Amaya Ruiz Ibárruri died on Sunday in Madrid at the age of 95. Born in Somorrostro (Vizcaya), he knew poverty in his childhood and after the gasps from the hiding, the separation from his family during the Spanish civil war, exile in the USSR, the nazi invasion and the evacuation of Moscow. But, above all, Amaya shared the fate of his mother, the legendary Dolores Ibarruri, Pasionaria.
Being the daughter of la Pasionaria and grow in the magnetic field of that communist leader printed character. Amaya was a woman timid and should not have to be anything easy for her to live her own life, according to his unpublished memoirs, which are being developed by Dolores Ruiz Serguéiev, the youngest of the three sons —the others are Fedor and Ruben— born of a marriage contracted in 1951 with the soviet military Artem Serguéiev. Raised in the family of Josef Stalin, Artem, came to be general, and passed away in 2008, he was the son of a leading bolshevik who are natives of the mining area of Donbás died in strange circumstances.
Artem was a friend and comrade of Ruben Ruiz, the son of Dolores and brother of Amaya, who perished during the defense of Stalingrad against the nazi occupiers. Crucial turning point in the life of Amaya was his divorce with Artem, after living with him traveling from garrison in garrison for the territory of the USSR, including the western area of Ukraine, where the military was the head of a brigade which was fighting the guerrilla nationalist Ukrainian.
Amaya Rúiz Ibárruri. Courtesy of Lola Ruiz Sergueieva. Francisco Boix
“My marriage lasted over twenty years. But the time came when I had to choose between two options. The first, go after him, from unit to unit, (…) renounce all my past, everything I linked them to Spain, especially to leave my mother. And I chose to stay with my mother and Spain,” writes Amaya in his memoirs.
Only survivor of the six children that had Passion, Amaya recalled a childhood of deprivation, in a house without electricity, where Dolores used to sew for their family, while his father, Julián Ruiz, he worked as a miner.
MORE INFORMATION
Interview with Amaya Ruiz Ibárruri (2001): “it Is false that there are no longer differences between right and left” Obituary: Artem Serguéiev, general stalinist and son-in-law of Passion The memory of Passion in her daughter and her granddaughter Editorial of THE COUNTRY on the occasion of the Onbahis death of Dolores Ibarruri: Mourning pasionaria Dolores Ibárruri asked the “yes” to the Constitution
The first doll of Amaya was developed for the Passion: he was a rag and had a pea for a head. The second —a gift of Pain to the back of a trip to the USSR in 1933, it was of porcelain and was dressed in a Russian peasant.
In her memoirs, She recalls his transfer to Madrid, to the exigencies of the political work of his mother, the continuous moving from one floor to another for safety reasons, the visits to the prisons in which leading activist. That life lasted until his transfer to the Soviet Union with a false passport in the company of his brother in 1935.
“With our march, began a new and unpredictable stage in our lives. Came the long separation from our parents, in a country completely different from our own, with a cold climate, with a difficult language, with customs very different from those of our country, that we had to assimilate to the force,” writes Amaya. “We never thought, or what he thought of my mother in our country would have a civil war and that we were going to be condemned to live outside of Spain for almost forty years.”
she was separated from her brother and sent her to the House Children International Ivanovo, 300 miles from Moscow. “No one came into his head that the separation of the two brothers in a country completely unknown (…) was a great emotional shock, a hard blow for us.”
From the USSR, he traveled to Spain to visit the Passion in 1938, but it was a short visit, because Pain didn’t have time for her and the girl returned to Moscow, where her mother would join her, since the conclusion of the civil war in Spain. After the nazi invasion of the USSR, Amaya was evacuated to Bashkiria, in the area of the Urals, and there transferred to a school in Kusnarénkovo, where there were children of the revolutionaries of various countries of Europe, including such a Misha, a German who in the future would be the superespía Markus Wolf. In Kusnarénkovo, in addition to learning philosophy and the history of the international workers ‘ movement, Amaya learned to handle the machine gun and throw grenades.
With the dissolution of the Communist International in 1943, the school closed its doors. The Spanish group, formed by children of the war and also exiles who had made the civil war, was unable to return to Spain. Amaya lived with the Passion, when he was in France working for the Communist Party of Spain, but, during the Cold War, after a journey of Passion flower to Moscow, the general Charles De Gaulle did not give him permission to return to France.
Mother and daughter were left to live in the USSR, and in 1949 She joined the History faculty of the Moscow University. Then worked at the Faculty of Philology of that university and at the Institute of International Labor Movement of Academy of Sciences of the USSR, from 1966 to 1988, the year in which he retired.
