On our trip to Antwerp and Ghent, we had a photo stop at Atomium, and our tour guide told us about the Human Zoo which was open during the 1958 World Fair. I had not idea that they still existed in the 20th century, yet along that recently, so I rushed to read more about it. I am sure that everyone less ignorant than me saw that picture, but I saw it for the first time, and frankly, whatever else you read about Human Zoos wouldn’t make the same impression as that one photo. Shocking is not enough of a word.
It’s easy to Google more details about human zoos; I do not want to put any more links here. I can’t imagine people tossing bananas and other food in the direction of humans which are literally “on display.” Just can’t imagine.
At the end of the third grade, “the most deserving” of us became “young pioneers.” Same as with Octobrists, everybody eventually would become young pioneers, but for this first group of “the most deserving,” it was a big deal. The earliest date for joining the Young Pioneers organization was April 22 – Lenin’s birthday. We had a classroom meeting a couple of weeks before that date, during which our room teacher would carefully guide a discussion about which students were “the best” and “deserve to be nominated to become Young Pioneers.” We would judge our classmates based on their academic records, whether they were “active” (actively participated in extracurricular initiatives), and whether they were “good comrades” for their classmates.
At the end of the discussion, everybody in the room raised their hand to vote for each of the candidates. The first “young pioneers” group was small – less than ten students. The ceremony was held in front of our school (fortunately, the day was sunny and not very cold. Our school’s “official supporter” was a leading ship-building plant. I am unsure what “supporter” means in this context. I wanted to translate it as a “sponsor,” but it was not about money. Although I believe that the plant would help the school financially in some cases, like paying for field trips, the true meaning was “ideological support” and demonstrating that “the school is connected with the working class.” To demonstrate that connection, the representatives from the plant (shock workers and the Komsomol leaders) took part in the ceremony of taking the Young Pioneer’s oath, and after we recited the words of the oath, the line of the plan representatives walked close to the line of newly minted young pioneers. Each of them tied the red tie on the neck of a student standing in front of them. From that day until we turned fourteen, we were supposed to wear a red tie and a young pioneer pin to school every day.
Subsequent groups of my classmates joined young pioneers during May Days, and the last group – in November, close to the Great October Revolution celebration day. I was not at school on the day of the last meeting (I believe I had a cold and stayed at home), but my friends told me that only Natasha Panasenkova was voted to be “not deserving” to become a young pioneer, but she cried, and the class decided to let her join.
By the beginning of the fourth grade, the class would become “a pioneer squad” divided into three “links.” The division was decided in the simplest possible way: based on each student’s desk location. Each link chose its link leader, and everybody voted for the “squad char person.”
We had regular meetings after school (hated by the “inactive majority”) and planned many activities; I will describe them in the next post.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
I am reading Ann Appelbaum’s Gulag, and it will be a while until I finish it, but I can tell even now that this is an amazing work that stands out among all other books I read on that subject. However, I am not going to write about this book today. This blog is about something else.
***
When I was a teenager, I thought I knew enough about the “unspeakable” part of the history of the USSR. Having almost all of my family suffered different forms of oppression starting from the 1930s and ongoing, I was more knowledgeable than most of my peers, even among the Leningrad intelligentsia. It turned out that I knew close to nothing.
For example, I didn’t know anything about Holodomor. Yes, they didn’t teach about it at school, but neither did they teach us about labor camps. My relatives and my friends’ relatives told me about the arrests and interrogations, and I read real people’s diaries, which were never published. I nobody, nobody ever mentioned anything about kulaks1 being sent to the same camps!
Now I am asking myself why people of similar upbringing (Boris seconds my recollections) and I believed that “everything started” in 1936? Or at 1935 at the earliest?
Many books and movies present a picture like this: life is peaceful and beautiful, and that’s a nice and peaceful summer evening, and nobody expects anything, and all of a sudden, here is a “black raven,” and the father is getting arrested, and children are sent to the orphanage, and everybody’s life is ruined. Why?
