I want to share something personal.
Something that took a long time to arrive here.
My mother’s memoir, Always With Hope, is now available to read and explore at lyudmilaoparina.com. Saying that out loud still feels a little unreal.
This book isn’t something I discovered later or decided to publish for an audience. It’s a life I grew up inside of. My mother, Lyudmila Oparina, was born in 1936 and raised in Siberia. In that world, resilience wasn’t a personality trait. It was simply how you survived. War. Industrial labor. Parenthood. Loss. Change that arrived whether you were ready or not.
She lived through all of that quietly. Not without strength, but without spectacle. What stayed with me was her steadiness. Her sense of responsibility. The way hope wasn’t something she talked about much, but something she practiced.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why her story matters now. Not in a historical sense only, but in a human one. Always With Hope isn’t written to explain an era or make a political point. It reflects on what it felt like to live through war and reconstruction, to raise a family while the world shifted ideologically, and to keep going after personal loss.
At a time when the past often gets reduced to slogans or arguments, her voice feels different to me. More careful. More patient. She doesn’t flatten her experiences. She sits with them. She remembers details. She asks what they meant.
The website was built to hold that care.
On lyudmilaoparina.com, you can read excerpts from the memoir, see photographs from across decades of her life, and learn about her not only as a historical figure, but as a mother, a friend, and a person shaped by her time and choices. The book is there too, for those who want to read it or pass it on.
This project isn’t only about preserving the past. It’s about how stories move through families. How strength gets handed down quietly. How voices disappear if we don’t take the time to keep them.
If you’ve ever felt the pull to save someone’s story before it fades, this one may feel familiar to you.
You can explore the memoir and her life at lyudmilaoparina.com. Or click below.
Mikhail Oparin 