Galina Vaněčková

"When I met him, he was the first guy I wanted to marry. And I couldn't imagine that my socialist homeland forbade such a great love of mine. He and I wrote a letter to Vorshilov, to Stalin we dared not, saying that we begged for an exception when marriages to foreigners were forbidden, that we loved each other so much, that we wanted to be together, let us be together. They summoned us. We came to the OVIR, where the issues of going abroad were dealt with. And they told us that our request was denied. We got out and walked across town to his dorm and kept quiet. It was about a kilometre and a half, and we were silent, I didn't cry, and he said, `Are you going to wait ten years for me? Ten years I have to work to pay back for studying here.' I said I would. 'But we'll try, we'll go to Moscow, we'll ask ourselves in Moscow.' And we went. My uncle gave me money for the train. We went to Moscow, we came to the Supreme Soviet. We got up at three o'clock at night, arrived at about seven in the morning, and got there at about three in the afternoon. - I wanted to marry a Czech. - Second floor, sixteenth door. - I walked in, knocked. - Come in, please. I want to marry a Czech. - You wrote to us? - Yes, I did. - We answered you? - Yes, we did. - Next, please. Well, why are you standing here? I said, next, please. - I went, I came to Mirek, I said that it didn't help that I begged, and he told me again what he said before. Only a year later, of course, I wrote to him that it was hard to leave my country, but then I changed my mind."

"Mum and Dad said it was Sunday and we had to go to a big park that was made out of woods. It was fun, it was great, I was rushing around on a bike like that. And all of a sudden I heard, 'Attention, attention!' And everybody, how many of us were there, and there were so many of us, because everybody came to that park to rest, they told us, 'The war has started.' And they started singing, [she is singing] 'Vstavaj strana ogromnaja, vstavaj na směrtnyj boji. And I said: 'Mummy, we have to buy a lot of bread and dry a lot of biscuits.' Mummy patted me on the head and said that maybe it wouldn't be enough. We packed up, went home, and the hard days of 1941 to 1945 began."

"Before the war we lived... it seemed normal to us. They told us on the radio that we had the best life of any country in the world, and we believed it. We were awfully happy to be in the Soviet Union and not somewhere in America where they lynch niggers. That ours was the happiest, fairest country. Here in the Soviet Union. And we believed it. And it's hard, hard to give up that. When I came to Czechoslovakia, I believed for a long time that in the Soviet Union, surely everything was done the way it should be done. And when my Czech friends told me about the camps... And those who were in those prison camps, I saw them! I met them in those forests! But my mother never told me they were people from the camps. They're some bad people who can't live with us in our house. They must be isolated.' And if they tell you three times, you believe it. And we were told it every day. That Comrade Stalin was a genius, they told us every day. They wrote poems about him, and I had to read them, and I loved reading them. They wrote songs about him and we sang them. And suddenly Stalin died and we all cried. We all cried. Ten days later, my mother died. I mourned Stalin first, and then I mourned my mother. But I learned everything about Stalin in Bohemia that I should have known there in the Urals. But nobody had told me. Among our friends, there were not as informed people as I have now in Russia. They are informed about Putin and know how to behave towards him."

“During the war. At first there was a lack of bread, a lack of meat. Then there wasn’t any meat, bread on occasions, we gathered nettles, we gathered orache. We used the nettles to make... you can make a lot of good meals from nettles. But orache, no one knows that here in Czechoslovakia! Orache can also be used to make a kind of mash, which is eaten without butter and is utterly revolting. But if you’re hungry, you eat it. And I remember lying on the bed, the bed happened to be opposite the door, which someone knocked on, Mum opened it, and there was a man standing there holding an enormous pike in his hands, and he said: ‘Doctor, this is for you, you saved my wife yesterday.’ And Mum said no, and she didn’t take the pike. She told me, when he left and I - after all those nettles and potato peels, which Grandma would wash and make some kind of mash from - I looked at Mum and said: ‘Mamochka!’ And she said: ‘Galinka, he has three children at home, and the day after tomorrow his wife will come home with a fourth.”

“The renewal process began. Two Thousand Words [a famous Czechoslovak text advocating reform before 1968 - transl.]. When we read the Two Thousand Words, Mirek told me: ‘Galka, we’re coming into beautiful times, when we we’ll be able to raise our children without lying.’ And so, when our cousin phoned us in the night and said we were occupied, I told her she’s crazy, that she doesn’t like the Soviet Union and she’s making up some nonsense. As a Russian, I wasn’t able to even say the word ‘occupation’ for several years. I would say ‘vvod voysk’ [deployment of troops]. I lived through that whole time with this unpleasant feeling that the tanks were here, but that it was some mistake and that tomorrow everyone would understand, and the tanks would leave. Of course, I was missing a certain education, which would have helped me understand that Socialism, Communism is built on different prerogatives than those they told me about at school. That somehow, it’s completely different. And because I had lived there, then of course I believed everything.”

“Stalin. For all of us he was the light of the world, of course. They go to fight for Stalin, Stalin speaks and everything is done, Stalin helps us live. And I don’t reckon I ever heard about Stalin at home, no, but they kept on about him at school. Of course, no one ever griped about anyone at home. One time we drove for water with my mum. One street, the second, the third, the fourth. And then they told us the pump had frozen up. But over there far off in the distance there’s a little spring. You can get water there. I remember to this day, and it’s sixty-five years since, how I lay on the smooth edge, with other people lying in front of me. And I was scooping up the water, reaching far, far out and passing it to Mum, and Mum would empty it into the big bucket. Mum said: ‘Galinka, that’s enough, we have three quarters of a bucket, we’ll come again tomorrow.’ Mum pulled the sledge, I went from behind, we were sliding along nicely, there was even a bit of a downward slope there. And we came to the railway. And when we were crossing the railway line, right by our house, the bucket tipped over and the water started pouring out. I grabbed at the bucket and held it, the water pouring out on me, pouring out on Mum, we saved a little bit... I still remember the sound it made when the bucket fell back on to the sledge. Mum sat down on the rails and said: ‘Spasibo tovarishchu Stalinu za schastilivoye dyetsvo!’ [Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood!] And that was the only protest in my life, in my ‘Soviet’ life, which I heard from my family.”