Tag #147742 - Interview #78105 (Jacob Mikhailov)

I remembered the Twentieth Party Congress, where Nikita Khrushchev divulged crimes committed by Stalin. I believed Khrushchev at once. I still think a new page in history was turned, removing the old one full of terror. It wasn't accepted by everybody. My father didn't know what happened at the party congress as he was in hospital. When he was discharged from the hospital, he went to the central party committee and read a publicly closed letter with Khrushchev's speech. My father was so astounded that he stayed in bed for a few days feeling unwell. Father saw things happening around him and he wasn't so gullible not to understand what was going on. After perestroika [42] they started publishing the list of people who had been shot [see Rehabilitation in the Soviet Union] [43], where I found many familiar names, former employees of my father. He might have stuck to the opinion of the majority that Stalin's surrounding was to blame, not Stalin himself. There are many people nowadays who disbelieve the repressions, the fact that millions of innocent people had been shot and exiled to the Gulag. Mother told me that after the exoneration many people came back to the ministry. When my mother asked her former employee who was falsely convicted and imprisoned for 14 years, what had happened to him in the Gulag, he told her to ask no questions. I can only imagine what horror he had to go through if he didn't want to recall things.

After the Twentieth Party Congress I was sure that our life would dramatically change for the better. Of course, certain things changed. We didn't have to fear repressions. One could speak his mind; anti- Semitism slightly faded in every day life, though it remained on the state level.