My father, Vasiliy Gavrilovich Medvedev, born in 1893, was arrested in Krasnoyarsk on the 28th of April 1937 for being considered an enemy of the people. At that time our family lived in a street called Dictatorship of the Proletariate No. 38 (nowadays No. 40). This building No. 38 comprised four houses altogether: two of them were situated at the side of the street, the other two stood in the courtyard; three of them were one-storey buildings, the fourth one had two floors. This was the one we lived in. The house owners lived on the first floor, our family on the second.
This very night all mal persons living in the courtyard buildings were arrested. Our landlord, Yakov Gritsenko, a person of my father’s age, and his son-in-law, Fyodor Plaksin, student of the 4th semester at the Institute of Forestry and Technology. Engineer Boris Vladimirovich Guldenbalk – and many others. My father was working for the State grain purchase as a forwarding agent. He was a very honest and prudent man. Not only once he received honours and awards for his efforts and good work. Thus, in 1935, he was presented with a grammophone; some time before he had received a voucher for a stay in a Krasnoyarsk recreation home. In 1936 he was handed over another voucher to attend the May Day festivities and demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad; apart from this he was given numerous rewards to wake his ambitions.
On the 28th of April 1937, on the occasion of the 1st of May, the school of railroad employees organized an evening party. It was hard to find a seat – and, for some reason or other, I felt very restless. Obviously, this is how all the misfortune was passed on to me. I ran back home through Union street (the school-building stood at the corner of Lenin and Robespierre streets).When I arrived at home I noticed that a couple of NKVD officers in uniform were just searching the house. I immediately understood what was going on there. White as chalk, father was saying something to them; mother interfered, breaking into loud lamentations … The apartment looked entirely rummaged through. Everything had been thrown into disorder. We were in possession of a Russian stove. The NKVD employees scraped the ashes out by means of a poker and an oven fork. They dirtied all our belongings, trampled on them, tore things into pieces or smashed them.
At that time I attended the 7th form, my brother Boris the 4th. Our mother, Anna Ivanovna Medvedeva, born in 1893, was a housewife; she was unable to read or write. They carried father away, not even allowing him to say good-bye in a human manner (and my brother had left for the bath-house with a friend – so he was unable to say good-bye to him, either; father was waiting for him for a long time, finally expressing his deep regret for being unable to wait for his return any longer). They did not leave a single document with us, not even a copy of the search protocol. On the following day two men wearing an NKVD uniform came to our house and told mother that she would have to leave the city of Krasnoyarsk within 24 hours.; they threw our clothes and other belongings into the street and then drove my brother and me out of the apartment. I was 13 years old, my brother 10. Mother was taken in by a friend, who occupied an apartment in the village of Yashnino. I was put up by the family of one of my classmates with 6 children, and my brother found accomodation at the home of one of his classmates, too.
Two years later, someone gave us the advice to contact the NKVD and ask for the permission to return to the place, where our mother was living. Finally, our numerous trouble and running around came to a good end.
However, there remained one problem: where were we supposed to live? Many people even feared to talk to us or greet us. For that reason we spent the night in places, which fate had chosen for us. After two years good peole let us in to live with them in a one-room apartment, 13 square meters in size, in a house with lots of corridors, without any facilities. It was heated by a stove. Seven persons were residing there, and they did not even dispose of a communal kitchen. (Our friends laughed, saying that the appartment was equipped with all modern conveniences, but without any partition walls). All this would have been bearable, if we had not met with so many insults and humiliations. There was a great number of people around us, who behaved in an utterly uncouth, unhuman and mean manner, who, at any odd time, swore at us, called us enemies of the people and urged us to rub their faces with dirt. No matter what happened, they always tried to shift the responsibility onto us and blamed us alone. They threw stones at us, poured washin-up water over us, and once, in the winter, in the middle of the night, the caretaker unhinged the door after having forced it open and started to drive us out of the room; he seized us by the collar and threw our clothes and other belongings out into the street. There was nobody to who we could make a complaint, it would have been useless, anyway. And thus we weeped ourselves to sleep and passed the situations over in silence.
In June 1941 I finished the 10th form and began to take up studies at the faculty of forest economics and technology (this is today the Institute of Forestry and Technolöogy), which I finished in 1946. In all these years I did not tell anybody, neither at school nor at the institute, about being the daughter of an enemy of the people, and nobody asked me questions, either.
After my brother had finished the vocational school, its director sent him to Yakutsk, where he worked as a radio operator throughout the whole war (the director had taken pity on him, for he was a very diligent and disciplined lad). My brother was quite good at writing poemes, too – he sent them to the newspaper publisher. Elsewise he would have been sent to the front. During the entire war our two elder brothers fought on the front. They got wounded, but returned home alive. My sister’s husband, as well as our father’s brother also fought on the front. We received a letter from our uncle, which he had yet written before the war. He mentioned that a hard battle lay ahead, and he even said good-bye to all relatives. In fact, this letter was then followed by his death certificate.
My eldest brother worked as an examining magistrate in a street called Dictatorship of the Proletariate, No. 23. When they came to arrest my father he tried his best to put in a good word for him and prove that father was an upright working person, that he could not be an enemy of the people or something alike. They also arrested my brother. He was detained in our prison for about one year (10 months), then they released him, because they had not found a single piece of evidence against him. He later told us, how they had jibed at the prisoners and tortured them: they either thrust needles under their fingernails, had them sit naked on sharp-edged stools directly with the base of their spines or ordered them to stand in front of a boiling hot cast iron stove, dressed in felt boots, fir coats and caps. The individual would stand there, until he finally fell on the stove. And they used to beat the inmates – on any part of the body, with whatever objects they just had at hand, and thought of numerous other cruelties they could apply on the poor prisoners.
Since the day of his arrest we have never received any news about our father, we do not know about his fate. Only once, during the first months after they had fetched him (as far as I remember) they permitted us to send him a small parcel with foodstuffs. An enormous crowd of people had gathered at the site in front of the prison building (where it is still situated today, in Republic Street). They were all heavily laden with parcels for their relatives. But the mounted militiamen scattered us by lashes with the whip. This is what I remember about the “Bloody Sunday”. I was a very modest, quiet person, and therefore I do not have the slightest idea, how I suddenly happened to get directly in front of the prison entrance. I recall the little window to both sides of which a militiamen was standing. The little window was opened and a member of the armed forces asked me: “Who do you intend to bring your parcel along!”
I replied that I wanted to give it to my father, told him my family, first and father’s name. He took the little bag away from me and said: “ Wait here”! Five minutes later they showed me a piece of paper bearing my father’s signature, a paper by which he confirmed having received my small parcel.
In 1956 the people began to talk about the NKVD being prepared to hand out documents (identification papers) to all those, who had been arrested for being considered enemies of the people. Mother made an application and received a certificate on the death of our father indicating that he died on the 7th of November 1943 from high blood pressure. However, nothing was mentioned about where he had been buried. Apart from this mother received a non-recurring amount, some financial support (I do not remember the exact sum). She did not want to accept it, but finally someone pursuaded her to take it. At the same time she received the information that our father had been rehabilitated. “Sorry – we were wrong!” Mother got sick and lost consciousness.
Our deep wounds, which had already become less painful in the course of time, had been opened once again. They have been hurting until today. And they will not heal up, as long as we are alive.
The Medvedev family