After the wedding my parents moved to the house my father had bought. It was a spacious wooden house with 3 rooms and a kitchen with a big Russian stove [8]. One room served as my parents’ bedroom, another room was mine and the 3rd room was a living room. Mama was a housewife. My father earned well.
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Displaying 36451 - 36480 of 50826 results
Evadiy Rubalskiy
During the revolution and the Civil War [9] there were Jewish pogroms [10] in Pavoloch. There were flocks [Gangs] [11] robbing Jewish houses and capturing and beating their Jewish victims, even killing some of them. Mama told me how she used to take shelter in a Ukrainian house holding me tight. Fortunately, none of our family suffered from pogroms.
I didn’t study Hebrew. My parents spoke Yiddish to one another at home and spoke Russian to me and my sister. I could speak and understand Yiddish. My sister only knew Russian and Ukrainian.
The family celebrated all Jewish holidays, but I think they did it as a tribute to traditions. They went to the synagogue on holidays and then celebrated at home according to the rules. When a holiday was over, they continued to live their routinely Soviet life.
We celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays at home. I was too young and cannot remember any details. On holidays my parents dressed up to go to the synagogue. Mama wore a kerchief at home and a fancy shawl to go to the synagogue. Jewish women of Pavoloch did not wear wigs, but they did cover their heads with kerchiefs. My sister and I stayed at home, when our parents went to the synagogue. When they returned home we started the celebration. I remember the festive atmosphere of the holiday at home. I enjoyed it and didn’t know that our life was to change dramatically in a short while.
We celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays at home. I was too young and cannot remember any details. On holidays my parents dressed up to go to the synagogue. Mama wore a kerchief at home and a fancy shawl to go to the synagogue. Jewish women of Pavoloch did not wear wigs, but they did cover their heads with kerchiefs. My sister and I stayed at home, when our parents went to the synagogue. When they returned home we started the celebration. I remember the festive atmosphere of the holiday at home. I enjoyed it and didn’t know that our life was to change dramatically in a short while.
April 1923 was dramatic for our family. In Pavoloch some gangsters brutally killed chairman of the executive committee called Ispolkom [13] – Varich, his wife, son and brother. The Soviet authorities sent an GPU [14] punitive unit to Pavoloch. The unit surrounded the town, gathered all people in the square and captured three hostages, who were wealthy and respected people in the town: Chernukha, an Ukrainian man, Leskowski, a Polish man, and my father. At first they captured another Jewish man, but then decided to replace him with my father. They said they were going to kill the wealthy bourgeois before anybody else. The hostages were accused of taking no action to prevent the murder of the Varich family. It didn’t even occur to them that the village was big and the hostages lived on the other end of it and did not know about the attack on the Varich family. There was no investigation or trial. The hostages were sentenced to death and executed. I remember that my father asked permission to say farewell to my mother and me. I remember how the crowd handed me from one another above their heads to where my father was. I understood there was something terrible going on, but I did not know what it was about. Then the hostages were executed. Few hours later an order to keep the hostages alive was received from Kharkov [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], but it was too late. In 1990 all three hostages were rehabilitated. Their relatives were notified that they had been shot illegally. I don’t remember how my father looked or how he dressed. I don’t even remember his face. Mama had my father’s photo before the Great Patriotic War, but I did not find any after I returned from the front. All I remember about my father is the feeling of reliability and strength that I had, when my father was with us.
Mama had no profession, but she had to provide for the two children. Grandfather Iosif gave her some food or money, but this was not enough. Mama got lucky: our neighbor’s son was director of a labor registry office and the woman must have asked him to help the widow with two children. He helped mama to get a job at the shoe factory. I remember that mama prayed at home every evening begging the Lord to help her keep her job. Mama was a reliable and industrious employee, but nevertheless she lived in constant fear of losing her job.
On Jewish holidays my grandfather, his children, their husbands and wives and their children went to the synagogue. They returned home to have a festive lunch. My grandmother was a very good housewife and cooked delicious Jewish dishes. There was a dining room in their house where the family sat at a big table. I remember Pesach. There was a glass for Elijah ha-nevi in the center of the table, and all members of the family were to drink 4 glasses of wine during the seder. My grandfather conducted the seder according to the rules. Then the family recited a prayer and sang merry songs. On Chanukkah my grandfather gave my sister and me some delicacies. This is all I remember about holidays – my memory fails me – but we celebrated other holidays as well.