There was no peaceful life, and everything was already wrong; why was it OK? Did they only care when the Great Terror started to grab people of their kind?
Why did none of my peers know that orphans were sent to the concentration camp, that kulak’s families were sent to the camps? Why did their relatives never tell them? Is it that they “didn’t know” about that before they were arrested, and then these tiny facts became “less important” when measured against their own misfortunes?
Maybe some of them didn’t know. But not all of them.
My grandfather was always portrayed as an “honest Chekist2” by my family members. Yet, his professional career started in the early 1920s when he was in Turkestan3, “fighting with Basmachi4.” That’s when he got his first stars. Did he not know? I doubt it.
Yesterday morning, I thought about what I believed I read in his file (the part of it which I own). I was frightened when I thought I didn’t remember where it was, but I finally found it.
The writing below is a draft of the “Characteristic” written by a famous Soviet movie producer, Ermler, as a testimony about my grandfather’s moral character.
That was a part of the rehabilitation effort, which resulted in acknowledging his innocence. Here is what “the master of Soviet propaganda” writes:
The resistance of our enemies was tremendous, and Chekists, like Dombrovsky, were on the front line of this struggle. They bravely fought with our enemies, smashed them, and built a new society.
My conversations with Dombrovsky were of great help to me since he often gave me good advice and helped me to correct my course. For example, I produced my movie “The Farmers” under his influence. He was very insistent in his demands to produce a film about the struggle with kulaks. He explained to me that this was one of the most important issues and that revealing the animal nature of kulaks to the public.
So he knew. And moreover, he was a part of it.
***
In the middle of the 1990s, when new parts of this forbidden history started to emerge here and there, my grandfather’s name started to appear in the press more and more often, mostly, however, in connection with my grandmother, who was a subject of many pieces of avantgarde poetry in the late 20s- early 30s. I remember one article (the whole newspaper page) in which the author speculated that since my grandfather was jealous because of this massive amount of love poetry and because he was a Chekist, it was he who ordered all these poets to be arrested. I told it back then, and I am repeating it now: this was 100% not true, and nobody who knew what the actual relationships between these people would ever think of any of that.
I asked my father why he didn’t protest. Why didn’t he write anything in response (in those days, objections were taken seriously.) I asked him why he would let this disgrace keep going. He replied: “You know, everybody had blood on their hands. Some up to the wrists, and some up to the elbows, that’s the only difference.” I hated his reply. I thought that he just didn’t want to get into the fight and backed out. And I promptly forgot about this conversation (as a coping mechanism.)
I recalled it recently. My father was a horrible person, and there are many things he has done that I will never forgive him. However, he was brutally honest about the past. He had no admiration for Solzhenitsyn, and he knew more about his father than he ever told me. I know that in the mid-50s, he was allowed to see his father’s file in the archive. He was not allowed to make copies or take notes, but he saw it. And he never told me anything about what he saw.
***
From multiple conversations with my greataunt, I have a pretty good idea about what people thought back then. They believed one can “bring happiness on the tips of bayonnets.” Still, I can’t understand why they were so ignorant.
My ignorance, multiplied by the ignorance of the previous generations, made the current state of Russia possible. Not only mine, but many of “us.” What’s done can’t be undone, but it’s important to acknowledge what was done. The only way to ensure this will never happen again is to understand precisely how it happened.
1 – Farmers who refused to join collective farms or were a little bit better off than others
2– A person who served in the “CheKa – “Extraordinary Commission”, the secret police.
3 – The Middle Asia Region established in the mid-19th century as a part of Russian Empie (link here).
4– The anti-Russian resistant movement in Turkestan (link here)
Last week, my granddaughters asked me at what age their mom started to cook and at what age I started to cook. I could not remember when Anna started, although I remember that by the age of nine, both Vlad and Anna were cooking on a regular basis, and we had a schedule of who was making dinner each day.
