On the outskirts of Kyiv, in the Lukyanivka area, my mother, my aunt Colonel E. K. Vysotskaya, and their friend A. D. Pokhitonova, daughter of a famous general, lived in a stone wing. Despite hunger, terror, lack of firewood and water, soldier quarters, and all the difficulties faced by the Russian intelligentsia, the women endured these trials with resilience. They survived by exchanging their remaining belongings for food. When there was nothing left to take to the market, they began to work for others. My mother found a job as a maid for an elderly woman living nearby. The old lady still had items for barter, and most importantly, a garden and vegetable patch, which in the era of integral communism was considered great wealth. As a servant, my mother took apples to the market, washed laundry, cleaned floors, tidied the house, worked in the garden, and cooked for eight Budyonovtsy soldiers who were quartered with the old lady. These energetic guys also helped: they stole crosses and fences from the cemetery, sawed them into firewood, saving the people of Kyiv from freezing in the harsh winter.

The old lady, due to her age, did not notice the revolution. Even the Budyonovtsy, loudly playing the piano, seemed to her like they were from another world. Only occasionally, when a friend from Smolny visited her, she would perk up, and both old ladies would reminisce over acorn coffee with pancakes made from potato peels about codes, pranks, and how they danced the cachucha at their graduation ball in the presence of the highest authority. Meanwhile, behind the wall, a political officer was teaching the Budyonovtsy, who had just robbed the cemetery, about how the Red Army is the vanguard of the world revolution, which Lenin is leading to victory over world capital. Trucks with armed men in leather jackets thundered past the house, transporting arrested Chekists.

By the second winter, my mother had neither a fur coat nor shoes to go to the market, and she took a job as a nanny in an orphanage filled with homeless children of the revolution, whose parents had been shot, gone missing, or died of typhus.