Abram Kopelovich with his wife Anna in Vitebsk

This is my wife Anna and I at the Marc Chagall Museum in Vitebsk. The photo was taken in 1999. Wherever I went with my wife, or if I was traveling alone, I always found time for visiting a synagogue. Not because I was a believer, I just felt drawn to it. Besides, I liked to enter mosques and Christian churches, too. My wife and I traveled a lot. We were on holiday on Baikal Lake when the putsch against Gorbachev came in August 1991. We were frightened, of course, because we couldn't reach our family. We knew something was happening because whenever a big Communist died, like Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, television played only serious music. And they started doing it again. But as we know, things turned out bad for the coup plotters.