Russian physicist Abram Ioffe left an unforgettable mark. During his life he wrote several books and a large encyclopedia published in 30 volumes. In addition, he opened a school from which great scientists graduated. Abram Fedorovich at one time became the "father of Soviet physics."
The famous scientist was born in 1880 on October 29 in the city of Romny, which was at that time in the Poltava province. His family was friendly and cheerful. When the boy was 9 years old, he entered a real school, which was located in Germany, where a significant role was assigned to mathematical subjects. It was here that the physicist received his secondary education and a certificate in 1897. Here he met his best friend Stepan Timoshenko.
After graduating from college in the same year, he entered the Technological St. Petersburg University.
He graduated from it in 1902 and immediately applied to a higher educational institution, which was located in Germany, in Munich. Here he began to work, his leader was the German physicist V.K. Roentgen. He taught his ward a lot, and thanks to him, the young scientist Abram Ioffe received the first degree of Doctor of Science.
In 1906, the guy got a job at the Polytechnic Institute, where 12 years later, that is, in 1918, he organized the first physical and mechanical faculty to graduate professional physicists.
Abram Ioffe determined the elementary electric charge back in 1911, but he did not use his own idea, but the American physicist Millikan. However, he published his work only in 1913, as he wanted to check some of the nuances. And so it happened that the American physicist was able to publish the result earlier, and that is why the name of Millikan is mentioned in the experiment, and not Ioffe.
Ioffe's first serious work was his master's thesis, which he defended in 1913. Two years later, in 1915, he wrote and defended his doctoral thesis.
In 1918, he worked as president at the Russian Scientific Center for Radiology and Surgical Technologies, and also headed the Physics and Technology Department at this university. Three years later (in 1921) he became the head of the Institute of Physics and Technology, which today is called A. F. Ioffe.
The physicist spent 6 years as chairman of the All-Russian Association of Physicists, starting in 1924. After that, he was the head of the Agrophysical University.
In 1934, Abram and other initiators created a creative club of scientific intelligentsia, and at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War he was appointed head of a meeting of a commission related to military equipment.
In 1942 he was the head of the military engineering commission at the Leningrad City Committee of the CPSU.
At the end of 1950, Abram Fedorovich was removed from the post of head, but at the beginning of 1952 he created a semiconductor laboratory on the basis of the Department of Physics of the Novosibirsk State University, and two years later (1954) organized a semiconductor institute, which turned out to be a profitable business.
Abram Iofe devoted almost 60 years to physics. During this time, a lot of literature has been written, an incredible amount of research has been carried out, and several departments and schools have been opened that are dedicated to the famous great scientist. A.F. Ioffe died at his workplace in his office on October 14, 1960. He did not quite live up to the round date - 80 years. He was buried in St. Petersburg at the site of the Volkovsky cemetery "Literary Mostki".
You see in the photo of Abram Ioffe, who earned the respect of the people thanks to his mind. After all, so many years have passed since the day of his death, and even today you can hear about him in many universities of the country.
Abram Fedeorovich was married twice. For the first time he had a beloved woman in 1910 - this is Kravtsova Vera Andreevna. She was the first wife of a physicist. They almost immediately had a daughter, Valentina, who eventually followed in her father's footsteps and became a famous doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, headed a laboratory at a university of silicate chemistry. She married a people's artist, opera singer S. I. Migai.
Unfortunately, Abram did not stay married to Vera for a long time, and in 1928 he married a second time to Anna Vasilievna Echeistova. She was also a physicist and perfectly understood her husband, his work, attitude towards family and friends. That is why the couple lived a long, happy life.
Even in his youth, Ioffe identified for himself the main areas in science. This is the physics of the nucleus, polymers and semiconductors. His work became famous in a short time. Ioffe devoted them to the direction of semiconductors.
This area was excellently developed not only by the physicist himself, but also by his students. Much later, Ioffe created a school of physics, which became famous throughout the country.
The name of the scientist is often found in foreign literature, where his achievements and the history of promotion are described. The books also talk about the organizational activities of the physicist, which was quite diverse and multifaceted. Therefore, it is difficult to fully characterize it from all sides.
Iofe participated in the collegium of the NTO VSNKh, was a member of the council of scientists, created the Agrophysical University, the Institute of Semiconductors, the University of Macromolecular Compounds. In addition, the organizational activity of the scientist was visible in the Academy of Sciences, the preparation of congresses and various conferences.
Physicist Ioffe Abram Fedorovich in 1933 received the honorary title - Honored Scientist of the RSFSR, and in 1955 on his birthday he was awarded the title - Hero of Socialist Labor. Received 3 orders of Lenin (in 1940, 1945, 1955).
Physics was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize in 1961. For outstanding achievements in the field of science, A. Ioffe received the Stalin Prize of the first degree in 1942.
In memory of A.F. Ioffe, a large impact crater in the southern hemisphere was given the name of a scientist. Also, one large research university in Russia was named after him back in 1960, a monument to the scientist was erected in the courtyard of the institute opposite the building, and a small bust was installed in the assembly hall of the same institution. Not far from the university, where the second building is, there is a memorial plaque, which indicates in what years the outstanding scientist worked here.
In memory of Ioff, a street in Berlin was named. Not far from the research university there is the famous Academician Ioffe Square. It is not difficult to guess in whose honor it is named.
In the city of Romny there is school number 2, which was once a real school. Now it is named after the great scientist.
In addition, not only in Russia, but also in the world, there are many pictorial, graphic and sculptural portraits of the physicist, which were depicted by artists at all times.
And until now, many citizens know about this man, who made physics much more interesting and brighter.
We reviewed the biography of Abram Ioffe briefly. At the same time, I would like to mention the literature that the scientist wrote. First of all, it is worth noting the great Soviet encyclopedia. It began to be issued in 1926. After the death of the physicist, it continued to be printed and the last volume was published in 1990.
Much later after the first volume, in 1957, the book "Physics of Semiconductors" appeared, which describes not only the theory, but also the introduction of semiconductors into the national economy.
In addition, Ioffe has a wonderful book "On Physics and Physicists", which describes all the scientific work of the scientist. Most of the book is designed for readers who are interested in the history of creation and research.
The book "Meeting with Physicists" tells how the scientist met with many Soviet and foreign physicists, they conducted research together, opened institutes and departments.
In addition, there are books that were dedicated to the great scientist Abram Fedorovich Ioffe. One of them is "Successes in the physical sciences." This book was dedicated to the day of the 80th anniversary. And in 1950 they released a collection, which was dedicated to the day of the 70th anniversary.
It is impossible to list all the literature, as it has accumulated too much. After all, the scientist worked on projects and science for about 60 years.
The biography of Abram Fedorovich Ioffe is amazing. After all, not every person will be able to work on science all his life, conduct some kind of research, open schools, educate people and come up with new physical methods. It was he who showed the people how to give themselves to work, their country and science.
Unfortunately, the scientist was never able to celebrate his eightieth birthday, but he managed to do a lot. And today students and their teachers use the methods of the famous physicist Abram Fedorovich Ioffe.
Heinrich Zinovievich Ioffe(born March 27, 1928, Moscow) - Soviet and Russian historian. Doctor of historical sciences , professor .
After leaving school, in 1945, Heinrich Ioffe entered the 1st Moscow Medical Institute (now the First Moscow State Medical University named after I.M. Sechenov). He left after a year. In 1950 he graduated with honors from the Faculty of History of the Pedagogical Institute named after. Lenin (now - Moscow State Pedagogical University). By distribution, he was sent to Kologriv, Kostroma Region. I worked there in a teacher's college. He returned to Moscow in 1953. Then he worked in the school of working youth (1954-1956). From 1956 to 1964 he worked at the State Library. Lenin, From 1964 to 1968 he worked as an editor and senior editor at the Nauka publishing house of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From here I moved to . He worked there until 1995. Since 1995 lives in Canada.
While in Canada, he writes for the New Journal (New York), in which he is a member of the editorial board, and Moscow magazines: Science and Life, Russian History, New Historical Bulletin, etc.
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Ioffe, Heinrich Zinovievich- Chief Researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences; born in 1928; Doctor of Historical Sciences … Big biographical encyclopedia
Ioffe- Ioffe, variants of Iofe, Yoffe, Yofe, Ioffa, Effe, Yaffe, Yaffa, Yuffa, Yuffis and many others (Hebrew יפה, יופה) Jewish surname, historically distributed mainly in the northern provinces of the Russian Empire (that is, among the Litvaks) .… … Wikipedia
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Heinrich Zinovievich Ioffe. 1951
Today's students, probably, do not really understand what "distribution" is. And in Soviet times, this word meant, so to speak, the last line that summed up the golden student years. The State Commission determined the future place of work for you. For 3 whole years. You were obliged to work for 3 years where the country that gave you a free education sends you. But few people, especially, of course, we - Muscovites - wanted to leave Moscow, leave our home, friends, everything familiar and close from childhood or adolescence. It is now, more than half a century later, that one can talk about "distribution" calmly, even with some humor. And then many perceived it almost as a disaster, "the scrapping of life." There was no humor...
"Distributed" in different ways. The lucky ones who remained in graduate school felt cheerful and cheerful. Solid, serious, looked students - former front-line soldiers, most of whom received appointments of a "closed type": to party bodies, the Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, etc. Subsequently, one had to read that the demobilized front-line soldiers repeated almost the "Decembrists" who returned from the war of 1812. I don’t know where such a historical copy came from and for what purpose it was invented. I saw something else. If we are to look for the post-war "Soviet Decembrists", then rather among the students who stepped into the institutes straight from the school bench and mainly from the families of the intelligentsia. And most of the front-line soldiers ... Who would "distribute" them to graduate school, to party and state bodies, if they professed "Decembrist ideas"? Of course, this does not mean that there were no exceptions.
Some who did not get into graduate school or did not become front-line soldiers due to their age, looked for their own ways to evade the “distribution” and stay in Moscow. Various kinds of medical certificates were used about their own ailments, about the illnesses of their parents. With good connections, such “documents” could be obtained. Not all of them, of course, were taken into account, but with a certain perseverance, or better - resourcefulness, the owners of this kind of "papers" reached their goal not by washing, but by rolling.
I didn't get into the first, second, or third groups. Although I received a “red diploma” (that is, a diploma in which “with honors” was written in red letters), I did not have to dream of graduate school after I was expelled from the Komsomol in the 4th year and I was waiting for an exception from the Institute for "manifestation of bourgeois ideology." At that time there was a campaign against "cosmopolitanism", which resulted in the persecution of some teachers in our history department, mainly, as they say now, of Jewish nationality. From the point of view of "big politics" this campaign was caused, of course, by the "cold war" with the United States, the turn of the newly created Israel into the American channel and a certain outbreak of Jewish nationalism in some circles. “On the ground” all this often resulted in a fight for seats, fueled by feelings of hostility, hidden anti-Semitism. When this petty politicking clearly outweighed the "big politics", the top officials probably felt that the campaign should be curtailed. And it ended as abruptly as it began. I was quickly reinstated in the Komsomol, the expulsion from the institute did not take place. However, relatively soon the “fight against cosmopolitanism” will continue in much worse forms. But the "cosmopolitan sin" was not in vain. It was not forgotten during distribution.
I also did not belong to the front-line soldiers by age. There was no Blat. I was placed at the disposal of the Kostroma department of public education (oblono).
And so, in August 1950, I arrived in ancient Kostroma. If I had been there under other circumstances, maybe I would have wandered around the city, examined its sights, its beauty. But now the mood was gone. I thought about one thing: how to use the last chance and convince the oblono to let me go on all four sides.
I was taken to the deputy head of the oblono. He sat at the table, looking through the papers and smoking "Belomor". Looking at my direction, he cheerfully said:
It's good that they sent us a lad. It is more difficult with girls, but our pedagogical work requires men. Do we know where we will send you? No, not to school, take it higher: to a pedagogical school, you will train teachers for elementary schools! We trust you...
I was stupidly silent.
Are you dissatisfied? - he asked.
Stumbling and blushing, I began to tell him that pedagogical work is difficult for me, because I have a speech defect, and it will also be difficult for the students to listen to me. He interrupted:
What kind of defect is this? Here you are talking and everything is clear. What's the defect?
Stuttering from childhood, especially when excited.
He interrupted again:
And I'll tell you a story. At our institute, when I studied, there was a professor, a historian. Kartavil - how terrible! And he stuttered. Well, he didn’t pronounce the letters “a” and “t” especially, but you know how we listened to him? Only his lectures were expected ... Because he told us such things that we had never even heard of. Hence the conclusion: if your form as a teacher is lame, give such content that all mouths open. If you give it, they'll open it... No, we won't give you freedom. We are sending you to a teacher training college, to Kologriv. Have you heard of this city? Regional center, Unzha river, surrounded by forests. And the neighboring district is Susaninsky. By the name of Ivan Susanin *. He's from that area. Hero, patriot. He led the Polish invaders into impassable places: he saved his homeland. You, as a historian, cannot find a better place. If you take up local history there, you will discover something like that! Then you don't want to leave. - Will you go directly from us or will you return to Moscow? It is only 300 kilometers from Kostroma.
