The "lost" treasures

Not so long ago, in the trends of social networks there were similar videos of young people from Western European countries, which said that their grandparents made efforts and started a company, business, created something, or received a large amount of land, which their descendants would inherit. In the Ukrainian segment of the same social networks this trend took on a slightly different shade and young people said that their ancestors made efforts and… survived. And this is true. Referring to the title of Timothy Snyder's book - Bloody Lands, we can really say that in the 20th century, the lands of Eastern Europe and Ukraine in particular are lands where a lot of blood was shed not only in two world wars, but also due to Soviet repressions and the Holodomor. Many families do not have inherited beautiful traditional clothes, jewellery, furniture, and there is nothing to say about the appearance of family wealth...

But this story will be both about the message of things that carry memories, and about the absence of such things.

Among such things the easiest to preserve are photographs. This is the photograph I want to present in this essay. It depicts my great-grandfather in 1937, in what would seem to be an ordinary apartment. The photo was taken in Kazakhstan and from this moment the story becomes more interesting. In the 30s, Kazakhstan had a large wheat harvest and many people from the territory of Ukraine were sent to work at harvesting this crop. One of those people was my great-grandfather Leontyi. He, then still a very young boy, sat down directly on the platform of the wagon, where tractors and other similar agricultural equipment were standing, and together with young men like him, he travelled to Kazakhstan. Being a clever and intelligent harvester, Leontyi worked on harvesting for many years in a row, he repaired the equipment himself, without waiting for the arrival of craftsmen from the district centre, and in the end he was noticed by the leadership and not just noticed, but invited to a solemn banquet in Moscow, where he received the Order of Lenin for labour merits, from the hands of Kalinin, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Stalin.

After such merits and receptions, Leonty was offered to enter the university to study in Leningrad, but he, being afraid, refused. Perhaps this refusal saved his life, because on top of everything else he was also sharp-tongued and, for those times, too free-thinking, so if he had not stayed in a small town in Kazakhstan, it is not known whether he would have survived the repressions of 1937...

However, let's not get distracted from the subject of my story - from photography. In the photo, my great- grandfather is sitting in his room in Kazakhstan in 1937, where he decided to study to be an engineer. But what is surrounding him? A bed, a table, shelves. He also received these things along with the Order of

Lenin as a reward for his labour merits. To the question I asked my grandmother, "Did you have no furniture at all before this?" Or did you sell it?" she answered in the affirmative – the family really did not have any normal furniture before this great "award". But even this simple set of furniture soon had to be parted with. My great-grandmother began to get very sick and the family wanted to return to Ukraine, where the climate was better and where all the other relatives lived, but such free movement in Soviet times was simply impossible. My great-grandfather sold all his property several times (and once the aforementioned furniture) to raise money on the way to his native land, but his leadership did not give such permission.

Only when my great-grandmother managed to get a certificate from doctors that her health problems were related to the sharply continental climate of northern Kazakhstan, they managed to get permission to move back to Ukraine. And here I could talk for a long time about the move itself and about settling in Ukraine, but I want to answer a question that may have arisen among the esteemed readers of this story. Did my grandfather sell his order, too? No, he took the Order of Lenin (as well as other orders and medals, the

names of which my grandmother no longer remembers) with him to Ukraine and kept them for many years, until one day. Until the day when he, as is always, listened to the speeches of the Soviet leadership on TV. At that moment, Brezhnev was speaking, and my grandfather, who was already disappointed in the Soviet government at that time, became even more irritated and took out all his orders and medals and flushed them down the toilet. He, a man who had originally sincerely and naively believed in socialist ideals, having worked hard and faced oppression all his life, realized that life in the country of the Soviets was a fiction and all these awards became disgusting to him. So today, my grandmother and I have only such a family treasure in the form of photograph which holds such a complicated family story.