Translated material
Austria. Memoirs
Print Maya Berzina
Memoirs [1]
We had to learn not French, but German - we were going to Austria, where the pope had been appointed envoy. An envoy is the same ambassador, but of a lower rank: in the great powers - ambassadors (Krasin in England, then in France; Rakovsky, then Maisky in England; Krestinsky - in Germany, etc.). In small countries there are messengers. All of them are plenipotentiary representatives, i.e. authorized representatives.
Before leaving, I managed to ask my history teacher, Miss Hiett, who had visited Austria, what she could say about Vienna. “The slums are terrible,” she replied. The view of a leftist public figure. I did not have a chance to see either the Viennese slums or the London ones, which, they say, were also terrible.
We are traveling around Europe. On the way we managed to stop in Koenigsberg, where for some reason my mother’s parents were at that time. There I fell in love with my charming grandmother Brokha Elyevna Garmiza. She and I had no common language, and we just sat there, smiling tenderly at each other. That was the last time my mother saw her parents.
At some European crossroads we stopped and met Kollontai, at that time the envoy to Norway, the world’s first female ambassador. I was completely amazed by her brightly painted lips, and her whole appearance as an elegant lady. Of all the women I know (mom, friends, teachers), no one wore lipstick. If unfamiliar women they met on the street wore makeup, they made sure that it was not noticeable and only improved their natural coloring. I was completely convinced that only prostitutes wore visible makeup (the result of a combination of Victorian and party upbringing). And here is a flamboyant party leader. (True, my mother powdered herself; when I asked her: “Why?”, she answered: “So that my nose doesn’t shine”; I didn’t understand why my nose shouldn’t shine.)
On the train I learned my first German words, “Spucken verboten” (spitting is prohibited). While there on the train, Dad used his leisure time to teach me the rudiments of Russian grammar, which I had no idea about. He told me that the Russian language has nine parts of speech and listed them. My knowledge of Russian grammar did not go any further.
And here is Vienna. Everything is different. London is, in essence, not a city, but a collection of several diverse cities, an immense world. Vienna is large but compact. Distinct radial-ring layout. Green boulevards, squares. The stone Beethoven sits thoughtfully in the green shadow. On the outskirts there are vast blocks of five-story buildings: the construction of housing for workers is an activity of the city's Social Democratic leadership to combat slums.
Again, as once in Helsingfors, we live in the embassy itself, and many (but not all) of the employees live there. This building is the old Russian embassy, inherited after some bickering by the Soviet government, described in the literature: “The Soviet embassy in Vienna is very similar to the Lubyanka. Same style, same color. Typical Chekist bad taste. False greatness. Lubyansky classicism. There was a time when my whole country was filled with this false KGB grandeur - columns, facades, cornices, spiers, turrets and fake balconies. Inside the embassy, too, “Lubyanka” is gloomy and boring. Fake marble, molded cornices, leather doors, red carpets and the smell of cheap Bulgarian cigarettes.
And yet not the entire embassy is a branch of Lubyanka. There is an independent island here - a sovereign and independent branch of Khodynka, a GRU station... But our style is hidden underground...
But there is also a third style in the Soviet embassy. Nearby, in a dense garden, a large Orthodox church rises solemnly. He stands proud and alone, and his golden crosses are higher than the red flag" [2] .
I don’t know what tastes the security officers have - Suvorov knows better, but the embassy building was not built by them; it served as the Russian embassy back in tsarist times and probably suited the tastes of some ruling individuals (it was from them that the security officers probably got their tastes). By the way, the GPU house on Lubyanka Square was inherited by the KGB officers from the insurance company, and was built at the end of the 19th century [3] . However, later the country (and especially the capital) turned out to be covered with even more lurid and magnificent architectural monsters (high-rise buildings).
I lived in this house several decades before Suvorov. The garden in my time was not dense. I remember the church in the kindergarten as small - after all, in tsarist times it served only embassy employees. And now she didn’t serve anyone - she just stood there. In the building itself, a wide marble staircase led to the second floor, where our apartment and my father’s office were located. There are also apartments for some other employees. Our apartment has three or four rooms. There was a piano, and they continued to teach me music. We bought sheet music, including Vertinsky’s songs (I had never heard such vulgarity before). A teacher came to see me, and later I went to her husband’s house, and he taught me theory, which was much more interesting.
