воспоминания -
memories
Eduard Alekseyev family history vignette
(told to Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Cabin John, Maryland, Aug. 3, 2006))
My father, Yefim Yegorovich Alekseyev, was a schoolteacher, member of the rural intelligentsia, who was one of the earliest to be persecuted in the Stalin era in our region. But the very timing of his early pick up and jailing and trial worked to his advantage. The charges were seen as so ridiculous that they let him off. He got one of the last public trials in the republic before things got more repressive – and people could just get picked up, arrested and shot with no mediating intervention of an open trial. He was accused of being a Japanese spy. On the surface of it, it was absurd – there were no Japanese for kilometers around, not to speak of no incentive for this. After he was let off, he was much beloved in his community and he seemed to think of himself as free, if not invincible. He refused to join the Communist Party, though he was repeatedly asked. He would say he was a non-card-carrying Bolshevik. He rose very high in the Ministry of Education, eventually. And people always assumed he had to be a Party member to have done this. But he would assure them he was not. Also, not long after he was arrested and released, he realized that he was being followed. He would walk down the street and play games with the guy following him. Family legend has it that he would turn around and talk to the guy, giving him messages to relay back to authorities, even insults. Once he told the follower to relay back that they should send someone smarter.
