The publicist and public figure Elena Bonner dedicated her memoirs to the events of the 20th century that took place in her family. (Editorial summary of 1994)

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Elena Bonner: I lived in house, which was called Lyubsk, the Comintern house. These are now two Central Hotels, if some oligarch has not already bought it. Our house had 500-odd rooms. There is a family in every room. And I think that maybe ten families remained unaffected. Moreover, the majority of the population of our house were non-Soviet citizens. Among them were a lot of people whom AIPPR (Assistance to Political Prisoners International) ransomed for those sentenced to death or to prison terms in their countries. And they were arrested here, and they disappeared. Those days, everyone was talking about the Bulgarians. I remembered one of my closest friends of those years, the Bulgarian Rosa Iskorova. Her mother was in the MOPR. In Bulgaria she was sentenced to death. Her father was arrested here, and her mother and two children were sent back to Bulgaria. In general, the miracles of cruelty and some kind of inconsistency and madness were supernatural. And in my family, my father was arrested. Mom sent us to Leningrad to visit our grandmother. Mom was arrested. In Leningrad, my mother’s brother was arrested, who was a non-party member and had never been involved in anything political. I studied in Leningrad in a class. There were 23 of us, 11 had parents arrested. And three of the boys in our class returned from the war, and I returned from the girls. The rest of the girls were not in the army. This was the generation of war, the Gulag, execution.