ABSTRACT
The business of bygone days 361 Nina Ivanovna Ermakova (since 1947 her surname has been Ginzburg), who had been subjected to repression in 1944 and in 1945 was living in Gorky, in fact, in exile. NI's father, an engineer and a rather old member of the party, had been arrested in 1938 and died in Saratov in prison, in 1942 (he was there with N I Vavilov, who died in the same place at the same time). Nina, a student of the Mechanics and Mathematics Department of the Moscow State University (MGU) , was arrested together with a whole group of young people on the charge of preparing an attempt on Stalin's life. It is a rather well-known case, already described in the literature, though not exactly (see 1978 Pamyat' (Istoricheskii Sbornik) [Memory (Historical Collection)] issue 1 (New York) p 219). According to the KGB's script, it was planned to shoot Stalin out of the window of the apartment on Arhat Street where Nina lived. But the KGB 'scriptwriters' had not bothered to check everything before the arrest and only found out later that the windows of the room where Nina lived with her mother did not face Arhat. With all the absurdity of the charges fabricated by the KGB, the investigators tried, to a certain extent, to avoid assertions which could have been easily refuted. Anyway, the charge of terrorism was withdrawn from Nina but what remained was 'only' the charge of counter-revolutionary group anti-Soviet activities (clause 58.10 and 58.11 of the then Penal Code). In March 1945, having spent about nine months in prison, she was sentenced, without any trial, by the decision of the so-called 'special conference', to three years' imprisonment in a camp. With regard to clause 58, such a 'small' term very rarely was given. Probably because of that when the amnesty was announced at the end of the war, even those imprisoned under clause 58 but with only a three-year term fell under the amnesty (while the overwhelming majority of those 'convicted' under clause 58 were not subject to the amnesty). So, in September 1945, Nina was released but without the right to live in a number of major cities. Her aunt lived in Gorky, so she chose Gorky but she was able to get official registration only in the village of Bor on the other bank of the Volga. However, she managed to enter the Polytechnic Institute in Gorky (this was quite unusual but some good people helped her), which she graduated from in 1947. Until 1949 she lived illegally in the room given to me in Gorky but at the end of 1949 she was registered in Gorky itself owing to A A Andronov's petitioning (it happened after the serious accident on the Volga on 29 October, 1949-a launch taking people from Gorky to Bor capsized: out of some 250 people who were on board only 13, it seems, were saved, Nina among them). Naturally, every year (i. e. as often as was possible) I put in applications for a permit for my wife to move to Moscow but every time I was refused. Only in 1953, when Stalin's death was followed by a new amnesty, was Nina able to move to Moscow. In 1956 she, like all her fellow-sufferers from the 'anti-Soviet group', was completely rehabilitated, i.e. all charges against her were declared groundless. To characterize the process of reha-
