I meet up with Alexey Gusev, the grandson of a victim of Stalin’s Terror, in a park in front of Kyiv’s Polytechnic Institute, just outside the city centre.
Gusev, a heating and ventilation engineer, is well-prepared for our meeting - he sent me a short biography, complete with photographs, of his grandmother beforehand. In 1938, an Soviet state security commission sentenced Gusev’s grandmother Vera Guseva-Romanovskaya (“Ukrainian, noblewoman”) “to be shot and her property confiscated”.
Gusev tells me how Guseva-Romanovskaya, 51 at the time, taught mathematics at the Kyiv River Institute before she was arrested. His grandmother was shot shortly after as a “Ukrainian nationalist” on the basis of a false denunciation by some of her acquaintances.