In 1928 I went to the first form of a Russian general education school. There were other Jewish children in my class. Our teachers or schoolmates had no prejudiced attitudes toward us. We had friends and nobody cared about the nationality. I don’t think there was any anti-Semitism before the war [the World War II], at least, I didn’t face any. I had Russian and Ukrainian friends and my mother never told me that I should have had only Jewish friends. I studied well. I became a young Octobrist [15], and a pioneer [16] at school. Then our class was transferred to the Ukrainian school near our house. I don’t know what this transfer was caused by, I was young and could not be possibly bothered about such things. The only difference between such schools was the language of teaching. I had no problems with the Ukrainian language. In the 7th form I joined Komsomol [17].
In 1932 horrible famine [18] began in Ukraine. It also continued the following year of 1933. This was a terrible period of time. People were starved, many villages lost all residents to the famine. The situation was not so hopeless in Kiev. Crowds of desperate hunger-swollen people rushed to Kiev. They were happy to get any job to earn for food. I remember a street artist selling his pictures in the street not far from our house. He painted on asphalt and passers-by dropped coins to him. I also remember a beggar who sang nicely. There were numbers of homeless children, dirty and shabby – they must have also come from villages. They spread typhus in the town. There was a big house in Bolshaya Zhitomirskaya Street in Kiev – its tenants were doctors and the house was called the ‘doctors’ house’. There was central heating in this house and homeless children stayed in the basement of this house. They had lice and entertained themselves pushing lice inside apartments through keyholes. This house became the source of typhus which promptly spread all over the town.
My grandfather went to work in the store where bread was distributed by cards. He supported us well. Sometimes I came to his work. My grandfather pretended he was tearing off my bread coupon [Card system] [19] giving me some bread in return. I rushed home to share it with mama and my sister. There was also a Torgsin store [20] where food products or clothes were sold for foreign currency. I remember mama taking our silver cutlery to the store. She and I brought home a bag of millet that she received in exchange for the silver. We boiled the cereal and it lasted for quite a while.
My grandfather went to work in the store where bread was distributed by cards. He supported us well. Sometimes I came to his work. My grandfather pretended he was tearing off my bread coupon [Card system] [19] giving me some bread in return. I rushed home to share it with mama and my sister. There was also a Torgsin store [20] where food products or clothes were sold for foreign currency. I remember mama taking our silver cutlery to the store. She and I brought home a bag of millet that she received in exchange for the silver. We boiled the cereal and it lasted for quite a while.
Our neighbor was a plumber and a superintendent and he taught me what he knew about the job. My first job was at a construction site. I learned fast and soon I could work independently. I was even appointed a crew leader soon.
During the period of Stalin’s persecutions in 1936 and afterward I was old enough to remember the details. There was a big brick apartment building to which the shed we lived in belonged. There were many arrests going on. Deputy director of the Opera Theater Linetskiy, who lived in this house was arrested. However, he was released a short time afterward. They must have failed to find evidence against him. Baranov, another neighbor, who worked as assistant to the minister, was also arrested and I never heard about him again. Baranov was a very decent man. Despite his high position he never wanted an office car to pick him up at home. He went to work by trolley-bus. I knew him since I was a child and could never believe that he was an enemy of the people [23]. Many tenants of this house were arrested. Almost every morning we heard that another of our neighbors was arrested. There were many high military and governmental officials living in our street and there seemed to be no end to arrests. Some people committed suicide to avoid arrest. Many members of parliament were executed. They were honest people devoted to the Soviet power. They were rehabilitated later, after the Twentieth Party Congress [24], but for the majority of them this happened posthumously. However, one didn’t necessarily have to be a high military or governmental official to be sent to the GULAG [25]. Some people wrote reports on their neighbors or acquaintances [many common people in the USSR sincerely tried to support the authorities involved in this unprecedented campaign related to struggle against the domestic ‘enemies’, they wanted to contribute into it by identifying and detaining such ‘enemies of the people’, and unconditionally believed in honesty, justice and infallibility of this regime]. A routinely row might have resulted in an arrest. Anybody could be called ‘enemy of the people’ and arrested on false charges. My papa sister Shiva Shkolnik’s husband was arrested. His family could hardly make ends meet, but he was arrested and his arresters demanded that he gave them his money and gold. Of course, he never had any, but they took him to interrogations where they beat him mercilessly. He was released some time later, but not all of those who were arrested were as lucky as him. There were on-going meetings and people demanded to execute all enemies of people calling them traitors. Perhaps many people believed this was true: we were raised to have blind faith in the party and Stalin.
