Tag #146763 - Interview #83417 (Genrikh Len )

Then for some time this correspondence was interrupted. But in the meanwhile another thing happened. My sister was suddenly summoned to the special department at her place of work and charged with serious accusations based on the fact that her relatives were corresponding with people from the USA. She was even deprived of the opportunity to work with secret materials, which meant for her the loss of certain privileges and a possible dismissal from her job. She burst into tears and said that she was absolutely innocent, not implicated in anything and knew nothing. They told her, ‘Your brother receives letters from two people abroad.’ They told her the names.

She came to me in tears: ‘What have you done? You are going to ruin all of us! There are two people writing to you from America.’ I said, ‘Tell them that it’s not two persons, it’s the first and the second name of one and the same man, that this man had served in the Red Army, was a soldier on the Soviet side and is a friend of the Soviet Union, not its enemy. At present he is already retired, and there mustn’t be any claims against you.’ But still they lowered her degree of access to information, complicating her work to a certain extent, but her direct boss, respecting her business qualities, kept her at work all the same, actually saving her family from big trouble. And the officer, who wanted to gain promotion and show that he had found a ‘leak’ of information at his enterprise, did not receive the next ‘star’ on his shoulder straps, as this affair was not really credited to him.