Kissing Doves

In our cooperative building, Rewekka Grigorevna, an old woman, lived in a studio on the 5th floor. (How she received money for buying the cooperative apartment (studio) I did not know. She had to pay in full 40 thousand rubles).

She loved her apartment very much and did all the decorating in her apartment herself. She invited us, my wife and me, to show us each new thing (pillows, something on the wall) and she was as happy as a lark.

When we became better acquainted (after many years), she told us her history. Before WWII, she lived with her husband in Leningrad. They organized illegally at home the production of badges of 'Kissing Doves'.

In the Soviet Union private business was forbidden. There was the danger of somebody informing the authorities about it. In 1939 they were arrested and received a prison sentence of 10 years. She was sentenced to a concentration camp in Kazakhstan; her husband was sentenced to prison in Leningrad (Cresti). At the time of Leningrad's blockade (1942) prisoners' records were reviewed. There was amnesty, because there was not enough food for them in the prison. Some prisoners were released, including her husband. He went to his wife's relatives. (He was not from Leningrad.) His relatives were dying from hunger and he returned to prison. Nobody accepted him in the prison again. Then he died from hunger near the prison gate.

Rewekka Grigorevna served her entire sentence and was released from the concentration camp in 1949. She acquired her cooperative apartment in 1963.

That is the end of that story. She became older and it was harder to take care of herself. Her nephew took her to his apartment and received money for her apartment from the management of the cooperative building. Very soon she died. (At that time a cooperative apartment could not pass to the heirs of the owner. We could not sell own apartment for its full value, but could receive only a portion of the full value. The real cost of the apartment on the free market was much higher than this portion.)

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