Moscow period. Memoirs*

Print Maya Berzina

National

Wherever I visited in just over two years (1918-1920), but every time I returned to Moscow, always by train, almost always late in the evening, and Moscow was greeted by a sea of ​​lights (it’s unlikely that they were very rich in those years, but that's how I saw it). In March 1918, dad met us at the station, and in a cab, shaking along the cobblestone street, we went straight to the National Hotel (aka the First House of the Soviets), and there to room 218. The National was very interesting: long corridors, strange numbering - on the second floor all the rooms were two hundred and something, on the third - three hundred and something, etc. A strange number of floors: the fourth was actually considered the second, under it there was a “mezzanine”, and under it the real first floor with some other name.

In Moscow, I was sent to the Kremlin kindergarten (for children of the party and government elite) - my third kindergarten. I don’t remember anything about him, except that Adka Sverdlov was a terrible hooligan and fighter. (Later I learned from self-published literature that he grew up to be a famous informer.)

My meeting with Lenin dates back to this same time, who, after moving from Petrograd, lived briefly at the National. I remember this: my dad and I were walking along one of the corridors of the National and came across a bunch of people talking animatedly. Dad joined them, and then called me over and introduced me: “This is Maya. And this is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.” The surname interested me, I then asked my dad if this was Lenin, whom I had heard about as “the most important Bolshevik.” But immediately upon meeting me, I was immediately fascinated by an adult who did not pester me with the usual stupid questions (“Are you behaving well?”, “Who do you love more, dad or mom?”, etc.), but immediately spoke seriously - I don’t remember what - and a few minutes later he was enthusiastically playing tag with me. I screamed and chased him down the hallway to his room, where he crawled under the sofa (yes!). Two women were sitting in the room, probably Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya and Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova. They, laughing, tried to intervene on my side - to prevent V.I. from hiding from me, but I did not accept help, shouted: “This is not fair!” I was, I don’t know where from, always very devoted to the idea of ​​fair play [fair play].

I still clearly remember his buttocks in his trousers, sticking out from under the sofa.

Switzerland

Soon my dad was appointed plenipotentiary envoy to Switzerland - one of the first diplomatic posts of the new Soviet state. In May we moved in a large horde. I remember G.L. Shklovsky [1] with a thick beard, young Maurice Leiteisen [2] , the artist Lyubarsky.

I remember Switzerland as festive: climbing Mount Jungfrau and watching the sunrise there, summer holidays at Lake Thun, forest walks picking berries (here I discovered an idiosyncrasy for strawberries and wild strawberries, and I only picked them in other people’s baskets). In the fall, I was sent to a French-language school (my mother’s big dream was to teach me French). Second school in my life. The girls are all in identical blue dresses with long blond hair combed back, decorous, decent, alien... It seemed a little creepy to me, but, fortunately, not for long!

In Switzerland, I celebrated my eighth birthday and felt that the family had reached some other material level. Never have there been such an abundance of wonderful gifts. For the first time I experienced a prosperous life. But this happiness did not last long. Soon Switzerland severed relations with Soviet Russia, and in November of the same 1918, a caravan of eleven cars and two trucks moved under the escort of a mounted military detachment towards the state border.

The severance of relations occurred “due to false accusations of involvement in the protests of Swiss workers” [3] . It is not for me to judge how false this accusation was. In his memoirs, published in the 1920s, my father writes that Lenin’s letters to him in Switzerland cannot yet be published. These letters were first published only in the “complete” collected works of Lenin [4] , and even then I heard that the publishers got into trouble for this publication. It is clear from the letters that the head of government, instructing his envoy, was least concerned about establishing good relations between the countries. I noticed one refrain when reading these letters half a century later: use every opportunity to publish Lenin’s works against the Social Democrats in all European languages, do not spare money for this, “there will be money.” However, in Russia’s relations with Switzerland, the most important thing was the zigzags of its relations with Germany.

We were driving to the border with Germany. Somewhere the staff of our embassy had to be exchanged for the staff of the Swiss embassy in Russia. Lyubov Ivanovna Pokrovskaya, the wife of the historian Mikhail Pokrovsky [5] , jokers assured that if the secretary-typist at the Swiss embassy did not have boys the same age as her Yurochka, then the exchange would not take place for her. Even at eight years old I understood that this was nonsense, but poor Lyubov Ivanovna took it very seriously, and it took my parents a lot of work to calm her down.

They took us along roundabout roads, hiding us from the population, bypassing cities. They said that the workers were on strike in protest against our deportation. In some small town, through which we nevertheless had to pass, we saw shopkeepers lowering the curtains on their windows: they, too, were on strike for us, and some of ours (“ungrateful,” I thought) grumbled that there was nothing You will be able to buy it before leaving - the shops are closed.

We drove all day. It got dark. In the dead of night, it turned out that our convoy had gotten lost, the cars had been driven into some kind of swamp, and there was no road. Dad said: “What a disgrace. Now I’ll make a scandal for the head of the convoy.” I was seized with horror: after all, the soldiers of the convoy were all with weapons! “Daddy,” I begged, “don’t, don’t make a scandal.” But dad still got out of the car and had a big talk with the squad leader. Somehow we sorted it out, and finally we arrived.

A point on the border with Germany. Tavern. We were given two rooms - one for men, the other for women. There were soldiers outside at the doors of each room; we were as if under arrest, awaiting exchange by embassy personnel. The soldiers guarding the women's room came up with a fun idea: they talked loudly to each other about how they would shoot us in the morning. The women were scared, my mother encouraged them, assured them that they would not shoot anyone, they would exchange us, the soldiers were just joking. Of course, I believed my mother, but it was still a little scary.

The night of fears is over, no one was shot. The next thing I remember is a hotel in Berlin. We are sitting in a restaurant, and Lyubarsky sculpts animals for me from black bread. They hardened and were stored with me for a long time.

415th number

And here it is again in Moscow, “National”. When I think about “the linden trees under which I spent my childhood,” I first of all imagine number 415 of National. Top (officially fourth, actually sixth) floor, long corner balcony... Walking past on the street, I always look at this balcony and for many years I have never seen anyone there. And I used to stand for a long time, Okhotny Ryad spread out below me (there were also stalls), then the Iverskaya Chapel, with old women always praying near it (“Poor things, they don’t know that there is no God”). To the left, on our side, the huge (and now so small!) House of Unions and the White Church (later demolished) towered above the surrounding houses. It was visible all the way to Theater Square.

We subsequently returned to this two-room suite from all our trips. In the first passage room there is a round table with a plush tablecloth. The walls are lined with books (before books, my father was a big hunter), among them there were children's books. Probably, it was done this way on purpose so that I would find them myself and by accident. Here I spent the whole day alone; my parents usually came home from work late at night. They left me food cards, according to which I had to dine in the National canteen. There they fed red fish and similar delicacies (the supplies must have been left over from the previous owners). It happened to me, after playing or reading, I forgot about dinner, the cards disappeared, my parents came at night and gasped, but what can you do - I went to bed hungry.

