“‘Come! Let’s look around the city. We’ll have a nice coffee somewhere.’ She knew all of them there, the little cafés. She was there all the time. She took me to the Dome Cathedral; everything the way it should be. Here there was perestroika, too. She set out after the next goal, to have a coffee. She entered a café. Ordered a coffee. She overheard the shop assistant say: ‘They’ve come crowding in, those Ruskies have!’ My mother turned red, and responded in good Lithuanian: ‘You are a right goose!’ She came home and said: ‘Ivan, we’re leaving!’ Within a month they sold the flat and moved to Orsha. The first opportunity they had.” [Editor’s note: The original Russian mentions Lithuanian, but as the event took place in Riga, Latvia, the language was presumably Latvian.]
“When they took her from Sakhalin to Magadan, she was already convicted, so they locked her into a cell. They had to stand there. Thirty people. It wasn’t possible to sit. We started to sing. I even know it was she who started the singing. She started singing ‘A tramp escaped from Sakhalin’. Then the guard took them and led everyone who sang, including her, into a cold room. They left them there for three days. When they came out, they had to lean on the walls. ‘I’ll show you how to sing!’ What a situation...”
“And suddenly the command came: ‘Whole camp, assemble!’ The prisoners stood in two rows in front of the gate. They led a fugitive in, covered in blood. They brought him up to the assembled rows and started beating him with the butts of their guns, right in front of them. As a lesson. I don’t remember, but they others probably legged it as well. I ran home blubbing like anything, snot running out my nose. I told Mum about it and she burst into tears. Such scenes...”
Vladimir Ivanovich Romanovskiy was born on 2 October 1941 in the Gulag (Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey, Chief Administration of the Camps) near Magadan. His mother, the young teacher Valentina Nikolaevna Dobrova, was serving a sentence for “anti-Soviet activities”. His father, Ivan Fedorovich Romanovskiy, had been exiled in the mines in Kolyma for three years from 1936, without permission to write. Vladimir’s mother was not allowed to raise her son. His upbringing was taken up by his aunt, who worked as a security guard at an agricultural enterprise. Vladimir grew up among the cattle in the barn. After completing his fourth year at school, he moved to a boarding school in the village of Tauisk. He spent the whole year in a children’s home that was in the same building as the boarding school. He left the village after finishing school and enrolled at the Magadan branch of the Polytechnic Institute. He then moved to Minsk and found employment at the Minsk Radioengineering Institute, in the computer construction office. He met his future wife in Minsk. At present, he heads the Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions within the United Civic Party. He continues to study Soviet repressions. He also heads the Belarusian branch of the Russian society Memorial. He lives in Minsk.
