My grandmother
If you studied banking in Belarus, you have almost certainly read my grandmother.
Galina Ivanovna Kravtsova wrote more than twenty textbooks. Money, Credit, Banks and Organisation of Commercial Bank Operations sat on students' desks for decades. Practically every banker in the country went through her lectures.
She was born in 1939 in the village of Velikie Selyutichi in the Gomel region. She graduated from the Minsk Institute of National Economy in 1961, came back to teach in 1966 and stayed for 45 years. For twenty of them she was a dean. She became a professor in 1989. Along the way the institute changed its name to the Belarusian State Economic University. My grandmother did not.
Our family has a rule that comes from her, and I love it: everyone talks to everyone as adults. Even the smallest child has interests and the right to defend them. I suspect it was the same with her students. They just got grades as well.
My father
Her son, my father Yevgeny Ivanovich Kravtsov, also studied at the institute. And founded a student theatre there.
He wanted to do creative work all his life. The bank just happened: the nineties, the Soviet Union falling apart, a university friend offering him the Minsk branch of Grodno's Kompleksbank. The branch soon outperformed the head office, and in 1996 it became MinskKompleksBank, one of the last fully private banks in the country.
He was a banker by profession. By temperament, a producer.
In the Oktyabr cinema he opened the Mezzo-Forte studio, where Lyapis Trubetskoy, Zhuki and Leprikonsy recorded. In 1996 he produced Lyapis Trubetskoy's first album, Ranetoe Serdtse. His company made the TV shows Otboi and Banka Komiksov. He wrote and shot the films Salvation Army and The Golden Car, and my mother acted in both. His friends included Volski, Leonid Shirin, Vasily Shugaley and Zhenya Kalmykov. He read all of Greek philosophy and kept thick notebooks on it. At home there was a huge library on business, philosophy and politics, and its shelves seem to have predicted my biography better than any fortune teller.
The authorities did not like an independent private bank. The National Bank never confirmed my father in his post, and he behaved boldly and defiantly and had no intention of adapting. In spring 2002 he left the bank to finally work in film and television.
On 27 August 2002 KGB officers detained him on the night train from Minsk to Moscow. I was travelling with him: a weekend trip to buy a school suit. I remember the KGB men in short-sleeved shirts. I still have my father's briefcase.
He spent a year and a half in the KGB pre-trial prison. The court gave him nine years with confiscation of property. The charge was that the bank had overpaid for gemstones. My mother commissioned an appraisal in Switzerland that confirmed the price, but the court ignored it. Nothing else was ever found against him. One year was taken off at once under an amnesty, and a second amnesty followed. In 2005 the bank was handed over to Belarusbank by decree.
My father served his time in a penal colony in Babruysk. Lyapis Trubetskoy came to play a private concert for him there. He was released five and a half years after his arrest.
In his last years he and my mother lived in Serpukhov. He was again doing what he had wanted from the start: making documentaries and publishing books. He died on 12 December 2012. He was 48.
My mother
My mother, Lyudmila Kravtsova, is a singer and actress. In the nineties Belarusian TV played her videos Salavei, Srebrany Dozhdzh, Putnik and Viasna. She acted in my father's films.
Around 2001 her album Nochnoi (Night) came out. Most of the songs were written by Nikolai Viter and Maxim Aleinikov, and Belorusskaya Gazeta named Prekrasen Krai, by musicians from Bravo, the best track.
By 2002 a second, companion album, Dnevnoi (Day), was ready. It was made by the poet Vasily Shugaley, Pavel Kuzin of Bravo, Maxim Aleinikov and Sergei Filimonov. Then my father was arrested, and the album was shelved.
It stayed on the shelf for almost a quarter of a century. In that time Luch managed to change its logo, and I managed to change three professions and one country.
In October 2026 Dnevnoi finally came out on streaming services. My mother lives in Belarus and still sings.