Another departure soon. In Latvia, at the turn of 1918 and 1919, Soviet power triumphed and the Soviet government was formed. My father, who had just returned from Switzerland, where he represented the RSFSR, was instantly converted from a Russian citizen into a Latvian and took the post of People's Commissar of Education of the new Soviet republic. Other Latvian Bolsheviks, led by Peter Stuchka, underwent the same transformation [6] . I, eight years old, was told that we would now live in Latvia, where I had another grandfather and another grandmother. Indeed, my father’s parents, peasants from a remote farm, came with their daughter Lisa to Riga to visit us.

We lived in a tall, dark apartment in Riga for only a couple of months: in May 1919, German and White Latvian troops approached the capital. The families of the “responsible workers” hastily evacuated (my second evacuation from the Germans!). The mood was gloomy. We—women, children, and for some reason the only man, Zaks, with a huge, thick beard—were loaded into a freight car (a freight car), stuffed to capacity. I was worried about dad, who remained in Riga, [7] but mom explained that members of the government should remain at their post until the last minute and would fly to Moscow by airplane. And if my mother herself was worried, she did not consider it necessary to show it. I don’t know if dad was evacuated by air or just by express route, but when we got to Moscow, he already met us at the station [8] .

The journey was difficult. Our train was delayed at every junction station - the tracks were clogged, there were not enough steam locomotives. The tortured station chiefs were torn to pieces, screaming and cursing. I soon fell ill with measles and spent a long journey on the upper bunks in extreme heat. Mom looked after me as best she could: at the stations she collected snow, which was thawed for drinking water, and adapted a tin can for a chamber pot.

I remember these stations: several men outside were struggling to push open the huge door of the heated vehicle, we were all covered in frost, we could see snow and pieces of earth. Mom hurriedly wrapped me up, told me to keep my head down, and, taking the bearded Zaks for representation, went off to try to get us sent further east - to be attached to a train. She returned many hours later, excited, tired, and victorious. They promised today! The first time the promise was not fulfilled, it was necessary to go again, demand, achieve. No one in the heated vehicle could match my mother’s energy. I was proud of her. I am still proud.

There were exciting adventures. Once the door of the car was boarded up, no one could open it for a long time; Once it shook so hard that all the women except my mother screamed, and I flew from my top bunk onto someone’s head...

We traveled from Riga to Moscow for about a month. And suddenly everything changed at once: spring, arrival in Moscow, dad, a cab driver, and me, recovering, cleanly washed, laid on a wide bed between fresh sheets. I, of course, considered this completely natural: children always confidently count on a happy ending.

And again life in my dear room 415. From here I went to school (my third school). Mom, I remember, kept discussing which school to send me to. It seems that they have not yet come up with a mandatory assignment to schools by address. I settled on the former Repman girls' gymnasium. The former owner of the gymnasium, a tall, stately, gray-haired lady with a voluminous hairstyle, remained the head of the school - no longer, of course, for girls: the Soviet government (or the Provisional Government?) introduced coeducational education for boys and girls [9] . The school was located somewhere near the Nikitsky Gate. I went there on foot (there was no public transport in Moscow) and was always late because it was very difficult to get up in the morning. In addition, there were distractions along the way. For example, outside the window of the National, a giant colorful poster looked out onto the street: a chariot with a tsar, a bourgeois and a priest, pulled by exhausted workers and peasants, and a giant whip fluttering above them. I was unusually attracted to this poster, I stood in front of it for a long time. The diary that I kept then began every day with the words: “Today I was 10 minutes late for school,” “Today I was 5 minutes late for school,” etc. And only once: “Today I was not late for school.” school" (an event that required special recording!).

I remember school fragmentarily. They assigned us to write a poem “Through the Wavy Mists” at home, not in a column, like poetry, but in a row. I was very surprised, I thought it was some kind of misunderstanding, and I asked my dad. He thought the same thing as me. I wrote in a column and received a remark.

The school celebrated the anniversary of the October Revolution (apparently the second). Chief Repman gathered us in the hall and said that the Russian people had won freedom. The Americans won freedom a long time ago, and now the Russians too. (This must have been one of the ways for the old intelligentsia to coexist with the Soviet regime.) I brought this version home, and my dad explained to me that the freedom of the Americans is not yet the same, but ours is real.

Once at school all the children were given a herring. I carried my herring by the tail with mixed feelings: pride that I was making my modest contribution to the family meal, and embarrassment because I was well aware that among a hungry population our family was relatively well-fed and, in essence, could get by without my herring, and other schoolchildren may be hungry at home, and I should have refused, but I didn’t want to show off either...

One incident at school is etched in my memory as deeply shameful. We stood in a crowd in front of the teacher, and one boy deliberately and rudely pushed me. Snitch? It's taboo. And I bypassed the taboo: I squeezed tears out of my eyes and depicted suffering on my face in order to attract the teacher’s attention. Attracted. And in response to her direct question, she reluctantly reported that Andryusha pushed me. I’m still ashamed, it would be better if I openly lied, and even better, I would wait for a change and fight.

And that's all I remember about school. She didn't play a big role in my life. The main thing was at home. Games with friends, reading, communication with parents, a huge spiritual life.

Games

My bosom friend was Dima Osinsky, the son of N. Osinsky (V.V. Obolensky) [10] . With him we made long sea voyages on ships built from overturned chairs; were shipwrecked; landed on uninhabited islands, where man-eating tigers roamed the thickets, etc. There were two positions on the ship’s crew that seemed interesting to us: captain and cabin boy. I never argued for the captain’s place, realizing that Dima was still a boy, and was invariably a cabin boy.

We went for a walk in the Alexander Garden. There, near the Kremlin wall, there was a hill of stones with a grotto. At that time, it all fell apart (the result of shelling of the Kremlin or just desolation?), the stones lay in a disorderly pile, crumbled, and it was dangerous to climb. This is what Dima and I liked: we studied every pebble and developed a road along which we could freely run up and down, shaming our enemies, that is, other people’s boys. And in winter we went sledding there. We didn’t have our own sleds - we had to borrow, beg...

The permanent war between the boys from National and the boys from Metropol played a big role in our lives. Among the boys, I, the only girl, it seemed, had equal rights. The war was going on on Theater Square. There were no current public gardens. There were tram rails, but the trams did not run. Nobody stopped us from fighting, the war went on with varying degrees of success. There was a case when there were very few of us (from National) and someone suggested calling street children for help. The homeless children stood on the sidelines and watched us fight. They were in rags and, of course, stained with soot. We approached them and asked: “Do you want to fight?” “We want!” - they exclaimed and joined our side.

The expected arrival of the Janson-Brown family from England caused great excitement. This outstanding Latvian party leader himself died, but his widow Anna Yakovlevna with her daughter Elya and son Eric were returning from emigration. Eric was a couple of years older than our group. “Metropol residents” shouted: “Eric will live in Metropol, he will be ours and we will win!” The “Nationals” shouted: “Eric is Maya’s friend [11] , he will be for us!” Eric, when he arrived, wisely avoided our battles.

In addition to all this - countless games with counting rhymes, hide and seek, “classes”, etc. Huge children's folklore (“One, two... ten, a clear month has come out. And behind the month is the moon, a boy, a girl, a servant. You, servant , give me the carriage, I’ll sit in it and go, I’ll put on a black tailcoat, you remain a fool!” and so on).

