In 1934, Schetinin’s paternal grandfather was conscripted to dig a clandestine tunnel under the Amur River, and his family never saw him again. Schetinin’s father was next: in 1938, at the peak of the Great Terror, he was relieved of his duties as a village postmaster and charged with “harmful activities related to untimely mail deliveries.” For this he was shot. The rest of the family was banished to a concentration camp in the Jewish Autonomous Region, a little known creation of Stalin’s intended to serve, oxymoronically, as a Soviet Zion for Russian Jews. It still exists today.