There was a billiard room next to the apartment. We all learned to play billiards. They even organized a billiards competition, ten people took part. Bernstein (I think he was an employee of the trade mission) and my dad competed for first place. I played well and had a chance to take third place, but I screwed up: when things go well, I immediately start to be careless.
In the same house lived, if I remember correctly, the responsible employees of the plenipotentiary mission - Khortytsky, Yakovenko, Yuri Mikhailovich Kotsyubinsky (son of the famous Ukrainian writer M. M. Kotsyubinsky), Lutz (or Lunts), Motuzko - deputies and advisers to the plenipotentiary representative. It was considered a deep secret, but for some reason everyone knew (I, for example, learned from my comrades in the Komsomol organization) that most of these people were actually carrying out one kind of secret work or another under the guise of diplomatic posts. Khortytsky's real name was Zaporozhets [4] . I also knew that he was an employee of the OGPU, and that he adored his boss, Dzerzhinsky. In the summer of 1926, the Khortytskys had a son. I remember how he came to us in confusion: in the maternity hospital he was mistakenly allowed into the maternity ward, and he saw with his own eyes how his wife Roza Davydovna gave birth. This bloody sight horrified him, he ran to the tavern, drank, then to us, where he was still beside himself. The son was named Vladimir, but then news came of Dzerzhinsky’s death, and the newborn was renamed Felix. I also knew that in Vienna Khortitsky was doing some kind of security work under the guise of a diplomatic post. And 45-50 years later, information came through samizdat about his role in organizing the murder of Kirov! [5]
There were some secret apartments in the city. The eldest of our Komsomol members, Alyosha Gerasimov, who worked as a courier, hinted that he was involved in these apartments - he carried out some assignments for them. Lutz, a party member attached to our Komsomol cell, small, black, thin, belonged to a different system: he (also under the cover of diplomatic activity) was a representative of the Comintern. I happened to hear about it a few years later: in Soviet newspapers (I think from the early 30s) they wrote with indignation that the Chiang Kai-shek authorities of China executed two innocent Swiss citizens - a husband and wife; someone told me in secret that this “Swiss citizen” was the same Lutz, of course, under a different name.
I don’t know or don’t remember what Yakovenko, Kotsyubinsky, Motuzko were doing, besides diplomacy.
Now the most interesting question seems to me - how did I know all this, and I’m not alone. After all, it was a state secret. My parents, of course, didn’t tell me this (yes, for that matter, why would my mother, who worked at the trade mission, know about it?). However, once in my presence, dad complained to mom that he was not allowed to do real diplomatic work - all the employees were busy with other things. And he saw his task in purely diplomatic work, in establishing cultural ties, in the rise of the Soviet Union in the eyes of Western public opinion; he complained about the need to cover up other, secret activities - as I understood from the conversation I overheard.
Yes, the secret in our building was not a secret. Having arrived and settled at the embassy, I immediately found myself in a Komsomol youth company and immediately heard about a hotly discussed recent event: as if, shortly before our arrival, one of the employees of the embassy (Ignatiev? Ipatiev?) fled from Austria to Germany with secret documents, with a goal sell them there. As if they were rushing after him, they managed to call him to negotiations in a cafe, poison him there and take back his documents. I couldn’t be critical of this not very plausible story (probably still based on something), but I was struck by the ethical side: how can this be lured into negotiations and killed?! To which I was told that the interests of the revolution and Soviet power are above all. For this reason, you sometimes have to break the rules of personal morality. This is how my Komsomol education began (although I had not yet read Lenin’s corresponding speech).
The entrance to the embassy building was guarded - you had to go through a turnstile. After checking the identity of the person entering, it was opened by the next duty officer (usually Alyosha Gerasimov or the old courier Pasechnik).
Enchanting Vienna! I'm running through the streets. Properly lost, I ask for directions in the few German words available to me: “Bitte, tram ein-und-siebtzich” (Tram number seventy-one, please). Answers using gestures. I'm getting there. My parents and I go to a cafe. There is music everywhere. Mom asks: “Well, tell me, what are they playing?” Dad, jokingly, replies: “Well, since Mom hopes that we will find out, it means either from La Traviata or from Carmen.” In the cafe “Wiener schnitzel”, “cafe ferkert”, i.e. coffee with a predominance of milk, etc.