On 13th November 1939 I was recruited to the army and sent to study in Kalinin, Donetsk region [about 500 km from Kiev], in reserve artillery regiment 19. We took a military oath and then batteries of our regiment were sent to join the armed forces in the Finnish front [Soviet-Finnish War] [26]. In late February 1940 I was sent to Vladimir (Ukraine) with a small group of other military. In Vladimir the commandment was forming a light artillery regiment to be sent to the Finnish front. In March 1940 we moved to the front. On our way we heard about execution of a peaceful agreement between the Soviet Union and Finland [12 March 1940]. We arrived at the Karelian Isthmus near Leningrad where our regiment joined the 24th rifle division. We were reequipped and became howitzer-artillery regiment 246. This division, one of the oldest in the Soviet army, was formed from partisan units in summer 1918. It was awarded the Order of the Combat Red Banner [27] and named ‘Iron’ for the seizure of Simbirsk during the Civil War.
We were sent to Leningrad. In April 1940 the division was preparing for the 1st May parade in Leningrad. We rehearsed at nights and during the day we could walk and tour the city. It was an interesting time. Leningrad is history itself.
We knew that fascism was booming in Germany and that Hitler’s armies attacked Poland in 1939, but it never occurred to us that Hitler or anybody else could attack the USSR. We had been told that we were the strongest in the world and that our victorious army could only defeat enemies on their own terrains. We never had a bit of doubt about it. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [28] was executed nobody even thought that there was such a possibility of an attack on the USSR.
At night of 20 - 21 June 1941 the situation around us raised much concern. At night on 22 June few additional guards, including me, were appointed. My duty was off at 2 o’clock in the morning and having transferred the post to another guard I went to bed. At 4 o’clock in the morning we were awaken by powerful artillery bombardment. Shells were flying into the rear over our heads. We were close to the near-border stripe line: one and a half hours later German units broke through the border guard covering forces and came close to where we were. One of commanding officers ordered us to retreat while he stayed keeping firing at Germans to help us leave. He must have perished. We were armed with rifles and didn’t have bullet stocks. We could not retreat running back: there was mass barrage of fire. I didn’t even notice that I was wounded in my arm at once. Fortunately, I had good ‘rush-run’ and crawl techniques. I got to a forest where nurses gave me first aid. Germans were very close and we could hear their shouting. Slightly wounded military were told to walk to a hospital in Grodno. When we got to Grodno, a bombing began.
From there I was sent to 722 rifle regiment of 205 rifle division. Germans were approaching Kiev and our division was fighting on the avenue of approach to Kiev. I was appointed a communications operator in a company. On 7 August 1941 our division and landing troops passed to the offensive and recaptured Zhulyany, a suburb of Kiev [today it’s a district in Kiev], the Zhulyany airport. This was our first success since we had only retreated before. We often had hand-to-hand fights and there were dead bodies all around. We fought for each street and each house. There were selected German divisions opposing us and they received additional forces of aviation, artillery and flame throwers. We held out till 18 September, when we were ordered to retreat. [Kiev was occupied 19 September 1941.
We fought in the south of Stalingrad, in Krasnoarmeysk, Volgograd region. This area had a strategic significance for the operative area of Stalingrad. The area was elevated and made an excellent observation point. Our battery was defending the town. Soon Stalingrad became a battlefield. [31] Our division was assigned to the 62nd army and we fought in the town with this army. I was a gun layer for a 76-mm front mortar in the first rows of rifle units and fired by direct laying. Our division was one of the first units to arrange transportation of the wounded to the opposite bank of the Volga on the rafts made by field engineers. We also hauled food and ammunition there. In the middle of September we were cut off the rear supplies of our regiment. My commanding officer ordered me to find a passage, when it got dark, to move our 3 mortars and the wounded from out of the barrage of the enemy. 2 other fellow comrades were to assist me. We fulfilled the task and came to the army 62 commandment point near the harbor. The battle was going on. Our cannons were camouflaged by the wall of a high ruined building. Few people were at the cannon and the others stayed in the nearby one-storied building. All of a sudden German planes attacked us. We had to go back to our unit and deliver a sealed letter containing an order and some food to the regiment commander. However, there was no way for us to fulfill this task. Germans cut off our passage, and there were already units of the 10th NKVD [32] divisions in defense on this site. They did not allow us to go through the passage to where our units were since our units might confuse us for the ones who wished to surrender and shoot us. Division 244 finished its combat actions in Stalingrad on 20 September 1942. Of over 4 thousand people at the beginning of combat operations it had 288 people left at the end, including maintenance and logistics people.
