Margaret Dewar Archive | ETOL Main Page
The Quiet Revolutionary
THE YEAR was 1904. We were travelling in a kibitka through the snow. Sitting snugly on straw in the depth of the sleigh, wrapped up to the tips of our noses in rugs, our nanny, my sister Helga and I were following the kibitka carrying my parents, on our way from the port of Arkhangelsk to Ust-Tsylma, some 300 miles further north-east, less than a hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. Suddenly our kibitka turned over and we all tumbled into the deep snow. No harm was done, except for the shock to our parents. My sister was just over a year old, I was three. These are my very first memories.
Why were we travelling so far north? My father had been manager of a pencil factory in Riga, the capital of Latvia, which was at that time part of Russia. In a desire to branch out on his own, he had decided, in partnership with a Polish civil engineer, to explore the slate deposits near Ust-Tsylma. The slate proved to be of inferior quality, the venture came to nothing and we returned to Riga about a year and a half later.
In spite of some difficulties, life there was not unpleasant according to my mother. Ust-Tsylma was the district town of the region, a glorified village where the rivers Tsylma and Pechora meet. It consisted of one-storey log-houses for the local people and larger two-storey houses for the doctor, the judge, the teacher, the paymaster, and for us. This was the sum total of the elite – all Russians, except my family who were a mixture. The rest of the population were the Samoyedy, a slightly Mongolian type of people – now called by their ethnic name Nentsy, the inhabitants of the Nenetski and two neighbouring districts. They were breeders of reindeer, fishermen, and some worked at the nearby sawmill (which provided Helga and me with sawdust, in place of sand, to play with).
As I look at the map I see that even now there is no railway line running through those parts, though oil has been discovered on the Yamal Peninsula. Reindeer were the only means of trans-port in winter, as horses were unable to stand the temperatures down to minus 40 degrees Centigrade. Large stretches of the tundra were permanently frozen to a considerable depth. In the short but quite warm summer the surface of the tundra turned into marshes and bogs. Vegetation was poor, but there were coniferous virgin forests and I remember a picnic in the summer on the edge of a forest by a small stream and my father standing on the top of a hill on the other side. I insisted on following him, promptly slipped on the flat stones and had to be rescued, wet and howling.
The people of the region were friendly, and were hardy workers, if rather primitive and mostly illiterate. A young woman who helped my mother in the house, a young wife of six months’ standing, sobbed bitterly, complaining that her husband did not love her. Proof of this was, as she explained to my mother, that he had never yet beaten her, a custom which he had apparently shed after working for a time in a larger town. The log houses were primitive, as were most peasant houses in Russia before the Revolution. Ust-Tsylma had one common bath house, a sort of sauna where the locals all used to go together; there they sweated on hot bricks, slashing each other with birch branches to massage themselves, pouring hot water over themselves from wooden buckets. Then, stark naked, they hopped out into the cold air, rolled themselves in the freezing snow, and then repeated the process of steaming and cooling off. I imagine we and the rest of the ‘elite’ had some sort of wash tubs in our houses, which had to be filled and emptied by hand.
In winter everybody – men, women and children – wore malitzas, a kind of reindeer-skin coat, hand-sewn together in one piece, which had to be pulled on and off over the head. On our feet we wore high, soft, fur boots, called pimy, beautifully made from long strips of reindeer fur, dyed in different colours. For winter entertainment the five families got together for parties and dances, and sometimes a fancy-dress ball. I remember a photograph of my parents dressed in native wedding attire: the bridegroom in a long reindeer-skin tunic, the bride in a similar coat-dress, made of some thick, luxurious, golden material, which my mother had borrowed from somebody.
Sometimes some of the men would organise excursions to surrounding areas. My father, who was very keen on collecting and pressing plants, was astonished to find Forget-me-nots beyond the Arctic circle.
On the whole life was quite bearable. In the short summer, when the rivers and the Barents Sea were free of ice, huge barges would arrive, selling household goods, fabrics, clothing, tools, and all sorts of luxury food. The paymaster had taken a fancy to us children, especially me, as I could already walk around and talk. He used to take me to the barges and treat me to delicious sweets, lovely toys and dolls, as well as the traditional carved and painted Russian bowls and spoons.
When we returned to Riga, We went by ship to Arkhangelsk. One morning my mother called me to the porthole of the cabin and I saw with astonishment huge ice blocks, almost mountains, floating in the water, lit up in pink and pale yellow in the early morning sun.
This was 1905. At about the time of our return the Revolution broke out. The defeat of the Russian navy in the war against Japan and growing unrest among workers and peasants throughout the summer, had led in October to the setting up of the workers’ councils (soviets) in St Petersburg, under Leon Trotsky’s leadership. Later, my mother told us about shooting, dead bodies in the streets of Riga, and her anxiety every time my father had to leave the house. I don’t think she knew what it was all about, and at the time, of course, I knew nothing. All I remember of that winter was that an ice rink was made for me in the back garden of our house and on my fifth birthday I was given my first pair of skates.
I was bom early in 1901 and named Margarete. But Rita was the name I became known by, from the Russian Margarita. My sister Helga was bom next, in 1902. Our brother Hardy was bom in 1906. During the First World War we Russified her name to Olga, or Olya, and called Hardy by his second name, Andreas – or Andryusha for short. When Hardy was bom we were kept in the garden all day while my mother was in labour. She was disappointed as she would have liked only daughters. But she loved him dearly all the same, especially as he was a frail child during the first years of his life. The doctors diagnosed haemophilia and he was frequently ‘at death’s door’. His condition improved in later years and disappeared altogether when he grew up. Perhaps it was a false diagnosis.