I met with several girls to buy a pie in Okhotny Ryad. Inflation was just beginning. The price of a pie, which previously cost a penny, has reached 70 rubles. While we collected 70 rubles, the price of the pie has risen even more. We caught up with him at two hundred. The pie was divided into seven parts. I was the smallest, and they offended me - they gave me a small piece of bread without filling.

Spiritual life

And with all this - reading. I read avidly, and it all went straight into spiritual development. What was not there! Three different pre-revolutionary anthologies. One of them was called “Hunting is Worse than Bondage,” which outraged me: they write for children, but not everyone will understand. What kind of words are “hunting” in an unusual sense, “further”. And in the textbooks there is a whole world: snowdrops, forget-me-nots, hungry orphans, kind old women... In vain this poor man is jealous of this rich man sitting in a carriage, because the rich man has cancer! The falsity of this logic irritated me - I was already prone to criticism. Nekrasov, Nikitin, Nadson, Maikov, Pleshcheev, a little Pushkin and Lermontov. The most fascinating A.K. Tolstoy (“Vasily Shibanov”, “Prince Silver”, “Russian history from Gostomysl...”, “The Dream of State Councilor Popov”). In the poems I especially liked the sublime and not too understandable: “And I, who is blood in the incessant battles for the waters like waters and lilies...”, or “The waves of Phlegethon splash, the arches of Tartarus tremble, the horses of pale Pluto quickly to the nymphs of Pelion from Hades God is being rushed..." or "The street was like a storm. The crowds passed as if they were being pursued by an inexorable doom [12] . Omnibuses, cabs and cars rushed by, the furious stream of people was inexhaustible.” I really liked all this. And, along with this, children's poetry, which at that time was entering its heyday. Of course, I knew “The Crocodile” by heart (thanks to which it later reached my children when the author was in disgrace), and I still remember the wonderful children’s poems of Anna Moravska.

And the magical world of fairy tales. Of course, I knew fairy tales before. I remember that my mother, when giving me an enema, softened the unpleasantness of this procedure by reading “Thumbelina” or “The Scarlet Flower” aloud. When I heard “Thumbelina” when I was about five years old, I exclaimed: “Mom, you knew this fairy tale before, you knew that you could have a baby this way, why didn’t you give me a brother, you know how much I want a brother!” To which my mother reasonably replied that the Thumbelina method of having a child is only in a fairy tale, but in life it’s different. And it didn’t enter my limited child’s mind to ask: “How?”

But now Russian folk tales have appeared, and Ershov’s “The Little Humpbacked Horse,” and the very special philosophical and poetic “Tales of the Purring Cat” by the Russian zoologist N.P. Wagner. Here are Mila and Nolly - both are beautiful, they love each other without memory. Troubles, vicissitudes, adventures, separation... And here they are on the Island of Happiness. Here all the girls are beautiful, like Mila, and all the boys are like Nolly. They dance, have fun, admire the beauty of each other and the surrounding nature. Mila and Nolly’s faithful dog has died, they are crying over the corpse, but a lovely girl runs up: “Oh, how ugly!” They are looking. But everyone is alike (perfection of beauty). And these lucky ones don’t understand why they are looking. “Am I worse?” - asks a lovely girl, exactly like Mila. And they look for each other, finally find each other by their tear-stained faces and rush into hugs. And they leave the Island of Happiness. This is how I remember this fairy tale [13] . Others were also memorable: “Max and the Wolf,” “Papa the Gingerbread Man,” “The Tale of a Fairy Tale.” And in each there are moral problems, good and evil.

Good and evil occupied me vividly. Ideas about them changed, but their fervor remained. Either I was an ardent pacifist, or an equally ardent “red” revolutionary. I was very concerned about the suffering of animals, I even tried to write a play about the revolutionary struggle of mice against people and cats, but due to my mediocrity I could not finish it.

Of course, there is no God, I thought, but if there is, then he is a villain - after all, there is so much suffering in this Civil War and in people in general. Well, people still suffer for their beliefs - red or white, but the horses are at war! For what?! And somehow, climbing onto a chair (closer to the sky), I shook my fist at the ceiling and shouted curses at God (“scoundrel!”, “scoundrel!”, “fool!”), calling him to punish me, but no punishment did not follow, and I got off the chair, somewhat disappointed and more convinced that He was not there.

Representations were made up of reading, living life was almost never achieved. After all, in essence, even then, without understanding it, I was living in my “nomenklatura” family, wrapped up from surrounding worries and contradictions. Occasionally something would break through.

Once I sat down on the porch at the National next to a group of hotel employees (maids or dishwashers). They animatedly discussed the situation of the royal family, then still alive, and felt sorry for the queen that she had to do something with her own hands (wash? Darn?). I was perplexed: after all, these are workers, they do the washing and mending themselves, why do they feel sorry for the royal family?

On the stairs of the National there was a sign “Don’t spit on the floor” (how the employees of this luxurious hotel laughed when I told them this in 1978!). A Red Army soldier passed by, read it and said out loud, not addressing anyone: “Why don’t you care? In your pocket, or what?” Again, bewilderment - after all, he is a Red Army soldier, which means he is ours. How can he be so unconscious and not see that there is a spittoon? But, in general, I lived both then and later more in the book world than in the real one.

At this time, acquaintance with the classics began. I remember that the newly created People's Commissariat for Education began publishing a series of collections of Chekhov, Korolenko, Kuprin, Skitalets, Gorky on yellow newsprint with narrow margins (according to the new spelling). I read “Kashtanka”, “Letter to Grandfather” [14] , “Children of the Dungeon”. Chekhov's story “The Exclamation Mark” contains my only (and so far) information about the rules of Russian punctuation [15] .

And, finally, educational, popular science literature. The great educator Rubakin, along with scientific works, found time to write for children, laying the foundations of knowledge in a variety of areas: where different languages ​​come from, what dreams are, the horizon, stars, time. From somewhere “channels” on Mars came into my life, it seems that I already read “Red Star”, and maybe also “Engineer Manny” by Bogdanov. There was some popular lecture for children about these channels. Pieces of history. Someone Al. Altaev (pseudonym of Margarita Vladimirovna Yamshchikova) wrote biographies of a wide variety of historical figures. From him I read about Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, from him about Lermontov, about Thomas Münzer.

Somehow I came across a book called “The Sea Is Coming.” I tried to read it - it was difficult, incomprehensible, I decided that the book was for an adult, and put it in its place. Time passed, I came across this book again, and suddenly it turned out that I was reading it with enthusiasm (it was about the Dutch who heroically flooded their city before the advancing Spanish army). And I realized that I was growing, changing, that I was no longer the same as I was a few months ago. This really amazed me.

As a result of all this reading, I was thinking a lot. Sometimes I’d go out onto the balcony and look into the distance, imagining space - further, further, even further... And what’s even further? I'm trying to imagine infinity. And I also thought about eternity on this balcony...

