Irkutsk resident Maria Nikolaevna Maryasina celebrated her 100th birthday. Relatives, city officials, veterans groups and even the Russian president congratulated her. The article tells of her difficult life, childhood in a large family, study and work, wartime years, her husbands death at Stalingrad and life with her sons family.

Last Saturday, August 4, Irkutsk resident Maria Nikolayevna Maryasina, a resident of Ryabikov Boulevard, celebrated her 100th birthday.
Maria Nikolayevna was born into a large peasant family in the Bayandayevsky District of the Irkutsk Region. Despite the hardships the family faced, she managed to complete seven grades of school. After school, she went to Irkutsk, enrolled in a workers’ preparatory school, and then studied at the Mining Institute. She worked as a mica cutter at a mica factory, and later in geology at “Baleyzoloto.” On an expedition, she met her future husband, Vladimir Fedorovich. “We got married just before the war,” Maria Nikolayevna recalls. “Very soon my husband went off to war, and our son Yury was born without him. Vladimir Fedorovich managed to see him only once, when the train carrying Siberians to the front stopped for several hours at Irkutsk-Sortirovochny station.” Vladimir Fedorovich was able to stop by home for only a few minutes to see his wife and son. In 1942, the sad news came that he had heroically died near Stalingrad. Maria Nikolayevna never remarried. “I couldn’t love anyone,” she says. For the past forty years, Maria Nikolayevna has lived with her son’s family.
On August 4, Maria Nikolayevna was congratulated by her relatives and grandchildren, and her great-grandson called from the army. Representatives of the administration of the city of Irkutsk, the veterans’ council of Sinyushina Gora, the chairwoman of the territorial public self-government “Sinyushina Gora,” Svetlana Taborova, and an assistant to Irkutsk City Duma deputy Alexander Voronin came to congratulate the birthday celebrant. Maria Nikolayevna also received a personal congratulation from the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.
Based on materials from the press service of the administration of the city of Irkutsk