My mother Ella had rather delicate health, probably because she worried about my brother. She had married at eighteen or nineteen; my father, Leonard Watz, was twelve years older. But my mother must have been pretty tough, having to withstand all our moves and see us through most of the children’s diseases that were rampant in those days: measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria and the like. Our family doctor was a familiar figure in our house.
During that time in Riga I became more aware of our extended family. My mother’s father had died early, leaving his widow to bring up five daughters and two sons on his civil service pension. I have a photograph in which our stately and handsome grandmother sits with an air of quiet and slightly amused authority, surrounded by all her children, a daughter-in-law and a son in-law.
After 1940, when the Baltic states were occupied by the Russians, and later incorporated into the USSR as federal republics, these aunts emigrated to Germany together with their husbands and children. Only one cousin, a forester, and our uncle Arthur stayed on.
We saw far less of the relatives on my father’s side, yet I remember more of their way of life – perhaps because it was so very different. They had a farm at a place called Rujen, with fields, horses, cows and other animals. The one-storey timber house was spacious, and I particularly remember a large, light room with colourful home-made rugs on the white-washed wooden floor, and my grandmother’s bedroom with numerous pillows of varying sizes piled up in pyramid-fashion, and a large, high chest of drawers. There was also a separate building, a kitchen with two large, built-in cauldrons where something was always simmering and being stirred.
There was another room where the family sat together in the evening. It was darkly lit with candles or paraffin lamps, and my baby sister lay in an old cradle which hung from the ceiling. Once, when I was rocking the cradle, the spring near the ceiling suddenly snapped and hit my sister on the forehead very near her eyes. The scar remained for many years. I was petrified and, though it was obviously not my fault, went round the room saying, ‘I am sorry’, to every single person. I seem to have been obsessed by feelings of guilt when very small.
They too were a large family. My father had ten or eleven brothers and sisters, but the only ones we knew well were my father’s youngest sister Victoria – Aunt Tori – who subsequently lived with us for several years, and Uncle Oskar, who stayed with us in Riga during his vacations while a medical student. He later became a very successful gynaecologist with a house in Riga and a summer house at the seaside. He too emigrated in 1940 with his wife, daughter and son-in-law, to Eastern Germany – where he worked at a hospital, had his private practice and was called upon for his opinion as a forensic consultant. He died at a very ripe old age.
My father’s family were Latvian. Our grandmother spoke hardly any Russian or German. The daughters knew more Russian than German, and all except Aunt Tori married locally and stayed on the land. As children we were not really conscious of our partly Latvian ancestry, or at any rate it did not mean anything to us. Latvian was never spoken at home, except when our mother and Aunt Tori wanted to talk about something that we were not supposed to know (when, with a kind of sixth sense, I always vaguely guessed what it was about). It was the language of the lower classes, the workers and peasants, the artisans and servants. When Latvian parents were in a position to afford a secondary education and perhaps university for their sons (hardly ever for daughters), many of them no longer considered themselves Latvians, but merged with the native German middle class, all of whom spoke Russian owing (or thanks) to the Russification policy of the Tsarist government.
Latvia was one of the Baltic states. Together with Estonia, it came under Russian rule in the 18th century; Lithuania followed after one of the partitions of Poland. They were all to become independent Republics for the first time after the 1917 Revolution. At the beginning of the century the population of Latvia was 65 per cent Latvians and about 15 per cent each Germans and Russians. The Germans, possibly because of their generally better education and standard of living, played a significant role in the running of the country. Even before 1917 there must have been a national liberation movement among the younger generation of middle-class Latvians, and some Latvians joined the Red Army and the state political administration which later became the KGB, the secret police.
Aunt Tori became our main contact with our Latvian background. She came to live with us for a number of years after we had moved to St Petersburg in 1907. She must have been around twenty then, cheerful and a good companion for us children. She used to sing Latvian folk-songs and tell us about country customs. In those years we went to the farm for holidays, and were once allowed to watch the mid-summer’s night festival, when young girls and boys dressed in their attractive national costumes, the girls with embroidered white blouses, swinging skirts, wreaths of flowers and long multi-coloured ribbons on their heads; the boys in embroidered shirts. They danced their national dances and sang. At midnight fires were lit and the boys and girls jumped through the flames.
In later years, even after we had moved to St Petersburg, we went to the seaside instead. The Baltic coast is ideal for summer holidays with its fine, white sand, long, almost melancholy, dunes, and, behind them, high and slender pine trees. The scent of the pines combined with the smell of the sea was wonderful. Sometimes a whiff of smoke would drift across from the huts and the shacks where freshly caught fish was smoked or cured. There was no tide, but to a small child the waves in windy weather seemed enormously high. The bathing costumes of the women would bulge out in the wind like red or blue balloons with white patterns. They looked rather funny, their sleeves with frills and ribbons right down to the elbow, the legs reaching down to the knees. With the bathing suits went a bonnet adorned with lace and ribbons. That must have been for mixed bathing, because a little further along the beach there was also nude bathing, at different times for women and for men. I don’t remember what kind of bathing suits we children wore. I only remember our play-suits, which my mother had made for us herself: bright red with white; bulging knickers with braces and elastic around the waist, to be worn with or without a blouse. I found them ridiculous and hated wearing them, but had to all the same.
There was a footpath of long planks of wood, separating the houses and villas from the beach, but no real promenade. There were larger, more fashionable seaside resorts, with a proper promenade, cafes and other places of amusement, but our parents seemed content with the more modest one. And the sea and sand did my little brother no end of good. One year, somebody suggested ‘sand baths’ for him because of his poor health, so we buried him in the sand regularly, right up to his neck. When we returned to town our family doctor could hardly believe he was the same child, so good and almost unexpected was his recovery.