I joined the Communist Party before the battle. I had become a candidate to the party in Stalingrad. I was eager to become a member of the party and sincerely believed in its ideas. I was unaware of many things then…
. On 9 May 1945 we heard about the complete and unconditional capitulation of Germany. This was the end of the war. I spent all these years at the front line, in continuous battle operations. I only took rest, if I can call it so, in hospitals. My combat awards are my proof that I had made my contribution into our victory over the enemy: an Order of the Great Patriotic War of Grade I, an Order of Victory, two Orders of the Red Star [40], order For Courage, medal for Valor, medals for defense of Kiev, for defense of Stalingrad, for seizure of Konigsberg, for seizure and defense of a number of towns. My awards are the best proof that there was no anti-Semitism during the war. We did not segregate between nationalities. All that mattered was what kind of person was beside you. It often happened at the front line that your life depended on how your comrade acted.
There were SMERSH officers of NKVD units in all regiments during the war [SMERSH is the abbreviation of ‘Smert Shpionam’ ("Death to Spies" in Russian), special secret military unit for elimination of spies. SMERSH is actually the Ninth Division of the KGB, originally created into five separate sections. The first section works inside the Red Army]. Their function was to capture spies, as one can see from the name, but they actually monitored the army and each individual. It was the same at peaceful times, when NKVD kept the life of each individual under control. I witnessed four executions in our regiment: a first sergeant, a lieutenant and two privates. They remained behind the regiment during a march and were convicted of desertion, though I’m sure that there was no such intention. They must have been just worn out, but they were shot after the SMERSH officer issued his verdict. Later the commandment set an order to grant them life, but the SMERSH officer replied that they had been executed: and that was that. When we set feet in other countries, the SMERSH officers got engaged in dealing with our prisoners-of-war. We never blamed those who had been captured be the enemy: we knew how it could happen. Often people were captured when they were lying wounded in the fields: and who was to blame that our nurses had failed to take them to hospitals? Anything could happen. However, those prisoners, who had had their portion of hardships in fascist camps were convicted of having surrendered and were sent to the GULAG in Siberia.
Our officers told me to stay in the army, but I was tired of this army life and was eager to go home, but nobody waited for me there: my family had perished. Since August 1941 I had no information about my family. I was trying to find out their whereabouts through the evacuation quest agency in Buguruslan. Despite the general mess, this organization worked accurately recording those who were in evacuation, but they replied they had none of my family on their records. This happened, when people evacuated on their own and left no information with official offices. I was hoping they had survived. When Kiev was liberated [6 November 1943] I wrote to our address until I finally received a reply from our neighbors. They informed me that my mama, sister and grandmother decided against evacuation. My grandfather remembered Germans from the time of World War I and believed they might persecute communists, but not Jews. They stayed and followed the commandant’s order to walk to Babi Yar on 29 September 1941. Besides my grandfather, mama and my sister Shiva, who finished the 1st course of the Food Industry College in June 1941, my maternal grandmother Itta Pogrebinskaya, mama’s sister Riva Pogrebinskaya, grandfather Iosif’s sister Hana Leschiner and her husband perished in Babi Yar. In Pavoloch fascists executed all Jews in the number of 2500 people. There is a common grave where those people whose only guilt was that they had been born Jews were buried. There were only 3 survivor girls, the rest of them were shot. There were no Jews left in Pavoloch except the Ruzhinskiye husband and wife. They’ve passed away. There is only a Jewish cemetery and the mass shooting site in the village. There are no living Jews left there.
Our annex where we resided before the war was not ruined, however strange it may sound. I moved in there and went to work as a construction plumber in a construction trust. Here was a lot of work to do: Kiev was severely ruined. At first we were to restore the utility lines and the buildings and later we started new construction. I made a big contribution into installation of gas supply lines in Kiev. There was my portrait on the board of honor of our trust. I was the best specialist. In order to fill the gaps in my theoretical knowledge, I entered the course of foremen at the Construction College and finished it successfully. I had all excellent marks in all subjects in my graduation certificate. This course gave me more than any college itself: there is a lot of theory in colleges, and this training course was for the people having practical skills and its objective was to improve actual skills and abilities of practical work.
