Today marks the 100th birthday anniversary of my grandma Lidia Yefimovna Sokolik (nee Alekseeva). She was born near Dorogobuzh in Smolensk Region on October 1, 1924. Ten years later the family moved to Borovsk, Kaluga Region. In 1941, with the last bus they were evacuated from the town to the Kirov Region, thence – to Yaroslavl, exactly at the time of the Stalingrad Battle. Then they arrived in the Moscow Region, first to the village of Mamontovka, then to Klyazma. In Klyazma they stayed for some 25 years: my mother was born there, and my great-grandparents died. Finally, grandma and mum moved to the town of Zheleznodorozhnyi in 1969 and eventually to Moscow in 1974. In Moscow my grandma lived 40 years until her death in 2014.
I’ve only listed my grandma’s moving from one place of living to another. When she got married, her husband and she lived in his flat in Lviv, the Ukraine. In 1960s and 1970s she was the head of “Friendship Trains” delegations that took the Soviet people who worked for the Moscow Railways to the Warsaw Treaty member states: Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic. And she also made countless auditory trips to pioneer camps and cinemas to Bryansk, Oryol, Aleksandrov and other cities.
This graceful and fragile girl was only 10 when she had to do a lot of housework after her mother got her nerve pinched and had her legs paralysed. In evacuation, she helped building the Kirov-Kotlas railroad to transport the munition from the Ural to the front. Later, she cared for my mum, then for me. She had just enough time to apply some hand cream and to perm her hair. She loved the Red Moscow perfume. She taught me to use an encyclopaedia. She saw me enter the Moscow State University, get married, go to live abroad, then return to Moscow. I’m sure she continues watching me with great joy.
I took stability, confidence, consistency, and calmness from her. “Girl, where is logic here?” was a rhetorical question that taught me to read, think and speak with attention. “Very good, I believe you will be a writer”, she said, reading my then youthful poetry and prose.
In 2006, when I worked as a journalist for the BBC, I took part in People’s War project. There was a section on the website dedicated to Russian war-time memories (in English), and with my grandma’s permission I added her story to the website. Later I narrated it in Russian for some Russian resources.
Read Lidia Alekseeva story.