In St Petersburg we lived in a flat in a large house on the comer of two wide streets. Our walks were now mainly in the Botanical Gardens nearby. My most vivid memory is of one of the hot-houses, which contained a pond and on it a most unusual plant, a Victoria Regis, completely flat with an upturned rim, which looked like a gigantic green frying pan. We were told by one of the attendants that the plant was strong enough to hold my five-year-old sister. Sometimes in winter we were taken for walks through the streets, our little brother sitting in a pram (there were no push-chairs in those days) or carried by my mother or Aunt Tori. He would be wrapped up in a long white coat with a cape reaching over his shoulders and arms, a blue gauze veil protecting his face from the cold wind and his eyes from the glare of the sun.
St Petersburg was built at the beginning of the 18th century by Peter the Great. He had travelled abroad, had studied West European industrial and technical methods and had himself worked for a time as a ship’s carpenter in Holland. He was determined to introduce these methods in backward Russia which still lived in the Dark Ages, with harsh and rigorous measures against those who dared to oppose the will of the Tsars. He made the Boyars, the ruling clique, shave off their long beards and exchange their tunic-like kaftans for European clothes, much to their disgust and opposition. But he persisted. And he could also swing an axe and a hammer. He first built the port and fortress of Kronstadt in the gulf of Finland as a protection for the future town of St Petersburg, and as a base for the Baltic Fleet which was to play such a victorious role in the revolution of 1917, and such a disputed role in the uprising of 1921 against the policy of the Bolsheviks. Peter the great built himself a tiny house right by the river Neva, rolled up his sleeves and got down to building this fleet, directing and supervising, earning himself the title ‘the carpenter-Tsar’. That tiny house, full of tools and drawings plus a bed, is probably still there, unless it has been transferred somewhere else since my childhood days.
He then started on the construction of St Petersburg, on land reclaimed in the estuary of the Neva. He engaged French and Italian architects, who planned a spacious city of classical beauty, with numerous outstanding buildings. Later the resplendent Isaac Cathedral was built, with its huge cupola covered with gold leaf, and many splendid palaces for the aristocracy alongside the canals. On one of the squares a bronze memorial was erected on a granite block: Peter the Great sitting on a rearing horse with one arm outstretched over the city he had built. In time, St Petersburg became the capital city, an international cultural and social centre, and also the chief industrial centre of Russia with its large armament plants, the workers of which played such a decisive role in 1905 and 1917.
On 9 January 1905 some 200,000 workers, led by the priest Gapon, a police stooge, gathered on the vast parade ground in front of the Winter Palace to petition Tsar Nicholas II for better working conditions, an easing of the autocratic regime and a constitutional government. In reply thousands of workers on the parade ground, as well as in other parts of the city, were mowed down by artillery fire, thus unleashing the first Russian Revol-ution – the dress rehearsal for 1917.
I remember some of the more prominent buildings and streets in St Petersburg, but my most vivid memory is of the Peter and Paul Fortress, with its sharp golden needle glistening in the sun and stretching high into the sky. Many revolutionaries, men and women, languished there for years, some till they died, others till they were banished to Siberia. Many made the long trek into exile on foot with chains around their ankles. Their plight had been described in the Russian literature of the 19th century, as had the compassion shown to them in the countryside.
The fortress is situated on the banks of the Neva by a bridge which we had to cross over whenever we went to the centre of the town. I knew what it was, but, of course, at the age of seven or eight I knew next to nothing of history or politics. For me, as for many others, it just happened to be near where the great event of the year took place: the breaking of the ice on the Neva in spring. It was an impressive spectacle. A few days before the ice got going there was a roar and a rumbling, and sounds as if from an explosion. Then the people knew: ‘Lyod posholl’ – ‘The ice is on the move’. The first real cracks were then announced by cannon shots from the Peter and Paul Fortress, and everybody who could would rush to the embankments or on to the bridge. It was a tremendous sight: the masses of ice split, small and large cracks appeared, lumps of ice of all sizes and shapes would pile one upon the other, crushing into each other with crunching and grinding sounds, and all this mass moving in a steady, rapid stream towards the estuary and the sea. I was allowed to watch this spectacle from the bridge with Aunt Tori. Then summer came with its white nights. What a bore it was to have to go to bed in daylight!
I regret never having revisited what is now Leningrad – St Petersburg became Petrograd during the First World War, and Leningrad after the October Revolution; it also ceased to be the capital, which moved to Moscow. I had an opportunity to go back in 1931, but I didn’t have the time – of this more in due course.
But I did visit Moscow again, in 1961, working as an interpreter at the British Industrial Trade Fair which was held in the huge Sokolniki Park on the outskirts. The delegates and interpreters were able to book theatre and concert tickets through Intourist, the state travel agency, and most of the businessmen and their secretaries went to the ballet at the Bolshoi Theatre. I went to the opera, for old times’ sake, and to a play at the Maly Theatre (the equivalent of London’s National Theatre).
But what I wanted to see was a new play, The Emperor’s New Clothes, at the small Sokolniki Theatre. All the tickets were sold out, Intourist assured me. This may have been true, but I knew the play was about Stalin and his disastrous personality cult, which had been denounced by Khrushchev in 1956. A period of relaxation had followed, reflected in changes in the economy, in politics and in the arts – the ice was on the move. So I went to the theatre’s director, explained that I and a colleague were anxious to see the play, and he kindly gave us tickets. It was an amazing play, full of allusions to Stalin while keeping strictly to the original story. There was an unmistakeable stirring in the theatre and two youngish men sitting in front of us kept turning to each other with amazed and delighted expressions on their faces. The ‘ice’ was indeed on the move!
