Peterson Maya Rudolfovna

Born in 1925 in Moscow, into the family of the Kremlin commandant. She lived with her parents in the Kremlin, then in the Government House.

In 1935, my father was removed from his post as commandant of the Kremlin in connection with the "Kremlin affair", and in 1936 the family moved to Kyiv. In April 1937, my father was arrested and the family returned to Moscow. In August-September 1937, my mother was arrested and sentenced to 8 years in a labor camp. Maya was sent to an orphanage in the Danilov Monastery, then to Orphanage No. 2 in Balakovo, Saratov Region, from where her older half-brother took her to Moscow in the spring of 1939. From October 1941 to the spring of 1943, she was in evacuation. After graduating from school in 1946, she entered the philological faculty of Moscow State University. She was arrested on April 23, 1949. She was sentenced in early June 1949 by a special meeting of the MGB.   Under Article 7-35 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (socially dangerous element), she was sentenced to 5 years of exile in the village of Pikhtovka, Novosibirsk Oblast. In 1950, she arranged for her mother to join her and bought a house with a vegetable garden. She worked as an assistant stove-maker, then in a felt boot-making cooperative, and in 1952, she transferred to the position of nurse. After the amnesty in the summer of 1953, she remained in Pikhtovka because of her mother's life sentence of exile . She worked as a teacher of Russian language and literature in the workers' settlement of Oktyabrsky, 50 km from Pikhtovka. She entered the correspondence department of the Novosibirsk Pedagogical Institute and graduated in 1955. She transferred to work at an evening school in Pikhtovka. In May 1957, she was rehabilitated and left for Moscow. She worked as an editor at the publishing house of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.