiscent of slave labor. Without corresponding record in a work-book to another job would not have, and there - or famine, or criminal article for “parasitism”. The collective farmers, for example, before the beginning of the sixties, even passports was not, that is, from the home farm, they could not leave.
So many years and all were convinced that flew over Lydia and Inna Mikhailovna what kind angel, old Professor Sands. I, too, sitting down for this book, I wanted to describe it in this romantic style, but something I still “pulled” to open the Small Soviet Encyclopedia and was surprised to find that Sands was really large scientist in the field of colloid chemistry, but died in... 1940.
No Professor after the war was not, as was my grandmother, Lydia V. Peter. She enrolled in the postgraduate Mendeleev Institute without any outside help, and there's nothing that time is not lost and gained the necessary connection.
Does not that bad for the forty-five, PhD student, who was almost in syllables? As she could prove that she was in the Mendeleev Institute signed a letter you want to transfer her daughter in graduate school, she has carried on all instances and pulled her daughter with Borisovata!
Oh, I almost forgot: still in senior year of College my daughter, that is, Inna, the first time I got married. Her husband was superintelligentny “professorial son, Yuri Iosifovich Levin, in the future - known structural linguist, specializing (at least in my mind) to Tyutchev and Mandelstam. Released in the early nineties, a magnificent two-volume edition of the latter replete with references to research Whilemina.
I saw Yuri Iosifovich once in a lifetime, years I was about seventeen (mother came to see him on some business - they maintained good relations), and I remembered it as the thin man, rather small. Yet fifteen years later I once went with my mother about it it, and I was surprised to learn that he was tall and slim, though thin. Intelligence and good manners visually reduce man - this funny fact is well-known psychologists. Hence, perhaps, the stereotype of the intellectual jokes.
Thanks Yuri Iosifovich, let a little inert and dull, but highly talented and intelligent - communicating with him and his company, Inna acquired the basic knowledge that in the near future have made it and poet, and simply well-educated man.
And once my mother decided to go with her husband on an excursion to Novgorod. Guide their group was a young architect Wolfgang Kavelmaher, my future father. It was 1956.
On this long stop. First, this year Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, which is logically completed the process begun in 1956 by the twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the report of Khrushchev “On overcoming the cult of personality and its consequences”. Secondly, the mother met a man for whom these events have meant the liberation of the parents of Stalin's camps and exile, and his own - from continuous standby arrest.

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