At the same time, theater entered my life. A special children's theater opened (the same famous one - Natalia Sats? Or some other one?) [16] , and they took me. Large barn. There are only children on benches and chairs, parents stand near the walls. On stage is Andersen's fairy tale "The Nightingale". Very funny, the courtier of the Chinese Bogdykhan said, raising his finger: “So-lo-wei!”; I was pleased with the festive nature of the theatre, but overall this performance did not make much of an impression. Unlike my mother, I never loved Andersen. Another thing is “Cricket on the Stove” at the Art Theater. Dickens immediately entered the soul and remained there. Perhaps Maeterlinck’s “Blue Bird” turned out to be even brighter. It was then staged without cuts. For subsequent generations, for ideological reasons, the play was shown without the “supernatural” afterlife “country of unborn souls” and “country of the dead,” and these scenes give the whole play its special poetic charm. After this performance, we played “Blue Bird” with enthusiasm. Having plundered their parents' chests, they changed clothes and sang: “We are in a long line / We are following the Blue Bird”...

They also took me to the Bolshoi Theater to see the ballet “The Nutcracker”. I had already read this fairy tale by Hoffmann, I liked it, but my aesthetic sense was not enough to perceive the ballet, it seemed boring. What interested me there was that we were sitting in the Council of People's Commissars box and that this was the former “royal box” (how easily all this was inherited!). In addition to the box itself, there was also a back room where the kings or, accordingly, the people's commissars could sit, rest, and have a snack during intermissions.

My aesthetic instinct turned out to be generally weak, but my mother tried to develop it. There was a circle in which we dressed up as courtiers from some century and danced a minuet. It was funny, but not the focus. I was very interested in songs. For some reason, we children knew well many revolutionary songs of that era: “The Internationale” (I remember heated debates about how to sing: “We will destroy the whole world of violence,” which is correct in meaning, or “we will tear it apart” so that it rhymes), “ Varshavyanka”, “Workers’ Marseillaise”, “You have fallen a victim”, “Bravely, comrades, in step”, “Red Banner”, etc. With the profundity characteristic of me at that time, I always found reason for bewilderment. For example, do I have the right to sing “We all came from the people, children of a working family”? Dad, it’s true, is from a peasant background, but I... A child of the nomenklatura (the term didn’t exist yet, but the fact was already there), I didn’t know where to classify myself. I was also confused by some of the contradictions in the songs themselves. For example, work in some songs was portrayed as a heavy burden (“Our whole life is hard work”), which seemed very natural to me, a lazy person, and in others - as something majestic and beautiful (“And we will hoist the scarlet banner of labor over the earth "; "Labor will become the ruler of the world"), But then why make a revolution if it does not save people from work? I haven’t addressed anyone with such questions.

I remember that I came up with a way to quickly win the Civil War - you need to make a tank so big that it would crush all the whites at once! I remember how I preached this method to children, climbing on a chair and screaming with all my might so that they could hear me better. I don’t remember the reaction of others to this invention.

I loved running to the Kremlin. There I tried to climb onto the Tsar Cannon and the Tsar Bell. Then suddenly they introduced passes. I approach the familiar Trinity Gate, and there are guards there demanding a pass. I said smartly: “The little ones don’t need it,” they laughed (the eternal manner of adults is to laugh, no matter what you say) and they let me in.

I remember an incident: Sunday, I was lying in bed late and, in order to disguise my laziness, I sang all the songs in a row at the top of my lungs. Dad said: “You sing revolutionary songs, but you lie in bed.” Got it. She fell silent and began to get dressed.

We children rushed through the corridors of the National, which were surprisingly well suited for children's games. I loved to do an experiment on myself: I ran as fast as I could with my eyes closed and stopped, almost running into the wall, but already feeling its proximity. Only now, in 1991, did I learn that not all people feel the proximity of a wall without touching it - by air compaction. It seems that I have a heightened sense of touch, and this fits with some of my other characteristics.

In the same “National”, where all sorts of “responsible workers” lived (of which I remember the dark, round Angelica Balabanova [17] ), I ran to the other floor to Nina Gukovskaya, a big girl of about fourteen, and she told me scary stories about dungeons, skeletons, etc. After that, in horror, I went home through the dark corridors and into bed, hurrying to lift my feet off the floor so that someone wouldn’t grab me from under the bed.

Trips

“National”, number 415 - this was my home, “my lindens”. But there was a trip to Switzerland in 1918 and to Latvia in 1919. There was also a short visit to Yuryev (Tartu). There, from June to October 1920, my father headed the delegation for peace negotiations with Finland, and my mother and I went to visit him. The atmosphere was cheerful (amateur performances, jokes), and at the same time, even in the evenings, the words “Karelia”, “Karelian Isthmus” were anxiously repeated - there was steep bargaining with the Finns [18] .

During some regular trip on the train with his parents, dad, who was reading a newspaper, exclaimed: “But this news will be interesting for you!” a solid sign (it later had to be partially restored) and some simplifications. I was very happy.

And there were also trips to the Moscow region in the summer of 1919 and 1920. I spent one of these summer periods (probably 1919) in Kuzminki, the other in Tarasovka.

Is this Kuzminki, where the metro station is now? I don't know. I remember a remote village with an endless white dusty road leading to it, a little to the side on a hill - a small manor house with a tower, and around there is a dense untouched forest. spent the summer in this manor house The wife and two daughters of A. I. Svidersky [19] , the youngest son of A. D. Tsyurupa, Volka and I, . Why this house turned out to be the dacha of Tsyurupa’s family circle - this question, of course, did not occur to me then. It is a fact that it was not the local peasants who owned this manor house, abandoned or taken away during the revolution, but the families of Moscow “responsible workers.”

Volka and I ran around the forest all day long, picking mushrooms (we learned very well to distinguish them from each other), berries - lingonberries, blueberries, raspberries; wild raspberry bushes were defended by dense thickets of nettles; We heroically made our way through the nettles and returned, tortured, with the spoils. Raspberries were often found with a worm; We took out the worm, and ate the berry without thinking (my mother, an ardent advocate of hygiene, would have been horrified). Everything we brought served as an important aid in our family meals. After all, it was 1919, and we, like all good people, were always hungry. We were entitled to a bread ration - a small piece (I remember, 200 grams) of black bread. In the morning, giving us this bread, Lyudmila Alekseevna Sviderskaya advised not to eat it all at once, but a piece at a time for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I don’t remember what other food there was, but L.A. cooked something with her daughters. In any case, there was not enough food, we were always hungry, we ate the bread right away; our berries and mushrooms were a significant contribution. A curious circumstance: we, the family circle of People's Commissar Tsyurupa, were given a meager starvation ration, but this ration was brought from Moscow by car with the corresponding expenditure of gasoline and human labor. But you have to imagine what a luxury a car was back then!

From my interactions with the village I remember a charming blond boy of about three years old - Petya the Cockerel. He used to stomp towards us, covering a considerable distance for such a baby. Apparently there was some connection with the village, because when Petya the Cockerel suddenly disappeared, we all took part in the search (he was found briskly walking along the highway on the way to Moscow).

The manor house had a bathroom (I don’t remember if there was running water, most likely not; in any case, the toilet was outside). The bathroom served as a place of confinement for Volka and me for bad behavior. The Svidersky girls, Nastya and Katya, dragged us there. We resisted with all our might, struggled, kicked, squirmed, but from the moment they managed to get us there, they admitted defeat and stopped all attempts to escape. Meanwhile, it was not at all difficult to escape - just jump out of the window into the nettles. When we needed to go to the restroom, we did so, but we always honestly returned through the window into the locked bathroom.

