The parents of my mother enthusiastically took part in the revolutionary movement as many others from the provinces of the former Russian empire in their early youth. Later on the ideology turned against its own followers... This photo was taken in the late 1940-ies, when a grandfather (second from the left) had already returned from jail after several years of political imprisonment and nobody could expect that after several more months Stalin will expel him with the whole family to an ordered place of residence thousand of kilometers westward. A brother of my grandma (uncle Dorji, third from the left in the front row) just returned from war in which he had reached the very Berlin in 1945. My grandmother (the very right in the rear row) was heading the whole clan during the years of war. Life stories of each of her sisters and brothers would make for a book. It was, however, thank to the strength of the grandma Evgenia that my mother remembers her childhood as happy time full of laugh and beloved relatives around.