As for me, the biggest problem was that in order to cook, I had to turn on a gas burner on the stove, and the burners didn’t have ignition. To start the burner, you had to strike a match, turn a gas knob up and move a burning match close to the burner. The scariest part for me was lighting a match. I was scared to scratch the head of the match with a force enough to produce sparkles. My mom was teaching me, and these lessons would end up with me crying and with her yelling at me. I do not remember why and how I overcame this fear, but it was definitely after I turned eight.
Even warming up the food was not that easy because microwaves didn’t exist (at least in our lives), so I needed to use our gas stove to warm up my food after I was back from school. The food would be most often “cutlets” (now I call them “Russian meatballs”) with potatoes or pasta, and I had to warm it up on a skillet, adding some butter so that it wouldn’t get burned and stirring constantly. I remember that for a period of time, my mom left one burner on (on “low”) in the morning so that I could turn it on “high” when I came home from school and warm up my meal. (There were other adults at home, so I do not know what was the deal and why others could not help me). This was supposedly “dinner,” but all this meal naming was a separate story.
Back to cooking. My help in the kitchen while I was limited to some low-skill level tasks. One of the things I was often assigned (and I hated it!) was to “watch the milk.” The unpasteurized milk from the barrel had to be brought to boil, and I had to stay by the stove and watch, and when it started boiling, I had to turn it off. Otherwise, it would “run away.” Of course, I would look aside precisely at the moment when it happened! Another chore was making mannaya kasha, which pretty much meant stirring non-stop, making sure it was not burned. And another one was potato peeling. It was always done with a knife, and the quality of my work was judged by how cleanly I peeled potatoes and how thin the peel layer was so that the waste would be minimized. More than fifty years later, I am still a potato peeling champion.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
Baba Ania’s birthday was on Sunday. When I went to Mom for our traditional afternoon Sunday coffee, I also took a small bottle of liquor with me, and we drank in memory of Baba Ania (for some reason, my mom was surprised I remembered the day (?!)).
Unfortunately, I can’t get any new information from my mom in addition to what I already know. Maybe I will be able to fill in the gaps later – I made some recordings of mom’s stories when she first came to the US, but now I need to find and decipher them.
I know that Baba Ania was “from a village”; however, the photograph below shows a group that could be anybody but peasants. These are four Grigoriev brothers; the first from the left, Petr, is Baba Ania’s father.
According to mom’s notes, Petr was either the second or the third of the brothers, next is Stepan, the fifth (the youngest) next is FIlipp (either the second or the third) next – Alexey, the fourth child, and last one is the oldest brother, Nikolay. Unfortunately, no information about when this photo was taken.
In this picture, Petr should be the first person on the left in the second row from the bottom, according to mom’s notes:
Was it the beginning of WWI? I can’t tell. One more picture, judging by its quality, taken by some “official” photographer, also hints the wartime, but mom’s notes indicate that she could not locate Grandfather Petr in this picture:
No images of Baba Ania’s mother. No images of Baba Ania as a child. The pictures I showed in the previous post were the earliest Baba Ania pictures I have.
And here is the last one prior to her marriage to my grandfather. For her excellent work, she was promoted, and the picture below shows her among the employees of the Eliseyev store – the number one grocery/delicatessen store in Saint Petersburg before the Revolution and later in Leningrad. See this wiki article for details.
Can you find my grandmother? She is in the top row, second from the right.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
I meant to write about this back in June when Robert Hanssen died, but I kept forgetting about it. Now that I started listening to The Code Name Blue Wren, which mentions Robert Hanssen in the introductory chapter, I remembered that this post was sitting in the Drafts.
When Anna went to Knox College (which is one of the best things that happened in her life not counting our arrival to the US) we learned a lot about this amazing educational institution. Among other things we learned that one of the graduates Knox was most proud of was a double spy, who for several years was a head of the task force dedicated to finding himself 🙂
Mom made several attempts to record her family history with various degrees of success.Since both of my mom’s parents came from peasants’ families, I do not think I will ever learn much more about them than I know now. I will start with the earliest photos I have and will record everything I remember about them.
