Saturday, 13 February

Ninth day of the first lunar month

It snowed heavily today. Zemienov, the Special Envoy, came. He said the snow from Tashkent to Alma-Ata was heavy that they haven’t experienced such scale for several years, therefore the airplane couldn’t fly. I said it was fine to go by train. I believe that everything is destined, and that I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy the special plane to the Soviet Union.

I spent all day in the hotel trying to catch up with my diary. Because the snow was already several feet deep, and the car couldn’t move, so there was no way I could go outside. According to the Special Envoy, in l941 the snow in this area reached 7 metres high, the houses in the village were all buried under the snow. Only the chimneys could be seen.