: The story of an unbroken woman who survived all the sorrows of the 20th century: civil war, dispossession, famine, arrests, executions, and for many years the Stalinist camps.
The author (the narration is conducted on his behalf) gets acquainted with Baba Leroy in the summer of 1963. The old woman lives in an abandoned village with Anisya Polikarpovna - Anisha. Both women went through the Gulag before settling together.
Anisya is prone to short drinking bouts. She is suspicious of new people. If a person does not like, she kicks him out. A few years after the acquaintance, the narrator acquaints women with the head of the regional department of culture, Vladislav Vasilievich, and he takes patronage over the old women.
A variety of guests come to the two-story house of Baba Lera, only she meets pioneers outside the walls of the house. For Anisya, children are a forbidden topic. She gave birth to six children in the camps, they were selected a few months after the birth, and she was sent to general work.
Baba Lera - Kaleria Vikentievna Vologodova - was born in 1900 in the family of a royal dignitary. In the seventeenth year, she married the former lieutenant-cadet Alexei, who later became the red commander. Lera did not pass on the name of her husband from the principle - he was too famous.
Lera was a secretary to a twenty-three-year-old divisional husband. His division was famous for iron discipline. Only the cavalry brigade commander Yegor Ivanovich did not recognize her. His relationship with the commander did not go well until he saved Alexei from Petliura’s entourage.
Soon, the Plenipotentiary of the Defense Council (chuso) arrived at Alexei’s division. While he was in combat units, he arrested and shot them. Returning, Alex demanded to release everyone. He was supported by Yegor Ivanovich with his brigade, and chuso had to obey. Having achieved the highest power, he chastely sentenced the forty-year-old commander of Alexei to be shot without appeal.
Lera spent eighteen years in the camps, not knowing anything about the children. Belief in the party helped Lera not break. For their persistent spirit, Kalyria Vikentyevna was even honored by “inveterate cribs”, but the camp authorities did not like. When Lera began to "reach", she was "attached at the hospital" as a cleaner - to rest. Soon, Leroux was asked to protect a man who was sentenced by death girls to death. She managed to put the person in the hospital, so messing up the documents that they figured out only a day after leaving the stage. Kaleria was again sent to the "general", and the saved man - Anisya - remained in the camp.
In 1956, Lera “left the underworld with an unbreakable faith and an indestructible spirit”, returned to Moscow and began to search for children. The search was unsuccessful. She found Leroux only Anisya and took her to her, in the Arkhangelsk region, where Kaleria Vikentievna Vologodova, a hereditary Russian intellectual, became a woman Leroy.
Anisya Polikarpovna Demova was imprisoned at age 15, and released in 1958, allowed to live in her native land. Her native village of Demovo, once rich, was empty. The collective farm chairman invited Anissier to guard the empty huts.
Many guys looked at her, but she chose the Komsomol member Mitya Peshnev. Once they returned home after the assembly of the cell. At first Mitya was gloomy, then he started talking about love and lured Anisya into the forest. The next day, he brought her family an order for dispossession and exile. Mitya knew about the order the day before.
At the place of her home Anisya found the ashes. Old Woman Makarovna - the only resident of the village - told Anisieu about Mitenka. He opened a village club in the house of Demovs, married a skinny “city teacher”. The club burned down, and Mitya and his wife were taken to the Gulag.
Having decided to repent, Makarovna spoke of the famine when fugitive convicts were handed over for a loaf of bread and ten liters of kerosene.She handed over, handed over Anisya's sibling when he reached his native places. Anisya told her to leave, she herself settled in the relatives' house. A week later, the chairman brought in food, clothing, kerosene and the feeble peasant Fedotych. He began to repair the old house, and remained with Anisya, who dreamed of a house and family. When Fedotych drank all the money of Anisya, she almost drowned the old man, woman Lera persuaded her to "replace the death penalty with deportation."