We got married in 1947. We had a very ordinary wedding considering the hardships of this period of time. We registered our marriage in the registry office and in the evening we had a modest dinner with our closest relatives.
My wife and I spoke Russian at home. I had forgotten my Yiddish, and my wife had never known it. We didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays at home. We were both atheists and besides, I was a member of the party. We always celebrated Soviet holidays: 1 May, 7 November [41], the Soviet army Day [42], Victory Day [43], New Year and our family members’ birthdays. Sometimes we visited my father’s sisters Sophia or Rachil or my father’s brother Anatoliy on Pesach.
Our daughters grew up as all other Soviet children. They studied in a Russian general education school, were young Octobrists, pioneers and Komsomol members like all other children. They were not raised religious. My wife and I believed religion and traditions to be vestige of the past, something that modern people did not need whatsoever.
In 1948 trials against cosmopolitans [Campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’] [44] started. There were articles published in newspapers every day about another ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, activists of science or art, and of course, they were all Jews. At that time the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee [45], organized during the war and providing a big support to the country was routed. All members of the committee, and some rather outstanding people among them, were sentenced to death or long-term imprisonment in the GULAG camps. Solomon Mikhoels [46], a popular actor and chairman of the committee was not put in trial. In Minsk, where he went on business, he was hit by a truck ‘accidentally’. I don’t know about the others, but I understood there was actually no accident and that this was all plotted. Of course, these processes inspired negative feelings about Jews in the people, who did not do any evaluation or comparison and preferred to blindly believe everything the newspapers published. Anti-Semitism was growing. It gradually emerged on the state level. I think it reached the peak during the period of the ‘doctors’ plot [47] in January 1953. The central newspapers published the letter of Doctor Lidia Timoschuk entitled ‘Murderers in white robes’. It stated that the Kremlin doctors whose patient was Stalin were trying to poison him. Stalin was an idol of the Soviet people. Nobody doubted the Timoschuk’s statements. I didn’t believe that what this newspaper published was true. During the war I was in hospitals and I saw how devotedly the doctors worked and how they took every effort to bring their patients to recovery, but the majority of people were convinced that newspapers were publishing the truth. This caused aggravation of anti-Semitism. To abuse a Jew was almost a patriotic deed. Of course, this was particularly hard for Jewish doctors. People refused to visit them or have them in hospitals and demanded other doctors. Jews could not find a job or enter colleges. It’s hard to say what this would have brought the society to, if Stalin had not died on 5 March 1953. Now I understand that his death was probably our rescue, but at that time Stalin’s death was a common grief. People did not hide tears and I cried, too. The speech made by Khrushchev [48] at the 20th Congress of the party in 1956 revealed the truth for me about Stalin and his accomplices’ crimes. The collectivization [49], when the most skillful and experienced farmers were called kulaks [50] and exiled to Siberia, prewar arrests and postwar trials over cosmopolitans, the doctors… It’s hard to name all of them. Some people still believe that we had won the war thanks to Stalin and that our forces went in offensives with his name. It is true, we went in attacks with the words: ‘Hurrah, for Stalin!’, but it was not Stalin who defeated fascism, but the people despite Stalin. How many mistakes had been made and perhaps they were intentional actions rather than mistakes. We might have won with significantly fewer casualties if it had not been for these misdeeds of Stalin. Since 1936 he was gradually executing the best commanders, the elite of the army. New commanders had no experience. At times general were appointed as commanders of regiments and when they arrived in place, their acting predecessor in the rank of captain transferred the office to him. Then it turned out that all high ranks in this regiment had been executed by Stalin’s order. There were many such cases. Many army units were in camps at the beginning of the war and there was no communication with them. The Hitler’s army was significantly more numerous that our army. German soldiers were armed with machine guns and we had antediluvian rifles of the World War I type. Stalin failed to figure out the direction of the major blow of Hitler. Hitler’s tactic was to seize the capital and then the country was to be his, but Stalin believed that Hitler’s priority was Ukraine, and he made another mistake. His next mistake was fortification areas. It was not beneficial for us to build weapon emplacements along the new borders of the USSR – Belarus and Western Ukraine. These areas were annexed to the USSR in 1939. [Annexation od Eastern Poland] [51] They formerly belonged to Poland where the railroad track was 7 cm narrower than in the USSR. [In Europe, the standard gauge is 143.51 cm. In the USSR, among other reasons in order to prevent a fast railroad offensive from abroad, the standard gauge was 152 cm. In many of the ex-Soviet countries this system is still in use.] So, we had to replace the railroad track and build bridges and reconstruct the roads. This was to take a long time. Then came our army food stocks and weapon stocks. The government decided on their location. They had some located farther than the river Volga and others for the western direction. The government’s rationale was that our army was not to retreat, but advance and then we would just march from one stock to another while we retreated and Germans captured our stocks. At best our units managed to eliminate them to leave nothing to the enemy. The next mistake was the tank corps formed in 1932. They did not justify themselves. After the war in Spain [Spanish Civil War] [52] they were disbanded and the combat power of the army reduced. Stalin did not trust the intelligence. Our intelligence agent in German Richard Zorge [53] informed Stalin that Germans were planning to attack the USSR on 22 June 1941, but Stalin called this information a misinformation of the British intelligence and believed Zorge to be a double agent. We are still unaware of many things, but even this information is sufficient.
