FATHER

The last time we saw each other was just briefly. He was going to Moscow. After a difficult, conflict-filled breakup with Boris Tseytlin, he went to the Drama Theater to look for a new chief executive. He was gloomy. I didn't know if it would work. I was going to St. Petersburg on television business.. We exchanged a few words, and well, bye-bye, see you later... It didn’t happen.

Peter was wonderfully good that summer. And there I learned about his death. I was sitting with friends in a cafe. They were joking. The bell rang. They said that they were urgently waiting for us at the hotel. All the way to the hotel I continued to chat about something. And my friends already knew what I didn’t know... At the hotel they told me that my father was not there. Died in a car accident. Then - a night conversation with Tomsk, a train ticket. And a bottle of vodka, which my understanding friends put in my pocket. I remember that I did not sleep and was completely sober when I arrived in Moscow. From there, together with my sister, they took their father to Tomsk. In a coffin.

Now that ten years have passed since his death, it is gradually becoming clear to me that I don’t know that much about him. And I don’t know many important things. He just seemed like a very open, sociable person. In fact... We learn many details of his biography, especially as it relates to his childhood and youth, years after his death. Piece by piece, piece by piece. He clearly didn’t want to talk about many things, and probably didn’t even want to remember many things. Like millions of people from several generations, through whom the history of our unhappy country rolled like a wheel in the 20th century.

From childhood I knew that I was the grandson of a Japanese spy. My paternal grandfather, Meer Iosifovich, was taken away in 1938. He was an ordinary hard worker - an electrician. How they, Bessarabian Jews, were brought to Semipalatinsk - we don’t really know. From the stories of my relatives, I know that several years earlier there was a fire at the plant - his then place of work. We were looking for pests. A government commission headed by Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife, arrived. One of the members of this commission, by the way, was Odessa engineer Nikolai Eberts, my mother’s uncle! This is how the stories of two families (Stuks-Ebertsev and Muchnikov-Kleiman) intersected for the first time. Then it came out in family conversations about thirty years later. Accidentally. If you think of someone like this in a novel or TV series, they will say it’s unnatural, it doesn’t happen in life. But it happened!

That's all that remains of Meer's grandfather... This certificate:

Muchnik Meer Iosifovich

Born in 1911, Romania, Chisinau; Jews; electrician, pedagogical institute.. Lived: East Kazakhstan region. Semipalatinsk..
Arrested on January 10, 1938 by the NKVD for East Kazakhstan region.

Sentenced: Troika UNKVD for East Kazakhstan region December 3, 1937
Sentence: 10 years in labor camp Rehabilitated on September 8, 1956 by the Semipalatinsk Regional Court for lack of corpus delicti.

As in any Soviet family... There are those who are imprisoned, and there are those who are fallen. My father's uncle, my great-uncle. Sergeant Kleiman. Buried in a mass grave. Together with him there are 279 more fighters. There are no photographs - only this reference:

The commission did not find any sabotage at that time. But a few years later they raked up many, remembering this fire too. It seems like someone from his superiors warned my grandfather in 1937. Leave, they say, at least for a while from the city until everything calms down. They'll take it away. But he and his wife had just lost a child, their second after their father. And my father was three years old. Meer felt very sorry for his wife and did not leave. They gave him a ten - a sentence in those epic times - even a small one. Troika judged. Among the charges seemed to be PS - suspicion of espionage. For some reason, in favor of Japan, although, given the Bessarabian roots, the Romanian Siguranza would look more logical. He did not live long in the camp. Some of those who returned twenty years later said that he was beaten to death by the Vokhrovites when he stood up for one of the prisoners. They also said that he went crazy in the camp. Whether it’s true or not, no one can tell now.

His father was raised by his aunts - Rachel (we always called her Aunt Rokha) with Sophia and grandmother - Perlya. I can only guess why his mother, Zina Kleiman, gave the boy to his sisters. Maybe she was afraid that they would take her after her husband... I have never seen this grandmother of mine. She then got married and gave birth.

My father loved his sister Vera and his niece Zhenya, but he avoided talking about his own mother. It’s as if she wasn’t in our lives. He called her Zina, as if she were a stranger. Why and for what reason could he never forgive her? Don't know.

I rarely remembered my childhood. It is clear that it was difficult. And who had it easy then? I remember telling him about a neighbor’s kid who came out onto the porch with bread, buttered and sprinkled with sugar. And how he envied this boy. By the way, he loved sweets. And at the end of his life, with his severe diabetes, he still strove to secretly snatch some piece of cake. And he was very embarrassed when one of us caught him doing this. From his poor military childhood - the gifts he gave us. My mother scolded me, I remember that there was nowhere to put the toys. And he kept bringing toys from his business trips, one more wonderful than the other.

