Parisian boys in Stalin Moscow. Belyakov S.S.

Sergey Belyakov - historian and writer, author of the books “Gumilev Son of Gumilyov”, “The shadow of Mazepa. Ukrainian nation in the era of Gogol ”,“ Spring of peoples. Russians and Ukrainians between Bulgakov and Petliura ”, laureate of the Big Book Prize, finalist of the National Bestseller and Yasnaya Polyana Prize.

The son of Marina Tsvetaeva Georgy Efron, better known under the home name“ Moore ”, Born in the Czech Republic, raised in France, but considered himself Russian. However, in pre -war Moscow classmates, friends, girls saw in him - a foreigner, a Parisian boy. “Parisian boy” was also a friend of Moore, Dmitry Syzeman, who at the same time came with his parents to Moscow. The life of friends in the USSR seems to be a series of misfortunes: the arrests and deaths of loved ones, crude, evacuation, hunger, front, where one of them will be wounded and the other will die... But in their Moscow life there were also happy days.

Stalinskaya Moscow is a radiant showcase of the Soviet Union. “Lincolnes”, “Pakcard” and Zisa raced along the new wide streets, delicacies were sold in Eliseevsky: from black caviar and crabs to Rocfor. Eisenstein put the Valkyrie in the Bolshoi Theater, in the chamber went to Madame Bovary - and Voroshilov himself went with pleasure to Tairov’s performances. Dzhazmen, Alexander Tsfasman and Leonid Utesov, played jazzmen for Muscovites, and dance teachers earned more engineers and doctors... a strange, cruel, but bright world where they went to the NKVD reception in the morning with a program for the arrested relatives, and in the evening sat in the restaurant "National or listened to Svyatoslav Richter in the Hall of Tchaikovsky.