Lena Moiseyeva and her family

This is a picture of my father's sister, Lena Moiseyeva, nee Rozina, her husband Mihail Moiseyev and their son, Mark Moiseyev. The photo was taken in Kiev in 1920. My father's sister Lena was born in Voronezh in 1895. She could read and write, but she didn't study anywhere. When she was eleven she began to work at a hat shop and learned to make lovely hats. In the late 1900s she was inspired by revolutionary communist ideas. After the Revolution of 1917, she studied at the Institute of Red Professorship in Kiev. [Editor's note: This institution was later renamed the Institute of Marxism-Leninism; it prepared the party officials.] She was a convinced revolutionary and a member of the Bolshevik Party. She was arrested in 1937 [during the so-called Great Terror]. Her husband Mihail Moiseyev, a Jew, was arrested a few months later and shot in 1937. Lena was in exile in a camp near Magadan from 1937 to 1952. She lived in Magadan until 1954. Throughout this period she wrote a few letters to my grandfather. In 1941 he perished and other members of the family went to the front, or evacuated from their homes, and she didn't know their address. We didn't know anything about her until she returned to Kiev. Her skills in making hats saved her life. Instead of working on a wood cutting site, she was sitting in a warm office making hats for the camp managers' wives. She made hats in Magadan, too. She got married for the second time. She and her husband, Iosif Maidlah, a Jew, came to Kiev in 1954. She didn't work after she returned from exile. Lena had a son with her first husband. His name was Mark , born in 1923. He was 14 when his parents were arrested. He went to live with his mother's sister, Sonia. In 1941 he went to the front, survived the war, and ended up in Berlin. After demobilization from the army he had to submit a questionnaire to obtain a passport. He wrote that his nationality was Russian. This enabled him to enter and graduate from the Moscow Aviation Institute and work at the cosmonauts' town in Podlipki near Moscow. He died in 2000. Lena died in the middle of the 1970s.