The city is full of music. Over the course of two years in Vienna, I listened to all the opera and operetta classics - “Faust”, “The Marriage of Figaro”, “The Barber of Seville”, “Egmont”, “Carmen”, “La Traviata”, “Siegfried”, “Maritza”, “Silva”, “ Circus Princess”, etc. I had a chance to see the great ballerina Pavlova, but, unfortunately, the art of ballet remained inaccessible to me. But I was happy to see and hear Chaliapin for the second time: he sang in the production of “Boris Godunov” - he sang in Russian, and all the other artists - in German; the wizard Chaliapin, as always, charmed everyone.
For the rest of the summer, they hired me a tutor, who taught me the rudiments of German and improved my weak Latin, and from the beginning of the school year they sent me to the fifth school in my life. Again we were looking for a “progressive” school. I don’t know how Frau Schwarzwald’s “realgymnasium” was progressive. Old stone building. Classrooms with desks. Long, dark corridors in which we loitered during breaks. Women's school. No self-government. No workshops or labor lessons. No fresh air or exercise. But there are lessons from the Law of God. Upon admission, girls indicate their religion. They wrote me down as “konfessionlos” (“no religion”). When the lesson of the Law of God began according to the schedule, only Jewish girls remained in our class, and Jewish girls from other classes joined them: Catholic girls left and went to the class where the corresponding lesson was going on. Protestants also came out (there were only two of them in our class, and perhaps in the whole school), and I also came out. During this lesson, the three of us wandered around the corridors. Sometimes I stayed in class out of laziness or curiosity. It turned out that the lesson of the Law of God was to study the Hebrew language. It was quite interesting, I got acquainted with the Hebrew alphabet and reading from right to left.
One day I wanted to borrow some French book from the school library (I had not yet read German for myself) and was stunned by the librarian’s question: “Did your parents allow you to read this book?” I quickly replied, “Yes,” and received the book. It had never occurred to me before that my parents might forbid me to read anything, and I never thought to ask them about it. However, one day, when I accidentally walked into my father’s office, I discovered, tucked away among academics and business books, a novel by the English writer Claire Sheridan, “The Thirteenth,” about a woman who had twelve husbands; they must have kept it there so I wouldn't bump into it. Of course, I read the novel, it confused me a little, but I had read “The Sheikh” before...
One episode at school greatly shocked me: recess was over, all the girls were there; I was sitting at school on the far right desk, and through the open door I could see part of the corridor. For some reason, the teacher was delayed, the girls became rowdy, the shouts became more and more hooligan, and then I saw the tip of a woman’s shoe in the corridor. There could be no doubt: our venerable teacher, before reaching the classroom, stopped in the corridor, pressed against the wall, and eavesdropped! Of course, I immediately elbowed my neighbor at the desk (a pretty Hungarian girl named Magda), the signal instantly swept through the class, everyone fell silent, a foot in the corridor moved, and a gray-haired teacher calmly and with dignity entered the silent class. What a progressive school! And, it seems, except for me, this did not particularly strike anyone: the usual struggle between teachers and schoolchildren, where all techniques are perceived as natural - in war as in war!
In terms of my level of preparation and age, I was in the fifth grade. On the first day, my classmates surrounded me and began to teach me German words with laughter. They taught me the word “dick” with particular delight, pointing to a fat girl; I thought it was her name, and it turned out very funny (her name was Laura), but the thing was that “dick” means “fat”.
On the wall of the classroom there was a poster showing what qualities a student should have: “Wahrhaftigkeit, Hoeflichkeit, Takt und Bescheidenheit” [6] . This list outraged me; I had completely different ideas about what was good and what was bad. But in general, I got used to it. Besides me, there were two foreigners in the class: Wanda, a Polish woman from the Polish mission - elegant and arrogant, and Magyar (Hungarian) Magda - small, black-eyed and very sweet.
I soon got used to German. Latin lessons were considered optional for me, as were lessons in the Law of God; This was probably due to the fact that my parents considered the study of ancient languages to be reactionary, an echo of the heated discussions on this issue in their childhood. But I still remained in the class (what else could I do, wander around the corridors again?), read Titus Livy with others and, as needed, prompted those answering - after all, it was not in vain that I sat. German literature, amazingly, was taught by a Russian emigrant - and she taught it perfectly! I quickly overcame my anxiety towards her (an emigrant!) and came to respect her, like the other students.