I started school at the age of seven, which is still customary in Russia, but in those days school was not compulsory. Consequently, the illiteracy rate among the workers and, particularly, the peasants of pre-revolutionary Russia was extremely high. I was sent to the German school, and though I must have attended the preparatory forms for two years, I remember nothing at all of those school days. All I recollect are the tram rides to school with my father, who usually sat reading the paper. I tried to imitate him – with some difficulty, since the paper was too large for a small child to handle. But I could read – my mother taught me when I was five – and I was trying to puzzle out what could be interesting in a newspaper. I asked my father whether everything printed in it was true. With slight amusement, perhaps mixed with cynicism, my father replied: ‘Some of it is.’
I wish I could recollect something of my first school years, but there is a complete blank. However, I clearly remember homework sessions under the strict supervision of my mother, who aimed at near perfection for her first-born, and many times I had to copy and recopy the work. Apart from that my mother spent a great deal of time playing with us and teaching us to do things. Among the games I disliked intensely was a singing and miming game, ‘the washerwomen’, where we had to imitate their movements during the whole process of washing.
There were no washing machines or launderettes in those days. Whoever could afford it, and did not have sufficient permanent maids to live in, hired a woman for the whole day to rub the washing – everything from handkerchiefs to sheets – over a washing board in the kitchen sink, after boiling the whites in a big container on the wood-burning kitchen stove. The sheets were pulled straight by two people, folded and put through the mangle. Ironing was done with big clumsy irons filled with glowing charcoal, which had to be renewed as soon as the coal had burnt out. A laborious process, the whole business.
To our great delight on these days, and occasionally on Saturdays when there was a lot of baking going on, we often just had boiled potatoes with marinated herring and onions for lunch or, better still, slices of very fresh black bread, thickly spread with butter and tomatoes – much better than the usual two or even three-course midday meal.
I was not very fond of dolls. I much preferred to play with small tin soldiers, of which I had quite a collection. (Yet military music in the streets always made me cry.) But one day sticks in my memory: rebuked by my mother for not playing often enough with Helga, I got conscience-stricken and spent a whole day with her, trundling our dolls’ prams up and down the corridor, in and out of the rooms, dressing and undressing them. That night I felt very virtuous when I went to bed.
Much more fun than dolls and miming games were the various handicraft skills our mother taught us. Fretwork was fascinating, and painting on cloth, and burning various designs with specially heated needles on wooden objects – boxes, trays, napkin rings and so on. We loved modelling with plasticine, and I was particularly fond of making tiny objects from aluminium foil. Our parents themselves took pleasure in making things for us, especially at Christmas: dolls’ houses, furniture, dolls’ dresses and similar things.
What a delight Christmas was in my childhood. There was nothing commercialised about the festival. Simply mystery and anticipation were in the air: the carrying and hiding of parcels by our parents; their inexplicable activities, which stopped in a pointedly casual way the moment we entered the room. Of course, we always knew that all this concerned Christmas and we desperately tried to discover what exactly was planned. The last few days before Christmas Eve the flat was full of cooking and baking smells: the traditional Pfefferkuchen – brown, spiced treacle biscuits, sand-biscuits that melted in your mouth, cakes and tarts. On Christmas Eve itself there was always clear soup with small savouries, shaped like half moons, filled with chopped bacon and onions; home-made brawn and other Baltic delicacies. For Christmas dinner the Russian tradition was to have a stuffed, roasted, suckling pig. There was a big market in the centre of Moscow, where row upon row of stiff, pink piglets were laid out for the inspection of prospective customers.
The living room with the tall Christmas tree reaching from the floor to ceiling was out of bounds for us during the day on Christmas Eve. So was practically the entire flat, since we were considered to be in the way almost everywhere. The midday meal was scrappy and hurried. We could hardly contain our impatience and curiosity whilst our parents were decorating the tree in the afternoon with dozens of colourful candles and glittering and sparkling decorations.
Sometimes we were taken to the Protestant church for the Christmas service in the early evening. This was both a solemn and joyful experience: the two huge lit-up trees, the hearty singing of the congregation, the generally festive mood.
Then, at home again, we sat in semi-darkness in a last, expectant hush. The little bell finally tinkled, the double doors were flung open, and the candlelight blinded us for a moment as we faced the gloriously bright and sparkling tree. But we had to pay for the surprise, the delight and the presents. For weeks beforehand we had to practise Christmas carols and learn to recite special Christmas verses with good wishes and promises to be good in the New Year. I had to copy out these poems on large Christmas cards under the supervision of my mother (for whom it was thus no surprise). Only then were we let loose to rush to inspect all the wonderful things we had been given. We were rarely disappointed. One thing, though, marred my joy: I was never very demonstrative, and my mother often interpreted this as ingratitude.
On the following two or three days there was a round of visits from or to relatives and friends. But the most enjoyable moments for me were waking up in the morning, not to be rushed out of bed, to take in all the Christmas smells – the tree, the candles, the cooking and baking – that pervaded the house and to read one of my new books. I particularly remember one Christmas morning when, having for some reason or other slept in the living room right under the Christmas tree, I avidly began to read Goethe’s Faust in a version with useful annotations. I don’t know how much I understood of it at the age of twelve or thirteen, but I found it fascinating.
Next were the New Year’s Eve amusements with the traditional pastime of ‘looking into the future’. Together with the grown-ups we stuck labels with different inscriptions on the inside of a large bowl of water and used the halves of empty walnut shells as boats, into which we stuck small lighted candles. They floated on the water, which we agitated, and we waited until the boats came to rest at one of the labels: journey, surprise, good school reports, marriage, and so on. Or we placed different objects under upturned saucers – keys, rings, coins, a picture of a house – which were discovered and interpreted when the saucers were lifted. Among the Russian peasant customs were staring into a mirror alone in a darkly lit room just on midnight, when a young girl would see the face of her future sweetheart or husband next to hers in the mirror. Or they (and we) sat on the floor with their backs to an open door and flung a shoe over their heads. If the toe of the shoe came to rest towards the door, it meant the person would leave the house that year.