I cannot say that our life improved during the Khrushchev rule, and there was no more anti-Semitism in our life, but it became easier from the moral point. There were no more demonstration trials, executions and there was a feeling of having more freedom. Anti-Semitism began to decline, but then it became visible again. It was hard for a Jew to get a job. Even if there was a vacancy, when a Jew came for an appointment, they demanded his passport. There was a ‘nationality’ line item in passports, the so-called ‘5th line item’ [Item 5] [54]. When they looked at this item, they declared the vacancy was already gone. However, I never faced this problem. Construction people were valued well and besides, many people knew me, but once I faced this problem all right. I was to be officially transferred from one trust to another. One morning I went there to submit my documents, when they told me there was someone else employed and there was no vacancy for me. “When did it happen – at night, if yesterday night there was still a vacancy?’ Anyway, this was not a problem for me: I got employed by another trust on that same day, but it was more difficult for others, particularly if they were office workers. Of course, employers never spoke out that they were not employing Jews, but it was all clear anyway.
After finishing school my older daughter Ludmila finished a course of training and worked as a registry clerk in the airport. She got married young. I don’t feel like talking about her husband. I was against their marriage, but my wife wanted her daughter to get married. We had lots of arguments about it till we divorced after living together 21 years. Since then I’ve lived alone. My daughters and I keep in touch and Ludmila remained Rubalskaya after getting married. Her son Mikhail, born in 1968, also has the last name of Rubalskiy. Inna, my younger daughter, entered the Plumbing Faculty at the Kiev Construction High School after finishing school. After finishing it she was to continue her studies in the Kiev Engineering Construction College, but she failed to enter it and went to Lvov where she entered the Faculty of Land Engineering at the Forestry College.
In the late 1980s General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev [55] initiated perestroika [56], the new policy of the USSR. I was still a member of the party. There was a meeting where the staff voted unanimously for the policy. I believed this was another promise of a better life. Yes, the situation has improved, there is a Jewish life and people are no longer persecuted for their convictions or religion. However, the break up of the USSR [1991] that the perestroika ended up with, reduced it’s achievements to zero. There was a strong and powerful state, and there are only small, separated and poor countries left in its place, even though they are called independent. Could any of these small states have won in World War II? No way. Strength is in unity. Everything bad that there was in the USSR should have been eliminated, but we should have stayed together. It is my point of view. The government is responsible for it all: it could cancel bad laws and put good ones in their place. Besides, I think it was wrong for Ukraine to refuse from weapons [in 1991 an agreement was signed under which Ukraine undertook obligations to eliminate its nuclear weapons]. It shouldn’t have destroyed it. Each country must have weapons to defend itself. After the breakup of the USSR I left the party and I did not join the Communist Party of Ukraine.
My daughters moved to Israel. Ludmila and her family reside in Holon and Inna lives in Sderot. Ludmila’s son Mikhail served in the army. He deals in car business in Israel. Ludmila works in a tourist company. Inna works at a plant. She is deputy director for the product quality. Its’ a good position and she is well-paid for it. My son-in-law also earns well. Inna’s son Yevgeniy served in the Israel army 3 years and retired in the rank of captain. Now he is a 3rd-year student of the Polytechnic College in Beer-Sheva. He studies to be a mechanic engineer in the future.