Oleg Filatov - The Unknown Tsesarevitch. Reminiscences and Considerations on V. K. Filatov’s Life and Times

So, when you entered the “hall”, on your right, in the corner, was the radio with a bookstand underneath. The table stood in the center. Near the door to the parents’ room there stood a bookcase. The hall was illuminated with a lusters. The house was heated by the stoves. One stove was in the kitchen, the other was in the children’s room. By order of the director of the school, the parents as teachers were always provided with coal. Father and I unloaded the coal with the spades and then carried it to the shed in buckets. One and a half bucket was enough for one day to heat the rooms in winter. Winters were very cold – we were located on the steppe, with surrounding hills

Father liked to associate with people. Not simply to speak with, but to play chess, dominoes, to go wolf-shooting, duck-shooting, fishing. He loved to take part in performances, in amateur concerts, to lecture, to see films, and to participate in competitions, etc. When we lived in Pretoria, a former middle-school director of studies Kliver Yakov Yakovlevich lived just across the street. He was a pensioner. Father often visited him, they played chess over tea. Father was friends with Yakov Shmidt. He was a miller, his son studied at father’s school. Father distinguished him from the rest and said that he was a genuine man. Father had one close friend – the chairman of the “Karl Marx” kolkhoz Konstantinov. He also associated with A.A. Makarov, an old man who later moved to the village of Sud’bodarovka. During World War II, he was in captivity in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He had two sons: Sasha and a younger one, Kostia. There was a thrown-away lorry in our yard. We would often sit in it, giving ourselves out to be drivers, as if we were travelling. I remember this because father with Makarov and the chairman would go either to the chairman’s house or to the Board, and we were left all by ourselves. Makarov worked as a supply manager in our new, brick-built school. Once F father told me that this Makarov was captured during the beginning of the war, but before the war he had worked in the NKVD and that he was an untrustworthy man. Later on, when his elder son finished the middle school, they moved to Orenburg. They had left before our departure from Pretoria (the Makarovs lived near the club-house, opposite the Klivers)

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