I know that my mom’s mother, baba Ania (full name Anna Petrovna), was born in the Pskov region in October 1911. Her maiden name was Grigorieva, and I believe I have somewhere an information about her brothers in one of the recording sessions with my mom in 2018 . Unfortuntely, I didn’t even start processing them. Surprisingly, I might know more about her childhood than my mom because I spent a lot of time with her during my second and third summers, and she used to tell me stories about her being a little girl. I never herd this storied from my mom, only from baba Ania herself. Being minimally educated, she recognized the importance of reading and self-improvement. She might have attended school for just a couple of years, but liked to tell me how she “already knew everything before she came to school” because “she read books.” She told me: And the teacher said, “well, Nura, you already know everything, so go and help me check other puples work. And here I am, walking along the rows of desks and checking everybody’s work. And all because I read a lot of books, that’s why.”
She left the village and moved to Leningrad when she was forteen to become a live-in nanny. Neither me nor my mom know anything about the family where she lived, except for that appeared to be well off and educated – some books baba Ania owned presumably came from that house.
In two years, she was already looking for a more prestigious job – a store clerk. On this picture, she is sixteen or seventeen, and she works in a grocery store near Warsaw railway station in Leningrad.
Bakarey departmentGrocery departmentWith coworkers in the same storeIn the Red Corner studying something politically-important
Looks like it was cold both inside the store and in the Red Corner since most people stay in their coats.
I can’t decode most of the slogans from the third photo background, but I can tell what was sold in the grocery department. Th list includes tea (“natural” and “surrogate”, sugar, buckwheat, millet, oatmeal, flour, coffee (also real and surrogate), several brands of sigaretts, matches, candles, shoe polish, black pepper and mustard.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
Thinking about most of my schooling years, I am retrospectively surprised by how little of the cultural events were there. There was almost nothing going on after school. In the third grade, I started to take piano lessons, which our school music teacher was giving. There was one 15-minute lesson a week for the price of 5 rubles (I was giving the money to the teacher at the beginning of each lesson). I neither liked nor disliked it. I thought the girls who played piano were cool, and I wanted to do the same. Nobody forced me to do piano, so it sort of went on until the eighth grade when I didn’t have enough time to do this and stopped. I didn’t play any sports, and I didn’t have any other extracurricular activities until I started to attend theater classes at the nearby House of Culture when I was already in the fifth grade.
I liked reciting poetry, and I was good at it – I still had an excellent memory and didn’t have a problem memorizing long poems and stories, and I enjoyed reciting all these pieces “expressively.” Like many other girls, I wanted to be on stage, but the teacher in the theater class wanted me to do storytelling – he thought I was better at that. Recalling the details, I believe he was a very good teacher, and he took the kids seriously. The core of the class was several extremely talented boys, and it was apparent to me that I was no match, not even close. In contrast to most of the amateur theatrical groups, our’s was constantly looking for talented girls rather than boys, with very intermittent luck.
These classes were no joke. Our teacher spent time with me one-on-one, going through the text. The first time I would start a new story, I had to copy it into my notebook and highlight the most important word in each sentence (and to be ready to explain why this is the most important word). Then, we would go through the text countless times. He said that this stage was not a creative stage but “craftsmanship.” Only after I passed this stage and learned the whole text by heart was I allowed to start adding emotions and other creative elements. I still remember that my best reward was when I saw my teacher laughing after I finished a humorous story at one of the concerts.
All of this, however, was happening in middle school. All the classes were free, and I went to the House of Culture and signed myself up – no parent’s content was required. As for elementary school (from first to third grade), there was nothing for me except for reading after school. Activities like going to museums or theatrical performances were extremely rare. The only “children’s” theaters were two puppet theaters (and it was hard to get tickets for these performances). Museums didn’t have any children’s studios or any kid-centered activities, and things like “children’s museums” didn’t exist. That’s for all this “most cultural nation”…
Most of the weekends (actually, Sundays only, since we had school on Saturdays) included sleeping in, going for some city walks, and almost obligatory visits to my grandfather. As I mentioned earlier, the apartment where my grandfather lived was very far from the city center. It was hard to believe that it was considered to be “within city limits.” The were multiple ways to get there, none straightforward, and all taking about one and a half hours each way. I can’t believe how much time was wasted so reproductively; I didn’t even read on the tram.
