(My grandparents in mid 1960-ies)

Before the World War II the utter Stalinistic repressions affected nearly each family in the Soviet Union and its political satelite Mongolia. Both my grandfathers, one in Russia and the other one in Mongolia, were arrested as political prisoners and, accused of espionage, were sentenced to death. Their families were either resettled or turned out of their homes. Grandmothers, both healthy and strong young women in those times, had to work hard to feed all children as well as parents and the widowered sisters with their own children. At the same time they were regularly questioned by the secret police and psychologically tortured to repudiate their spouses.  It was nearly a miraculous coincidence that both grandfathers remained alive. Tens of thousands of other people in Mongolia and millions in Russia were physically liquidated - the most educated and diligent ones, strong personalities with wide knowledge. They ended up in concentration camps, many of them later executed. As if the Bolshevic machinery systematically cut the intellectual and spiritual level of the nations below the level of its own, to disguise its complexes about half-literacy and creative impotence. Ironically, to this day the Communists are still relatively strong in both these countries and they continue to propose primitively simplified solutions to all problems of the complex life, which makes the societies neither used to freedom nor to responsibility, instinctively confused and scared. 

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