This is my father Jacob Bogdanov. The picture was taken in Babruysk in 1940.

My father finished only four classes at school, but he was a very intelligent and active person. He lived for his family, strove to maintain his wife and children, and managed it very well.

He had a shop for casting millstones for grain milling, which were in high demand in the collective farms and state-run collective enterprises. We were rather well-off due to my father. Our happy life was over in 1928, when the authorities decided to follow the NEP (New Economic Policy). They confiscated my father’s shop. He was also deprived of food cards. After my father was bereft of his shop, he was involved in construction.

In 1930 our family left for Moscow. Father was 42, but full of vigor in spite of what he had experienced. He took pains to make a better living for us.