During my studies in Leningrad (today ST Petersburg again) I had the honour to make friends with my grandfather's friend and colleague Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev, the great Russian historian and geographer. He was a son of the best Russian poets of the so-called Silver Century - Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev. I met him after he already had spent 14 years in Gulag camps, reached Berlin as a Red Army soldier and, regardless of all these incredible circumstances, had become an outstanding scholar. Even in 1977, when we first met, his life was still very poor and difficult. Only in the last period of his life, since the Gorbachov's "perestroika", Gumilev could live a little bit easier.