But once we were punished more severely. An unfamiliar Latvian woman came to us as a housekeeper, and her two daughters came with her to join us. We hated these girls at first sight for their good manners, neatness, elegant dresses, wide bows. We felt all this as acutely hostile, something from another world. We were thugs, brawlers, slobs. We had our own rules of honor, which we religiously observed (for example, not running away from the bathroom). Among these laws was: do not throw sand when fighting, we understood that this could be dangerous. And so we were overcome with such disgust for these girls that we broke the taboo - we began throwing sand at them, without the slightest reason on their part. For this wild prank we were punished unusually severely - we were locked on the second floor and, most importantly, apart.

I spent the next summer in a “children’s colony” (what later became known as a “pioneer camp”) in Tarasovka. Here everything was completely different. In Kuzminki I had a good friend, I had the freedom to wander through the forests, there was a feeling of moral satisfaction, because by picking mushrooms and berries, we contributed our share to the general diet. In Tarasovka there is loneliness among the crowds: organized meals, organized walks under the leadership of the head Olga Andreevna. On one of her walks, she suddenly hugged a birch tree with the words: “Oh, dear birch tree, how I love you!” This was probably intended to instill in us a love of nature. We stood silently and stupidly. I don’t know about others, but I felt excruciatingly awkward.

The surrounding area is not so wild - it is a dacha area. Of course, I talked to other girls, but I was a little bored with them; boys didn’t accept girls, and I didn’t know how to explain to them, strangers, that I was not like other girls, that an exception should be made for me.

We were taken to the river to swim - there was a swimming pool there. But how to learn to swim? I read somewhere that puppies are thrown into the water and they swim out. I'll try that too. But you can’t do it in front of your superiors—they’ll interfere. In the afternoon “dead hour”, when everyone was sleeping, I climbed out through the window, ran to the swimming pool, walked along the deck to the middle of the river, where it was deep - above my head - and plopped down. Everything turned out to be correct: I swam out like those puppies, and since then I have been able to swim like a puppy. (My mother was a great swimmer, but she couldn’t teach me.)

Everything would have been fine, but something bad happened: I wet myself in bed at night. There is no way to hide, in the morning everyone will know my shame. And early in the morning, when everyone was still sleeping, I ran away. I figured out to take with me a few crackers that were lying on the buffet and set off along the highway to Moscow (it happened that they showed us this road).

White dusty road, striped milestones. From the inscription on the nearest post I learned how far I had to go - 30-something versts. I walked barefoot in the heat, wearing a light white dress all day. Empty. Quiet. One time there are two cars coming towards us. Just in case, I hid in a ditch in case they were looking for me, no matter how incredible it may be. (But they really were looking!) Once I was passing through the village, and I was attacked (simply out of hooliganism) by boys. Somehow I fought back.

I entered the city already barely alive. I need to ask for directions, but I was overcome by pathological shyness. Finally, I gathered my courage, turned to a passerby, and he answered: “I don’t know,” and then I could no longer hold back my tears (in general, I thought that I was already big and it was shameful for me to cry, this is a girl’s weakness, and I am like a boy). I had to ask again, no matter how difficult it was. Fortunately, this time they pointed out Tverskaya to me, and I ran straight down it. Where did the strength come from?

I came to the National already in the dark. Room 415 is locked, no one is there. I sat down on the top step of the stairs, and my mother found me there, coming home at 12 o’clock at night. As it turned out later, they had been calling her all day to report my disappearance, but, fortunately, she was running around meetings and was not found, so my appearance on the step was a complete surprise for her.

After I slept and washed myself, they forced me to return to Tarasovka and apologize for the trouble caused. I stood with my eyes downcast in front of Olga Andreevna, and she persistently repeated: “Look into my eyes. Raise your head and look me in the eyes." It's painful, but it's my own fault...

Soon, for some reason, the somewhat boring, but fair and kind Olga Andreevna was replaced by a new manager. Ta appeared with her two children, a boy and a girl, whom she immediately placed in a privileged position. They were never punished, in all conflict situations they were always right and, of course, quickly learned to take advantage of their position. It got to the point that we were sometimes sent to a large dacha (where we somehow belonged) to buy milk, not for general needs, but personally for the manager and her children. We were indignant. Once, we agreed to set up a situation in which it was impossible not to recognize her son as guilty (he seized someone else’s toy locomotive). She spun really well, but she had to admit her guilt and return the toy. For me, this was the first acquaintance with untruth in my life.

There, in Tarasovka, one of the girls explained to us, her peers, how she knew how (supposedly having read it at home in some medical books) the secret of conception and childbirth; It was not very clear and very implausible.

In addition to the summer seasons spent in Kuzminki and Tarasovka, there were short trips with parents on vacation to other estates near Moscow (also former landowners). One of them is Ilyinskoye (the one on the Belorussian road - near Moscow there are two Ilyinskoye): the Moscow River above the city is clean, bright, with a high steep bank where swifts nest. Another trip was to Firsanovka, in which a large landowner’s house was surrounded by “outbuildings” with tasteless names “Monplaisir”, “Milovid”, etc. There were patterned iron gates. Once I was tempted - I climbed onto this gate, and a passing woman said: “Ugh, how embarrassing! And also a girl!” I was deeply offended precisely by the fact that the “girl” was somehow placed lower - she was especially not allowed to climb.

There was another trip in which Bukharin was among the adults. Bukharin, to my great indignation, was hunting. One day he shot a jay, it remained alive, and he placed it in a huge wooden cage. I persuaded a local girl, Zoya, and we secretly released the jay by pulling back the corner of the blanket covering the cage. The adults gathered around and gasped: how could the jay get out? But no one suspected us. It seems that throughout the outskirts of Moscow, landowners' estates have become holiday homes for the highest party apparatus.

More fragmentary memories of being outside the city. Somewhere in the company of children I took part in harvesting hay - great pleasure and a proud feeling of doing important work. Somewhere on the porch, women teach me how to thread a needle, tie a knot, sew, crochet, and even show me something inaccessible—knitting. Somewhere they teach you how to chop wood and how to hold an ax correctly. Where? When?

In the forests of the Moscow region I learned to distinguish between trees, berries, mushrooms...

Communication with parents

I didn’t see very many parents (except for these out-of-town trips). They usually came home late. One day my mother came tired from her Khamovnichesky district committee at about 12 at night and found a noisy group of children at our place. Seeing my mother come in, I shouted: “Mommy, how out of place you are!”

My father worked for some time in the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. On this occasion, it was said that Chicherin was an extraordinary eccentric and worked mainly at night. It’s as if he was offered a young man as a secretary, and he said: “Yes, he suits me. He works during the day and is therefore completely free at night.” Our phone would ring at any time of the night, and dad would get up and go to Chicherin. For some time he worked in the Comintern. I once went there to see him on an errand. An elegant mansion with colored glass on Serebryany Lane near Arbat.

Some other mysterious work (related to the Comintern, the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, or something else?) required that he live separately from us for some time in house No. 14 on Sofiyskaya Embankment. Also a manor house - it later housed (and still is) the British Embassy. I went to Sofia Embankment to see my dad across the Stone Bridge. One day, in front of me, he removed a couple of boards from the parquet and took out the papers hidden there. Some kind of secret!