One must assume that she did not stand in the corridor eavesdropping on our conversations - this is not in the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia! I had the following case with her: I didn’t write the essay assigned for home (writing was always very difficult for me, and more than once I submitted a blank sheet of paper instead of an essay) and I lied to the teacher that I forgot the essay at home - I was thinking of writing it and bringing it the next day. And she told me to bring the essay to her home after class and gave me the address. What to do? I rushed home, wrote the essay as if on fire, and, without rewriting it completely, took it back. It is unlikely that she was deceived... [7]
Among my classmates there was one (Linda Brown) who was interested in politics. In her views, she is a social democrat. I considered myself obligated to argue with her, although I had no arguments: I kept repeating that the transition to socialism is possible only with a violent seizure of power (as the communists argued), and she answered that we must try to transition peacefully (the point of view of the Social Democrats) . Her words seemed convincing to me, but as a Komsomol member I considered myself obligated to object, to defend the communist point of view, although, in essence, I did not understand the issue at all. Here my two lives touched...
Yes, in Vienna, unlike in London, my different lives sometimes came into contact with each other. Here I am walking along the street with several classmates, and the girls suddenly get angry: they make noise, sing, bully passers-by - petty street hooliganism. I could take part in it, but I can’t: I represent my country and think with horror what kind of trouble dad will have if I allow myself to do anything compromising.
In Vienna, connections with the Soviet Union were felt much more than in London. Is it because Vienna is a crossroads through which people from Russia traveled to all European countries, or because the NEP developed and the economic and cultural ties of the Union grew with it, or because we lived in the building of the embassy, where everyone came and which many people stopped, or simply because, as I got older, I began to notice more? I think that all these reasons were at work, but the second one was the most important.
Mayakovsky’s beloved Lilya Brik passed through us to visit her sister Elsa, who was married to the secretary of the French Communist Party Aragon and lived in Paris. Musicians went on a European tour - composer Prokofiev (a rising celebrity), violinist F. (Feinberg? Feinstein?) with his twelve-year-old child prodigy nephew (or son?). Volodya Nikitin and I dragged the child prodigy into the garden, and the pale boy violinist had a chance to run around a little in the fresh air. Unfortunately, he fell and scraped his knee. What a fuss was made here: the child of genius could not suffer the slightest, even the most trifling damage - this could interfere with his high purpose. I felt sorry for the guy who was deprived of ordinary boyish joys. A young musicologist, Lebedinsky, was passing by. He turned out to be the brother of the writer Libedinsky [8] , whom I read. When asked why their last name was spelled differently, he answered with a grin: “My brother thinks that it will come out prettier with an “i.” He took me to the opera a couple of times. My cousin Shura, the son of my mother’s older sister Maria, who had by then become an engineer, went to Italy for an internship. He stayed with us for several days and taught me boxing. Strauyan was passing by with his lovely young wife Tanya.
The Jewish theater Habima passed through Vienna on the way to tour the countries of Europe and then to Palestine [9] , either from Kharkov or from Kiev. Already in Vienna it became known that they were not just going on tour, but were going to stay in Palestine. In the meantime, the theater continued to be listed as Soviet. there My parents and I watched the play “Dybuk” [10] . Here I again felt what real dramatic theater is. The artistic mastery was such that, without understanding a word (the play was played in the Hebrew language, as we called it then, i.e., Hebrew), I trembled and got used to the emotions of the actors. And I’m not alone, but probably all the spectators. The few dramatic performances I saw in England and Austria were worthless in comparison - there the actors simply repeated memorized roles. (This was the case in the opera “Boris Godunov”, where Chaliapin did not just sing - he played like a great artist, and the Austro-German artists around him simply sang.) In my childhood there was the Moscow Art Theater, and since then I have not seen anything comparable, until I saw The Dybuk in Vienna.
