Natalia Goricheva recalled that she belonged to the first generation of Soviet people who, as she put it, came to the Church unexpectedly even for themselves.
Her childhood, she said, was much like that of her peers. Goricheva was born in 1947 to a topographer father and a history teacher mother. Her parents showed no interest in religion and raised their daughter according to standard Soviet rules and norms.
“The family was atheistic, the upbringing was Soviet, and by the age of seventeen [she] had even begun to take an active part in Komsomol work,” one of Goricheva’s friends later said of her youth.
In her own recollection, nothing mattered more to her in school than study and knowledge. She said she joined the Komsomol mainly out of a desire to help people, as well as vanity.
Goricheva did not have a close or warm relationship with her parents. Seeking greater freedom and independence, she left school after the seventh grade and enrolled in the radio polytechnic school attached to the Svetlana factory.
The diploma she received there later allowed her to work as a technical translator from German. It was during those student years that her membership in the Komsomol came to an end: Goricheva was so shaken by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that she threw away her Komsomol membership card.