Baba Lera tells how she got lost in a swamp and all night remembered her first meetings with Alexei. He was the best friend of her older brother, cunk Kirill. In the nineteenth year, Alexei’s division captured a group of white officers, among whom was her brother Cyril. The prisoners were shot. Lera did not blame her husband for the death of her brother - Alex could not betray the idea.
That night, woman Lera understood: faith cannot be replaced by teaching; instead of religion, the current generation needs faith in the homeland. She began to communicate with the pioneers, trying to captivate them with a new faith, but the listeners eyes remained cold. Anisya attended only the first meeting of Lera with the pioneers to support her.
A friend reacted to the passion of women Lera negatively. Anisya had her own god, whom she "complained as a higher authority, so that he would take action and stop the ugliness." In August 1966, Anisha met a man with a thin face, overgrown with a skinny beard and empty eyes - Sinner. In his youth, he was in an artel digging up Kremlin graves for jewelry. In one of the graves there was a lead coffin with a young queen. In contact with the air, the beauty crumbled to dust. Since then, the Sinner has dreamed of a dead queen, and there is no rest for him. Anisya felt sorry for him and invited her to live in the village of Demovo.
Once a thief climbed into a boarded up church. A young, educated man wanted to steal vintage icons. At the request of the woman Lera, the guy was released, and she took the icons to herself.
The sinner, Vasily Trokhimenkov, settled with old women, helped with the housework and fished. He turned out to be "extremely gloomy and unresponsive." Watching him, Kaleria suddenly realized that he was also studying her.
Soon Vladislav Vasilievich (the department of culture, who took patronage of the woman) brought Lera several dozen icons. Gradually, she launched the “whole museum”.
At the end of September, Sinner had an epileptic seizure. Anisya undertook to nursing him. The sinner appreciated Anisya's kindness and gradually began to thaw.
He told her that he was growing up a street child, all relatives died of hunger in the Volga region. After the coffin-digger’s artel “went to the factory,” he got married. When he returned from the war, his wife died, he began to drink, his son went to prison, and his daughter went around. After that, the queen began to seem to him in a tomb.
Sinner told the same story to Lera, adding that at one time he escorted the dispossessed. From Vladislav, Baba Lera learned that the Sinner was born far from the Volga region. She began to look closely at the tenant.
Anisya and Trokhimenkov fell in love. At the beginning of winter, a sinner again had an attack. Anisya hurried to the neighboring village, but did not find the paramedic. To shorten the return trip, she decided to cross the frozen stream. The ice was thin, and Anisya fell waist deep into the water. He ran eight kilometers to the house with a severe heart attack.
Recovering Trokhimenkov did not leave Anisya’s bed. Before her death, she managed to reach Lerin's room, and there she died. After the funeral, the Sinner admitted to Babe Lera that he served as the head of the camp where she was sitting. He changed his name so that Baba Lera would not recognize him. After the death of Stalin, he was expelled from the “organs”, his father’s children began to be shy, his wife died. He drank for a long time, and then decided to go through the suffering to which he subjected other people. I picked up an article for five years and went on to the stage. When I got out of prison, I found an alcoholic daughter, a freak’s granddaughter, I didn’t stay with them - I became a tramp.
Confessing, the Sinner went into a blizzard.For three months of winter, woman Lera lived alone, very old, but remained unbending. In these lonely months, she recalled her mother, who had suffered in a stampede on the Khodynsky field during the coronation of Nicholas II. She remained half-mad. The fact that her father was shot and her mother arrested, Lera found out when her husband was awarded the third Order of the Red Banner. Using his authority, Alexey obtained a pass to the Solovetsky camp.
A date with my mother was the only one. After Lera letters came. Only when she was in the camp did she realize that her mother was shot in the Solovetsky cellars immediately after this meeting, and letters were written before him.
In the summer, Baba Lera received guests and met with pioneers. Head of the Department of Culture, Vladislav has already found her an old companion for the winter. On the ninth of September 1974, late at night, the author was woken up by a telephone call, and Vladislav said that a thief who had come for the icons had killed Baba Leroux.