Andreeva, Antonina Evdokimovna

Lyadi, Pskov region
Nov. 2006

(Fragments of interview)

Could you introduce yourself, please?

I am Antonina Evdokimovna Andreeva, I am being interviewed by Natalya Sergeevna.

Antonina Evdokimovna, can you tell us who your parents were?

My parents farmed the land, so did my parents' parents.

We are particularly interested in the 1930s and 1940s. Can you tell us how old you were at that time? What do you remember about those years? What did your parents tell you about them?

I didn't really see that period: I was born in 1935. My parents told me that our family did not suffer from the repression.

What happened [in the 30s] with religion and with priests or church officials? What did people think about that, how did they behave?

My parents went to church, as usual, and behaved as normal in that, in everything.

Could people at that time change their place of work or residence?

At that time – well, people who worked in the town could.

And place of work?

You could change your place of work, people were free at that time.

Which events of that period had an influence on your life, on the life of your family?

Our family got on with working the land which belonged to it, just as normal, there were no changes.

Did you know anything at that time about the Stalinist repression?

No, I didn't know anything

...

Do you think it would have been possible to prevent what happened, do you think that we can avoid similar cases in the future ...?

You can avoid it if our government listens to the working classes

What are your impressions when you compare life at that time, with life today? Would you say that life was better / worse / more frightening / more free / more interesting...?

After the war, life was very difficult, because everything was destroyed after the war, and we had to eat grass (herbs?), we suffered everything, and now, of course, we eat bread. Of course life today is better.

What has improved, and what has got worse?

What's improved is that we are freer, and what is worse is that we get a tiny pension, of course for older people it's harder to live. And the prices go up with every day.

Can you remember the years of the Great Fatherland War? What do you remember about the fascist regime?

At that time, we lived in fear. Either it was the Germans chasing the partisans out of the villages, or it was the partisans chasing the Germans, and we were kept in fear the whole time.

Did the Soviet army help during the war years?

The Soviet army helped, ours was a Red Army family, my father was at the Front. They gave us 10 kilogrammes of flour for that.

What do you remember about your life after the war? How did people live after the war?

After the war I went to school, finished 4 classes and then I had to go out to work, since I wasn't able to feed myself and my parents. I went out to work from the age of 14, as we had to restore our own smallholding and the Kolkhoz, everything had been destroyed by the Germans. There was not a single house for 40 kilometres, so we had to build everything. Very few men returned from the War, so we had to – children of 14 years old, and women – we had to rebuild everything. Women ploughed the land themselves and worked their own land and the Kolkhoz fields, as there were no horses. It was so difficult for us to live and work and walk about half-starving. But what could we do – we couldn't do anything, we had to restore everything that had been destroyed.

...

Were there arrests after the Great Fatherland War?

There were arrests after the War. Anyone who didn't want to work, anyone who didn't fulfill the Plan, who stole things – they were all charged with criminal offences.