Tag #152642 - Interview #95280 (Grigoriy Kagan)

Every day newspapers and radio published about new arrests and discovering new ‘enemies of the people’ 14. My friends and I admired Yezhov 15 and those decisive efforts he undertook to discover and eliminate enemies of the people and enemies of the Soviet power. Of course, my friends and I believed it all, being Komsomol members. How could we doubt the Communist Party and Stalin’s decisions! When my mother’s brother Boris Braginskiy was arrested, I started having doubts about what was happening. I knew and admired him since my childhood. He was a wonderful person. We didn’t see him often: he was a high official and did not have much in common with an ordinary cabman’s family. Boris and his wife Alla visited us occasionally. Once he told me that Trotskiy 16 was a great man. I never mentioned it to anybody since we had this discussion after Stalin deported Trotskiy from the USSR. Boris may have spoken it out elsewhere. He was arrested, prosecuted for being a Trotskist and enemy of the people and executed in August 1936.