Every time, beginning to write a new chapter, I have to invent a heading. And that is hard for me. Well, all right. How right our Storm of the Revolution was, having said such words about a woman’s lot, which in the future could befall most of us!
I remembered our class lady-curator Nadezhda Ivanovna. Of course, “Baba Nadya”! She spoke German perfectly, I think from the time of military operations, but she had a very simple appearance, for which she got a simple nickname. Once our group decided to organise an evening meeting with cadets of KVIRTU in an institute auditorium.
Since at that moment I was already married, I was present at the meeting only briefly and did not catch the culminating moment of “tea-drinking of strong drinks” and the seclusion of some couples in whom love arose at first sight. But “the people” complained that Baba Nadya “spoiled everything”: she ran after everyone, did not let couples seclude themselves, in short, “behaved badly and because of her the evening ‘was not languid.’” Do not forget that Baba Nadya was a member of the Communist Party and a great moral responsibility for every student was laid on her!
Elena Semyonovna Pozina…. — teacher of the history of foreign countries, starting from dinosaurs and ending with the 19th century. We trembled, quaked before every exam; we did not dare invent a nickname! I remembered her words about the Great Patriotic War: “for your generation the war is something distant-distant, but in that war every family suffered an irreplaceable loss of kin and close people!”