I'll be back again: I need to take things.
A business! - he said. - Take things and move. From Moscow, go to the Manturovo station, and from there the bus will pick you up.
He got up and held out his hand to me.
There, in Kologriv, the director is Repin Alexander Alexandrovich. Smart man, stick with it. Well, happy to you!
I came out of the oblono, not at all feeling the spiritual gloominess with which I entered it.
I had to do more than just pack my things. From the institute, "lifting" money was still due - money for a travel ticket and some other expenses associated with "distribution". I don’t remember why, but I couldn’t get this very little money. In the institute's accounting department, they "footballed" me from one person to another, asked me to "come in in a week or two." My "savior", Associate Professor of the Department of History of the Middle Ages, A. A. Kirillova, came to help. I wrote my term paper “Jan Hus and Martin Luther” with her, and she believed in me. In the cool “cosmopolitan days”, when I became the hero of harsh studies for my supposedly “bourgeois views” and was about to fly out of the institute, in fact, she was the only one who supported me. Now she promised to talk to the new rector D. A. Polikarpov in order to finally “stop this disgrace” in relation to the student who was leaving for distribution. For Polikarpov, already at that time, the rumor of a “persecutor of cosmopolitans” stretched. In the Central Committee, he was the right hand of the famous G.F. Aleksandrov, academic philosopher, in the late 40s. “lowered” from the Central Committee for making a mistake “on the philosophical front”, and later, apparently in 1954, already in the rank of Minister of Culture, pierced “on immorality” - a rather rare case in Soviet times. At the end of the war, Polikarpov was secretary of the Writers' Union, in which he also carried out, as they would now say, sweeps of a national character.
It would seem that the holy soul Alexandra Andreevna Kirillova could not have anything in common with such a person, but no. Already in Kologriv, I received a letter from her in which she complained that even such an honest and principled person as Dmitry Alekseevich Polikarpov was unable to put an end to "the unrest at the institute and he, tired, gives up."
Whether Polikarpov was then, during the days of my departure, already the rector or while he was only acting, I do not remember. But at the request of A. A. Kirillova, he answered:
Let him come straight to me.
The rector's office seemed huge to me, but somehow dark. Only on Polikarpov's desk was a light on. When I entered, he raised his large, heavy head with large, sharp features and abruptly asked:
Surname?
Without inviting me to come closer to the table, he picked up the receiver of one of the telephones standing on the side table and, having waited for an answer, began to speak wearily and indifferently:
Accounting? Here I have a student who is followed by "elevating". He will come to you, give him. Let him take his belongings and leave.
He hung up and said to me:
Go to accounting right now.
At the Yaroslavl station I was escorted by all the members of my "bourgeois-nationalist" organization, which arose at the behest of the institute authorities and disappeared also at their beckoning, when the struggle against "cosmopolitanism" was stopped from above with the same suddenness with which it began. The members of the “organization”, after various walks and troubles (of their own and their parents), were not subjected to “distribution”, they found work in Moscow schools. Now they were escorting their "leader" to the unknown Kologriv and doing their best to cheer up his despondent spirit. They collectively presented me with a book by J. London "Martin Eden", the image of the main character of which was supposed to strengthen my will and faith in achieving a lofty goal. Strange that they forgot about the sad end of Martin Eden. But I took the book with me.
In my pocket I had a "letter of recommendation" to a certain Gordon, who worked in Manturov as a judicial worker, either as a lawyer, or as a prosecutor. This letter was given to my father by his acquaintance, it seems, Gordon's uncle, who, as he said, was also "distributed", but only a year earlier than me and just in Manturovo. He supposedly could help me on occasion.
I rode in the common car of a train going to the Far East. In Manturov stop - two or three minutes. Further - Sharya junction station. The conductor did not even lower the ladder from the vestibule: I jumped to the ground, and he threw the suitcases down to me.
Gloomy, gray morning. The rain had just stopped, and the one-story old building of the station seemed to me to be ruffled. Without going into the room, he wandered into the village to look for the "saving" Gordon. The "building", it seems, of the court was a small wooden house with a porch and a railing. The hallway smelled of toilets. The aunt who was sitting in the room said that now Gordon is not there, and when he will be is unknown, but he promised to be.
I waited on the porch. Gordon didn't show up soon. He was a tall, overweight man of about 30 in a padded jacket and rubber boots. He read the letter and said that although he had been to Kologriv a couple of times, he did not know anyone there closely, so he did not know how, in fact, he could help me.
But the town is good, - he said, - not like here - mud up to the ears, - and pointed to his rubber boots. He had the air of a man who only thinks of one thing: how to get his boots out of Manturov's mud once and for all. The only thing he helped me with was explaining that the bus to Kologriv leaves early in the morning from the station. Sometimes, however, he does not come, but often there are passing cars from the station.
So I advise you to go to the dining room, eat there, and return to the station. It's better to be there: suddenly some car turns up.
That's exactly what I did. I returned to the station when it was already dark. There was a specific railway smell inside: a mixture of fuel oil and mustiness. A light bulb burned faintly under the ceiling. About ten people were lying and sitting on wooden sofas and right on the floor. I sat down on the edge of one of the sofas, extinguishing the feeling of loneliness and melancholy that gripped me. The peasant lying on the bench got up and looked at me with some surprise.
Did you come with Moscow? In Manturovo, perhaps, to work?
No, I'm in Kologriv, in a teacher training college. Far away from here?
Kologriv something? - the man chuckled. - And he is like Bui da Caduy. Damn, I've been looking for them for two months - I didn't find them. There will be ninety kilometers, maybe a little less. There should be a bus in the morning, they are also waiting for him here. You'll get there, nothing. The road is beautiful, through the forest. Mud only...
The bus came early in the morning. It was old, pre-war, and small. Like Adam Kozlevich's Wildebeest from The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf*. By the way, in the film directed by A. Gaidai on "The Twelve Chairs" Kologriv is mentioned! There are shots when Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov appears in the janitor's room and his former janitor shouts in amazement: “Master! We've arrived! From Paris!" And when Vorobyaninov began to deny it, Bender, who was in the janitor's room, “prompts”: “Well, yes, of course, you are not from Paris. You have come from Kologriv!”**
* Adam Kozlevich and his car "Antelope-Gnu" appear only in the second of the novels by I. Ilf and E. Petrov mentioned by the author - "The Golden Calf". ( )
** In the text of the novel "The Twelve Chairs" Kologriv is mentioned twice - in Ostap Bender's remarks addressed to Vorobyaninov: "Excellent<…>you are not from Paris. Of course, you came from Kologriv to visit your late grandmother” (Chapter V); “... As seconds, you can take Ivanopulo and a neighbor on the right. He is a former honorary citizen of the city of Kologriv and still boasts of this title ”(Ch. XXI). ( Note. Internet publishers.)
"Antelope-Gnu" drove us to Kologriv for almost 6 hours. In places, a washed-out country road did not allow keeping the "speed" more than 20-25 km per hour. We often stopped at roadside villages, picking up 2-3 more people waiting for the bus. We stood for a long time on the banks of the Unzha River: the ferry had just left. When he sailed back, they were slowly loading: our bus, a couple of cars, carts, people. They sailed to the other side too slowly: two ferrymen in canvas raincoats and mittens moved it, fingering the iron cable with their hands.
Having left the ferry, again for some reason they stood for a long time. Halfway there is the large village of Nikolskoye. In the wide driving yard, horses harnessed to carts chewed hay, sometimes tossing their heads, which made the harness jingle. Chickens roamed. Cabbers and the driver of several trucks parked in the yard were sitting on a mound near the house, smoking cigarettes and cigarettes.
I had to visit Nikolskoye several more times, including in the winter, when I was traveling from Kologriv to Moscow for the winter holidays.
In winter, blizzards made the road impassable for buses and cars. It was possible to pass only on a horse, in a sleigh. Difficult road. But the urge to go home was so great that I did not hesitate. A downcast, but quite strong horse, a sleigh, laid with hay and reminiscent of those in which the noblewoman Morozova is being driven in Surikov's picture, a stocky man in felt boots and a sheepskin coat. He also throws me a sheepskin coat:
Put on - you'll freeze!
Here we set off. The horse slowly runs along the snowy road, more and more through the forest. Suddenly, a howl somewhere far, far away. Wolves!
At dusk, we already reach Nikolsky, where we have a halt: to feed the horse and rest ourselves. It's dark inside the hotel. Someone is snoring on the floor. Downstairs, at a large table, they drink and eat. The conversation is hoarse. Warm, and drowsiness disassembles from the road. We climb on the floor: there are places there. It smells of rawhide, terrycloth.
Half asleep, it seems to me that time has “turned over”, and we are somewhere in the old days, in the era of Ivan the Terrible, as it is drawn to us, living in the 20th century. I remember this feeling as a child. Here we are with my father on the deserted Red Square. Sentinels in overcoats and budenovkas at the Spassky Gates. And above the Kremlin, in the silence - a crow's eye, it breaks the veil of time, and it seems to me that we are in the depths of a distant, distant past. The same feeling in Nikolsky, abandoned in the Kostroma forests ...
But I was ahead of the curve. Suddenly, the swollen country road ends, and our Wildebeest climbs a sandy hillock. It can be seen that it has recently rained, but the ground has already “taken” all the water and there is wet heavy sand all around. The road went down a sloping slope, and here it is - the glorious city of Kologriv!
Later I learn that in the XVII - the first half of the XVIII century. the village of Arkhangelskoye was here, and under Mother Catherine II, the town of Kologriv already stood: in the old days it was supposedly called horses with a thick mane. And it seemed to me that when you look at the surrounding forests from the bank of the Unzha, they look like a thick horse's mane. That's why Kologriv: a place near the manes.
Houses are like in large villages: one-story, but there are also two. They include regional institutions: managerial and "production": district consumer union, procurement, timber industry. Here we rolled down to the main, central square. We stopped at a two-story "piece of wood" painted green. At the bottom of the sign - "Dining Room". Two cars, several wagons, men are wandering around, all after the rain still in long canvas raincoats with hoods. Across the road - a small square with the obligatory bust of Lenin.
In this "Dining Room", or rather in "Bokovushka", I happen to be more than once. "Bokovushka" was a separate room in the "Dining Room", where the local authorities or "nobility" could "spree" without fear of the prying eyes of the local common people, who drank and ate in the "common hall". "Bokovushki" in those days were widespread in cities and villages.
I spent the night in the "House for visitors" and the next morning I went to the school. According to the scale of Kologriv, it was a large, two-story building. The first floor is brick, the second is wooden. From the rear, a whole grove of ancient deciduous and coniferous trees adjoined it. Climbing the creaky steps to the second floor, I knocked on the headmaster's office. It was Repin Alexander Alexandrovich.
A small, even small man in an officer's tunic and wartime riding breeches. Sparse, smoothed hair, some kind of pointed face, an attentive, curious look. As soon as we started talking, the door to the office opened slightly and a big blond head stuck in. She stuck herself in and, seeing a stranger, disappeared.
Wait, wait, Boris Dmitrievich! - shouted Repin, slightly okay. - Come in! You will need...
The door opened again and a large, heavy man in a worn tracksuit entered. His face was decorated with a potato nose and small sly eyes.
A new history teacher has come to us, - said Repin. - You would, Boris Dmitrievich, help him get up to the apartment.
So why not help? - this Boris Dmitrievich spoke quickly. - Over there at Augusta-from Tsvetkova and it will be good. One lives. Ivan ot her Vasilyevich spent weeks in the forest, and the guys left last autumn. She's free, clean. She will cook and wash, go...
Well, take her to her, - said Repin. - If he likes it, he will take it off. See you off, Boris, do a good deed.
And we went. On the way, I learned that his surname was Bochin, that he was born here, in Kologriv, like his father and grandfather, that he works at the school as a sportsman and generally keeps order.
Later I saw how he did it. The school often held evenings with dances "to the button accordion", which was usually played by the school musician Stepanovich. If one of the guys - ours or from the side - who had previously taken a sip of vodka or moonshine, began to "disperse", Bochin approached him, moving clubfoot, and said in a whisper:
I'll give you two minutes. I mark the time.
Exactly at the appointed time, the "divergent" or "divergent" disappeared. I don’t know what acted more here: Bochin’s authority or enormous physical strength, however, it could be both ...
I liked the house where Bochin took me. The hostess's name was Augusta Ivanovna Tsvetkova. She looked about 50 years old. A round face with glowing red cheeks, almost toothless and therefore a little mumbling. And she was almost completely deaf. Heard only if you shouted directly into her ear. And what about a hearing aid... What kind of apparatus in those years in godforsaken Kologriv... She was married, but her husband, Ivan Mikhailovich, a puny man who wore a tattered, reddish sailor's cap on his head, worked as an accountant at a timber industry enterprise about 15 kilometers -20 from Kologriv. These logging enterprises and leshozes surrounded Kologriv with many "points", hiding in the forests. All winter long, hard workers felled wood there, pulled logs on tractors to the banks of the Unzha, so that in the spring, when it overflowed, it would lift this "alloy" and pull it with water to the "drench" near Makariev. It was called "mole", "mole alloy".
