Tag #154443 - Interview #97841 (Hertz Rogovoy )

In 1936 repressions started [Great Terror] 25 and lasted until Great Patriotic War. There were a lot of children in our class, whose parents had been arrested. Probably those made about 2/3 of the class. People treated them in a normal way, nobody abandoned friends, just because their father or mother got arrested. Jacob Lidov was my friend. His father was a driver of Balitskiy, NKVD 26 minister, a slaughterous hangsman. Stalin had a certain system: a person had a leading position in NKVD for 2-3 years, and then he was removed and put to trial аs ”enemy of the people”. He was replaced with a new one. Balitskiy in his turn became enemy of the people and was shot. His driver, Jacob Lidov’s father, was imprisoned. Jacob’s mother came to NKVD with the fairing for her husband, and she was told that he was not alive. She died there in the reception office. Jacob remained an orphan, he was raised by an old grandmother. There was a Ukrainian girl in our class, named Galina Uschipovskaya. Her mother was shot, and her father was put in jail. There were many such kinds of families. It even had not caused any emotions. The savage to us was that very often the teacher began the lesson by telling us to turn out from the textbook the page with the picture or information about a well-known person. In case we could not remove the page, because there was something useful overleaf, we were told to delete or to paint in blank ink or to clout that piece. Once we learned at a history lesson: Blyukher 27, the great commander, marshal of the Soviet Union, and the next day we would have to cover his portrait with black ink. Today he is a loyal communist, a struggler for the revolution, the hero, and tomorrow he turns out to be enemy of the people, betrayer, spy, coward or other riff-raff. The best people of the country, renowned revolutionaries, commander Yakir 28 – there were so many of them… Of course our children’s minds could not comprehend it. I could acutely feel such an inconsistence.