Having graduated well from school in my Semipalatinsk (I always emphasized that they were taught by very good teachers from exiles), I wanted to enter MGIMO. No more - no less! But Rokha was summoned to the MGB and kindly warned that it was better for the son of an enemy of the people not to meddle in MGIMO (by the way, I recently learned this detail from Israeli relatives; my father never told any of us about this, he didn’t like to talk about failures). So he ended up in Tomsk. Entered TSU to study law. I studied successfully for some time, and then transferred to correspondence, which I abandoned after meeting my mother and my birth.

The unfinished higher education was also his secret. He never told us about this. We found out by chance, a few years after his death. Apparently it was a serious injury. Accordingly, he treated the university, higher education, and scientific degrees very reverently. I remember that I had just entered the university for my history department, and plunged into a freer life compared to school... Various gatherings in the dorm, guitar songs, love. And here my father gives me a very difficult conversation... Naturally, a beating. They say they will kick you out of the university, you should sit in the library and not drink vodka. It was a very emotional conversation. I didn’t understand anything then. Until that moment, my parents had only been interested in my studies in the first grade... My father had only been to school a couple of times. And then this... Now I understand that he was trying his fate on me. Then I calmed down a little when I passed several sessions with straight A’s. I was very proud of our PhD degrees. I really hoped that his children would be doctors of science. And only in this did he see our future.

In the early 90s, when my wife and I, like everyone else around us, started buying and selling in order to survive, I was terribly worried. Instead of writing dissertations, his children sell condensed milk... Of course, this was a blow for him. That’s why I was very jealous of our television activities. I didn't take it for a long time. I considered it pampering. It seems that he softened a little only after the television company TV-2 received its first federal TEFI. I'm glad he got to enjoy it. It was very important for him - on a federal scale! He always seemed to be trying to escape from Tomsk. It was a bit cramped for him here.

In the early 90s, my father happened to visit New York. He came back all glowing. He said: “This is my city!” I was delighted with the energy, the scope, and the fact that I immediately felt like I belonged there. Although he didn’t know English at all, he explained himself with gestures. And with the help of twenty to thirty German words that remained in memory from the times of the Semipalatinsk school. Tomsk space was not enough for him, of course. But he never left, even though there were various Moscow offers... And this despite the fact that he was generally inclined to dramatically change something in his life.

The first time this happened was in the mid-60s, when he decided to leave the “Knowledge” society (there was such an educational institution under the Soviets, if anyone doesn’t remember), where he had already established a career as a good lecturer (it was in this capacity, by the way, that he met with my mother in Asina, where she worked as a distribution doctor). He left - to become the head of the football team. I already wrote about this - I’ll add a little.

Our whole family at that time lived not only on goals, points, tactical schemes and refereeing errors, but also on the various personal circumstances of these two dozen guys from Tomles. He looked after the football players like children, although some of them were practically his peers. For some, I took exams at the ped, where they received their certificates of higher education. He talked about it with delight, how he walked around with other people’s notebooks, and how they didn’t recognize him. Maybe I made it up a little.

I remember during my father’s matches on the bench - how he nervously put cigarette after cigarette into his mouth (he didn’t know how to smoke, didn’t inhale, and when he left football he stopped dabbling in smoking). And towards the end of the game, when it was necessary for our team to score, he went behind someone else’s goal (at that time this was not forbidden by the rules) and scored a goal. The sign was like this. There was a noise in the stands: “The tormentor has gone”! Sometimes it came true. By the way, he believed in omens...

My father left the team somehow abruptly and unexpectedly for us. Everything seemed to be fine there, but he apparently understood that the team had reached its ceiling and would not jump any higher, and therefore was bored. The Sports Palace, which happened after football, was probably the best period in his life. Poetry evenings that attracted several thousand listeners (now this is impossible to imagine!). Training sessions of the USSR national figure skating team and its demonstration performances.

The armfuls of flowers that our spectators piled up on the ice were, naturally, all over the place. His friendship then began with Tatyana Tarasova, which lasted until the end of his life.

I remember how indignant my father was with the accepted payment system, when he was forced to pay great figure skaters pennies for their demonstration performances.

He considered this humiliating for himself and was very happy when he found some more decent option. Then, I remember, he was bullied for a long time in the OBKhSS for this very option, he walked around all white.

However, they couldn’t sew anything on. Because he personally did not gain a penny from all this. He invariably said, “I honor Soviet laws, no matter how idiotic they may be.”

Respect for Soviet laws, however, did not prevent him from carrying home a variety of self- and tamizdat, naturally, in bags (here, of course, there was not only the reader’s interest, but also his inherent gambling passion - it was simply a thrill to beat the Soviet regime).