A team of Soviet football players arrived. All the time we were told that sport is a bourgeois idea, because sport is a competition, that is, a conflict, and under socialism there should be no competition, only physical education is allowed to preserve bodily health. The term “socialist competition” was not yet widespread, but on the issue of sports, political attitudes suddenly changed, and Soviet sports (physical education) teams began to increasingly take part in international sports competitions. My parents and I went to this competition. Before the start, the Soviet players gathered in a group and shouted in unison: “Fizkult - hurray! Physical training! Physical education - hurray - hurray - hurray! I don’t remember who our team played and who won. In any case, they were not disgraced.
The first (it seems) and, of course, the best Soviet film to appear on Western screens, “Battleship Potemkin,” created a great sensation. This masterpiece of silent cinema was first shown at a closed screening for journalists. There were us too, from the embassy. The power of the impression was such that this seasoned journalistic audience clapped and shouted at critical moments. I noticed that when on the screen the rebel sailors were covered with a tarpaulin and the soldiers pointed guns at them, dad turned away: his nerves could not stand the scene of the expected execution.
This film (of course, black and white and silent - there were no others at that time) was shown in all cinemas in Vienna - first in the most prestigious ones in the city center, then in the inferior ones in the working-class outskirts. I watched it in different cinemas eight times! It was said that in the Soviet Union, on each copy of the film, the flag was hand-painted red. This was not the case in the export version.
The chairman of BOKC [11] Olga Davydovna Kameneva, Trotsky’s sister, Kamenev’s wife, came with a film from the life of street children. She was distinguished by her phenomenal stupidity from both her brother and her husband (whom I, however, did not know, but who were both reputed to be talented people). She stayed at the embassy, and we all had to communicate with her, listen to her stupid boast of her son and other nonsense. It was especially hard on my mother, who had to take her to Viennese cultural institutions and serve as her translator (one of the duties of the envoy’s wife). Mom told me with indignation that at a closed screening of a film about street children, O.D. remarked about the grub of ragamuffins around a street fire shown in the film: “They all eat together - this is Soviet collectivism,” and mother had to translate this indecent nonsense into German .
In general, my mother’s workload in Vienna increased - after all, here she was the wife of an envoy, and not a “deputy,” and there were more diplomatic (representative) functions. She received the ambassador's wives. I remember that we all found it very interesting to see the democratic nature of the wife of the Swedish envoy, who drank tea with her mother and discussed with her how to darn socks. The wife of the Turkish envoy complained that Western tourists admire Turkish exoticism, while the Turks themselves are forced to live in this “exotica” among backwardness and poverty. There were also other visitors. Miss Cadbury, from a family of English Quaker millionaires - owners of the largest confectionery company, came for some charitable work, she was dressed in a traditional Quaker hood. There were also large receptions for several hundred people - our embassy maintained cultural ties with the Viennese intelligentsia. Mom stood below, at the marble staircase, and all the men who came kissed her hand (in England there was no longer a custom of kissing women’s hands at that time, but in Austria there was). This was painful for her, and she, slightly violating etiquette, put on gloves, and then showed that a black spot appeared on the white glove after countless touches of her lips. The reception was standing, there were snacks and drinks on a long table in the large hall, the guests took what they wanted, journalists sometimes overused it. The hosts (i.e., my parents and the most senior of our pseudo-diplomats) engaged the guests in conversation. During receptions, we - young people and non-official people - quietly looked out from the gallery, and after the last guest left, we went down to the reception room and, chatting animatedly, ate what was left. The atmosphere at these moments became lively and friendly, similar to the memory of Finland.
Even I had to participate in diplomacy once. The fact is that at that time, of all the countries in the world, the Soviet Union had the closest friendly relations with Turkey (this came to mind again when the situation around Karabakh escalated in the late 1980s). Therefore, I, sixteen years old, was invited to visit the Turkish envoy in Austria for the birthday (I think the 14th) of his daughter, whom I, of course, had never seen in person. The Turkish embassy was a couple of blocks away from ours. I was driven to this distance in an embassy car decorated with a Soviet flag. I immediately found myself in a crowd of adult guests; The poor birthday girl was completely lost among them. Somehow I congratulated her in French (an international language of communication, like Latin once was, and now English). They asked me how old I was. “Soixante,” I replied, dying of shyness. The general laughter at my mistake (and I immediately caught myself) cleared the atmosphere. That's all my “diplomatic activity”.
