Boris Boguslavskiy

This is my father Boris Boguslavskiy wearing a commissar's leather jacket. The photo was taken in Khorol in the 1920s. Although my father and his brothers grew up in a religious family that honored Jewish traditions they were atheists. They were enthusiastic about the Revolution and the new ideas. My father quit the mill in 1917 and joined the Red Guard unit. In 1918 he became a member of the Communist International of young people. A year later my father became the secretary of the provincial Komsomol committee and then instructor and political education department supervisor of the Komsomol committee in Kharkov, which was the capital of Ukraine at that time. In 1925 he became a member of the Bolshevik Party. My father was an intelligent man. He read a lot, knew the [then] modern poets Mayakovsky, Yesenin and Blok and he wrote poems himself. Women liked him and he had the reputation of being a 'playboy' before he met my mother in 1925 and fell in love. On a photograph of my mother, father and his ex-girlfriend he wrote the words addressed to my mother, 'I used to think that sentimentality was just spree, but here - a little spring has broken in my chest'. My parents got married in 1926 never to part again.