During my student years, I had a short-term girlfriend, whom I then courted. I liked visiting her at home. I especially liked her grandmother, who, according to her, was a graduate of the Smolny Institute. I didn’t have much confidence about Smolny, because my grandmother was at that age when it often happens that the mechanisms of memory rattle a little, and different times and eras easily change places and gently intertwine with each other.

Last week, the story of Tomsk resident Denis Karagodin, who searched for and found everyone involved in one way or another in the murder of his great-grandfather during the Great Terror, developed. Now they were talking about this in a broader context, since on November 23, 2016, the Memorial society opened access to a database containing information about almost all employees of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD of the second half of the thirties.