Participation in the Komsomol was expressed in meetings of our cell; I don't remember them at all. We studied Bukharin's "ABC of Communism". We learned shooting. The shooting room was equipped in the basement; it was considered very important that no foreigner knew about it - a secret! Once we were taken on a tour of a factory, where a worker came up to us and said in a whisper that he was a communist, but was hiding it.
The youngest of the Komsomol members of our cell (I think she was the daughter of a typist) suddenly had a father in Italy, and she and her mother went to him. It turns out that she became an emigrant? But she’s a Komsomol member! What should she have done? This confused me. It somehow didn’t occur to me then that my grandparents were also emigrants; I realized this only now, having asked myself why they ended up in Konigsberg.
In addition to my comrades in the Komsomol cell, I was friends with thirteen-year-old Volodya Nikitin, who had not yet reached Komsomol age, the son of one of the employees (it seems, the commandant of the building). Volodya was a couple of years younger than me, and I was childish in many respects, and we got along well. By the way, he and I discovered an underground passage between the basement of the embassy and the basement of the church standing in the courtyard; the underground passage was gloomy, sticky, covered with cobwebs.
Along with these children's entertainments, I continued to read voraciously. New horizons opened up before me. “Andrey Kozhukhov” [13] , memoirs of Vera Figner, Nikolai Morozov, Kropotkin, “What to do.” Heroes of revolutionary terror - Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, Kalyaev... The heroic figures of the Narodnaya Volya captivated my imagination. Doubts about the morality of their actions arose only in connection with the possibility of the death of people other than the intended victim. Simply killing the Tsar or the villainous governor did not seem to me a bad act, but I was worried about the fate of the Tsar’s innocent coachman and servants. And I was always happy when I came across in my memoirs cases where this or that Narodnaya Volya terrorist cared about reducing these victims to a minimum (and such cases did occur).
However, I knew that the Bolsheviks were against individual terror, because the social system cannot be changed by destroying individuals - this is what Marxism teaches.
I somehow made an attempt to wise up. A thought occurred to me: why am I a member of the Komsomol and consider myself obligated to share Marxist views? Just because my parents are communists? And if they were, say, Catholics, would I be a Catholic? No, you need to choose the right worldview and stick to it. That's what my parents did when they were young, but most people just follow what they were told when they were kids. And I decided to choose my worldview. Nothing came of it. Quite quickly, I saw, firstly, that there are many hundreds or thousands of different worldviews, and I was not able to study any noticeable part of them. Secondly, that I don’t know how to start this - what to read and where to get it; thirdly, that I do not know how to intelligently and critically master serious literature; fourthly, that for the most part I am not interested in reading it (although I still read the discussions interspersed in fiction and, especially in science fiction and memoirs, with enthusiasm). I tried to communicate with the most intelligent and, at the same time, the closest Komsomol member to me in age - Nemoy Broido, but there was nothing to talk about, he, apparently, was bored with me, and he did not live in our house, he only came to Komsomol meetings. So, I went with the flow: the Komsomol, the party is ahead...
Puzzling questions remained. Once, for some reason, my mother said: “When you grow up, you will have a child, you will need a nanny...” How did my mother, a party member, imagine the coming communism under which I would live? Will private individuals still hire nannies? And will poor women be hired as nannies? The Komsomol press promised public education. But what about mom?
Family friendly relations were mainly with the Khortitskys and with trade representative Semyon Davydovich Wulfson and his wife. They visited us and often played dominoes, sometimes until late at night. Wulfson had a radio, and he was very interested in it and assured that he was able to catch Moscow. Once, while visiting him, we actually heard the Kremlin chimes from a large wooden box. It was a miracle.
There have been incidents. One day, one of the employees living in our building became mentally ill. Of course, it was a secret, and of course, everyone knew about it right away. They said that he stripped naked, shouted some nonsense, did not understand where he was and who he was. They said that this was “progressive paralysis,” which turned out to be not paralysis at all, but a type of mental illness resulting from syphilis. His wife, as always, was skipping her baby’s embassy in the kindergarten, pale, exhausted, aloof, with her head held high. And the authorities’ first concern was to hide all this from foreigners and take the sick person away unnoticed to the Soviet Union. Which was done on the same day. Of course, tickets and visas were issued immediately. A car, several men accompanying a shrouded man, and that’s it.