The greatest fun was perhaps the melting of lead, usually in an old spoon, over a small flame. When it became liquid, it was quickly tipped into cold water, where it acquired most intriguing shapes, which then had to be interpreted by holding the transformed lead against a wall on to which it threw its shadow. Sometimes one could see a sailing boat, sometimes trees, or a house. New Year’s Day was always a holiday and I, among other people, always started the day with good resolutions, and tried not to do anything all day long that I disliked doing, lest I would have to do them all through the year.
Since then, Father Christmas has been pensioned off in the Soviet Union and replaced by Grandad Frost, who visits the children with presents for New Year, which is celebrated in no less sumptuous and lively style than the old-fashioned Christmas.
There have been a great many New Year’s Eves for me since then. Some gay and merry in the midst of friends, some quiet and contemplative, nostalgic or hopeful. But I particularly remember one in Prague, where I lived as a refugee from Nazi Germany. I had quite a few friends there among the other refugees, but that winter had been a troublesome time for me and I did not feel like celebrating. I chose to stay in my furnished room. There I saw in the year 1937 quietly and peacefully all by myself, with a glass of blackcurrant juice. That year I left for England and – apart from the war years – the least troubled and happiest period of my grown-up life.
The Russian winters could be really severe, not only in Siberia but in Moscow too, where the temperature at Christmas usually fell to minus 25 degrees Centrigrade or lower. Whilst the summer clothes of the townspeople varied little from that of the middle class in western Europe, winter clothing was a different story. People wore thickly padded or fur-lined coats, or – depending on circumstances – fur coats, Persian lamb or other rare skins. All coats had fur collars, and women sometimes wore skins (such as fox-skins) draped over their shoulders. The usual head-dress in winter, especially for children and men, was a fur cap with separate flaps for the forehead, ears and neck; these could be turned down, or folded back and tied on top. I brought one back from my visit to Moscow in 1961. Alas, it was only black cat skin. If it was windy a bashlyk was worn on top of the cap, a kind of Seven Dwarves hood, made from some soft, warm material, usually white or light grey, with golden or silver trimming, and long straps to wind around the neck for extra protection. Hands in fur mittens or thick, knitted gloves were tucked into a muff.
In very severe weather we had to protect our faces with vaseline, and if by chance (or out of curiosity) you touched an iron railing with bare fingers, the skin was sure to come off. Fur boots kept our feet warm; and we children also had to put on some woollen leggings, which we took off indoors. So dressing for outdoors, and undressing, was something of a procedure. Peasants and workers wore knee-high, rather shapeless and clumsy-looking felt boots, valenki, but they were warm. In early spring when the snow began to melt, or in rainy weather, everybody wore galoshi – rubber overshoes to keep one’s shoes, boots, and feet dry.
In winter a favourite pastime for the wealthy landed gentry and town-dwellers, and occasionally even for peasants, was to take a ride in a large sleigh drawn by a troika of three horses, of which the lead horse in the middle was usually gaily decorated with coloured ribbons. The coachman sat high above them, cracking his whip, with the sleigh gliding over the crisp snow, glittering in the sun or moonlight.
The most important celebration in old Russia was Easter. It usually coincided with the arrival of spring, which made it something special: the intoxicating vapour rising from the earth covered for months with snow and ice, now rapidly melting away in the warm sun. It also melted the snow in the trees, the ice on the roofs, the icicles hanging down. Little rivulets were running everywhere on to the pavement, down into the streets and gutters, hurrying into the gullies. The sky was often blue, with large white clouds floating high above. People would shed their furs, their padded winter coats and heavy boots, and feel light and free. There would be an indefinable longing in the air, an expectation and happiness. There was inevitably an indescribable amount of slush and mud in the streets as the snow and ice was scraped and swept from the pavements on to the streets.
Easter was also the end of Lent, the seven-week fast to which the very orthodox old people adhered rigorously. The less orthodox fasted for only a week, or just for the last two or three days before Easter Sunday, if at all. Then shortly before midnight on Easter Saturday the crowds, dressed up in their best, would flock into the churches – there was one on practically every street comer in old Russia. Some of the churches were very rich and could display precious icons painted in the Middle Ages by well-known artists, such as Andrei Rublyov. The faces and figures were set into golden frames, adorned with pearls and precious stones, and each icon had a big candelabrum in front with innumerable lighted candles.
The Easter mass was rather special: each person would hold a burning candle. The priests and deacons would change their vestments twelve times, each time putting on a more beautiful and festive one, finishing up with a particularly splendid one, white, and richly embroidered with golden thread and pearls. A great procession would then take place with the whole crowd following the priests three times round the outside of the church. The main part of the mass was over and only the most devout remained for the rest until the early hours of the morning. The majority would leave for home, their candles still burning, to light the little oil lamps that hung in front of the icons in the right-hand comer of the main room in every house. These oil lamps had been extinguished the night before, and now, newly lit, they would bum for another year, and people coming into the room would cross themselves, asking for the blessing of whoever was represented on the icon. This was certainly the custom among religious people, particularly in the villages.
