Drobinsky, Yakov Izrailevich

Youth

Childhood and youth passed in Odessa . Yakov was the eldest child in the large family of a cabinetmaker, lost his mother early, and in the famine of 1921 the youngest were taken to an orphanage , others died, of the thirteen children left two.

Y. Drobinsky began working at the age of 13: a laborer in a hotel, a peddler of newspapers, and a landlord. Learned to read, mastered reading and writing.

In 1923 he became a worker, joined the Komsomol . A lot of self-education. Performs in the local press. In 1926 he was sent to the All-Union Congress of Rabselkor .

In 1928, a hundred Komsomol members of Odessa to mobilize the Komsomol Central Committee were sent to the periphery to strengthen Soviet local power. Drobinsky falls into the Koidanovsky district , works as a secretary of the Komsomol district committee. Then he is nominated for the post of chairman of the Trade Union of the Medical Staff of Belarus.

In 1933, he was sent by the party organizer to the Mogilev silk factory , the largest object of the first five-year plan.

Things were going bad at the factory, the plan was not fulfilled, the staff turnover was uninterrupted. Drobinsky managed to improve the material situation of workers at the expense of the subsidiary farm, the staff turnover ceased and the previously lagging factory went to the forefront in the Republic (Union) and the only one from Belarus was put on the All-Union Honor Board. In 1935, Drobinsky was a delegate to the First All-Union Congress of Stakhanovites.

Then he was sent to Gomel, from June 1935 he was the second secretary of the Gomel city party committee.

Period of Repression

In 1937, Ya. I. Drobinsky was repressed, like many others who fell under the repressive policy in Belarus ^[4] . His name at number 19 is on one of the "Stalinist" lists of repressions in category No. 1 (death penalty) in Belarus ^[1] .

At ten in the evening I was again taken through this corridor to the same room - but what difference does it make ... In the afternoon it was a quiet corridor, respectable offices in which neatly sleek people leafed through folders. In the evening I walked through the ranks, through the screams, the screams of the tortured. The areal, the dirtiest scolding of torturers rushed from all rooms. Somewhere a body lying on the floor flashed, and I saw a crimson, familiar face, he turned it toward the door, his twisted mouth shouted: “Mom!” It was Lyubovitch , the old Bolshevik, chairman of the State Planning Commission of the Republic, deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. When Lenin created the first Soviet government in October 1917, he introduced Lyubovich as deputy commissar of communications. Lubovich was a member of the Small Council of People's Commissars, he worked with Lenin. Now he was lying on the floor, he was whipped with rubber, and he was an old, sixty-year-old man, shouting: - Mom !!! Why are the doors open? For exposure. Everything works for one purpose - to weaken, to destroy. The torture chamber of the 16th century. I was brought into the office. As in the afternoon, there were two of them. “Well,” the captain asked busily, “changed your mind?”

I shook my head. It was difficult to speak ... ^{[5] [6]}

He was detained for 29 months, endured everything (the black stripes of scars on his shoulders did not disappear until the end of his days), didn’t stipulate anyone, didn’t sign anything to anyone, received 5 years of administrative expulsion (free, as they used to say then) in Kokchetav Severo- Kazakhstan region. He worked there at the motor depot, then the labor army, again the motor depot, the medal “For Valiant Labor”.

From the memoirs of E. N. Usminskaya, the widow of Y. I. Drobinsky:

In Kokchetav, he worked in auto repair shops (vehicle depot). He seemed to them to be an accountant (techsnab), but he performed such broad functions that almost the whole city soon felt this. There was already a war with the Nazis, the city was starving, from night to night we had to wait in line for bread, we also stood in line for nights ... And there were Siberian frosts. In agreement with the authorities, the grandfather organized a breakthrough of a caravan of cars in the grain outbacks of Kazakhstan, where the bread lay from the harvest to the harvest un exported. Cars were at the car depot, were repaired, under repair, unclaimed. Bread disappeared, for years it lay in Kazakh villages under a canopy, farmers needed the most necessary: ​​clothes, implements, household items, money. ... ... adventures in the Hungry Steppe (there were no railways then) - a meeting with a pack of wolves, as cars covered with snow and sand, how to find a machine on foot along the dunes, it seems that this was the name of a single dwelling, hundreds of kilometers away. One person lived there or with his family, watched the power line. Overcoming everything, cars with grain returned to the city, bread was provided by workers and employees of the car depot, and a considerable part fell to the city dwellers. Grandfather was pleased that he was doing a good deed. Cars started to bring fruit (from Alma-Ata), which people here did not even dream about. Life has come into its own. When exchanging passports, the grandfather received a passport of a free person. Maybe it was necessary to leave immediately, and everything would be fine.