One day, coming home from school, I found everyone in confusion. It turns out that my father was assassinated by some White Guard. They managed to intercept the terrorist, the police visited, I only found noise around the old courier Pasechnik, who was slightly wounded (they said that he wounded himself, carelessly holding a revolver taken from the killer).
Once dad returned earlier than usual from some regular reception and laughingly told why he had to run away from there: the hostess, who had gathered many prominent people (among them foreign envoys), with a friendly smile told the Soviet plenipotentiary, i.e. to my father: “Here you can meet your compatriot - Kerensky is among the guests.” It was obvious to all of us that the Soviet envoy could not communicate with Kerensky, but she did not understand it (or was she trying to play a cruel joke?). Dad hurried to leave, the meeting did not take place, nothing happened...
I remember once my dad was supposed to meet with some German diplomat, and he turned out to be a Baltic baron - one of those Germans who made up the ruling class of Latvia and whom he had absorbed hatred for since childhood. This was extremely unpleasant for him. He turned white when he talked about it.
One day, dad came joyfully excited and whispered to mom and me: “You know, in Vienna now, it seems, something like a revolution is happening!” There were some labor unrest that ended in nothing. Dad amazed me: he was all glowing.
In Vienna, dad bought a typewriter (he generally loved all sorts of innovations and always carried an “eternal pen” in his pocket). We all learned to type. Sending personal letters typed was not always convenient: some were offended that they were communicated with in such a “mechanical” way. Perhaps the same thing happened in the 19th century during the transition from goose feathers to steel ones? But in our family we quickly got used to it.
Krasin died in Paris. His body was taken to the Union, and dad went to Berlin to meet him. Then he said that one of Leonid Borisovich’s eldest daughters (I think it was Katya), crying on his chest (dad cried easily on his chest, and mom said that he needed to sew a waterproof vest), said: “Dad wanted us to work , dad wanted us to go to Russia! I will work, I will go to Russia!” I don’t know whether these girls had to work or how they lived in general, but none of them went to Russia. Life must have been prosperous, because during the Khrushchev Thaw they sent an invitation to their half-sister in the USSR to stay in Paris, and she went - I learned this from mutual friends.
My father’s parents died - I don’t remember who first and who later. He mourned his mother terribly. After the death of his father, according to Latvian laws, as the eldest son, he became the owner of the farm. He wanted to transfer the farm to his younger (and beloved) sister Lisa: his other sister, Olga, was married, his brother, Karl, was earning money. In countries where primordacy reigns, it is very difficult to break it in a particular case; He should have gone to his homeland in his Old Pebalga volost, but in Latvia, as a communist, he was outlawed. We had to work hard in writing, it was a lot of hassle, but the matter ended successfully, and Aunt Lisa lived on her father’s farm to a ripe old age and death.
By coincidence, some of my mother’s relatives were also in Latvia: the husband of my mother’s older sister Maria, Moses Borisovich Gurevich, worked as a representative of the Oil Syndicate in Latvia in the 20s and lived in Riga with his wife and granddaughter, little Ada, the daughter of the late Lily. My mother’s parents also spent their last years in Riga.
I took different routes back from school. Sometimes a whim led me along the main commercial street Kärtnerstrasse. Sometimes, on the contrary, I walked through the ancient deserted center of the city - Burg; there were no modern residential buildings, no shops, and almost no passers-by. I felt free there, like in a forest, and loudly recited Russian poetry. One day I started “Until the poet demands...” and was amazed to realize that I knew this poem by heart. Sometimes I made a detour to go to St. Stefan; Gothic architecture, darkness, solemnity of the atmosphere - all this helped restore peace of mind, which I was sorely lacking at that time.
