Bulgun talks about herself and her ancestors. I was born in 1937 in Gorodovikovsk. My father’s name is Lapsin Burbet Vasilievich. Our surname comes from our grandfather Lavs. My great-grandfather’s name is Menke. He was a non-commissioned officer in the Tersk Army. My father told me that my great-grandfather was a very strong man and even when he was 82 he could topple a bull by holding its horns. When my grandmother died during childbirth, my grandfather took his three children and left his nomadic camp to work for some Ukrainians. So, my father learned Ukrainian songs. My father’s elder brother, Nimgir, graduated with honors from a parish school and taught his two younger brothers how to read and write. My father knew several languages, including Ukrainian, Chechen and Ossetian, and was a skillful person himself. When we were deported, our father was fighting at the front. He was wounded in late 1944 and ended up in a hospital in Georgia. When in May 1945 he returned to Bashanta, he found no one from his family. He did not believe that the Kalmyks had been deported. He went to the local council and asked them to give him a certificate about what his family had left behind: two cows, a house, a bed and a bookcase. Before the war, he worked as a chief accountant at the machine-tractor station. His younger brother graduated from the Soviet Party School and became secretary of the Party Committee of the collective farm Leninets. He ended up in Shiroklag (work camp for soldiers), in 1945 he was released and transported to Omsk where he died in a hospital, unable to recover. My father found us in Siberia in July 1945. He had medals: Chevalier of the Order of Glory and the Red Star. He died in 1968 in the city of Gorodovikovsk in Kalmykia. My mother died in 1944 in Siberia. In Siberia, we lived in the Krasnoyarsk rayon of the Omsk region, where I graduated from school. My school was very good and the teachers knowledgeable. We were even taught how to properly hold a fork and a spoon. Our German teacher was an exiled German from the Volga. After graduating from Kalmyk State University, I worked in a teacher’s college and later as head of the Civil Registry Office in Elista until my retirement. I have two children, a son and a daughter, as well as five grandchildren. My husband is 83 years old, his name is Koldunov Sergey Morokovich. He worked as a driver.