In winter, when the road was covered, or in the spring, when it was drowning in the mud, cars did not pass to the timber industry enterprises until a tractor punched through the road. Then they went one after another, with bodies full of crates of blackhead vodka, from which fuselage was reeking a mile away. In the city, this vodka was also at least poured, and there was also a sprat in a tomato.
Only towards Sunday did Ivan Mikhailovich come home with a field bag over his shoulder and in his invariable naval cap. Almost always drunk. Avgusta Ivanovna did not scold him, did not shout, she only muttered something to herself, and he quietly went to bed. So one day, already in late autumn, he was returning home from his forestry, drunk fell into some kind of ditch and did not get up again. But this happened when I was no longer living with Augusta Ivanovna.
She had two adult children (son Vovka and daughter Tatyana). But if I caught Ivan Mikhailovich, and once he even cured me of a severe cold, forcing me to drink a glass of moonshine and climb up to sleep on the stove at night, then I never saw either Vovka or Tatyana. The daughter, who graduated from our school, was sent somewhere beyond the Bui station as a teacher. There she, as Avgusta Ivanovna said, "came together" with a certain machine operator who "drank heavily", and, apparently, she was no longer up to her mother. True, letters from her sometimes came. Vovka also left somewhere and almost did not make himself felt. So Augusta Ivanovna actually lived alone. In the early morning she drove a cow into the herd, and in the evening she waited at the gate.
Augusta Ivanovna was an extraordinary tidy woman. Every now and then she made, as she said, “washing”: she brushed off non-existent dust from all the walls, various curtains, lace capes and “collections”, and scrubbed the floors in the upper room and two other rooms.
Have a rest, Augusta Ivanovna, - I shout in her ear. - It's clean, it's clean!
Where is it clean? - answers. - Out inherited, out ...
And again, bending over, washes, scrubs, cleans ...
The lyrical soul lived in my Augusta Ivanovna. One summer my mother came to visit me in Kologriv. Since childhood, she had very poor eyesight. And somehow Augusta Ivanovna says to her:
Would you like to go to the forest nearby. There is a ravine and a stream running. Handsomely! You don’t have such places in Moscow, go.
So I can’t see well, ”my mother answers her. I don't see this beauty.
Augusta Ivanovna, who was wielding her grips by the stove, straightened up and dried her hands.
And then let's go at least the two of us. Let's sit on the beach. I’ll tell you about the stream, how it runs, and you’ll tell me how it murmurs and rings: we’ll see everything, and we’ll hear ...
Bochin Augusta Ivanovna did not like frequent visits to me:
Be careful with Boris...
Well, he drinks. And you will be pulled.
Won't delay. I'm not into vodka.
After all, no one is drawn to her at first. And then you see how...
She told me about Bochin: - People say that his grandfather and father kept good horses. They drove people and goods to Manturov and back. They had really good horses. Rich men...
It was true. At big drinking parties, when Boris Dmitrievich's little eyes turned red from the drunk "chernogolovka" and his consciousness clouded, he sometimes began to hallucinate. Clenching his heavy fists, as if holding and pulling on the reins, he clicked his tongue and croaked in a whisper:
But-but-but let's go, strays! Let's! Come on, you lazy ones! Forward!
Then he suddenly fell silent and, looking around, said:
Hey, where are you my horses? Where? Whoa, darlings. Stop!
Never, neither before nor after Kologriv, have I met a man in whom, in a strange way, masculine rudeness, even cruelty, especially when drunk, coexisted with genuine intelligent delicacy, self-restraint, as was the case with my colorful friend Bochin.
At the direction of A. A. Repin, the head teacher of the school, Nikolai Vasilyevich Kudryavtsev, initiated me into a teaching position. Like Repin, he was also a participant in the war, an invalid: he did not have his right arm above the elbow. The empty sleeve of the blue tunic is tucked under a leather belt. But even with one hand, Kudryavtsev knew how to use surprisingly well. He even fell asleep shag in the "goat's leg" quickly rolled up by himself, struck a match and lit a cigarette, inhaling acrid smoke right to the very depths. Almost completely gray hair curls fell on his forehead, confirming his last name - Kudryavtsev. Yes, he deftly controlled his only hand, but only looking closely, you could see that he was trembling slightly. And it was in the face too.
Having “dressed up” me with more than twenty hours a week of the history of the USSR, new history and the Constitution of the USSR (more than the rate), Kudryavtsev invited me to “come in in the evening”, to talk: he also taught history part-time with the head teacher. I went, of course. He lived near the school with his wife and daughter, aged 14-15. His wife, Maria Vasilievna, worked at the school as a biology teacher. She seemed to me to be a rather elderly woman with a tired, even exhausted face. She smoked incessantly and probably spoke in a low, smoky voice because of that.
Now a bottle appeared on the table and, as I later found out, a “classic” appetizer for those times in Kologriv: sliced lard and salted cabbage. Who understands, it’s better for vodka and it’s not necessary! As they say, "the very thing."
I do not remember what our historical conversation with Kudryavtsev boiled down to. One thing became clear: my head teacher could drink "in black" and go on a drinking binge. But, coming out of it, he always kept quiet, even, calm.
The work generally went well. I applied the methodology of the institute teacher, with whom we had an internship at the Moscow school on Usachivka, Pyotr Vasilievich Gora. Then he was still a young, forelocked lad, not so much different in age from us senior students. Years later, he "defended", became the head of the department and helped me in many ways. Now he is gone, but I cherish the memory of him ...
Based on the postulate "class struggle", he found a strictly logical chain in the chaos of historical events and then depicted it in the form of diagrams. It turned out visually, convincingly, easily remembered by minds not burdened with knowledge and doubts! Of course, a primitive, but as a basis for further knowledge, such a method (school) seems to me quite suitable. And in my lessons at the Kologriv Pedagogical College, I strictly followed what Gora taught us. I saw that this was well received by the students - mostly boys and girls from the surrounding villages and villages.
GZ Ioffe (center) with his class. To his right - a teacher of geography and part-time director of the Kologriv Museum P. A. Kamaisky; left - mathematics teacher A. L. Volkov. 1951
They asked me to speak more slowly in order to have time to write in their notebooks: at home it was easier and easier for them to teach. There was another reason for the practice of taking notes in the lessons: there were not enough textbooks for everyone in the school library. With this, by the way, was connected the case, which at that time inspired fear in many people.
Once, on my arrival from the school, Avgusta Ivanovna handed me a piece of paper and said:
Then one came, he asked you - from the police, go. He ordered me to give you a piece of paper.
The paper turned out to be a summons demanding to appear, but not to the police, but to the "RO MGB". We knew well what it meant: "District branch of the Ministry of State Security." My heart went cold. What? Why? “Moscow trace”, or something, connected with the times of the struggle against cosmopolitanism?
Went to Bochin.
I'll go with you, - he said, - I know some guys there.
We went on the appointed day. The wooden two-story house seemed to me large, almost huge. We passed something like a vestibule, where there was a strong smell of a toilet; two or three young men were sitting in the reception room. I handed out the agenda. One got up and gave me a sign to follow him. Bochin remained in the room. We climbed the shaky, creaky stairs to the second floor, and I found myself in the office of the head of the RO himself. The office seemed to me as large, boundless as the office of the rector Polikarpov, to whom I came to get money to go to Kologriv. The chief was in uniform with shoulder straps. He smiled, softly, affably, but somehow slyly.
At his invitation, I sat down and started talking. He asked where I was from, where I studied, why I came to them, to Kologriv. I answered, feeling in myself some kind of nasty readiness to “adapt” to him, “to hit the mark”, so as not to cause him displeasure.
Well, how are we here? Like? - he asked.
The sly smile never left his face.
Of course, of course, - I hastened to answer. - Good! Nature! And the people at the school are great! Everything is great.
How do you like our students? he interrupted me.
Great guys! Preparation, of course... You understand. But disciplined, interested in everything.
He interrupted me again.
And how do you like my son?
I was dumbfounded. I absolutely, absolutely did not remember any “son”, for the life of me, but answered:
Good student, no complaints.
And in your subject pulls?
The only trouble is... He says that there aren't enough textbooks for everyone at the school. Is there any way to help?
I assured him for a long time that this was not a difficult matter, of course, we will help, what are we talking about?
We parted in an amicable way, downright friendly, shook hands.
When I went downstairs, Bochin was not in the waiting room. Either I stayed with the boss for a long time, or he was simply forbidden to be here. I went outside and decided to sit in a small square and catch my breath. Bochin was sitting on the bench.
Released? he asked when he saw me.
As you see. And what, they could not let go, or what? There is nothing behind me.
Do you know what the guys there whispered to me when they took you upstairs? Go, they say, Boris Dmitrievich, don't wait. There is nothing to wait. He will not return.
From the public garden we went straight to the dining room and in our "side" for a long time celebrated my "return". They didn’t call me to the MGB Department again, and the chief’s son, of course, received his history textbook.
Soon after my arrival in Kologriv, another "distributed" arrived. It was Felix Ippolitov, a graduate of Leningrad University. At the school, he was supposed to teach psychology and pedagogy. He did not come alone: with his mother. It was a lady in her 50s, an intellectual "from the former". Only not "from the former" pre-revolutionary, but, as it seemed, "from the former" Soviet, from that Soviet elite that fell under the Stalinist felling in the late 30s, and then partly after the war. I think her husband was in the nomenklatura before the Great Terror, and she herself may have had noble roots. Figuratively speaking, she walked around the godforsaken Kologriv with "pursed lips", not always being able to hide the fact that here is not a place for her and her son.
This Felix also tried to avoid the "natives", including the school ones. He moved quickly, did not look around, and in the teacher's room entered into a conversation only when he was addressed. However, he spoke with some kind of mockery, often, after listening to his interlocutor, he said: “Well, well!”, as if making it clear that in front of him was a fool, or even a fool.
But I rejoiced at the arrival of Felix the Leningrader and after a while invited him to live with me at Augusta Ivanovna's: there was plenty of room. He consulted his mother and they came. But life didn't work out, I don't remember why. They rented another apartment.
Alexander Liveryevich Volkov, always a slightly drunken mathematician in a heavily greasy black suit and a dirty shirt, but with an indispensable tie, let the school teachers hearsay that Ippolitov and his maman were Jews.
The reaction, however, was weak, the rumor started up by Volkov was accepted sluggishly and indifferently.
Well, Jews, Bochin told me, so what? Here we had one Jew in the army ...
I interrupted him:
Have they actually been here, in Kologriv?
In Kologriv something? Where? Although they say that in the Civil War, it seems that one was wormed his way here. Then he disappeared and left a trail. Do you know Zhenya Volpert? Here he is, according to conversations, she will be her dad.
I knew Zhenya Volpert. It was Bochin who called her Zhenya, and she was a teacher at a school for the deaf and dumb, and she was respected in the city. She was small, dark-haired, with thick black hair with a sparse gray, collected in a bun at the back of her head. She sang well. Often in spring or summer, in the evening on the banks of the Unzha, where the old squat cinema building was located, Zhenya would begin to sing, for the most part, old Russian romances, while waiting for the screening. Her voice, not strong, but clear and sonorous, hovered over Unzha, excited, inspired sadness.
The night is dark. Above a river
The moon shines softly
And glitters with silver
Blue Wave...
A circle gathered around Zhenya. Some started to sing along.
The rain has passed and early in the morning
On a long journey, my dear,
I'll leave with a crowd of gypsies
Behind the nomadic kibitka ...
I liked Zhenya's singing - simple, sentimental. And so it remained in my memory: it is evening, quietly, a light breeze, Unzha flows quietly and quickly.
And glitters with silver
Blue Wave...
I pestered Bochin. Well, so what kind of person was he who awarded our Zhenya with one Jewish surname for the whole Kologriv and in such a voice?
He really did not know anything and once advised me to contact the geography teacher Peter Alexandrovich Kamaisky.
If you were to ask what a Russian educated person is who has risen from his own soil, from the "earth", from his roots, I would point to Kamaisky. Like him, I remember another. During the war, in the evacuation in the city of Glazov, we had a teacher of botany at our school. From him came the spirit of nobility, kindness and modesty. Kamaisky was the same. For some reason, it seems to me that in pre-Soviet Russia such people were Zemstvo - doctors, teachers, agronomists, etc. Slowly, without haste, without fuss, without crackling chatter, it seems to me that they would have raised Russia to a level that they will never approach , and the "money West" does not want to approach. Or maybe there were few such people in Russia? Even so, but it was they who created her image with the features of modesty, selflessness and ... sadness.