In 1918, my mother broke with the Left Social Revolutionaries and joined the Bolshevik Party, in which my father had been a member since 1902. Now she worked in the Khamovnichesky district committee (in the “district”, as she said). She came excited. There was a struggle with some opposition there. There was a case when she went to her “neighborhood” seriously ill, with a temperature of 39°. There's nothing you can do - fight! Event! Myasnikov is coming! We must rush! What all this meant was not given to me to know; I had enough worries of my own.

My energetic mother, no matter how busy she was, still managed to tinker with me in fits and starts: she gave me medicine (the terribly bitter laxative “Cascarasagrada”); during illness (pneumonia), she applied compresses and read “The Children of Captain Grant” aloud, systematically combed out lice (life was unimaginable without them); it happened that I cooked jelly (and the milk came from somewhere!); she got me used to work a little (I washed my blue satin robe); participated in some group of mothers preparing children's gifts for Christmas. I wasn’t particularly interested in dolls, but suddenly I started dreaming - I wanted to have a Negro doll. And - oh, miracle! I received a black child as a gift. Many years later, the miracle became clear: it turns out that my mother, already knowing what I would get, managed to quietly instill this dream in me.

There were evenings when both were at home and relaxing. Mom was playing solitaire, and dad and I were “sick.” Something was a mystery. There were many different solitaire games, I almost forgot everything. Sometimes my mother sang. She loved the romances of her youth (“Looking at the ray of a purple sunset”, “Time flies”).

Sometimes friends came by. An old friend of his father, Jan Yakovlevich Strauyan, was a former Latvian partisan (“forest brother”), later a writer, author of the book “Forest Brothers.” Red-haired, red-faced, snorting funny (my mother quoted some French classic about him: “Vous etes Jean, vous etes Jaques, vous etes roux, vous etes sot, mais vous n'etes pas Jean-Jaques Rousseau” [20] ), he traveled abroad on mysterious missions, and once brought me an orange from Italy. Grigory Lvovich Shklovsky also traveled on mysterious missions. On this occasion, I was once tested: would I recognize him when he appeared clean-shaven - without the usual thick beard. I didn't find out. Then they explained to me that the change in appearance of G. Jl. - this is a great secret connected with some heroic mission of his, they took a vow of silence from me. And finally, the next day, a group of men provoked me with long questions to break this vow. I was confused and let it slip to the general laughter (they immediately explained to me that I had not caused any trouble - everyone here was their own, and they were just testing me).

Prince Kugushev came in - a real prince of tsarist times with vast estates in Bashkiria. At one time, on the estate he gave shelter to Bolsheviks who fled from exile - Tsyurupa and my father; after the October Revolution, as they said, he voluntarily gave everything to the Soviet state. Mom told how in 1906 she fled in St. Petersburg across Palace Square to the State Council - to a member of this Council, Prince Kugushev. Due to his high position, he could make inquiries and check the accuracy of the newspaper report about the execution of Yan Berzin (there were repressions after the 1905 revolution; apparently, lists of those executed were published in the newspapers). I checked and the message turned out to be false.

I sat on the lap of Mark Andreevich Nathanson [21] - one of the founders of “Land and Freedom” - living history! He seemed to me like a very old man (gray beard), but he was about 70.

We, the kids (and the kids most often gathered with us), especially rejoiced at the rare visits of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin: firstly, he knew how to do a handstand on the arms of a chair; secondly, he knew and willingly told a lot of all kinds of funny nonsense. From him I learned classic jokes: “It was raining and two students; one was wearing a coat, the other was going to university; one drank tea with jam, the other with pleasure.” “Once upon a time there were three Japanese - Yak, Yak-Tsizrak and Yak-Tsizrak-Tsizroni; Once upon a time there were three Japanese women - Tzipi, Tzipi-Dripi and Tzipi-Dripi-Lambomboni...” Conjugation: “I walk on the carpet, you walk while you’re lying, he walks while he’s lying.” And a lot of other stuff.

More relatives showed up. For some time, seventeen-year-old Lilya, Aunt Maria’s eldest daughter, lived in our room 415 on the way somewhere. Lily's charm, characteristic of all Garmiz, reached its peak. Artistic in nature, she sang wonderfully, drew, was beautiful, smart... She was destined to live another three or four years.

On the way to the front, my mother’s only brother Solomon passed by with his young wife Greta Dochman. The newlyweds radiated joy. Uncle Solomon soon died of typhus in Kharkov. Subsequently, I heard that he worked there in the Cheka and was very burdened by this [22] . And Greta lived to be 90 years old, became an outstanding geobotanist, Doctor of Science, and was married several times.

West again

But the time is coming to say goodbye to my dear number 415. Negotiations with Finland are completed, and a diplomatic mission headed by my dad is sent there. I managed to make more trouble: I wandered into the back staircase of the National and saw a bony, emaciated dog there. A great rarity - after all, dogs and cats during the three years of the Civil War managed to rest or were eaten. I ran home and brought some crackers. The dog greedily attacked the crackers, and I began to pet it. I knew that I shouldn’t stroke the dog while it was eating, but I thought that the dog would understand that it was I who brought the crackers, and for this he would forgive me for such a violation. The dog growled, but I persistently continued to pet her, still hoping that she would accept my affection. It ended with the dog suddenly rushing towards my throat. I managed to jump up two steps, the teeth grabbed my shoulder and ran down my arm. It was, of course, very painful, and morally upsetting, but the main thing was how to hide a bloody hand from your parents? Painfully, she pulled on a knitted blouse and walked home sideways. Mom, of course, immediately noticed that something was wrong. When everything became clear, a crisis arose: the dog that bit me could turn out to be rabid, just in case we need to get vaccinated, which will take some weeks, and we are almost leaving tomorrow. I ardently argued that the dog was not mad - I myself saw how she greedily ate crackers. Convinced. We went without vaccinations.

Finland

We went by train. There were 36 of us, many of whom already knew each other from Yuryev. Alexey Sergeevich Chernykh [23] with his wife Tatyana Mikhailovna, Tikhmenev [24] , Ekaterina Mikhailovna Obolenskaya (Osinskaya) with her little son - my friend Dimka, Platon Mikhailovich Kerzhentsev [25] , Behrens (the tsarist admiral who went over to the side of the Soviet regime) [26] , Smirnov [27] , Marusya Salapa [28] ... The mood was high.

We were detained near Helsingfors (Helsinki): in order to enter the city, we had to complete some formalities. They allowed two employees to go into the city and buy food for everyone. They bought 72 pies (so I know there were exactly thirty-six of us). They said that there was a report in Finnish newspapers that two Russians ate 72 pies in a cafe. We had a lot of laughter about this, and immediately a little ditty appeared:

Our two comrades spent time at Faber's [29] , without sparing themselves . and ate seventy-two pies

In Helsinki, we were all settled in the same house, in the same place where the official representative office was located. It soon became clear that the population’s attitude towards us was acutely hostile. Sometimes they pointedly refused service in stores; understanding Russian, they pretended not to understand; Offensive remarks were often heard on the streets. This must be why they decided not to send Dimka and me to school. Mom began teaching me French. Things were going badly. Dimka and I were not allowed on the street alone, for fear of trouble.

