In the summer of 1938 Zoya began to prepare herself to enter the Komsomol. She went over the rules and regulations again and again, and would ask Shura to test her to see if she had remembered and absorbed everything.
One very memorable event for me is connected with that period.
"Mum," said Shura one day, "look what an old newspaper! It's all yellow. Look at the date: 1924."
The newspaper was Pravda and the date—January 30, 1924. Silently I took the newspaper sheet. And it all came back to me in a flash: The frosty February day, the village reading room full of people, and in the deep stillness Anatoly Petrovich reading to the peasants Stalin's vow-speech.
"Where did you get this paper?" I asked.
"You told me I could put my school things in Father's drawer. I opened it and saw a folded newspaper there. unfolded it and…
"Yes, I hid it away then. I meant Zoya to read it whet she grew up. She was not six months old then."
"So it's my newspaper?" said Zoya.
She carefully spread out the sheet, which was fragiIe with age, on the table, bent over it, and began reading…
"Read it out loud," said Shura.
And again the words rang out, which had remained so clear in my memory from that far-off day.
"Like a huge rock, our country towers amid an ocean of bourgeois states. Wave after wave dashes against it, threatening to submerge it and wash it away. But the rock stands unshakable. Wherein lies its strength?"
Zoya knew this speech already. But she read the familiar words in a new way now: the yellow sheet of newsprint was a witness of those days, it brought home to you with special force all the grandeur of the words it carried.
"We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we will fulfill with credit!" read Zoya slowly.
The next day she brought home from the library Joseph Stalin's speech delivered at a memorial meeting of the Kremlin military school. And I remember I was glad that Zoya's acquaintance with the works of Stalin had begun in this particular way. So lucid and convincing are both the profound thought of Stalin's speeches and the examples and events they contain, so clear are they to the youngest beginner that the words of our leader went straight to the heart and mind of the fifteen-year-old girl.
I find it hard to remember just what books were on the long list that was opened by that memorable old newspaper. Zoya read Stalin's report to the Eighteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.), then his report at the Extraordinary Eighth Congress of Soviets of the U.S.S.R. on the Draft Constitution. It was very important for her to test her understanding of what she read, to be able to say to herself—yes, this is all clear and near to me.
And then a new note appeared in her diary. She showed it to me. It was some lines from Henri Barbusse's book Stalin.
"The man whose profile is painted on the red placards, alongside of Karl Marx and Lenin, is the man who takes care of everything and everybody, who has created what is and is creating what will be…Whoever you are, you stand in need of this friend. And whoever you are, all that is best in your life rests in the hands of this man, who is vigilant and works for all, the man with the head of a scholar, the face of a worker and the clothes of a plain soldier."
Next: That Goes Without Saying