Whoever saw the old Soviet film about Suvorov and remembers the actor who played him, it will be clear to him what Peter Aleksandrovich Kamaisky was like. Small in stature, thin, withered and, it seems to me, even with a tuft on his head. The clothes were simple. An old, worn jacket over a shirt-shirt. I tried not to stand out, even seemed to walk sideways somehow. When he spoke, he sighed a lot. The guys loved him: they had their own. In addition to teaching at the school, Kamaisky had one more job. In Kologriv there was a museum of local lore, located in a two-story stone building with some "architectural excesses". Kamaisky was the director there. It is a pity that in my youth I did not get into the habit of going to the museum. There were a lot of interesting things there, Kamaisky told me that Kologriv has been known for more than 450 years. Here in the 19th century lived Pushkin's friend, poet and critic P. Katenin, who was sent here for belonging to the Decembrist societies*. Here were the estates of I. Pushchin, A. Zhemchuzhnikov. Professor F. Chizhov founded here an agricultural school **, the current zootechnical technical school, located on the other side of the Unzha.
* P.A. Katenin was expelled for a public scandal during a theatrical performance. ( Note. Internet publishers.)
** The school was built on the capital bequeathed by F.V. Chizhov, his executors - S.I. Mamontov and A.D. Polenov. ( Note. Internet publishers.)
And the Soviet government Kologriv gave his fighters. Special mention was made of V. Trefolev, a sailor, commandant of the revolutionary Kronstadt, at one time chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Baltic Fleet. Brave sailor, shifted to the back of the head peakless cap. Dashing guy.
Something indistinct was said about Kamaisky himself. Literature teacher Mikhail Mikhailovich Gromov, outwardly resembling an actor-lover, once, while drinking at Bochin’s, told me in secret that Kamaisky, a former lieutenant, allegedly participated in the Yaroslavl uprising of B. Savinkov in the 18th year, and when the Reds suppressed the uprising and the participants dispersed, got and settled quietly in Kologriv, hidden in the forests. Gromov was famous for being a visionary and it is possible that he invented all this, but it is possible that there could be some basis for the “invention”. Pyotr Aleksandrovich himself never talked about his past. I was not close to anyone at the school. In his free time, he always wandered through the surrounding forests, even in the rain. On his head is an old cap, dressed in a long canvas cloak with a hood, in his hands a stick and a canvas bag over his shoulder ...
In autumn, when we started digging potatoes, our students were sent to collective farms. They were usually accompanied by two or three teachers. Kamaisky never refused, he accepted the appointment of his superiors as an order. Once I was given a couple to him. We walked to a village about 10 kilometers from Kologriv named "Beauty". The cold rain lashed all the way, the country roads were carried away, we moved, drowning in the mud. "Beauty" was on a hill. She was a few rickety, blackened from the rain huts. There was silence. There were no people to be seen. Only from two or three windows looked out indifferent old women's faces. Kamaisky took us to the huts to rest and dry off. I went to the hut with him. He spoke the same language with the old woman, the same words as her. They were kindred spirits and understood each other, not alienating, not moving away.
You should, old, get off the stove, warm up the samovar or something. You see, the guys got wet, - said Kamaisky.
I would get off if I could. I'm sick, honey. What a year.
Come on, we're on our own. Where is your samovar?
We came for a week but it rained all the time. Low black clouds were moving in succession over the Beauty. It was impossible to work in the field. Having done nothing, sitting restlessly in the huts, we moved back.
On the way, crawling with my rubber boots through the mud, I asked Kamaisky:
How so? The village is called "Beauty", so it was once such. What now? The last old women will live - and there is no village? The government should know...
Kamaisky said:
The men were knocked out by the war. Few returned. And their kids, when they get a little older, run in different ways, as best they can. These old women also all overstrained ...
He fell silent, striding and leaning on his invariable stick. Then he said:
No, it looks like nothing can be done here in central Russia. Missed the case. You see how it turned out: the peasant held on to the earth with his teeth, went into axes, and now the earth is on you: no one needs it!
When spring began, life migrated to the "hut". The hut was called something like a dugout, dug into the left, high bank of the Unzha. Wooden bunks were made there, a table was dug into the ground. A kerosene lamp illuminated this cozy dwelling in the evenings. The river lapped very near, a few steps away, washing the fine golden sand and slightly rocking the boat that stood on it. The “hut” was the building and property of Bochin and his friend, a dental technician named Kirill, whom Bochin for some reason called “Father Sharlapy”. The “hut” was their base for fishing, which was carried out after the spring floods of Unzha. The water had not yet completely subsided, large expanses of meadows turned into backwaters, and fish went there in abundance, most of all - burbot. Bochin and father Sharlapy poached a little: in the evenings they set up nets slowly, and in the mornings they filmed with fish. Somewhere later it was handed over. Not always their "cooperative" lived peacefully. There used to be quarrels. And once it came to a bloody beating. Bochin suspected his friend of cheating: he went to Kostroma or Moscow and bought some “wrong” networks there, allegedly appropriated the difference in price.
Bochin came to me pretty drunk, spoke indignantly about the act of Charlapy, growled:
Me? Deceive me? I will not let it!
We went to the "hut", where Sharlapy was already. And my kind, caring, delicate Boris Dmitrievich smashed Charlapy's face into blood with his fist the size of a child's head, knocking him down into the water...
The matter was hushed up. Bochin also had friends in the police, and they framed the incident as a "mutual fight." And after a while, our "father Sharlapy" again began to come to the "hut" and again, together with Bochin, fished. Something to think about...
Honored guests often wandered into the "hut". There were even “fathers of the city”. More often than others, the chief of police, who was in the rank of captain, looked in (Bochin nicknamed him “Captain Grant”). This one just liked to drink "for free." He was not restricted. Once he found out that I was going to Moscow on vacation, he asked:
Listen, would you bring me a samovar, would you? Well, I can't buy it anywhere. There are no samovars for sale - that's all. Maybe there is something in Moscow? Would you bring me, I'll pay how much it will cost. Respect.
I "respected". I did not find samovars for sale in Moscow either, but remembering that Bochin also asked me to “respect” the request of the chief policeman, I nevertheless got hold of the samovar. Grandparents, who lived at the Airport, somewhere in the kitchen dump turned out to have a large copper samovar, which they brought with them from the former "Pale of Settlement", when in the mid-30s. together with my son (my uncle) moved to Moscow. The samovar did not have a lid, all attempts to find it were unsuccessful. I had to take the samovar as is. I decided that I would throw it out as a last resort. But the police chief was delighted with the samovar without a lid, as if it were his own.
Let's find a lid! he said. - This is bullshit. The main thing is that the samovar is large and roomy.
According to Bochin, "Captain Grant" had several children, and my grandparents' samovar seemed to be designed for the entire Grant family.
The captain offered money, but I refused: the thing was incomplete, old.
No, I said, consider it a gift. Drink tea for health ...
This is how the two eras came together. Maybe even today that samovar is still puffing at someone in Kologriv?
Sashok, a surgeon at the local hospital and a friend of Bochin, was a frequent visitor to the "hut". Sashok was a fat, massive man with a puffy, red-bluish face. He spoke little. He drank more, not swallowing, but pouring vodka from a glass right down his throat. After sitting and smoking, he usually left or fell asleep on the bunk.
Sashok, - said Bochin, - shone. Surgeon from God. Operates only when others refuse. Once some ace had to do an urgent operation in Manturov. Everything is a pass. Sasha is called: "Save me!" But they know his law - a mug of alcohol before the operation. Pour. He drank, shook his hands, and went. Saved!
You lie, I suppose, everything! Bochin was told.
Ask yourself!
There were rumors about Sasha that during the war he and his wife were in a partisan detachment. There she became addicted to morphine, and our Sashok - to vodka and alcohol, having learned to drink them without swallowing. I don't know what was true and what wasn't.
Once in the "hut" the director of the school, Alexander Alexandrovich Repin, visited us. We welcomed him royally. They cooked on a fire in a bowler hat such an ear, which, I am sure, has never been served in the best restaurants and is not served. The “white head” kept for special occasions was put on the table (in Kologriv, forestry enterprises and timber industry enterprises, mainly vodka was imported in bottles sealed with brown sealing wax, which was not much different from sivukha). The sun had already set, it was getting dark, and we lit a kerosene lamp in the "hut". It was warm, cozy, calm. The conversation flowed.
Exasperated from drunk vodka and hot fish soup, Repin exhorted me: - You are all sad about Moscow, but what is good there? When I come to Moscow, I can’t live there for more than a few days. Crush, nothing to breathe. And we have ... Look what meadows-forests! You will enter Unzha up to your throat in the summer, you can see every grain of sand at the bottom. Clean as glass! Stay with us. We will build a house for you here, we will marry you. There are plenty of brides in our school. We will give the best - Elena Pavlovna Gruzdeva. Pretty girl? That's it. Her father worked here as the first secretary of the district committee, a good man ... Well, did you persuade her?
Sometimes it seemed to me that Repin was right, that nothing was waiting for me there in Moscow. Such thoughts testified that in Kologriv I slowly "settled down", began to get used to it. But when I received letters from friends from Moscow, the "Moscow craving" again made itself felt, intensified.
Once I said to Repin:
Alexander Alexandrovich, we were talking about Moscow. And my school friend, Vitaly Svintsov, has now entered graduate school. And even got married.
Repin interrupted me:
Well, a married friend is not that friend. As for graduate school, if you have such an intention, please! We will help, we will write a paper to the ministry. There are no obstacles here.
The paper-recommendation was indeed written. It said that the Kologrivskoye Pedagogical College was petitioning the Ministry of Education to assist a teacher such and such in entering graduate school. Repin signed the recommendation. Naive provincials! In whatever ministerial offices I showed the "Repin paper", it was treated not only with contempt, but with a poorly concealed condescending grin. What “strength” could she have in deciding the issue of admission to graduate school, where they were accepted according to completely different papers and calls? They returned my "paper" as unnecessary ...
However, in one office they said:
You go to Yaroslavl, where the Pedagogical Institute announced a postgraduate enrollment. Try it! There, by the way, present your “Kologriv letter”, if, of course, you need it.
I bought myself a blue velor hat, fashionable in those days, a white scarf and went to Yaroslavl. There were about 25-30 of us, applicants. They settled us in the institute's gym. Beds with spring mattresses were placed along the walls, pillows and linen were given out. There was a large table in the middle, at which we gathered in the evenings and "cut ourselves into a goat." Next to me was the bed of a guy from Astrakhan, Tarakhani, as he called it. He was 9-10 years older than me, participated in the war, had injuries and, in addition to medals, a soldier's Order of Glory. His name was (he introduced himself as such) Sashka Yukht. In Tarakhani, he worked at the department of history at the Pedagogical Institute and intended to write a work about the Armenian trading colony in Astrakhan in the 17th-18th centuries.
In the evenings we lay on our cots, and I read to him from memory Esenin's poems, which were not yet published at that time and which he listened to with admiration. And I knew a lot of Yesenin's poems, including those from the Moscow Tavern. Sasha listened with bated breath.
That hold was a Russian tavern,
And I bent over the glass
So that, without regretting anything,
Cut yourself down in a drunken frenzy...*
* Correct: “That hold was - / Russian tavern. / And I bent over a glass, / So that without suffering for anyone, / I would destroy myself / In a drunken frenzy” (“Letter to a Woman”). ( Note. Internet publishers.)
Others also listened.
Let's! someone asked.
And I read:
The poet's gift is to caress and squabble,
Fatal seal on it.
White rose with black toad
I wanted to get married on earth.
Did you see how the guy wrote? Sasha said thoughtfully. - No, brother, they don’t write like that now ...
At a bad time, we came to enter big science. The campaign against the "cosmopolitans" was stopped back in 1949, but its consequences continued to be felt. And in the winter of 52, the “doctors' case” “exploded”. It was obviously stupid to meddle in graduate school at a time like this. But it seemed to many of us that all this was “not about us”: perhaps the really guilty are being punished, but what do we have to do with it? No, it cannot be that we are hooked for nothing. Oh, it will pass...
It didn't. Once, after the end of the consultation before the exam on the history of the USSR, prof. Genkin let Yukht and me know to delay. We talked about this and that, who came from where, about exams. And then Genkin said quietly:
You pass the exams in vain: you will not be accepted.
We both understood what he was talking about, but I still objected:
Well, they won't accept me - they will accept him: he is a participant in the war.
Genkin shrugged his shoulders, said nothing, and left. We didn't know what to think or what to do. I said that Genkin was simply expressing his opinion, but the more experienced Yuht shook his head.
No, he wouldn't say that himself. There's something different here.
We went outside:
And to hell with them all, - said Yuht. - Let's go to the Bear.
There was then such a restaurant in Yaroslavl. We drank heavily there.