My father loved to receive his famous guests at home. Who didn’t sit at our table in those years! Evgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky (both are still at the peak of people's love for them), the alien, completely European grandmaster of some kind in manners Salo Flor, the amazing big-eyed Marina Neelova, the stern Alexander Kaidanovsky with the smiling Evgenia Simonova, Andrei Tarkovsky with the film crew of his “Stalker” "...

Father received everyone on a grand scale. Mother usually baked pies. But he cooked the meat himself. Didn't trust anyone. I loved the kitchen. When he was in charge there, there was no place for anyone else. Big, as a child it seemed to me simply huge. In clouds of smoke and steam. Everything rattled and shook when he cooked. The entire kitchen was splashed, flooded, covered with spices... In general, it needed to be slightly repaired after his cooking. But everything turned out delicious for him. Especially the cutlets. I’m also a good cook, but I know that my cutlets don’t live up to those of his. He had some kind of secret. Maybe it's all about the noise...

Well, back to the Palace. The Palace was famous at that time for its film premieres, the most famous of which, of course, was Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” in 1979. From time to time, my father received severe punishment from the authorities for the ideological inconsistency of events (and “Stalker” was just such a story; it seems that my father was then charged with religious propaganda). At that time, when no one in our area knew the words “marketing” and “promotion,” the posters for events held in the Palace were amazing in size. They caught my eye from afar. A funny story happened with one of these posters. Exactly during one of the party events, my father held the premiere of the film “Much Ado About Nothing.” According to William Shakespeare. As always, I went overboard with the poster. And so, it means that the First Secretary of the Regional Committee, Yegor Ligachev, is driving around the city and on Palace Square he sees two adjacent posters. First - the decisions of the Party - put into practice! Well, the second, larger one, which in meter-long letters invites you to Shakespeare. According to my father, there really was a lot of noise .

And here we must say separately about Ligachev, who, although angry at times, ultimately covered for his father. Ligachev's father sincerely loved him. I loved him for his scope and ambition. We in the family could not understand this sympathy - for us in those years, Ligachev was simply one of “these”, from the Soviet nomenklatura. And my father, both in the perestroika and post-perestroika years, when Ligachev seemed just some kind of relic of a bygone era, kept saying, “You don’t understand...”. Now, it seems, I understand what he wanted to tell us. That ideology is not always the most important thing. What Ligachev tried to pull out and in many ways pulled Tomsk out of the sleepy state in which the city was at the turn of the 50s-60s... He did it, of course, in his own way... But his father was undoubtedly in his opinion , more fair than we of that time.

Exactly on the eve of August 1991, my father somehow ran into Ligachev at the airport and he, out of the blue, told him “Don’t be sad, Moses. Our people will come soon." While telling this story, the father laughed. But he laughed somehow sadly, or something. Those who could come then were, of course, not “ours” at all to him. But he certainly sympathized with Ligachev, who had already been thrown to the political margins.

Paradoxically, for my father, whom the Soviet authorities blamed for years for allegedly behaving not like an ideological worker, but like a businessman, the era that began in the 90s turned out to be completely alien. He then once again made a sharp turn in his life and left the Philharmonic (where he went after the Palace), where he also became bored in the last year of work. And he tried to start a business. It would seem that for him, with his connections, acquaintances, and unlimited opportunities to get loans from many banks where he was known, the golden time had come. The opportunity has finally arisen to turn into reality the myths about millions that have been circulating in Tomsk since ancient Soviet times, which Muchnik has been spreading. But he was bored. It's boring to just buy and sell. But the typical business scheme of the early 90s was exactly like this. It was important for him to have some kind of super-idea. And he was talking about some kind of factory for the production of some very important plywood for the production of some marine vessels, which would be built as a result of his trading operations. It was extremely important to him that, ultimately, there would be a plant... But in reality there was some kind of boiler room in which all the money received from trade was safely burned. And these investments in the boiler room were clearly unnecessary in the business scheme. Of course, nothing worked with the plant. And the father was very sad. And here we are, selling condensed milk, instead of writing doctoral dissertations...

That’s why the Drama Theater became such a blessing for him and all of us. I think that the invitation to the theater extended his life by several years. Father was in his element. He rejoiced as he rebuilt the building. He got some lamps and was proud of the best toilets in the city. He brought young actors from somewhere. He took care of them.

He proudly greeted spectators at the entrance to theater premieres. In a tuxedo. With a butterfly. I was happy when I brought a new chief executive to Tomsk - Boris Tseitlin. I admired him. He generally knew how to admire people. And then... In the summer of 2001, he went to Moscow to look for a new director.

It always seemed to me that he and I were very different. He was expansive, quick-tempered, hot-tempered, noisy, easy to get along with people... I am completely different. But they say that over the years I become more and more like him. Maybe so...