I continued to read voraciously. Dickens (in Russian, I had completely forgotten English), Jules Verne. One day my mother took the book that I was reading at the time (I think it was “Nicholas Nickleby”) and began to carefully take it away. I got up and went to get the book, continuing to read. I woke up from general laughter. With a feeling of sinfulness, I tried to read the emigrant newspaper “Common Cause” (edited by Burtsev, whom I had never heard of before). Nothing interesting for me.

Life in our hostel was fun. People escaped from a terrible, hungry, typhoid country into a well-fed, prosperous, bourgeois country. Maybe that’s why there’s a feeling of festivity. Evenings were often held. If there was no suitable holiday, my mother would come up with: “Platon Mikhailovich, we will celebrate your birthday tomorrow!” Platon Mikhailovich just bulged his eyes. And at the evenings they sang “Lilac” (“Lilac is blooming, Don’t cry, it will come”...), “Tumbu” (“From dawn to dusk, As soon as the lanterns are lit, Students stagger in a line ...”), “Gaudeamus igitur”, adopted from German student traditions, etc.

They played charades. I especially remember the charade “Kat-a-strophe”, where the gloomy cat (Kacco) led Anne Boleyn (my mother) to the chopping block, and then the foolish graphomaniac (my mother) tried to sell her ridiculous poems to the editor, saying: “After all, this is the stanza very good".

Trips out of town with the whole team. In the forest, someone came up with the idea of ​​giving me pleasure by catching a squirrel. Young employees knocked down the squirrel with pebbles and cones, becoming more and more excited. The squirrel darted along the branches, I screamed, cried, begging these villains to leave the poor animal alone, to which they did not pay the slightest attention (assuring that they wanted to please me!). They caught a squirrel and, carrying it by the tail (fiends!), brought it to me. I shouted: “Let me out! Let me out!” They released... Through all these horrors two disgusting thoughts made their way. The first is that, under the pretext of giving me a gift, they pleased themselves - they liked to torture the poor animal. And second, that they wanted to give me pleasure not for my own sake, but because I am the daughter of their boss.

Russia's foreign relations expanded, and so did the diplomatic corps. Alexey Sergeevich Chernykh, appointed plenipotentiary envoy to Persia (Iran) [30], left us . At the next party, a telegram allegedly received from Chernykh was read out to general laughter: “We eat tumba and the Persians like lilacs.” I kept thinking: is this a real telegram or a joke?

Somehow I got sick. Obvious to my mother (with her paramedic education) are the symptoms of malaria. When I got a chill (always at a certain hour), my mother covered me not only with many blankets, but also with pillows, and she herself lay on top, and my shaking threw it all up. And the Finnish doctor denied malaria with such a strange motivation: “There is no malaria in Helsingfors.” In the end, my mother got hold of quinine and cured me herself.

In the summer we rented a dacha. Dimka and I wandered through the forest, along the rocks. Croquet turned out to be a big hobby. Dimka and I ourselves played peacefully, but when the adults played, he and I each “rooted” for our mother, and our mothers, as luck would have it, turned out to be the strongest players and therefore always played against each other. During these games, Dimka and I became mortal enemies. One time my dad caught us in time to prevent a murder: I was squeezing Dimka’s throat, and he raised a croquet mallet over me. Many years later, to my amazement, I heard from my father that he retained antipathy towards Dima, who attempted to kill me (but not towards me, although I also attempted to kill him). I didn't think that my dad could be so unfair.

But now our hour has come - diplomatic relations between Soviet Russia and Great Britain began, and dad was appointed to work in England as deputy plenipotentiary L.B. Krasin. We immediately got ready and rushed straight from the dacha by car (100 km per hour!) to Helsingfors. From there to London.

---

* For the first part of the publication, see the previous issue of our magazine (2007. No. 6 (39), pp. 283-299).

[1] Shklovsky Grigory Lvovich (1875-1937). Member of the RSDLP since 1898. In 1909-1917 in exile. After the October Revolution, a member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture and a representative of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in Petrograd and the North of the RSFSR. In 1922-1924, at diplomatic work in Germany. — Note. ed.

[2] Leiteizen Maurice Gavrilovich (1897-1939), son of the old Bolshevik Gabriel Davidovich Leiteizen. He graduated from the Air Force Academy named after N. E. Zhukovsky, was the executive secretary of the research section of the Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communications, formed in 1924 at the Military Scientific Society of the Academy. Honorary members of this society were K. E. Tsiolkovsky and Ya. I. Perelman. He worked at TsAGI as the head of a scientific group. Arrested on charges of espionage in 1938. — Note. ed.

[3] BSE. 3rd ed. T. 29. P. 322.

[4] V.I. Lenin. PSS. 5th ed. T. 50. M., 1970. P. 89, 135, 150, 161-62, 182-184, 187-188, 192-194, 199-202. — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

[5] Pokrovsky Mikhail Nikolaevich (1868-1932). Historian, statesman, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1929). Graduate of the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, student of V. O. Klyuchevsky. Since 1905, member of the RSDLP. In 1908-1917 - in exile, 1918-1932 - deputy. People's Commissar of Education, headed the Communist Academy, the Institute of History, the Institute of Red Professorships, the Central Archive Ya. A. Berzin was friends with Pokrovsky. At our house there was a collection of poems by V. Ya. Bryusov with a dedicatory inscription from Pokrovsky to Berzin. Unfortunately, it is lost. — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

[6] Stuchka Petr Ivanovich (Yanovich) (1865-1932) - writer, lawyer, politician. In 1918-1920, Chairman of the Soviet Government of Latvia. — Note. ed.

[7] I remember this clearly. But, judging by his testimony in the “case,” his father had gone to Moscow even earlier to ask Lenin for military help. Maybe he managed to return to Riga?

[8] Judging by the same testimony in the “case”, he had been in Moscow since the beginning of April and did not return to Riga. I talked about this with M.Ya., and she admitted that, most likely, they simply hid from her that her father was already in Moscow. — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

[9] The 1st Moscow Cooperative Gymnasium, founded by E. A. Repman and V. F. Fedorova, was initially male, but even before the revolution it practiced co-education of boys and girls (according to the program of male gymnasiums). studied at this gymnasium A. N. Kolmogorov, D. A. Andreev and others - Note. ed.

[10] Osinsky N. (Valerian Valerianovich Obolensky, 1887-1938), party and statesman, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, academician of the All-Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He was deputy people's commissar of agriculture, then plenipotentiary representative in Sweden, traveled to America twice, studied agriculture there. In the late 1920s, he headed the Central Statistical Office and was the first director of the Institute of National Economy. Vadim Osinsky (1912-1937) graduated from the Military Academy of Mechanization and Motorization of the Red Army, worked as a design engineer at NII-20 of the People's Commissariat of Defense Industry of the USSR. Arrested at the same time as his father, executed in December 1937. — Note. ed.

[11] Joint emigrant life in London in 1914-1916.

[12] Correct - “inevitable fate”; poem by V. Bryusov “The Horse of Bled”. — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

[13] And I remembered, as I have now learned, somewhat distorted...

