I say I was born in the spring of 1937, although I do not know the exact year of my birth. In 1956, I received a passport, saying that I was 16 years old. In the archives there is no data available on me, although when I retired they found a book where it was written that I was born in 1937.
Since my father, Aduch Manzh, was an orphan, I do not know which clan I belong to. My mother, Budaeva Kooku Budaevna, was from a large family. My father was the brigadier of a fishing artel (Soviet cooperative). He took children from poor families with him on fishing trips in the Caspian Sea that lasted for a month at a time. One day an old man came up to me and said, ‘Are you Aduch Manzh’s son? I recognized you, you look like your father’. Being grateful to my father for what he had done for him, that old man was just happy that he met a person related to Aduch Manzh.
In 1943, when we were exiled to Siberia, I remember that our train was passing over a new bridge in order to examine its worthiness. They took pity on cattle and freight, but not Kalmyks.
With us in the barracks in the Krasnoyarsk region lived an elderly woman. She used to stand by the stove in the corridor, and everyone who passed by her gave her something to eat – bread, some potatoes. Later we learned that she was the widow of Marshal Tukhachevskiy.
One winter I went out into the street and was frightened. I saw a mountain of corpses in the hut. The earth was frozen, and it was impossible to bury the dead. I ran back home.
After the war two of my mother’s brothers returned, both wounded and both with medals. They first stayed with us, but later when they were allowed to relocate as former front-line soldiers they went to the Tyumen region to look for their brides. From there they sent a telegram to us, and we set out on a journey to Tyumen. First we reached Novosibirsk where we waited for the train. Since the train was delayed, we stayed in the train station which was crowded. When the train arrived, my father showed the conductor his tickets. The conductor looked at the tickets, tossed them on the floor and kicked my father in the chest saying: ‘Go away, your tickets are fake!’ My father was illiterate and did not know that the cashier had deceived him by selling expired tickets. The cashier was nowhere to be found, and so we stayed at the station near the public toilet. When we ran out of food my mother sold bed linen and clothes to buy bread. One day my father found a big fat purse with money and a passport inside it and brought the purse to my mother who cried. She said to my father: ‘Return the passport and the money to whom it belongs’. On the second day of his search my father found the woman whose photo was on the passport. In tears, the woman thanked my parents and gave us a bucket of potatoes, which we ate for 2 days. A few days later, a military patrol who was checking on the station detained us and transported us to the Kemerovo region. My parents spoke little Russian. As I only went to the first class, I did not speak Russian well. I remember being hungry all the time. We were settled in a barrack. In the beginning people were afraid of us. Later some brought frozen potatoes and bread. We ate frozen potato skin.
After 4 years in school, in 1952 we finally moved to the Tyumen region. By that time many in my family had died, and I was left with my mother and a brother. My mother had tuberculosis, and I had been sent to a children’s hospital with open-type tuberculosis. The hospital did not even have penicillin. Later, when I was 18, I realized that I was behind in education, and decided to go to an evening school for working youth. Because of poor health, I hardly finished 7 classes. My legs ached, I felt cold. After passing all my exams successfully I entered the Tyumen Machine-Building Technical School. The competition was fierce, and there were 18 applicants for each place.
As a member of the Komsomol, in the summer I was sent along with other students to stack pipes in a factory where I was nearly killed. The prisoners who were supposed to be carrying pipes were sitting doing nothing. I told them that they should carry a pipe to a place. Suddenly, a pipe hit my head from behind. At night the watchman found me and brought me to consciousness with alcohol. The next day, all the prisoners came to me to apologize, falling on their knees. They said that they had thought that I was a worker. They did not know that I was representing the chief engineer and reporting on the work. Had I complained, they would all have been sent back to prison.
While studying at the technical school, I loved drawing, and even taught drawing there.
In Tyumen, I lived in a factory, in a shed next to where prisoners lived. Later I was given a separate room. At the factory I restored an old, decommissioned machine, as there were no specialists around. I over-fulfilled the plan, and was invited by the director of the factory to live with him. He also asked me whether I wanted to work at a trust, which controlled all the factories in the vicinity. He also offered me a large salary, an apartment and an official car. Back then I was closed and not talkative. I told the director that I wanted to learn how to draw. In a museum in Tyumen I first saw a graphic drawing and told him about it. The director decided to help me and advised me that first I should get an apartment and then exchange it for another one where I wanted to live. Then I fell ill. I was taken to a hospital in Sverdlovsk.
In Tyumen I had a friend, who offered me to go to the dacha of his uncle in Moscow, who turned out to be President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Mstislav Keldysh.
In 1961 the Caribbean crisis erupted. Students in technical colleges and technical schools were sent to military units. I was also assigned to study at the Omsk Higher Military School, but my friend Sasha Radin, nephew of Keldysh, intervened and I was allowed to continue my education.