When my sister and I were old enough, we both used to attend the Easter mass at one of the Greek Orthodox churches – the official church in Russia. To us it was all rather exciting and mystical: that procession of endless little candles in the dark of the night, protected by paper bags against the wind, men and women carrying small bundles with painted eggs and Easter cakes, which they had brought to the church for the priest’s blessing. Afterwards, at home, a great orgy would start in Russian houses and sometimes continue right through the night. The table would almost break under the burden of all the food: a whole cured ham, then a bowl with colourful hand-painted Easter eggs, some in plain bright colours red, blue, yellow, green, others with elaborate designs on them. There was paskha, made from curdled milk, cream, butter, eggs, sugar, raisins, finely chopped almonds and spices, mixed together, strained and pressed in the shape of a pyramid and decorated with a red flower on top. It tasted delicious. There was a fairly plain cake, a Baba, decorated with a sugar Easter lamb. These were the basics for an Easter meal at midnight. Then there were all sorts of other delicacies: soup, smoked and cured fish, red and black caviar, cold meat and various pickles, served with vodka. There were also desserts and wine.
One of the most fascinating things before the Easter holiday was a market and fair on the huge square in Moscow, now known as Red Square. You could buy almost everything there, but as children we were most interested in the small animals and birds and the toys: small clowns carved from wood, balloons, all kinds of trumpets. My favourite was a glass tube filled with water and tightly covered with a bit of rubber. Inside was a tiny glass devil. As you pressed or released the rubber, he would rise to the top or fall down to the bottom. I also remember smallish pink rubber piglets, round and plump when blown up; but as the air gradually escaped the little pig would slowly collapse. I found that unbearably sad and invariably cried at the sight of the expiring piglets.
Among our Easter, Christmas and birthday presents there were always a few books from our parents and friends. I early discovered the pleasure of reading, no doubt encouraged by my mother. At the age of seven or so, I seem to have been reading indiscriminately everything I could lay my hands on, including scraps of newspapers without beginning or end, which, in the days before rolls of lavatory paper, sometimes found their way into those secluded spots. I also tried to read whilst soaking in the bath, until my mother discovered it, looking through a crack in the door, wondering what I was up to being so long. (This latter habit I still indulge in occasionally on leisurely Sunday mornings.) And I would even lean over the window sill trying to catch the last of the daylight, before it got dark enough for the kerosene lamp to be lit over the large table in the middle of the room, around which we sat in the evening.
Oh those lamps! The smell and the soot from them went all over the room if the wick had accidentally been turned up too high! The airing on cold winter evenings and the cleaning and wiping away of the soot on everything in the vicinity of the lamp! The airing was done by opening the very small casement widows. The rest of the double windows were tightly sealed with putty for the whole winter. But those small windows were quite enough for the cold incoming air to make itself felt. In spring the windows would be flung open – till the onset of the next winter.
As a small child I used surreptitiously to read the bible in bed in the beam of light from the next room, where my parents often sat with the door slightly ajar in order to be able to hear us, just in case. What made me read the bible with its tiny print I don’t know; somehow it fascinated me for a while. Religion was not rammed down our throats at home, though we were taught to say our prayers in the evening and we sometimes went to church (the Lutheran one). Religious tuition at school was compulsory and it was probably taken for granted that everybody believed in God. I was to lose my faith literally overnight at the age of thirteen: having said my usual prayer in bed, I added a special request to God for the good health and long life of my parents. Early the following morning my father died of a heart attack, leaving my mother devastated. But that was in September 1914, still some years off.
In my childhood there were no public or school libraries, so the choice of our books depended largely on exchanges with school friends or on my parents. Very occasionally I managed to get hold of my mother’s books. I particularly remember one, on which my mother had imposed a strict ban, and which therefore became even more interesting to me. It dealt with Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s special army, with which he broke the resistance of the old Boyars and princes against his ever more autocratic rule. Whether it was the description of the cruelties perpetrated by these Oprichniki or whether there was also a love story which I was not supposed to read about, I don’t remember. However, with an unerring instinct I managed to find the book in its successive hiding places: in drawers, in my mother’s sewing basket, behind wardrobes or in the kitchen cupboard. Yet it was a historical novel. Whereas only a little later, when I was eleven or twelve, nobody objected to my reading the most trashy, sentimental novels by a well-known writer, Courts-Mahler. They were love stories à la Barbara Cartland, I imagine (not ever having held a book of hers in my hands), where the girls were pure and virtuous, and young men declared their love kneeling before the chosen one, and death threatened when love was unrequited.
But that was later. Until the age of eight or nine I read young girls’ books, which served as a base for a fantasy world of my own. At times I imagined myself to be a robust, country girl, enjoying a healthy life on a farm, to which my plump physique and rosy cheeks as well as part of our ancestry seem to have predisposed me. At other times I preferred to be a pale sometimes languid, sometimes wild, creature with large grey eyes (instead of my grey-green, smallish ones), dreaming indefinable dreams. This last fantasy was no doubt inspired by a series of girls’ books about Knyazhna Nina Dzhavakha, a Caucasian princess, too unruly to be brought up at home, who was therefore sent to a boarding school. This seemed to me very attractive at the time. She was beautiful with black curls, clever and quite pleasant to her schoolmates when she chose to be. But she was the terror of her teachers and headmistress, forever plotting and organising tricks. She spent her holidays at home in the Caucasian mountains where she donned the cherkesska, the traditional black attire of the cossacks and Caucasian mountain people: over a tight-fitting bodice they wore a kind of knee-length coat, slightly flared from the waist down, with breast pockets on the slant for cartridges. Her long hair hidden under a high fur cap, she galloped on fiery horses up and down the mountains and over precipices, with the wild river Terek cascading and foaming down below over its rocky river bed. It took years and several books to tame this princess, but by then I seem to have lost interest in her.