I never returned to my mistress Augusta. Druzhok Bochin found a new apartment, closer to himself and the teacher training school. The house (a good, strong five-walled building) stood on a hillock of a dammed street, immersed in a lilac garden in spring and summer. My room - narrow and long, like a pencil case, had a separate entrance, which was, of course, very convenient. But there were four owners. The main one is Aleksey Alekseevich Zhokhov, a short, broad-shouldered old man of about 70, with a large broad beard. Silent "to the point of impossibility", with a facial expression that is always a little mockingly understanding, condescending. He spent whole days fiddling in the yard, correcting, forging, reinforcing something. His wife, an old woman with severe arthritis, lay on the stove and got off it, in my opinion, only when the stove was turned into a bathhouse: they covered the “floor” with straw and the old woman climbed in there for “washing”. This "baking" old woman was the real ruler of the house. From the stove, she gave “instructions” to the old man Alexei Alekseevich, supervised her daughter, whose name was Nyurka, in her kitchen activities and kept her son Alexei, or simply Leshka, in an iron fist. Leshka was a hunchback and a drunkard. Quiet and affable when sober, he turned into a wild brawler when drunk.
Often Bochin and I kept him company. Then, at his command, Nyurka put out vodka, brought chopped lard and sauerkraut in large plates. Once it happened that the plates with the “snack” turned out to be devastated by us. Drunk Bochin said to Leshka:
Alexey Alekseich! What do you have and have nothing else to eat?
I have?! - Leshka roared. Yes, I am now...
He tore off a gun hanging from the wall, rushed into the pigsty and from both trunks "opened fire" on the pig that was there. The squeal of a piglet, Leshkin's cries, our cries - everything was mixed up. The old man Aleksey Alekseevich, Nyurka, came running, they tried to snatch the gun from Leshka, twist it and dump it on the floor. Nothing succeeded. Leshka raged. No amount of persuasion helped. Then Nyurka opened the door to the house so that her mother, who was lying on the stove, could see what was happening.
Leshk! she said softly. - What are you doing wrong? Well wake up!
And a miracle happened. "The Beast" was tamed in an instant. He put the gun in a corner and silently, pulling his head into his shoulders and hump, backed into the yard...
The Zhokhovs had a good life. In the summer, branches of lilacs looked through the open window in the early morning, and a light breeze drove the freshest lilac air into my “pencil case”. Even from Augusta, he learned how to play smartly with tongs at the Russian stove, and here, at the Zhokhovs, he also managed without the help of Nyurka, who was still working in the kitchen in the dark at the commands of the old woman lying on the stove. He pulled out a pot with potatoes and pork, and ate from it. I drank tea “without anything” and went to the school. It was close. Feet sank slightly into the clean, crumbling sand. Turned around the corner - here it is our school. It stands on a hillock, immersed in the greenery of the garden, beauty!*
The educational process went "normally", almost without a hitch: Repin firmly held everything in his hands. He was an absolute authority for both students and teachers. On holidays, after the official part, the teachers gathered in a separate company in the teacher's room, "drank and ate", dragged out songs. There was a music teacher at the school, a certain Lev Stepanovich - still a young man, curly reddish blond. What he was like as a musician is hard to say, but rather easy. How can you lure a real music teacher to the Kologrivskaya wilderness? Lev Stepanych famously played the button accordion, and given our musical poverty, this was sufficient. Among the teaching staff there were quite a few young people - the Leningrad psychologist Ippolitov, the geographer Elena Pavlovna Gruzdeva, two writers and Russianists - Lyudmila Alexandrovna and Anna Vasilievna, myself, and others - and we gradually “migrated” somewhere to the side, gathered around Lev Stepanovich, who was sitting on a chair, sometimes lazily, sometimes zealously stretching or "tearing" his button accordion "according to the mood." He knew many ambiguous ditties, thieves and semi-thieves songs of different times. Once he “tugged” the furs of his button accordion, extracting from it the well-known motif, probably from the time of the New Economic Policy, of the famous “gop with a closure, it will be me.” And he sang himself, but with other words composed by someone for "atheistic propaganda."
Leaning his curly head to the button accordion and stamping his foot to the beat, Lev Stepanych did not sing, but “poured” with a patter.
Archangel Gabriel was reborn
A responsible person suddenly appeared,
Serves as a financier in a bank,
Renowned as a specialist
They say he got high too!
He raised his head, asked: “Well, how?”, Laughed and “poured” again.
Elijah the prophet lives in the same world,
Riding in a gilded carriage!
His horses are amazing
It wouldn't hurt to ride
And then drive them all to vodka!
This is how we got the disco.
In the midst of the fun, the door opened and Repin entered. Lev Stepanych made a semicircular movement with that part of the button accordion on which the mother-of-pearl keys were located, and cut off the melody. But it's too late.
What's this?! Repin asked menacingly.
We were confusedly silent.
Lev Stepanych organizes the tavern, and everyone goes there?
Sad that time turned out to be fun. Some time passed, and an order appeared to dismiss our Lev Stepanych. I don’t know what played the main role here: either his “blatnyak” at the teacher’s holiday, or something else happened to him. He was often invited to various "events" in institutions and private homes, where a party was supposed, and he never refused. Many years later, Vysotsky, in one of his best songs, will talk about such parties and the bayan players who played them.
Two big boys
I was grabbed by the sides
"Play, bastard, sing while
They didn't strangle me!"
Then they caught the groom
And beat for a long time
And all the good things in yourself
Exterminated...*
* Correct: “I was grabbed by the sides / Two hefty men: / “Play, you bastard, sing until / They didn’t strangle!” //<…>Then they had an ear / And giblets, / Then they caught the groom / And beat them for a long time, / Then they went to dance in the hut, / Then they fought not out of malice - / And everything good in themselves / They destroyed it ”(“ Smotriny ”). ( Note. Internet publishers.)
I don't know where our curly-haired Lev Stepanych has gone. Dissolved somewhere in the Kostroma forests. And he was a good guy. And he played his accordion great ...
But I had to fall under Repin's repressions, though not as tough as Lev Stepanovich and me. There were transfer exams. According to history, I received them together with my colleague - another historian Vladimir Nikolaevich Ponomarev. He was a tall man with a swarthy face, dotted with some blue and black dots, like miner's coal dust. He was lazy, slow in movement and speech, and spoke with long pauses and seemed to sing along. He worked at the school for only a year, he came to Kologriv, it seems, from Galich, where he worked at the teacher's institute. Behind him stretched a large "tail" - a large family, and he tried to gain more hours, as he said, "kids for milk." Even with the naked eye it was clear that Vladimir Nikolaevich was a complete type of hack. It was with such a “fruit” that we took exams in history together. Subsequently, for all my many years of experience, I became convinced that the historical knowledge of the majority of students in schools, technical schools, or even technical universities is practically approaching zero. Even what they memorized “for the blackboard”, or even more so for exams, quickly disappeared from their heads, and, at best, some vague ideas remained there, except for the already very large dates, events and persons.
Those boys and girls who were examined by Vladimir and I, as I called him to myself, Galitsky, could only confirm the general sad trend.
In fairness, a full-fledged deuce could become an average well-deserved score for all of them. But some still answered something, terribly confused in dates, estimates, etc.
Well, shall we put three? - I asked Vladimir Galitsky in such cases.
He raised his "Belomor" and thought a little, answered:
What is there! Get four!
When one of those who answered told us the date of the Battle of the Ice, and on the second question, the difference between the Soviet constitution and the “bourgeois” ones, my Galitsky demanded resolutely:
Well, that's five!
I looked at him doubtfully, but he did not hesitate:
Well, here - no stretch! The guy knows everything. Get five!
By the end of the exam in our statement, from top to bottom, there was a “track” of some fours and fives. We signed, and I carried the statement to the head teacher Kudryavtsev. He looked up, shook his head, but said nothing.
Then Repin called me. On the table in front of him was a statement of Galitsky and me. He nodded at her.
Your students and Ponomarev have high knowledge, huh?
I explained to him that these were not my students. The exam was taken by classes in which Ponomarev taught history. I was just an assistant.
And that means they just signed the “linden”? What for? Why?
I began to mutter something in response, feeling that I was blushing shamefully.
You can’t do this,” Repin said wearily. - Discipline will be shaken at once: why teach, work, if all the same, four or five are provided. Well, Ponomarev - okay. I know him: he doesn’t stay anywhere for a long time, he wanders around the region, and he won’t stay with us. He doesn't care at all. And you, then, too? But for us, here, no. If it goes like this, with what will the guys return to their villages? With nothing. What will they teach - after all, they are teachers without 5 minutes. It turns out you: the village - well, to hell with it!
The next day, an order appeared on the notice board. Ponomarev-Galitsky was given a severe reprimand with a warning. It's just a reprimand for me. Both - "for the liberalism shown in assessing the knowledge of students."
I said to the head teacher Nikolai Vasilyevich Kudryavtsev:
Well, what kind of liberalism? Just slovenliness, irresponsibility...
And this is liberalism,” he replied. - We cannot allow this, we must have a firm order and tough demand. Otherwise, everything will go-roll.
And the day came, about which I thought and dreamed, leaving for the first time in Kologriv: the day when it was said - you can return home. A paper from the oblono arrived, announcing that from the new academic year there would be no enrollment in teacher training schools and teachers' institutes, since in the future they are subject to closure: the training of teachers of all grades of the school will henceforth be conducted in pedagogical universities. In practice, this meant that the academic “load” would decrease in the coming academic year, and further this reduction would increase. I was a "newcomer", and if anyone could be cut with the least damage, then, of course, me.
Well, - said Kudryavtsev, - what are we going to do? If you want to stay, stay. Find the clock. And then it will be seen. If you don't want it, let's go.
That's human nature! He tries with all his might to break out of the “ban”, but as soon as the “ban” is removed and the person is told: go, walk, take this “forbidden” - he begins to hesitate.
Lying in my "Zhokhov pencil case", I thought. From newspaper reports, and more from letters from Moscow from my school friend Vitaly Svintsov, I knew: the ideological screw is screwed up to the very hat and the creak from this is getting stronger. It was clear that Moscow was not waiting for me and, most likely, would meet me gloomy, if not harshly. And Kologriv almost became his own, I got used to him, to the school, to his people: Bochin, Repin, Kudryavtsev, others. It's funny, but it seemed to me that they might be offended by me if I left. At the thought of this, a feeling of guilt even began to stir ... But in Moscow, my parents, friends, my bosom friend Vitaly. He was already finishing his philosophical graduate school, got married and even became a young father. Will it be hard in Moscow? Probably so. But I am only 24 years old, I recalled A. Tvardovsky:
Let's not get carried away, let's break through
We will live - we will not die!
I arrived in Moscow in the late autumn of 1952. I was not looking for a job: I was “taking off” my vacation, and when I started looking, I realized that I had stumbled upon a wall. Yes, I'm not alone. In schools everywhere there was a "bust" of teachers-historians. It was only possible, if you were lucky, to get a job somewhere to replace patients or teachers who were on maternity leave. But even these places were "under the gun": those who left, as a rule, passed them on to acquaintances or relatives, whom they believed that upon the return of the "regular" they would release what was given to them for a while and leave.
In "walking through the ordeals" I unexpectedly met with my classmate Felix Letushev, who, after graduating from the institute, was assigned to Kaluga and now also returned. They began to walk together. The schools were deaf. We decided to give up on them, went to the editorial offices of newspapers, publishing houses. In the newsrooms, Felix seemed to have more light. At the institute, he was a fairly well-known athlete, he ran a distance of 400 m, as they said then, “in the first category”, that is, he approached the standard of a master of sports. He hoped that in some newspaper he could be hired as a sports correspondent. Did not work. Something suddenly flashed in Detgiz. There, in the frames, a long, thin man cheerfully received us, called us "children" and assured us that such a "children" was needed in a publishing house, for example, in a proofreader, ordered to come in a week. Then another week later, two weeks later, a "month" later, and that was it. And we were already happy ...
Then in Moscow in crowded places - at tram and trolleybus stops, in parks, squares, etc. - special stands stood or hung on fences, on which (under glass) central newspapers were hung. The nearest to our house such a stand hung at a tram stop at the corner of Trifonovskaya Street and Orlovsky Lane. In the morning, I think it was January 13, 1953, on my way to another job search, I stopped at this stand. People crowded around him, and it took me some time to push through to the newspaper. It contained a TASS report about the arrest of a group of doctors who were plotting to assassinate party and government leaders.
The crowd read this message in silence, I do not remember any remarks or exclamations. Trams were approaching, and people were in a hurry to get into the cars. It was cold, and a little snow was falling. The list of "killer doctors in white coats" also included Russian surnames, but Jewish ones predominated. Another tram approached, but I did not get on it: I decided to return home. What this message meant, including for people like me, was not difficult to understand.
Subsequently, after the death of Stalin, and even more so in the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years, a lot was written about the “case of doctors”. Many authors argued that this case was only the beginning, the prologue of a large-scale anti-Semitic campaign, the finale of which was to be the total deportation of Jews to Siberia and other remote places, and even almost a second Holocaust.