[14] “Vanka Zhukov.” — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

[15] Not the only ones. M. Ya. gave me funny poems (not inherited from Bukharin?), where these rules are played out: “There is a steep mountain, (Comma) / On that steep mountain (No need for a comma here) / There is a priest’s daughter. (Point) / Suddenly the illustrious prince is coming! (Exclamation mark) / He says to the priest’s daughter: (Two dots) / Where is your most holy father? (Question mark) / “Oh, my father will die - (Dash) / From an evil and destructive habit” (quotation marks).” — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

[16] This was the First State Theater for Children (now RAMT), directed by G. Paskar. — Note. ed.

[17] Balabanova Anzhelika Isaakovna (1877-1965). Participant of the Italian labor movement, member of the Central Committee of the Italian Socialist Party, one of the editors of the newspaper Avanti! In 1917, she joined the Bolshevik Party and took part in organizing the First Congress of the Comintern. In 1922 she left Soviet Russia, and in 1924 she was expelled from the CPSU (b).

[18] On June 17, the head of the Soviet delegation, Ya. A. Berzin, reported to Lenin that, in his opinion, the Finns will now “probably quite easily come to terms with the fate of Karelia” (Letter to Lenin, the Leader of the Red Army L. D. Trotsky and Chicherin dated June 17 1920. AVP RF. F. 0135. Inventory 3. D. 103-1. L. 7-9). On October 14, 1920, the Dorpat (Tartu) Treaty and the Declaration of Karelian Autonomy (as an annex to the treaty, but formalized as an independent document) were signed. Subsequently, the status of the declaration on Karelia caused sharp disputes with the Finns. The Finns preferred to interpret it as a commitment for the future... The Russians argued that this declaration only informed about the rights of Karelia already granted between June and October and therefore contained neither an admission that autonomy was incomplete nor a promise of further concessions. Regarding these disputes, Ya. A. Berzin, in a private letter to Chicherin dated April 8, 1921, wrote: “By interpreting my declaration at the final plenum of the peace conference as purely informational, we undoubtedly sin somewhat against the truth, however, we should, if possible, stick to this line" (AVP RF. F. 04. Op. 41. D. 250-53399. L. 5. Quoted from: Baron N. Through nationalism to communism: Towards the formation of Karelian autonomy // Russia and its regions in the XX century. Territory - Settlement - Migration. M.: OGI, 2005). — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

[19] Svidersky Alexey Ivanovich (1878-1933). In 1918-1922, a member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Food, then the Deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture of the RSFSR, the rector of the Agricultural Academy. K. A. Timiryazeva. In 1928-1929, member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR, head of the Main Art Department. Since September 1929, USSR Plenipotentiary Representative in Latvia. — Note. ed.

[20] Play on words: You are Jean (Yan), you are Jacques (Yakovlevich), you are ru (red-haired), you are so (stupid), but you are not Jean-Jacques Rousseau (French). — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

[21] Nathanson Mark Andreevich (1850-1919), Russian revolutionary populist. He studied at the St. Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy and Agricultural Institute. One of the founders of the “Tchaikovsky” society and “Land and Freedom”, after its split he joined “Narodnaya Volya”. Founder and head of the People's Law Party. Since 1905 - member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. From 1907 to 1917 he was in exile. Participated in the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences. In 1917 he joined the cool Socialist Revolutionaries, from whom he dissociated himself after the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion. In 1918, he organized a group of “revolutionary communists” that advocated cooperation with the Bolsheviks. — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

[22] M. Ya. said that Solomon, dying of typhus, was delirious about the executions. — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

[23] Chernykh Alexey Sergeevich (1892-1940), secretary of the delegation, adviser to the Plenipotentiary Representative of the RSFSR in Finland, who replaced Ya. A. Berzin as the Plenipotentiary Representative of the RSFSR in Finland in June 1921. Arrested in 1939. — Note. ed.

[24] Tikhmenev Nikolai Sergeevich (1884-1961), son of a forensic investigator, doctor of medicine (University of Strasbourg), participant in the signing of the Brest-Litovsk and Tartu peace treaties. He was the director of the Moscow Chemical Technology Institute named after. Mendeleev, worked in the Foreign Ministry system in France and Japan, then until 1937 as ambassador to Denmark. — Note. ed.

[25] Kerzhentsev Platon Mikhailovich (real name Lebedev, 1881-1940). Son of a doctor, deputy of the 1st State Duma. He studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University (did not graduate). In 1904 he joined the RSDLP. In 1912 he emigrated to Great Britain, then to the USA and France. In 1918 he returned to Russia, employee, then deputy. editor-in-chief of the newspaper Izvestia. In 1919-1920, responsible head of ROSTA (Russian Telegraph Agency). In 1920, he was part of the Soviet delegation at negotiations with Finland, then worked in the central office of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. One of the creators of the Soviet censorship system. Director of the Institute of Literature, Art and Language. From 1933 to 1936, he was Chairman of the All-Union Committee for Radiocommunication and Broadcasting at the CHK USSR. In 1936, he headed the Committee for Arts Affairs at the CHK USSR. He led the persecution of art workers and was responsible for the destruction of Soviet cinematography. — Note. ed.

[26] Berens Evgeniy Andreevich (1876-1928). He graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps and the Temporary Navigation Officer Class, and served in the Baltic Fleet and the Pacific Squadron. A participant in the Russo-Japanese War, he was a navigator on the cruiser Varyag. In 1910-1917, naval attaché in a number of countries. He went over to the side of the Soviet regime. Since November 1917, Chief of the Naval General Staff, since April 1919, Commander of the Naval Forces of the Republic. Since 1920, he was a commissioner for especially important assignments under the Revolutionary Military Council, was involved as a naval expert in negotiations with foreign states, and participated in international conferences in Genoa, Lausanne, Rome and Geneva. In 1924-1926, the naval attaché of the USSR in London and Paris. — Note. ed.

[27] Perhaps we are talking about Vladimir Martynovich Smirnov (underground nickname “Paulson”, 1876-1952). Born in Pskov into a merchant family, in 1893 he moved with his Swedish mother to Finland. He graduated from the Russian gymnasium in Helsingfors, then entered the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. For participating in “student riots” he was expelled from the university and exiled to Finland, where he met Finnish Social Democrats. In 1901-1905 he ensured the delivery of the Iskra newspaper to St. Petersburg. Created the “Committee for Assistance to Russian Political Emigrants.” From the spring of 1918 he worked at the State Education Commission. In the fall of 1918, he left for Stockholm, where he organized the work of the branch of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA). Wife: Karin Strindberg, daughter of August Strindberg. — Note. ed.

[28] Salapa Maria Fominichna, Marusya (1900-1994), wife of S. A. Dalin (1902-1985), member of the presidium of the Far Eastern Secretariat of the Comintern, authorized by the KIM in the Far East (in 1922-1924 - representative of the KIM in China). — Note. ed.

[29] Faber is a cafe in Helsinki. Recently (in 1993) I learned that this company still exists: at the Cheryomushkinsky market I came across a joint confectionery venture with the participation of the Faber company from Helsinki. How stable capitalism is!

[30] A. S. Chernykh was appointed plenipotentiary envoy to Persia in 1935. He may have been sent to Persia in 1921 to negotiate a Soviet-Persian peace treaty. — Note. V. Vasilevskaya.

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