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14 False Accusation I stood before the secretary of the city Komsomol committee, awaiting my fate. Expelled from the Ulyanovsk Flying School, banished from the sky, I felt my dreams of flying slipping away from me, as the secretary sat silently in front of me. He scratched his head, ran his fingers through his hair, and suddenly exclaimed, ''I've figured it out, Yegorova! You'll go to work as a Pioneer leader at the NKVD1 work-colony reform school for juvenile offenders. You'll be assigned there until next year's enrollment at the flight school. By that time, everything will have been straightened out, I am sure, and your brother will have been released. Then you can re-apply." But Vasya wasn't exonerated that year. I dutifully worked and waited, struggling to make Pioneers of rebellious boys at the NKVD colony, until the program was cancelled. I then transferred to a military plant to work in the financial department, despite my protestations that I knew nothing about accounting . A very kind woman took me under her wing, taught me to calculate sums on an abacus, and protected and supported me as much as she could. As soon as I heard that the flight school was admitting additional cadets, I sent an application to the admissions board. They rejected me in the preliminary interview: "Last time you concealed the fact that your brother was an enemy of the people, and again, you're trying to worm your way into the school. You won't sneak by us again. We are vigilant." Again, I found myself on the train from Ulyanovsk to Moscow. Babies' cries and thick curls of smoke drifted up from the benches below me in the teeming common carriage. I lay in the upper berth, moaning with grief for my favorite brother and the death of my cherished dream. 1 In 1917, Felix Dzerzhinsky created a secret police, security, and intelligence force called the "All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage (or "Cheka" for short). The Cheka had the power to arrest, torture, imprison , and execute Soviet citizens without a trial. The GPU and then the OGPU replaced the Cheka and expanded the agency's powers and its network of spies and forced labor camps. In 1938, the name was changed to the "People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs," or the NKVD, and it remained the Soviet Union's main instrument of terror and central control throughout the war. 50 RED SKY, BLACK DEATH "She's broken-hearted! She's been pining away all day, with nary a poppy's dewdrop to drink," came an old woman's muffled voice from a lower berth. "Maybe she's sick," posited a balding man. "Love-sick, probably," said a shrill voice, followed by a repugnant giggle. I turned my face to the wall and covered my head with a coat. How could my brother be an "enemy of the people"? I wondered desperately. He is the people! We came from a family of sixteen children. Only eight of us survived. Father had to take whatever jobs he could find to feed the family. He worked as a carter, delivering fish from Ostashkov on Lake Seliger or buying cucumbers wholesale from Torzhok to sell. Some years he even went to Petrograd2 to work at a dye factory. He froze in the trenches in the Imperialist War3 and defended Soviet power with a rifle during the Civil War.4 He came home a sick and broken man and died in 1925 at the age of forty-nine. Vasya, the eldest, was eager to study. But when he finished primary school, the family decided he should become a tailor's apprentice. Father said, "Let's sell the sheep, Mother, and I'll take Vaska to 'Pieter.,5 My brother-inlaw Yegor can put in a good word for him with the owner. You'll see! He'll have a trade. What choice do we have? We can't afford to send him to school and feed and clothe him." Father then turned to Vasya and said, "Sonny, if you don't want to become a tailor, I'll send you to Uncle Misha, Mother's brother, and he'll teach you to be a shoemaker. It's your choice." So Vasya decided to become a tailor. When the October Revolution broke out, Vasya got hold of a rifle and joined a Red Guards detachment. Wounded and near death, he...

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