The news from the Union was encouraging. The famine ended several years ago, and rationing was abolished. The NEP upset many (a retreat!); there were, as they say, even cases of suicide on this basis (“the socialist revolution did not take place!”). But he carried progress - everything that the progressive Russian intelligentsia had been dreaming about for decades. The passport system was abolished - this is a disgrace to the tsarist regime; compulsory primary education was introduced, plus extensive literacy training for adults (“educational education”); the equality of women, the right to divorce, and civil marriage were proclaimed; equality of nationalities in the constitution; education in native languages; the right of the countries of the Soviet Union - former Russian colonies - to freely secede from the Union; a focus on technical progress has been adopted; the spread of electric lighting (“Ilyich’s light bulb,” although it should have been Edison’s); in schools - coeducational education for boys and girls, school uniforms have been abolished; in schools and universities - broad self-government; in prisons - education through labor (this, of course, is not that “we will raze churches and prisons to the ground,” but crime will not be eliminated immediately); advanced labor legislation (eight-hour working day, vacations); a planetarium was being built in Moscow; a crematorium was also being built (a mischievous ditty has reached us: “They opened the crematorium, / They imprisoned a homeless child, They opened the door - he dances / And shouts “Close it, it’s blowing!”); there is an active struggle against religious prejudices, and the People's Commissar of Education Lunacharsky holds open debates with church leaders; The Moscow Zoo is expanding - animals are being transferred from cramped cages to spacious areas (like in London); universal smallpox vaccination; the creation of a written language for previously unliterate peoples; Litvinov's speech proposing general disarmament [14] ; abundant, completely new Soviet literature - Fadeev, Fedin, Serafimovich, Seifullina, Babel, Leonov, children's poems by Marshak... It seemed that the dreams of the progressive people of Russia were coming true, it was becoming a civilized and more or less prosperous country. This is how I saw the Soviet Union then “from my beautiful distance.”
* Ending. For the beginning, see the previous issues of our magazine (2007, No. 6 and 2008, No. I and 2)
[1] Suvorov V. Aquarium. St. Petersburg, 1992. P. 160.
[2] Gilyarovsky V. Moscow and Muscovites. Tashkent, 1988. pp. 123-124.
[3] Zaporozhets Ivan Vasilievich (1885-1937), one of the heads of state security agencies. In the 1920s he worked abroad, then became the head of the 4th department (foreign trade) of the Economic Directorate of the OGPU. In 1932, he was appointed deputy head of the Leningrad Directorate of the NKVD F.D. Medved. He brought his own employees from Moscow and pursued a different internal policy from Bear in Leningrad. After the murder of Kirov, he was removed from office and then arrested. Sentenced to a short prison term and appointed to a leadership position in the Gulag system. After N.I. Ezhov joined the NKVD, a new investigation was opened in the Zaporozhets case. Shot in 1937. — Note. ed.
[4] Our family archive contains photographs of the Khortytskys. — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.
[5] “Truthfulness, politeness, tact and modesty” (German).
[6] M. Ya. said that at that time she was experiencing acute attacks of homesickness, and one day this same teacher caught my mother writing RUSSIA PUSHKIN on the window glass. The teacher didn’t say anything... - Note. V. Vasilevskaya.
[7] Libedinsky Yuri Nikolaevich [1898] - proletarian writer, member of the RCP (b) since 1920. One of the founders of the “October” group, the main employee of the “On Post” magazine. From 1923 to 1932 he held a number of leadership positions in VAPP and RAPP. Libedinsky's main artistic works: the stories "Week" (1922), "Tomorrow" (1923), "Commissars" (1925), the novels "The Turning" (1927) and "The Birth of a Hero" (1930), the play "Heights" (1928) . — Note. ed.
[8] At that time a British Mandatory Territory, now the State of Israel.
[9] The premiere of Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s play “Dybuk” based on the play by the Jewish writer-folklorist S. An-sky (pseudonym of Shlomo Rappoport) took place in January 1922 in Moscow on the stage of the Habima Theater-Studio. After Habima's triumphant world tour of 1926–1930, the play was recognized as one of the most outstanding theatrical achievements of the 20th century. A dybuk is the spirit of a deceased person that inhabits the body of a living person. — Note. ed.
[10] The All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (BOKC) is a Soviet public organization founded in 1925. Officially, its tasks included familiarizing the public of the USSR with the cultural achievements of foreign countries and popularizing the culture of the peoples of the Soviet Union abroad. In reality, the organization was closely connected with the GPU-NKVD and served to collect information about foreigners coming to the USSR and communist propaganda outside the USSR. — Note. ed.
[11] Sixty (French).
[12] A novel from the life of Narodnaya Volya by the Narodnaya Volya writer Stepnyak-Kravchinsky. — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.
[13] Of course, I didn’t know that none other than Nicholas II once addressed a similar call to the countries of the world!
Omsk through the eyes of an engineer: a story about quality control Activities of the Russian Spiritual Mission in China*