Whether under the pernicious influence of that beautiful but rebellious princess, or due to my own awakening desire for a certain self-determination, I was beginning to get into arguments with my mother. She liked to dress us up, to roll our hair at night over paper curlers, or make it look full with lots of plaits. I hated all this, preferring my hair combed straight back and tied with a plain ribbon. My mother protested that I was making myself look even less pretty than I was. I also liked to wear comfortably large gloves and shoes, whereas my mother was in favour of smaller ones. Luckily my hair began to curl naturally at the age of eleven or twelve, and my hands and feet stopped growing before I did. Then there were perennial arguments about losing the big ribbons we had to wear or letting teasing boys pull them off.
At times I also stood up for my sister when she was scolded by our mother, or apologised on her behalf, if she had done something wrong. She was timid and I felt rather protective towards her. This very timidity and gentleness sometimes irritated my mother, as did the fact that Helga so easily burst into tears. But she was even more infuriated by my refusal to cry when I was scolded, which was sheer stubbornness on my part. So life became somewhat less smooth for a while.
In retrospect our mother’s educational methods were practical, direct and unsophisticated. She was not averse to administering a quick slap to assert her authority and to make us behave, but I don’t think she was all that strict, and she rarely appealed to my father for stricter measures or greater paternal authority. He was very quick-tempered and perhaps she tried to avoid rousing his wrath for our sake as much as for his. He loved to teach us things, especially those that interested him. He would display his collection of plants, pressed and lightly glued to thin sheets of paper, which he kept in large box-like books, or long tins of the kind used for steaming whole fish. Each plant was carefully marked with its name, the place and the date he had found it. He loved to show them to us, but none of us had more than a superficial interest in his hobby.
He would take us out for walks on clear autumn nights and point out the constellations to Helga and me, holding our hands, so that we could feel the warmth of his own. Unfortunately, I learned little on these walks and, even today, I can recognise only the Great and Small Bears, the Polar Star and Orion. Or he would explain something to us in his study. I liked that room where he sat at his desk behind ledgers and a press – in those days before typewriters, word processors or photocopiers, he used this to make copies of business letters written by hand. A lamp with a green-glass shade threw a soft light on the desk, the bookshelf and, dimly, on to the sofa, where my sister and I sat.
We did not at all enjoy the Sunday afternoon walks with our parents, all dressed up in our Sunday best and made to walk sedately in front of them. This ritual was terribly boring. Sometimes we went to the nearby Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar’s village or summer residence, built in imitation of the Palace of Versailles near Paris, with its ornamental gardens and multitude of unusual fountains. We were hopping along a lovely tree-lined pathway on one of these walks when my mother drew our attention to an apparently still lovelier green pathway down an embankment. So we ran down – and nearly drowned. The ‘pathway’ was a stream completely overgrown with short, lush pond weed.
While we lived in St Petersburg we were fairly frequently visited by Uncle Arthur, our mother’s brother. We particularly enjoyed his visits because he was great fun and always brought us delicious cream and chocolate cakes. I always kept the choicest morsels to the last, but more often than not my little brother would sneak up and snatch them from my plate when I was not looking. Very annoying. Generally I was a great sharer, especially with my sister. If we had been given sweets or chocolates in different wrappings, for example, we shared each piece, in case the fillings were different. And when there were pieces of chocolate of different sizes, I would bite off the surplus until both were the same. It took me years to realise this gave me the largest share!
Uncle Arthur was a colourful person and the black sheep of the family, which nevertheless accepted his unorthodox way of life – especially as he did not live too close to the family home in Riga. He had round, slightly sagging cheeks and cheerful, slightly mocking eyes and he often made us laugh at his jokes. He always had unusual hobbies. At one time it was embroidery and he made a very handsome bedcover for my mother. Then he became fascinated by photography, which was still new at that time for amateurs. It was a complicated procedure as it required a tripod, good lighting and plenty of time. The camera had to be loaded with a large glass plate, then one had to cover it and one’s head with a black cloth to cut out the light, check the desired position of the people to be photographed, and press the little balloon linked to the camera.
I still have a faded photograph of our family, for which half the bedroom had to be cleared as it had the best light. There is my mother sitting in the middle, holding Hardy on her lap, and Helga, with cropped hair, sitting in front of her. All three look somewhat weary: the children were just recovering from scarlet fever, and my mother is visibly worn out. I had somehow managed not to fall ill, so there I am by the side of my mother, proudly conscious of my first school uniform and my new boots. On the other side stands my father, very erect, with his high forehead, dark wavy hair and a handlebar moustache. He combed and set his moustache every morning, covering it with a special moustache net while he was dressing until it had set for the day.
Uncle Arthur worked for a tobacco company and often had to travel all over European Russia to contact manufacturers. He invariably brought back small mementoes – ash trays, salt and pepper cellars, spoons, all marked with the names of hotels. During his visits to us, he pulled them out of his pockets looking quite puzzled. When rebuked, he protested, with an innocent expression and a twinkle in his eye, that he had not the slightest idea how this or that object had found its way into his pocket.
From one such trip he brought back not a small memento, but Zina – a strikingly blonde tobacco worker. She was very handsome and very astute, and also quite uneducated. He taught her reading, writing, manners and deportment; he bought her beautiful clothes and jewellery, made her take singing lessons – she had a very good voice – and generally spoiled her. It was not long before she had started to imitate what was at one time called a ‘grande dame’ and demanded more and more. There was a constant whine: ‘Arturkhen, kupi’, ‘Little Arthur, buy this’. I think Arturkhen finally put a stop to this, when she asked him for a horse and carriage since ‘she could not possibly rub shoulders in the tram with every Tom, Dick and Harry.
