Tag #148313 - Interview #95114 (Lazar Sherishevskiy)

In 1938 during the period of arrests [24], my father was arrested and executed. I got to know that he was executed only 50 years later. At that time I only knew that my father had problems at work and that he was arrested. I wished I could believe this was a mistake, they would find out and my father would return home. We lived in a communal apartment [25] in Kiev that we shared with two other families. When the capital of Ukraine moved from Kharkov to Kiev in 1934 [before 1934 Kharkov was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1934 the Government of the USSR decided to move the capital to Kiev. All governmental structures moved to Kiev as well], 2 party officials from Kharkov became our co-tenants in this apartment. One of them Golyi, a Party Central Committee official, a decent and honest man, lived in one room, and Claudia Zakharovna, a young woman, who worked in the Komsomol Central Committee [26] of Ukraine, and her daughter lived in another room. We were friends. First Golyi was arrested and then, one night in summer 1938, my father and this lady were arrested. Perhaps they beat and tortured Golyi trying to make him confess who else he had involved in the anti-Soviet group and he must have named his colleagues and neighbors. The lady was released and I met with her later. Golyi must have been executed. My father was convicted of anti-Soviet activities and executed. What they wrote there was: ‘for anti-Soviet activities aimed at the detriment of the economy and disruption of Soviet production’. They didn’t give much thought to the wording, it never occurred to them that one day relatives would get access to these files. Besides, there were millions of innocent people put on this conveyor, exterminated and exiled without trials or investigations, so they didn’t care much about definitions of crimes. Besides, what could they accuse him of? He was ah honest person and a skilled employee. It was just that the policy was aimed at the extermination of the best individuals. Golyi was also innocent, but we would never be able to find out why he gave the names of his neighbors, and besides – did he? This is what I assume. Perhaps, somebody else reported on my father … I received notifications in the 1990s. My mother and I managed to have my father rehabilitated posthumously [27].