Smorodina F.A.

Despite the declared genre, the memoirs are documentary in nature. The author, a geologist by profession, writes about the tragic fate of her father, secretary of the Petrograd District Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, whom she loved and was proud of.
The beginning of the memories is the denunciation of those who distorted the life of her family and the lives of millions of people turned into slaves.
The grandfather on the paternal side is a laborer. Large family - 12 children. The eldest son, the future father of the author, having finished two classes in a rural school, also worked as a farm laborer for seven years. Further work as a presser at the Tomsk butter factory for five years. Service in the tsarist army, first as a private, then as a corporal. Northwestern Front. Severe wound. Hospital in Petrograd. Complications after the injury, which made him an invalid. Studying at the Znamenskaya School for the Disabled. Then at the Petrograd Workers 'and Peasants' University, then at the All-Union Agricultural Communist University, which he graduated in 1924. Joining the party in 1918. His shock at the death of Kirov. Work as the first secretary of the district committee of the Petrograd region, in 1938, the removal from this position. A visit to Zhdanov with a request for employment, a dry refusal to help. Deterioration of health - the inability to move around. Faith of the father that Stalin does not know about what is happening. The proposal of the authorities to go with the whole family to the Rest House in the village. Tolmachevo. Sending all the children on a camping trip for two days, and at this time (July 26, 1938) the arrest of some of the parents. The return of the family without a father to Leningrad, to an apartment sealed after a search. Mother's unsuccessful attempts to find out something about her husband. Constant refusals to get her a job. Two months later, the arrest of the mother. Sending sisters to the orphanage. Description of a joyless life. Longing for parents. Transfer of the sisters to the special house of the NKVD in Ukraine. Barracks. 40-50 children in each (they were selected by age), and therefore the sisters were separated. Cold, hunger, lice. In the spring, they ate unripe greens, even henbane seeds, because of which they almost lost their sight. Dysentery, malaria. Despite this, conscientious study, so as not to let down the parents who are about to return. Two years later, Velikiye Luki, where the mother's sister lived, who took the girls from the orphanage. The need to hide the truth about their parents, which greatly traumatized the sisters. In 1940, a letter from his father from the prison hospital. Gaza in Leningrad. A visit from his older sister. The author mentions that out of a sense of revenge for her father during the war years, she becomes the leader of a gang of thieves, for which she will be sent to prison. (Only in 1956 did he meet his sister, who had already become a stranger to the author.) The author, who was about 14 years old, visited his father in the prison hospital every day for a month. (The prisoner is taken out on a date on a stretcher.) Father's stories about his experiences - day and night interrogations. The appearance during some interrogations of an unfamiliar woman in the clothes of his wife, who looked like her from afar. A confession of guilt by a tortured father. Two postcards from him to a friend announcing his impending death from starvation.
The author entered Tomsk University in 1945, from which she transferred in 1947 to Leningrad State University for the 3rd year of the Faculty of Biology.
Lamenting that because of the stigma "daughter of an enemy of the people", she "did not take place as a person." At the end of the memoirs, the information that her mother returned from prison in 1945 (they, "unfortunately, turned out to be strangers") and that her father was rehabilitated in October 1956. (According to the certificate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, his death occurred on July 12, 1942.)

The annotation was compiled by Zhidkova T.G.