My grandfather, with his niece Tamara, who came to visit him from Beslan.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
It does not look like I have any photos taken during my second grade. It could be partially because my mom was a lot into the home movies at that time. In fact, pretty much all home movies I have were filmed in 1971 – 1973 (See here, here and here).
When I was in the second grade, I started to develop myopia, and for some reason (although everybody in the family wore glasses), it was a world-class tragedy. The ophthalmologist wanted to try some new methods on me. I do not know what was the logic behind these methods, but both of them were essentially building more obstacles :). The first was that when I was reading or writing, I had to wear bifocal glasses, which had “plus” instead of “minus” on the bottom. I believe that the idea was that I would “try harder” and my vision would become better, which obviously just made things worse.
Another torture was of the opposite kind. Three times a week, I had to come to the ophthalmologist’s office and spend twenty or thirty minutes staring at the table for vision checking while wearing more “minus” than I needed. Again, I think that this way, I was supposedly “training” my eyes “to try harder.” It took a lot of time from my life (fortunately for my mom, she didn’t have to take me there; the doctor’s office was on the same street where I lived, but still, I remember how annoyed I was by the fact that I had to waste this time and by the torture itself).
Other than that, my life was pretty dull. I walked to school in the morning, walked back home at 1 PM or 2 PM depending on whether I had English class on that day, warmed up my late lunch, did my homework, which sometimes was very time-consuming and always boing, most times (unless I would forget), I did my chores, which included watering the house plants, dusting the surfaces and sweeping the floor in our room (if you already lost the context, mom and I shared a room in an apartment where my father’s family lived). I also had to shine my boots, because mose of the year, the weather outside required boots.
Whatever free time I had, I spent on reading. During my elementary school years, my mom started to attend different evening classes, and as far as I remember, she had something almost every evening. I remember that one year, she studied French, and another year, she studied German (I do not think she succeeded much in any of these languages, but she tried). Also, she was attending sewing classes and knitting classes. I was quite happy to be left “unattended,” and spent all this time reading. The bulk of my reading was Alexander Dumas, Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott, with occasional Conan Doyle.
Good books, or just decent books were difficult to get, you could not buy the books you wanted in the bookstores, and you could not get the books you wanted in the library. Since my aunt worked in the publishing house, she had access to the “special” library, which is why I had a chance to read “The Lost World” and “Pippi Longstoking” (do not ask why the latter one was also “a deficit.” )
For a while, we only had one TV set in the apartment, which was placed in the “dining room” (actually, one of two rooms where my aunt and my great aunt lived). Sometime in the early 70s, my mam got a chance to purchase a TV just for us, so we could watch it in the evenings sitting on her sofa. She also got earphones (probably form work), and sometimes she watched something when I was already asleep, or at least was supposed to be asleep).
The radio (combined with the vynil disk player) was located by my mom’s bed, and one of our Sunday morning activities included listening to the “Good Morning!” show while still in bed. I know it is hardly possible to believe that there were times when I would get out of bed way past 9 AM!
The reconstruction of a forest ranger camp from the 1900s was one of the things Lena and I missed last year. The staff member (whom I didn’t photograph) was dressed as on of these very first forest rangers, and he talked about their jobs and how they had to be away from home on horseback for months. I immediately started to estimate how much they would have to carry with them. Even if we assume they didn’t take s change of clothes with them (which is possible!), he still had just this one saddle bag with two compartments. And he had to hack his tent, a blanket, some tools, his pan and a coffee pot, and a mug, and supplies like coffee, sugar and salt for several months!
Hettie's Reflections 