he knew how to do everything. he cooked incredibly tasty pastries. if he waited for guests, he prepared the food and put it on the table himself. he chopped wood and heated the fireplace and the water heater himself. he liked the floor to be shining and thus he polished it himself. —anna konopleva, gan’s stepdaughter

late years and death

 

Not much is known about Gan’s life after 1933, although some historians claim he wandered Siberia working as an architect and decorator. According to one source, Gan brilliantly decorated Khabarovsk port to celebrate the arrival in 1934 of Chelyuskin sailors saved from the Arctic ice.

The same source says that drunk Gan cursed Stalin, which in the Soviet Union of the 1930’s was one of the fastest routes to prison and death. Additionally, Gan’s anarchist past was a recipe for disaster.

He somehow managed to survive the Great Purge of 1937 but was unable to live through the subsequent wave of repressions initiated by the outbreak of World War II. Aleksei Gan was sent to prison in Tomsk in 1941 for counter-revolutionary agitation and shot to death the following year.

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