i come from a fucked up family, some of whom are powerful people in my home country, one time my nephew visited with his mom and their friends, they brought to me as a present a solid gold wind up watch, weighs a ton, and they were visiting us in california because they were going to go to las vegas to take pics of the bellagio staircase so they could recreate it in their home. lol
my great grandmother was a famous woman, she was the first woman to publically take off the muslim veil in the central asian country i come from
on my mother's side, her father was a true badass, he served the whole duration of ww2 in the part of the army they call inteligentsia i think, but it wasnt intelligence, it was the part that took the heaviest casualties and their job was to stay way out there between germany and russia and run raids against undefended german camps
on his way back after germany's defeat, zhukov the general in charge was driving by, my grandfather was awarded the highest medal don't know what it was, he identified himself to zhukov, who said fuck you you go to jail. when my grandfather arrived in jail he was the man because anyone sent there by zhukov himself had high status lol
he never got the medal of course, because the medal meant u get extra food rations and money and what not, so the people handing them out sold them of course, but my grampy cared not
after the war he worked in a university, one his of his friend sin the kgb said pack up your shit stalin is doing his anti intellectual purging at ur school, so he fixed the locks at school so that he could get back in, hid his shit in that room. he didn't go home that night but hid somwerhe, that night he snuck back in, took his shit and climbed out the window and was gone. his coworkers were rounded up the next morning in their homes and sent to the gulags
what followed next was a decade of running and changing his name, from town to town, until he got caught. he and his wife were sent to siberia, they smuggled my mother and her brother out on a train, came back eventually resettled somewhere