If this were the case, then what was happening in the winter of 1953, which I witnessed "from below", could not be ignored, let's call it that, "preliminary preparation." She wasn't there. In our “outlying” district of Meshchansky Streets, Jewish families lived as before, although, of course, everyday anti-Semitism has intensified, this is a fact. However, it did not develop into something like pogroms, beatings, etc.
Yes, and how it was possible to practically evict the Jews, who lived not concentrated, but scattered. Ghettos did not exist in Soviet cities.
My cousin's husband, Andrey Zakharovich Dmitriev, a small, thin man with slits in his eyes, from which intelligence and cunning gleamed, said to me:
In vain you go with your Felix to the personnel departments. One would, perhaps, be taken, de in front of the other, it seems to be embarrassing. You interfere with each other, and more, to be honest, you interfere with him. Do you understand why?
Andrei Zakharovich knew what he was talking about. Together with my aunt, Vera Grigorievna, he worked in the Moscow City Financial Department and knew bureaucratic psychology to the marrow of his bones.
At the next meeting with Felix, I told him about this conversation, directly adding that now they would not take me “on the 5th point”, and this point, when we are together, casts a shadow on him.
The conversation was on the move, and Felix, after listening to my monologue, even stopped.
Are you completely, or what? He twisted his finger at his temple. - As we went for a couple, so we will go. Listen more than any Andrey Zakharychev.
But both of us - both I and he - understood: Andrei Zakharovich was right, there was nothing to be done about it. The last time together we wandered into the theater. Moscow City Council on Mayakovsky Square, which required scene workers. We were not hired: the personnel officer said that he had no right to register people with higher education for such work. Our “search” actions differed on this, but not friendship. Felix Letushev nevertheless became a sports journalist, and we often met with him. But that was already later. And then I only had my Kologriv in reserve. And I gave a telegram to the school - an SOS telegram. The answer came immediately: “We guarantee a full weekly load. Come. Kudryavtsev."
At that very moment, the seemingly impenetrable wall cracked! My aunt, Vera Grigorievna, the same one who worked with her husband Andrei Zakharovich in the Moscow City Financial Department, asked by phone to urgently come to her. The Moscow Financial Department was located in a large building on the corner of Kuznetsky Most and Neglinnaya Street, which, it seems, had been a bank before the revolution. There were wide staircases, long corridors, half-dark for some reason. Vera Grigorievna came out to meet me in one of the dark corridors.
Do you know where Gagarinskaya street is, near the Kropotkinskaya metro station? - she said. - Go there now. There is a school for working youth on Gagarinskaya. You will find the director, remember - Sofya Markovna Golman. If there is no one in her office, you will say that it is from me. If there is someone else, don't speak. I'll tell her myself later. It needs a historian. Come on, we'll talk right away.
I knew that Vera Grigoryevna worked in the Department of Healthcare and Schools Financing. From here, apparently, its thread stretched to the school of working youth and to its director. There were many schools for working youth in Moscow at that time. They worked in the evenings. Their abbreviated name was ShRM. Not without excitement, I went to Sofya Markovna Golman, unknown to me, who, with her school, will play a huge role in my whole life.
She turned out to be an emphatically strict woman of a typical teacher's appearance. Strict, even a little lean face, thick black hair with graying, taken at the back of the head in a large bun, strict clothes.
I worked at her school for several years, we had many young teachers there, and among ourselves we called her “a Komsomol member of the 20s.” She was such with all that was inherent in many Komsomol members of those years: devotion to duty, which was placed above the personal, disinterestedness, utmost honesty.
Sofya Markovna was alone in the room, and I immediately said "from whom I am." She seemed to soften a little, but she did not retreat from her strict business tone. After asking me about everything, she said:
You probably will not be satisfied with what we can offer you. 10 hours a week is less than half time.
Arrange, arrange, - I hastened to assure her. - Quite satisfied. And there in the future...
It seemed to me that Sofya Markovna sighed knowingly.
Well, if it suits, let's get the documents...
And I did not go to Kologriv. I don't know what Bochin, Kudryavtsev, Repin and others thought of me. But even after more than half a century, I think of them with love. And now I see the Bochin "hut", dug into the high sandy shore, at the top of which the old pines of the Kologrivskoye cemetery were rustling and, of course, rustling. And on the other, gently sloping shore, where only the eye can see - all the meadows and meadows. Here, near the Unzhi River, there is a bend, a turn, and then it “goes straight” and flows smoothly, but quickly. At the beginning of summer, Unzha is still quite deep, but through its crystal-clear depth, you can see the golden sand of the bottom. Russia...
From the life of the Russian "backwoods"
late 40s - early 50s.
I did not come to Kologriv by chance. When I was a student (second half of the 40s of the last century), after graduating from universities, those who graduated from them were distributed to different cities and villages throughout the Soviet Union. In 1950, I graduated from the Faculty of History of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute and was sent to the disposal of the Kostroma Oblono, and from there to the Pedagogical School of the district town of Kologriv.
This town was then 80 kilometers from the railway station. In good weather, it could be reached by a decrepit bus with a crumpled and rusty bucket tied to the rear bumper. And in winter, in snowdrifts - only on a horse, on a sleigh. If you go through the forest at night, it happened that a wolf howl was heard. In late autumn, the town is also not easy to get to: the rains turned the country road into impassable mud. The lorries skidded.
In Moscow, Leningrad and other large cities in the late 40s - early 50s, under the late Stalin, there were ideological battles and battles, they whipped writers, then biologists, then cosmopolitans, then doctors - "killers in white coats." I vaguely remember how two classics, Sholokhov and Simonov, clashed over pseudonyms. Sholokhov hinted: we know, they say, who is hiding under these pseudonyms and why, and Simonov defended the right to pseudonyms. But all this ideological felling almost did not reach our Kologriv, it was quiet here.
Entrance to Kologriv - at that time, of course, through Sovetskaya Street. It was perhaps too wide for such a small and abandoned town as this one. Built up mainly with one-story wooden houses, Sovetskaya Street ran down a long, sloping hill. At its foot, it spread like a river, forming a square, which, according to the custom of those times, was also called Leninskaya in almost all cities and towns. This is the center of our city.
The busiest place here is near the old two-story building. At the entrance to it is a sign - "Dining Room". Here, always on the grass or on the snow (if, of course, in winter), armfuls of straw, hay, and in some places heaps of horse manure are scattered. People are crowding, horses harnessed to carts or sleighs are standing. Chewing hay, they toss their heads, which makes the harness emit some kind of specifically rural "rawhide-belt" sound. A warm, rustic sound... Occasionally trucks drive up, but since there are few of them, they don't change the rural image around the canteen building.
The city spirit reigned nearby, on the other side of the street. There was a "shopping center" here. It consisted of two two-story stores, grocery and manufactured goods at the same time. In one rule, Aunt Augusta, in the other, Aunt Klava. Both in aprons not the first whiteness. Their scales are old, with two metal "cups" and cast-iron weights from 30 kg to 200 gr.
In stores on certain days you can buy black bread, some kind of cereal. Always in stock - bottles of cheap vodka sealed with brown sealing wax, canned sprats in tomato, sweets - "pillows". From manufactured goods it was possible to purchase canvas raincoats, rubber and tarpaulin boots, washing troughs, kerosene lamps, shovels and many other things needed in the household.
Behind the shops is a polyclinic: a one-story house of an outwardly barrack type. But inside everything is tidy and clean. The inhabitants of the town (and there won't be even five thousand of them) are generally clean. Wash and rub their homes right up to a full shine. Women will tuck up their skirts, bend almost in half, butt up, head down, and scrub, scrub their floors with some kind of special combs.
Behind the shops and the clinic is the river bank. Our river Unzha is raftable, non-navigable. Throughout the winter, forests are felled in the timber industry enterprises. Then the logs are pulled by tractors to the shore of the Unzha, and in the spring, when it overflows in high water, it picks them up and carries them down to the dam. Zapan - a wide dam from the same logs. And on the shore - old warehouses. Although rusty locks still hang on some of them, these warehouses have not been used for a long time, they are empty, lopsided, cracked. For many years, from the sun, wind and snow, their logs and boards have lost all color and the warehouse walls have become completely colorless, white-gray. They say that once the owner of the warehouses was the timber merchant Vasily Tsvetkov, who also owned a side, “gastronomic” business. Local women collected various mushrooms and berries, which are in abundance in these places. Then the best ones were selected, they were placed in special barrels in a special way and sent to St. Petersburg and Moscow for sale. It was said that Tsvetkov supplied his exquisite products even to the royal table. During the revolution, according to rumors, his business was ruined, and he and his family disappeared somewhere in unearthly distant places.
From the abandoned warehouses, a path with benches installed on it stretches. This, one might say, is a walking city embankment. It leads to the only cinema in town. It works regularly - three times a week, although there is no electricity in the city. That is, the electrical wiring exists, but the light is supplied to the houses only on revolutionary holidays. But cinema has its own "engine".
Behind the cinema, the coastal side of the square ends. It narrows and turns into Kirov Street going up. From the square you can clearly see what was once a large church up there. It has long been turned into an MTS *, polluted, littered. Around the tractor and other agricultural machines - abandoned or under repair. Perhaps this is the dirtiest place in the city.
* MTS - machine and tractor station. ( Note. Internet publishers.)
Here, Kirov Street is crossed by Trefoleva Street, named so in memory of a local native, a representative of the "beauty and pride of the Russian revolution" - a Bolshevik sailor from Kronstadt in 1917. On Kirovskaya, in a two-story brick building, there is a museum of local lore. Before the revolution, the building was built as a station. A certain merchant Mikhail Gromov set out to build a railway line to the town, but something got in the way*. After the revolution, the building was turned into a museum. Very interesting but never crowded. And the director of the museum - Kamaisky Pyotr Aleksandrovich - is also an interesting, but not very sociable person. Elderly, outwardly similar to Suvorov's film portraits - quiet and polite. In World War I he was a lieutenant, and in 1918 he participated, they say, in the Yaroslavl anti-Bolshevik uprising of Boris Savinkov and Colonel Perkhurov. I think that those who should have known knew about this, but for some reason they did not touch Kamaisky. Maybe they didn’t find it in the outback, where he apparently disappeared? And then how many years have passed?
* According to other sources, the merchant's name was Gavriil Vladimirovich Makarov - see: http://russia4d.ru/magazine/05-2015/istoriya-kologrivskogo-muzeya.html. ( Note. Internet publishers.)
Behind the museum is a short cul-de-sac descending to a deep ravine. It is very beautiful here in autumn. The leaf is already falling, but the crowns of the old trees are still thick, they are in contact with each other, and you are walking, as if along a covered alley. In this cul-de-sac - the House of Culture with a large good library. Unlike a museum, there are always people in it. The inhabitants of our town are great bookworms. In addition, there is a choir at the House of Culture, in which young teachers of two city schools and our teacher training college were enrolled almost without fail. And on holidays we stand on the stage and sing. One song - long, viscous - I remember well. It began with the words:
I'll tell you, dear friends,
How good it is for us to live in our native land ...
It was funny, stupid: the choristers are men, but they sing like some kind of girlfriend ... We sang with our hoarse voices another, purely masculine song:
Artillerymen, Stalin gave the order!
Artillerymen, the fatherland is calling us!
Of the many thousands of batteries
For the tears of our mothers
For our Motherland - fire! Fire!
A battle song, of the war years, and they are here, still very close. We are still at war.
We could not help but sing: the head of the choir from the House of Culture directly complained to the leadership of the school. Its leadership consisted of two people: the director and the vice teacher. Director - Repin Alexander Alexandrovich - a thin, small, former front-line soldier, an intelligent and insightful person, demanded strict order in everything.
Slackness, he often said, is our misfortune, this is our possible ruin. And no one will ever help our country, no one will ever regret us, they will not let us down. This must be understood. And we ourselves get into a lot of nonsense. So with these songs of yours too ...
The head teacher's name was Nikolai Vasilyevich Kudryavtsev. He also fought, walked in a military uniform: he wore it. The left sleeve of his tunic was tucked under his belt: at the front, Kudryavtsev lost his arm. But with some incredible ease and speed he rolled cigarettes, smoking almost continuously. Noticing somehow my surprise and even admiration for this art of his, he grinned and said:
You will suffer - you will learn. Good saying. Get armed.
Laughing at the complaints of our choirmaster, he said:
Don't want to sing? How it is? The song helps us to build and live! Sing, sing! In a loud voice! Party orders!
True, there was one “Protestant” among the “singers” - a mathematics teacher Alexander Liveryevich Volkov. A man in a heavily greasy black suit and a dirty shirt, but with an indispensable tie. And always lightly drunk.
I respect the party, he said, but there is no clause in the charter that a communist is obliged to sing. And I won't! Get lost, my cart, all four wheels!
