Childhood
Igor Smirnov was born in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russian SFSR during World War II. He was the son of Nikolai Stepanovich Smirnov, a worker within the Soviet Communist Party apparatus and Zinaida Grigor’evna Smirnova, a journalist and newspaper editor. As the Party promoted Nikolai Stepanovich to ever more important positions, the family moved from Petropavlosk to the Ukrainian SSR, where the Red Army had recently expelled the Nazi German military. The Smirnovs initially benefited from Nikolai Stepanovich’s successes—he reached the position of First Secretary of the Golopristanskiy Raion (district) committee in Soviet Ukraine.
However, in the summer of 1952 Nikolai Stepanovich was arrested for irregularities in supply distribution among the Raion’s collective farms. He was sentenced to fifteen years in the Soviet forced labor camps with a following period of five years’ internal exile. As the family of an enemy of the people, life was difficult for Zinaida Grigor’evna and her three sons, Vladimir, Oleg, and Igor. In the wake of Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikolai Stepanovich was released together with many Soviet inmates. The Smirnov family was reunited in central Russia near the Ural Mountains, where Nikolai Stepanovich directed a primary school and Zinaida Grigor’evna worked as the editor of a local Komsomol newspaper.
Read more about this topic: Igor Smirnov
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“The limitless future of childhood shrinks to realistic proportions, to one of limited chances and goals; but, by the same token, the mastery of time and space and the conquest of helplessness afford a hitherto unknown promise of self- realization. This is the human condition of adolescence.”
—Peter Blos (20th century)
“The real dividing line between early childhood and middle childhood is not between the fifth year and the sixth year—it is more nearly when children are about seven or eight, moving on toward nine. Building the barrier at six has no psychological basis. It has come about only from the historic-economic-political fact that the age of six is when we provide schools for all.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.”
—Edna O’Brien (b. c. 1932)