I was born in Moscow in 1937, in a year of maximum oppression of millions and millions of people by Stalin's regime. I was born in an ordinary soviet family that after the October revolution had migrated from southern part of Russian Empire to Moscow in search of a brighter life condition and more promising future. My mother came from a peasant family from the outskirts of Kiev and my father was of an equally simple upbringing coming from a philistine family from Kremenchug, also Ukraine. Second World War separated my parents apart by bringing my father to the soldiery service almost the first day it started, while forcing my mother to quest a safer place to live for the remnants of the family (me, my older sister and herself) along the Volga river till she discovered an opportunity in Cheboksarii city. We were lucky! In 1944, at the end of the war, the family was able to get together without losing a member and enjoy the post war life.

That was an enjoyment of purely soviet happiness, - that included a little room in a communal apartment (well suited four other families) on Pyatnizkaya street, a hungry childhood spent on the generously poetic streets of old Moscow, a carousel of dim classrooms and subjects in the endless succession of years while at school and then in the mining university. Since 1955, still in the university, my geological life began. I visited the places, which names till this very day bring up the memory, through means of phonetics and printed shapes, their unique geographical and life properties that providence had been laboring on. Cola peninsula, estuary Ob river, Yamal and Northern Ural, Magadan and Habarovsk areas, Dauria and Amur river, Turkestan and Dagestan, Donbas and etc, and etc. That was the happiest time of my life. I was working on my dissertations and books. I also developed a strong interest in history, which I studied at my own pace with every opportunity. I am happily married with three kids. In 1996 I immigrated to the United States, which among other goods provided me with the time available to quest the past. My particular interest in history lies in times that are remote from my own. That gives me the oxygen and good nutrition to sustain my intellectual life and spirit.

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