It is strange, but the fact of the presence of the authorities of our regional town was hardly noticeable. Even on holidays, there are few red flags, and no rallies were held. In general, politics did not really excite and disturb the inhabitants of the town. Life was divided in two: "before the war" and "after the war." But no one expected that now, after the war, it would be much better. A popular slogan has already been born: “If only there was no war!”
The secretary of the district committee of the party, Pavel Ivanovich Gruzdev, was probably most concerned not with the town, but with the region: villages and villages. After the war, many of them were in such an abomination of desolation that sometimes it was impossible to look without tears. Once in the fall we went with the guys to pick potatoes. Kamaisky led, he knew the whole district. The village "Krasavitsa" is seven kilometers away. The rain didn't stop for two days. The dirt is barely passable. They got there anyway. We turned into the first house. One grandmother on the stove.
You, the old one, - says Kamaysky, - got off, the samovar blew up, the guys were soaked through. Do you have any potatoes?
No, father, no potatoes, no bread.
We waited two days for the rain to stop. Lil and lil damn. So we went into the mud and rain.
One well-known agronomist, “drinking,” once said to me:
You know, nothing can be squeezed out of this non-black earth. Throw him to the fucking hair dryer and leave. And then how does Saltykov-Shchedrin get it: we want to turn a loss-making economy into a profitable one, without changing anything in it.
What to change to and how? Everything can go upside down...
Nothing will fly if wisely ...
But what could the local leadership do? Our Pavel Ivanovich Gruzdev, also a participant in the war, was a calm, courteous person. He rarely appeared in public.
His daughter, Elena Pavlovna, worked in our own pedagogical school as a teacher of geography, kept herself modest. The school button accordion player Lev Stepanovich courted her, however, without success. This often brought him into a minor state, he drank, took out the button accordion and sang sad thieves' songs.
Hat pulled down over the eyes
Rails escaping dotted line.
We are a companion on this distant branch
There will be only a gloomy guard...
He played and sang well, this Stepanych, and from his songs the dreary pain of abandoned, deserted Russian places penetrated into the soul. But somehow by chance director Repin found our Stepanych performing this thieves' hit. The punishment was the coolest: Stepanych was kicked out, remembering his other sins.
Elena Pavlovna preferred Felix Vladimirovich, a teacher of psychology who came from Leningrad, although, in my opinion, there was little pleasant in him. Arrogant, mocking. He arrived with his mother - the wife of some major worker, who was repressed back in 1937. The lady was demanding. As, however, and the son. At first I invited them to live with me, but then they separated and lived rather closed.
The other, careless side of the square began with a house in which the people's court was located. Next came the usual residential buildings, and only in the last of them, almost next to the dining room, was the District Consumer Union.
And in the center of the square there is a public garden with a typical figure of Lenin (the leader's hand pointing forward). It was a little funny: the leader, as it were, invited to move towards the same dining room. This "Leninist way" we often walked with my friend from the pedagogical school Boris Bochin.
Shortly after arriving at work at the school, I went to see him for some reason. Several people were sitting at the table, including three of our young teachers. That's who, probably, was bored and sad in the town - that's for sure them. Not only suitors, but also reliable boyfriends in the town were few: the war took away. And they sat, the poor, and played cards with the peasants.
Bochin joyfully greeted me:
Sit down with us, we're playing points here...
Yes, I can't.
You can not? It's in vain. Learn. Useful in jail.
Bochin was a hereditary resident of the town. Here, as well as in the surrounding villages, everyone knew him. He was born in 1916 and was drafted into the army before the war. Enlisted in the convoy troops. They transported prisoners: criminal and political - the Great Terror was just going on in the country.
What have I seen, seen enough, - he told me, - it’s better not to talk about it ... What many escorts did, what criminals did with political ones - one horror. Criminal cases used to be even worse than escort ones.
And you? I once asked.
No, God bless me. I was on guard all the time. No, God did.
I don't know if he was telling the truth or not. He had a strange disposition: sometimes quiet and even delicate, sometimes tough and ferocious. He had a friend - do not spill water. By the strange nickname "Father Kiripy" *. Then something happened between them, and Bochin, with his pood fists, almost sent the frail friend to the next world. But the most interesting - very soon they reconciled!
* Bochin called his friend by two nicknames: "Father Kiripy" and "Father Sharlapy." "Kiripia" was called Cyril, he was a dentist. ( Note. author.)
During World War II, Bochin fought in the infantry, was wounded twice, had military awards, but did not wear them. On the lapel of his jacket he had only two stripes: red and yellow. Then such stripes were still worn: red meant a severe wound, yellow meant a lighter one.
The man won the war, - he told me, - the man. Be not a man ... Here, listen to such a thing. In 1944, very late autumn, we crossed the river. It was snowing, the water was cold, the wind was piercing. We stood up to our shoulders in the water - more and more village men. They held a crossing made of logs on their hands: troops and light equipment were transferred along it to the other side. There were three such "bridges". The corps commander personally led, urged on: faster, faster, brothers !!! Wounded in the leg, he stood leaning on a stick. Some part of it shut up, he shouted to the officer and whipped him right in the face with a stick! I saw it myself. So, brother ... And instantly figured it out! Went. Count in the ice, and what to do ...
Bochin and I often wandered the streets of Kologriv. He usually dragged me into the dining room first. Her manager, aunt Panya, let us into the side room. It was a special room for local and visiting VIP bosses, etc. Ordinary people drank and fed in a common room. Another difference of the “side” is the menu, a sheet from a school notebook, on which the available dishes were listed with a slobbered pencil. There was no menu offered in the common "hall". And the menu in the sidebar sometimes made me smile. Once this menu offered visitors "pinzon soup". Together we found out what was meant by "soup-peyzan" i.e. peasant soup. In order not to offend Aunt Panya, they didn’t say anything to her, they fixed it themselves.
Aunt Panya was a kind and hardworking woman. Like most other women in our town. Here, for example, is my mistress, with whom I “stood in the apartment,” Augusta Ivanovna. She never complained about life, about fate. Her husband died, the children (son and daughter) parted, their mother did not visit. The son somewhere not so much worked as drank. And she lived, no longer young, alone. She kept a cow, a pig, chickens, she also had a small garden. She did not take any money for gifts from her garden, if she was offered, she waved her hands:
Will you! What more money! Eat for health.
In general, money was rarely discussed in the town. Probably, poor people are kinder and more disinterested, but there were no rich people in the town.
We often sat in the “side room”, talked, each drank his own dose (Bochin - a mug of vodka or diluted alcohol) and usually went to the square, to the public garden.
One day I suggested going to the cinema. On this day, the trophy German film "The Life of Rembrandt" was shown. I saw this film at the end of the war, it made a strong impression on me then. Bochin agreed to go take a look. On the way, I began to tell him what I remembered from the film.
Rembrandt was - the greatest artist. He knew how to convey the subtlest human feelings and experiences. He was rich and famous. But then fate turned its back on him. Saskia's beloved wife died, then her son and other relatives. Rembrandt became poor, actually semi-poor. Many of his paintings were dumped in the attic of a large house that once belonged to him. And then one day, old and sick, he went ...
Wait, - Bochin interrupted my story, touching my sleeve. - There are two of my acquaintances coming out of the court. Let's find out what's the matter ... “Smirnov! Lech! he shouted.
Two short men in quilted jackets, boots and filthy officer's caps with broken visors stopped and headed towards us.
Why are you wandering through the courts during working hours? Bochin asked them as they approached.
There was a trial for us, - said the one whom Bochin called Lekha.
What are you? What are you orphans for? Whom did they let blood? Doesn't sound like you.
Not at all. In the spring, the logs were dragged from the rafting to the store manager Khromov in Krasnukha. He planned to put up a new house, and he persuaded us for three bottles.
Did you miss a lot?
Yes, no ... A cop from the 3rd forestry covered us. Khromov gave him our bottles, and he left the logs for him. And now we have to complain.
How much did you solder, sinners?
On a nickel, you see how.
Bochin whistled, but for a minute I was just numb. And not so much the exorbitant term of punishment, but the calmness, it seemed, even the indifference with which these peasants talked about what awaited them, struck me. As if they were just moving on to another job.
Why were you released?
Until the evening, - answered Lech. - Where are we going? Now let's go home, take some of the clothes, grubs, shag too. Smoking passion hunting, but nothing. At you, hour, is not present?
We handed them our already opened packs of Prima. With hardened fingers, they could not immediately pull a cigarette out of the packs.
Yes, take it all...
Well, God bless. Farewell guys. See you.
They pulled up the bags on their backs and left. I watched them go until they were out of sight...
Well, let's go to the cinema, or something, - said Bochin.
Hard...
What's hard?
Well, it’s necessary, with what calmness and humility men go to hell ...
So to hell. They seemed to have come from the front, since then they have been working in the forest, at the logging site. And in the camp they will probably be driven to logging. Vydyuzhat, the people are beaten, familiar. Nothing. Went.
...The last shots of the film were going on. Rembrandt, a beggar, weak, went to his former house and asked the doorkeeper to take him to the attic. Here they wander there in the dark among the piles of rubbish, and Rembrandt lights the way with a candle. With the sleeve of an old shirt, he erases the dust thickly covering some kind of picture. Looks at the old man's face. This is a self-portrait of him, Rembrandt. Last self-portrait. On a tired face - calmness, humility before fate. Rembrandt brings the candle closer, peers and quietly laughs with an old rattling laugh.
What are you laughing at, old man? asks the astonished gatekeeper
I understand,” Rembrandt answers quietly.
What did you understand?
I understand everything, - says Rembrandt and blows out the candle. Darkness. The end of the film.
We were walking home, and Rembrandt, the wavering light of the candle he held in his hand, the condemned peasants with sacks over their shoulders, interfered in my head. Bochin was sullenly silent...
It seems like six months have passed. Once, Bochin, who was already tipsy, simply burst into my room, which I rented from the quiet and kind old man Alexei Alekseevich Zhokhov.
Did you hear that?” he shouted.
Those two peasants with whom we talked in the fall, remember? Who soldered the jailers for five years?
I don't have them anymore. On the shipment, they argued about something with the urks, and those Finns hid. Our peasants died, now remember what they were called.
What are you? Let's go to the sidewall and remember. The guys were good. We passed the front and nothing, but here you see how it happens ...
Aunt Panya, when we came to the dining room, explained to us that the “side” was occupied: Komsomol members from the district committee were “walking”.
Nothing, - said Bochin, - we are in the dining room. We just need to remember.
Who is it?
Lech Repin and Pashka Smirnov. And also Rembrandt.
And who is this?
He was also a good guy. Lived a hard life.
And is it easy?
Wow, he thought so too. Kingdom of heaven to all of them.
Aunt Panya crossed herself.
We went to the river, sat down in someone's boat standing on the shore. The director of the museum, Kamaisky, pitched his boat nearby. I approached him. We started talking, I told about the two men we met, about the film "Rembrandt".
What suffering and torment the brilliant artist had to endure in order to come to the idea of humility before fate, but ordinary men seem to have been born with this idea...
Our peasants, - said Kamaisky, - have humility, or maybe humility, like nature, like that river over there. Yes, they themselves are part of nature ...
He paused and went back to his boat. Then, after thinking, he said:
But they have humility for the time being. Did you hear the ice drift on the river, did you see it? How cannons roar. So it is with this humility. Until the time. We need only special - rebellious - people, ringleaders.
Pugachev?
Well, yes, like him. Pugachev, Razin, Makhno. A lot of them.
The thought suddenly occurred to me that Kamaisky looked like Rembrandt in some way, and I told him about it.
So, we all look like him here: round-faced, broad-nosed... It's like Bochin's: it doesn't fit in the mirror. (He laughed.) And not a single Rembrandt. However, there is an artist here in one village ... An interesting man! Rembrandt is not Rembrandt, but talent. Come to the museum, I will show his work *.
A light wind drove a small swell through the crystal water and carried the refreshing spirit of a pine forest that was darkening in the distance on the other side. Dusk began to descend on Kologriv.
(The story of Boris Bochin from Kologryvka)
After graduating from the institute in 1950, I was assigned to the Kostroma region. There, in the oblono, a cheerful deputy head said:
You will go to Kologriv. Heard about this one? I've been there. Miracle town. Russia is deep. Not much has changed since the 17th century. Only now there was no teacher training school in the city, but now there is. You are there to teach Russian history and our most democratic constitution to children, mainly from the surrounding villages. They will understand you. You are not much older than them. They are 16-17, you are 22. You will carry culture to the very bottom of the people. Well, happy for you...
If Kologriv really was Russia "from the roots", then the physical instructor of the pedagogical school Boris Bochin was a Russian peasant without "admixture". Hefty, 35 years old. Round face, bulbous nose, small eyes, shining with intelligence and cunning. The fists are "half-pound", but they were not used. Damn, I haven't seen many of those. And the most delicate person.
I was very friendly with him, and he told me a lot of interesting things from his life.
Once said:
Here you are a historian, but if you want, I'll tell you a story that you probably never heard. Believe it or not. It's all true, that's the cross. I am a believer at heart.
