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# Lyudmila Petrushevskaya on childhood in the Second House of Soviets and the Veger family's fate
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/ia-staraia-moskvichka-i-ot-rozhdeniia-zhila-v-metropole/
- Published: 2021-08-19T18:10:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:54:32.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Moscow, Mores, Society, People

“I am an old Muscovite and from birth I lived in the Metropol. In the Second House of Soviets. Where lived those members of the Comintern who had fled arrest in their own countries, and who by the time of my birth had already been shot or were serving their terms in the GULAG. In today’s parlance, “agents of foreign influence”. The word “agent” has surfaced again from the depths of Stalin’s dungeons. “Agent of foreign intelligence”, Stalin-style. The Lubyanka agents are not far removed from the days of the Terror. Why invent something new?

My great-grandfather, Ilya Veger, was pushed under a lorry much later, in 1947 (ten years had passed since 1937, when his son and daughter received the sentence of “ten years without the right of correspondence”, and my grandfather used to go to the Lubyanka to ask where his children were).  
The window of my Grandpa (my mother and I lived with him after she brought me from Kuibyshev at the age of 9, and we had nowhere else to go) looked out onto the ancient wall of Kitay-gorod. With the stress on the wrong syllable. Much as in ZvenIgorod. Or prIgorod and zAgorod.

What has remained to me of my childhood in the Metropol? The wall of Kitay-gorod, which I saw today. We drove past it. And the triumphant Soviet way the announcers in the metro pronounce it: KitaygOrod. Dreadful. Like “we were out of tOwn”.”

Written by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya