First of all, it should be said that she was born in 1925, in the Jewish family of artists and intellectuals. Unfortunately, both these facts, i.e. Jewish origin and social status of her family as artistic and intellectual that could be practically perceived as an aristocratic in the Soviet society of that epoch, produced a dramatic impact on her further life and work. In fact, being a little girl, Maya Plisetskay soon learned what it meant to be Jewish artist and intellectual in the Soviet Union. Moreover, this lesson she learned was probably the greatest tragedy of her entire life that she always remembered.
What had actually happened was a typical story of an average Soviet family of Stalinist epoch. At the beginning the life of the Plisetsky family was usual and calm. The little girl, Maya went to school in Spitzbergen where her father worked in a coal mine as an engineer. However, the tragedy occurred when the girl was only nine years old. In 1937, her father was arrested during the Great Terror launched by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and in 1938 he was executed. It does not worth mentioning that the accusation and death sentence were based on fabricated allegations and, in actuality, he was an innocent person. In fact, his only guilt was that he was a Jewish intellectual who lived in a wrong place in a wrong time. Briefly speaking, the farther of Maya Plisetskaya became a victim of the Stalinist regime that repressed millions of people.
However, it was only a part of the great tragedy of the Plisetsky family that affected the entire life of Maya. To put it more precisely, the father was just the first victim in the family of the regime. Similarly to millions of other families the family of Maya had undergone the same procedures of total ruination. After the execution of her father, her mother was under attack. In that epoch it was quite natural that the family of a ‘criminal’, or ‘people’s enemy’, as political criminals were often officially called, was repressed. As a result, the mother of Maya Plisetskaya was exiled to Kazakhstan where she was sent to GULAG, the penitentiary system created for the opponents of the regime and their relatives.