In 1949, a new wave of repression began. Moreover: whoever received the exile then went to the camp, and who received 10 years and left, to them the exile - Stalin equalized everyone ... ^[7]

In 1949, Drobinsky was repeatedly repressed. Sentence: 10 years of special regime camps , 5 p / p. He served his term in the Komi SSR (colloquially - Vorkuta , Abez camp ^[3] ). link

In 1955, he was succumbed as hopelessly ill, in the fall of the 55th he returned to his family in the village of Zaykovo (Sverdlovsk Region), where his wife raised children and worked as a head teacher in high school, of course hiding that her husband is a political criminal. In a very serious condition (heart failure, Botkin's disease), Drobinsky was treated for several months in the Irbitsky hospital, which he always remembered with gratitude.

He was completely rehabilitated .

Literary activity

In the spring of 1956 he came to Moscow, is reinstating himself in the party, at the same time they are reinstating his wife without any statements, who was expelled in due time because she did not want to “abandon her husband”.

In the summer of 1956, Y. Drobinsky moved with his family to Gomel , where he began to write. The book about Nikolai Dvornikov “From Gomel to Extremadura” was published in the magazines “Neman” and “Maladosts”, was published as a separate publication in Russian in 1971, and in 1974 was published in Belarusian. In the seventies he wrote a book about Ilya Katunin, a pilot, a Hero of the Soviet Union, but it was not published, as they demanded that the author remove the “5th Earl”, did not talk about the Jewish family - the pilot’s parents.

The main work of Ya. I. Drobinsky, the book "Chronicle of a single investigation" / August 1937 - December 1939. / ", during the life of the author was not published. All the names in the book are genuine and many can be verified by TSB , the book tells about the courage of a man who dared and managed to remain a person in inhuman conditions. In the seventies about this book Vl. Lakshin , then still a young man, said in the editorial office of the New World: “In our lifetime, this, Yakov Izrailevich, will not be published,” and the book was only published in fragments and quotes from the works of Roy Medvedev (“On Stalin and Stalinism” , in the magazine “The Banner” and in the book “Towards the Judgment of History” ^[8] ). In 2007, an excerpt from the book was published in the magazine Mishpoha No. 20 ^{[9] [10]} .

In 2013, after the official publication of the book by Y. I. Drobinsky “Chronicle of a single investigation” / August 1937 - December 1939 /, one copy of it was transferred by relatives to the Memorial Library .

• Drobinsky, I. From Gomel to Extremadura. [About sec. Central Committee of the Komsomol Zap. Belarus N. Dvornikov]. Minsk, "Belarus", 1971. - 192 p. - 60,000 copies ^{[11] [12]}

The book has also been translated into Belarusian.

• Drabіnskі, Yakaў Izralevіch . "The Hell of Gomel and Estramadura": Apovets pra zhytsstse M. Dvornіkava: For sheread. і st.shk.uzrost / Per. V.Paltaran; Pradm. M.Arekhva, “Mast. lit. ”, Minsk, 1975—192 p. - 21,000 copies OF THE UNIFIED ELECTRONIC CATALOG
• Drobinsky, I. Chronicle of one investigation (August 1937 - December 1939). - Hannover .; Verlag “SPIRIDONOV.DE”, Verlag “EPUBLI” (drück), 2012. - 298 p. - ISBN 978-3-8442-0968-6 ^[13] .

• Chronicle of a single investigation / August 1937 - December 1939 / . [The author describes his fate and the fate of contemporaries who fell into the clutches of the Stalinist investigation in the period 1937-1939]. Hannover, Epubli, 2012. - 298 p. -. ^[fourteen]