Liya Geraskina

Liya Borisovna Geraskina was born on October 3 (16), 1910, in Novorossiysk. She spent her childhood and youth in Krasnodar, where she graduated from secondary school. She had been writing poems since childhood, and she wrote her composition for the final examination in verse. She began working at the age of sixteen, teaching at an adult school and delivering mail.

She married and gave birth to a daughter, Alla. At that time, she got a job at a toy factory.

In 1932, Liya and her husband signed a contract and went to the construction of Magnitka, to Magnitogorsk, which was still under construction. There Liya began working as an operator at the switchboard of a power station.

It was in Magnitogorsk that her son Viktor was born. After that, the family moved to Solnechnogorsk, where they stayed for only a short time and then moved to Glazov in Udmurtia. There the young parents worked at a parachute factory.

In 1938, the family moved again, this time to Krasnoyarsk. There Liya Borisovna got a job in the editorial office of the newspaper Krasnoyarsky Rabochy as an ordinary literary staff member. The oldest journalist of the regional newspaper, Afanasy Artemyevich Shadrin, who arrived there almost at the same time as she did, wrote in his memoirs that they were both city reporters and, by lot, divided the city in half: she got the “upper” part from Stalin Avenue (now Mira Avenue), and he got the river and the area beyond the river. Having shown herself to be a mature journalist with an original language and style, Liya Geraskina soon became a special correspondent.

During the war, a stream of evacuees poured into Krasnoyarsk, and Liya Borisovna went to work as a volunteer at one of the evacuation centers. At the same time, she joined the CPSU and, on the party’s assignment, headed a children’s technical station (DTS). Her journalistic work continued: she wrote articles about schools, published reviews of all the city’s entertainment events, and collaborated with the newspaper Krasnoyarsky Komsomolets.