My Grandfather Grigory Grigorov

Grigory Grigorov was historian, philosopher, a man of extraordinary fate, he wrote the uniqueinteresting book of memoirs - “Turns of Destiny and Tyranny. Memoirs. 1905- 1927”. Born in a Ukrainian small town in 1900, G. Grigorov suffered all the sorrows and hardships of the century, its wars, jails and exiles. The book is of great interest to historians and not only to them. It is written by a lively, vivid language, is full of a lot of interesting details, descriptions of a great many meetings with his contemporaries and between them many prominent figures. Grigorov met some well-known revolutionaries, rebels, members of the Kremlin ruling clique. Lenin, Trotsky, Boukharin, Krasin, Chicherin, A. Kollontai, P. Dybenko, Voroshilov, Boudenny, Toukhachevsky – that is only a part of the list of the mentioned names. He was discharged from jail by Makhno troops, spoked at meetings in famous Polytechnical Museum at the same time with Yesenin and Mayakovsky. He gave a vivid description of a life in a small town before the revolution, whose inhabitants were afterwords involved into the revolution, anarchy and civil war. The Juish pogroms in the Ukraine and arrival of the emperor-autocrat, Bund movement and revolutionary underground. Truly to say, “Turns of Destiny’ is not quite a book of memoirs, it is actually a book of live records, we can realize how that difficult time formed his philosophical and historical outlook, that developed into the disapproval of violence system and further was analytically realized in his monography about Spinosa. On the whole, it is a fascinating book, a well of facts for any intellectual person, interested in Russian history.Grigorov (Monastyrsky Grigory Isayevich) – lived a long life and died in Israel in 1994.