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Between Two Aerodromes
the second time in my life I found myself in the Hall of Columns.This time it was
nothing like the New Year’s celebration.
The people moved slowly, trying to get a better look at Lenin lying in the red
coffin. My friend Pashka Lebedev said rather loudly, “Looks like in the portrait.”
In response, someone immediately gave him a whack in the back of the head. My
mother leaned down and whispered to me,“Look, there are Krupskaya, Bukharin,
Zinovyev, and Dzerzhinskiy!” 11 But we had already been gently nudged out the
door, and once again found ourselves outside in the freezing cold. The tenkilometer
march back home, now in the dark, was an arduous trial, but everyone
returned without frostbite.
Two days later, a newspaper devoted to Lenin’s mourning was posted on the
wall of the factory. It contained my drawing “Lenin in the coffin” and a description
of our march to the Hall of Columns.
After Lenin’s death, the Central Committee of the Communist Party
announced the “Lenin enrollment.” All upright workers were called to join the
Party in order to compensate for the loss that it had suffered from the death of
Lenin. The factory’s Party cell proposed that my mother join the Party. “Sofiya
Borisovna selflessly works without regard to the time spent caring for the workers’
health,” announced the secretary of the Party organization. A family council
was convened to discuss this issue. One of my uncles, the husband of Mother’s
younger sister Berta Borisovna, had been a member of the Party since 1917. He
told Mama that she should not be hasty.There was to be a “purge” in the Party
and she might be expelled as a former Menshevik. Being purged from the
party was far worse than simply not being a member. And so, my mother, who
before my birth was an active member of the Russian Social Democratic Party,
remained a non-party woman.
11. Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya (1869-1939) was a leading Russian revolutionary who married
Lenin in 1898. Nikolay Nikolayevich Bukharin (1888-1938) was an influential Bolshevik, Marxist theoretician,
and economist. Grigoriy Yevseyevich Zinovyev (1883-1936) was a revolutionary, Bolshevik, and a central figure
in the Communist Party leadership. Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskiy (1877-1926) was a member of the
Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee and also headed the Soviet Union’s first security police agency, the
dreaded ChK (Cheka).
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