When I got home, I wrote down his amazing story.
It was in the first weeks of the war. We stood in Lithuania, almost on the border. German tanks just rushed in. I see their soldiers jumping from armor to the ground, laughing. "Hyundai hoh!" What should I do?
They kept us for more than three months in an old cowshed with narrow windows right under the roof. They were fed some kind of gruel of potato peelings and sorrel. Then some of the people, including me, were separated, driven out into the yard, brought to the station and pushed into a wagon. Where they were taken, why - we do not know anything. At night, Senka Smirnov, who was lying next to me, asks in a whisper:
Do you hear, Kostroma?
I am from Kologriv.
And I'm next door. Soligalichsky.
Will you cut the screws?
Be others...
There is a third. Vaska Shakhmatov, my countryman.
We, a hundred prisoners, were driven by the Germans along the high, steep bank of the already frozen river. It was getting dark. They have a small convoy. We were not taken seriously, apparently: so, half-ragged rabble. As the middle of the column stepped onto an icy turn, I, walking on the extreme, suddenly felt a blow from my boot in the back and somersaulted down to the river. Almost next to the bloodied face, in a tattered tunic, Senka Smirnov also collapsed. I understood: it was he who kicked me out of the column with a kick, pushed me down and jumped himself. The Germans fired, but they must have been in a mess. Apparently, they were afraid that the prisoners would scatter, and only two fired from the shore. But we still managed to get away. We got to a dilapidated hut, which someone built here, on the shore. We climbed inside and covered the narrow entrance with frozen bushes.
In the morning we left this shelter and, breaking the ice formed during the night, wandered along the shore. We ran into the murdered Vaska Shakhmatov. He was lying on his back in his overcoat, the floors wide open, slightly swaying in the water. It suddenly seemed to me that Vaska was about to get up, and a floating overcoat, like a sail, would carry him up. They carried Vaska to their night shelter, blocked the entrance with bushes and stones. We crossed the river and moved to the darkening forest in the distance. Wandering through unfamiliar places, Senka and I eventually lost each other. And neither then, nor after, I was never able to find out his fate ...
And I accidentally went to the hut, which stood on the very edge of the village. He knocked on the window. After a while, the door creaked. A hoarse voice asked from the darkness:
Russian, I say. - Mine.
What you are - we'll see. Are you alone?
And I ended up with Alexei Alekseevich Zhogin, an agent of the partisans of a large district. For two weeks he lived in a shelter arranged in the underground of the Zhogin hut. Then I was transferred to one of the units.
The detachment was small - 30-35 people. It was commanded by Captain Albert Kudryavtsev, who had left the encirclement. For about a month I was kept “in reserve”. Once (in the winter of 1942) Kudryavtsev built a detachment. Slowly passing by the line, he stopped in front of some of those standing in the line and, pointing to them, said:
You! you! and you too! Three is enough.
Fourth and senior, he pointed to me. He ordered everyone named to go to his dugout.
Our task was reconnaissance, observation and clarification of the mood of the local population. We had to move in a circle. A few more groups from other detachments went in other ways, but with the same tasks.
We went around several villages and villages in a circle indicated by Kudryavtsev on the map, and by the next evening we lay down in a ravine, about a kilometer from the farm standing on a hillock. Former sailor Sashka Gromov volunteered to go explore the possibility of spending the night. He gave me his PPSh, put a pistol in the bosom of a padded jacket and went. I looked through binoculars. I see that Sashka slowly climbed the porch, some grandfather came out of the door to meet him. For 5 minutes they talked about something. Then Sashka waved his hands to us: go, they say, safely.
We threw off our sheepskin coats, quilted jackets, felt boots, we go into the upper room. Warm, cozy. We sat at the table.
Boiling water would be, - I say. - Your sugar.
At first they decided to sleep dressed and with PCA, but then they changed their minds - to rest like that. Undressed, foolishly even unwound footcloths to dry. Placed on the stove and floors. The machine guns were placed in a “slide” at the bottom. Grandfather put out the wick of the kerosene lamp.
Around the middle of the night, I woke up from a wave of cold that covered the beds where I slept. He raised his head and saw that the wick in the lamp was burning at full power and that it was light in the upper room. The door at the threshold is almost wide open, in the opening - clubs of frosty steam, at the lintel - a tall German officer with a "Schmeiser" in his hand. Waking up, I decided that the officer was alone, but immediately several more soldiers appeared from behind him. Now it seemed to me that almost a whole platoon of Germans had packed into the house. Actually there were 10 of them.
He pushed aside those who were still sleeping, hissed in a hoarse voice, either from surprise or from fear:
Automata! Machine guns where, b ... b ?!
But I clearly saw how a hefty German grabbed all our weapons standing in the corner and dragged them into the canopy. Mother-peremat, how could we leave the weapon below ?! For several minutes they sat in a daze. “Well, - I think, - krants to us, p ... ets! Now they will shoot like partridges.”
But I looked - a German officer went up to the stove, took off his glove and, grinning, beckoned us with his finger. Get down please. Why sit there?
Well, we went down. Where to go? The officer signaled to his soldiers, who were already seated at the table, to move on the long benches and give us seats. Sat down. A fragrant liquid was poured into tin mugs.
Schnaps! said the officer, raising his mug. - Vodka! Heil!
And here is the dawn. The blizzard did not stop, but subsided. The Germans were about to leave. At the threshold of the house, having thrown the Schmeisers over their shoulders, they adjusted the skis to special boots. We looked away frowningly at these preparations. A German officer came up to me, patted me on the shoulder, and said:
Gegen Sie spaziren!*
* Walk! ( German)
Forming in single file, they left the gate of the house and soon disappeared around the corner. Their tracks were covered with snow. Picking up a fallen stick, Sashka Gromov broke it over his knee and hissed:
Nothing, we'll meet again!
When we returned, we reported everything to Kudryavtsev.
And he? I asked.
What is he? “Under the tribunal,” he says, “you must be given away! Yes, what's the point? There the Germans would have shot you, here ours. Better fight. Just don't say a word to anyone." In, as it was, historian!
Well, how did you happen to meet, as Sashka Gromov promised the Germans?
It is unlikely. Although all the same with one of those Germans could. After all, there were still many wars. But if they met, - Bochin laughed, - then they are no longer at the table of some grandfather!
Montreal
[*] Heinrich Zinovievich Ioffe(1928, Moscow) - historian. Graduated from the Faculty of History of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. IN AND. Lenin (1950). In 1950-56. taught history at the Pedagogical College and schools in the city of Kologriv, Kostroma Region. and Moscow. One of the founders of the study of the problem of the Russian counter-revolution ("white cause").
Crimean Federal University named after IN AND. Vernadsky held a meeting of the "round table" dedicated to summing up the results of the presidential elections in the Russian Federation in the Crimea.
The work was attended by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Minister of Internal Policy, Information and Communications of Crimea Dmitry Polonsky, Deputy of the State Council of the Republic of Crimea Vladislav Ganzhara, Chairman of the Civic Chamber of the Republic of Crimea Grigory Ioffe, members of the Public Chamber of the Republic of Kazakhstan Alexander Sedin, Andrey Malgin, Vadim Petrov, Viktor Kharabuga , Anzhelika Luchinkina, Roman Chegrinets, deans of faculties and teachers of KFU. IN AND. Vernadsky.
The discussion was moderated by Alexander Formanchuk, Deputy Chairman of the RoK OP. He stressed that the Civic Chamber of Crimea and the Crimean Federal University were the initiators of the meeting.
Starting the discussion of the agenda, Dmitry Polonsky drew attention to the successful completion of the integration of the Republic of Crimea into the political system of the Russian Federation.
“Summing up, we can say that the Republic of Crimea has completed a full political cycle of presence in the Russian Federation,” he said. “This stage began in 2014, with the All-Crimean Referendum and, finally, the presidential elections became the step after which we can talk about the full political integration of the Republic of Crimea into the legal, economic, social field of the Russian Federation.” Dmitry Polonsky stressed that the presidential elections in Crimea were held at a high organizational level. In particular, he noted the role of the Civic Chamber of Crimea in the formation of a corps of public observers in the presidential elections.
In turn, Grigory Ioffe recalled the adoption of amendments to the federal law on the election of the President of the Russian Federation, thanks to which the public chambers had the right to form a corps of "civilian controllers". In Crimea, 3,620 people went to the polls as public observers. Their ranks included representatives of public organizations, labor collectives, trade unions, employees and students of the Crimean Federal University named after V.I. Vernadsky, Crimean Engineering and Pedagogical University. G. Ioffe noted that among the "civilian controllers" there were many Crimean Tatars.
“This process has become a kind of litmus test,” G. Ioffe said. - The participation of one or another social group in the formation of a corps of public observers shows their attitude to Russian reality, the authorities and demonstrates options for self-determination of citizens. This was most clearly reflected in the example of the participation of a large Crimean Tatar community.” He stressed that representatives of all republican national communities have become public observers, however, in connection with information stuffing by representatives of the Mejlis banned in Russia, the participation of Crimean Tatars in the presidential elections in the Russian Federation has acquired a special meaning. He noted isolated examples when the Crimean Tatar youth took the initiative to become “civilian controllers”. In many cases, according to G. Ioffe, the Crimean Tatars, especially in the places of compact residence of this people, alas, did not go to the polls.
“What happened in 2014 that the Crimean Tatars were frightened by Russia and did not accept it? What has Russia done wrong to the Crimean Tatars? - Grigory Ioffe asked the audience a question. - Crimean Tatars were deported by Russia? No - the Soviet Union. Did Vladimir Putin sign the deportation documents? No, Stalin and Beria. Why is there such an attitude towards Russia? The fact that once Catherine I annexed the Crimea? I do not believe that in 2014 the vast majority of the Crimean Tatars suddenly remembered this fact and were offended by the Russian Empress. Moreover, Catherine I then gave the Crimean Tatars huge advantages: the Murzas became nobles, the Crimean Tatars received land. This speaks of an amazing and unique case when the Mejlis organization, banned in Russia, subdued an entire nation with its levers and technologies of influence.”
G. Ioffe invited the audience to remember what privileges the Crimean Tatars enjoyed in the Ukrainian Crimea, and what has changed in the life of the representatives of this people after the reunification of the peninsula with Russia. “It is clear that in Ukraine the Mejlis received huge preferences: grants, bonuses, money, deputy positions,” he said. - And what did ordinary people see from Ukraine? Why didn’t ordinary Crimean Tatars compare in 2014: how they lived under Ukraine, and what they began to receive in Russia? Has Ukraine adopted at least some document on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression? For 23 years - not a single one, but Russia did it right away. Under Ukraine, the Crimean Tatar people legalized their squatting and lands? Again - no, but in Russia it happened. Under Ukraine, the construction of the largest mosque on the peninsula was carried out? Now goes. The television air of the Millet channel is not privatized by a single businessman, but belongs to the whole people. So why do the Crimean Tatars accept everything that Russia gives, and give nothing to the state in return, do not go to the polls? Why is the need and even demands for special treatment of the Crimean Tatars being cultivated? Every nation should live and work on a common basis: there should be no quotas or preferences.”
According to the head of the RoK OP, this situation requires analysis and revision of an important section in the field of national policy in Crimea. “These elections have become the watershed, after which the traditional Ukrainian Crimean approaches to this problem in the conditions of Russian reality already require serious changes,” he said.
Grigory Ioffe expressed the opinion that the political activity associated with the Crimean Tatar factor in the republic is based on one historical event - the Stalinist deportation of many peoples, "which showed an inhuman manifestation of the totalitarian Soviet regime." In this regard, he proposed to reconsider the position of the Crimean authorities regarding the concept of "previously deported peoples."
“And then, and until now, the accents in this process have not been placed, people were deported without identifying the guilty and the innocent,” stressed G. Ioffe. - And then the real criminals disappeared behind the backs of children, women, old people, automatically becoming innocent. Today, restoring justice, one must understand that the guilty people escaped punishment due to the mass deportation of the entire people. This important aspect was hushed up for many years by the top of the Mejlis, now banned in Russia. I remember the process of introducing a draft law on the rehabilitation of deported citizens to the session of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Then an equal sign was placed between the concept of "previously deported" and the Crimean Tatars. A person deported in 1944, his children born in the places of resettlement, fall into this category. But there are a lot of Crimean Tatars: young, self-sufficient, educated, smart, who today fill the classrooms of Crimean universities, and in the evenings go to discos, and they do not want to bear the stigma of the previously deported. They want to live life to the fullest. It is the task of the Crimean authorities to settle the issue of these terms.”
Concluding his speech, Grigory Ioffe noted that “today the situation with interethnic peace and harmony in the Republic of Crimea is stronger than ever, but some points need to be reviewed so that all participants in the process are on an equal footing,” he summed up.
At the meeting, lecturers of KFU, representatives of the Crimean expert community, members of the OP RK also made reports.