Years later, during the First World War, when we no longer lived in St Petersburg, I visited them in their comfortable flat on my way to Kronstadt. They both received me very hospitably. But it eventually came to a sad end: Zina abandoned him during the Second World War for an army officer who, presumably, was not only younger, but had some pull to obtain food and other useful things so precious in besieged and starving Leningrad. After the war Uncle Arthur returned to Riga where he died in a municipal old people’s home, a lonely, sick and half-blind old man, visited only by a nephew, our forester cousin, who was the only other member of my mother’s family not to have emigrated to Germany in 1940.
At the beginning of 1910 we faced another move – this time to Moscow. It was to be the last move for my father.
As a town, Moscow was quite different from St Petersburg, which was built to a plan, with straight, wide streets, elegant houses and Renaissance palaces. Moscow, of the ‘white stones and golden cupolas’, was not really built: it ‘grew’ on the hilly side of the river Moskva. It was the seat of the medieval princes and Boyars, and the first Russian Tsars. There was an enclosure, not very far from the Kremlin, with some old streets and the Tsar’s small, picturesque medieval house. Inside, it had no doors, only arches cut through the thick walls – and cut so low that whoever passed through had to bend low and thus, willingly or not, show respect to the prince or Tsar. The town and the streets, as I knew them, were mostly quite irregular, with crooked side streets and lanes leading away from the main streets. There were also, of course, straight and wide streets, and a very attractive ‘Ring of Boulevards’. Nevertheless, when I visited Moscow in 1961 as one of the interpreters at the British Trade Fair, I had the strong impression that the central part of Moscow was an overgrown village. By then there were a number of high-rise houses, fewer in the centre and more in the outlying districts, particularly along the route from the airport. But in the 1960s they were still interspersed with small timber structures.
In Moscow we had a flat with electric lighting for the first time. What a blessing after the kerosene lamps! We also had a more modem flush toilet, with a bottom which opened up when you pulled a knob; the water came rushing and swirling with a great noise, and I sometimes felt that a witch would appear and pull me down. But though we had graduated to electricity, we had no bathroom. A previous occupier had installed a bath tub (without piping!) in one of the rooms. A most inconvenient arrangement. So we took it out, and instead went every Saturday to the private baths, the Sandunovskiye Bani, which were somewhere between the Bolshoi and Maly Theatres and the Lubyanskaya Ploshchad (later to become notorious as the site of the headquarters of the GPU, later the KGB).
This was quite an expedition: my mother packed a case, or more likely a travel basket after the fashion of those days, with clean underwear, towels and refreshments. My father hired a cab (a sleigh in winter), and the whole family got under way. This particular bath house was a mixture of primitive weekly ablutions and Victorian comfort. On arrival my father bought a ticket for an ‘apartment’, which had a red carpet, old dusty curtains, and red plush furniture – a settee, chairs and a round table. The door was locked, we undressed and then entered the actual bath room. There may have been a bathtub there, I don’t remember. But usually we sat on the wooden benches around the walls, put our feet into wooden buckets of hot water, while our mother, from her bucket, washed or scrubbed us. Finally, we poured cold water over ourselves to cool off before we dressed. Then it was our father’s turn. There was a brick stove for a Turkish bath. My father climbed on to it, poured buckets of hot water over the surface to produce steam, and then lashed himself with bundles of fresh birch leaves as a kind of massage. Ablutions finished, we all sat down around the table and rang for the attendant to bring cool drinks, while my mother unpacked the sandwiches, oranges and apples. Then, warmly wrapped up, we returned home fresh and clean, after my father had, as was the custom, suitably bargained with the cabby over the fare.
Our maternal grandmother visited us that year. We brought her home from the railway station in style – in one of the new contraptions, the motor car. It was an open vehicle in those days, driven rather slowly. It was easily followed by the cab horses, which tried to poke their heads over the seats of the car, making my grandmother shriek with fear.
Then there was a visit by our paternal grandmother. She was a small, lively woman, who spoke only Latvian, which we children did not speak or understand. But she patiently played with us, and especially with our little brother. He sat on a small cushion on which she pulled him round and round the dining table to his great delight. She brought us a bale of dark red material, spun and woven by the farm women on those long winter days and evenings. For years this material was never made up. Then, when my father died, it was hurriedly dyed black and made up within a few days. And we wore these heavy and scratchy woollen dresses all through that winter into spring.
Of the more momentous events of that year I remember the consternation of the grown-ups at the news that Lev Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, had died. He was a nobleman, who eventually became a moraliser, a seeker of truth, who preached Christian love, non-resistance to force, and who strove after the simple life and faith of the peasants. He had eventually left his long-suffering wife, and died of pneumonia at a small railway station on the way to somewhere, with only his daughter Alexandra present. Sick as he was, he absolutely refused to allow his wife to come to his bedside.
The summer of 1910 was memorable for me in another respect: I acquired my first ‘admirer’! We had rented – as was the custom in Russia for those who could afford it – a summer house, a dacha, for about three months, the summers being rather hot in Moscow, and the school holidays very long. The really wealthy people used to spend the summer in the Crimea or the Caucasus. Others, like our family, preferred to be near enough to town for husbands and fathers to join them every night. These dachas were usually two-storey timber houses, often built in the old Russian style, with carvings around the gables, window-frames and shutters. They usually had a large terrace and a balcony and were surrounded by a garden, with perhaps an orchard at the back.
Our neighbours were a Russian merchant family. They owned their house, which had a large garden with many rose beds. We had only a nodding acquaintance with them, but there was Kolya, ten years old, a year older than me, who had spied me through a gap in the hedge separating our gardens. So he took to throwing me a red rose over the hedge every morning. One day, when dusk had begun to fall, he crawled through the hedge into our garden and gave me my first kiss. Then... lightning and thunder descended upon my head. My mother had seen us. She came rushing out, chased Kolya away and uttered a flood of angry words at me as if she thought I had just taken my first steps on the road to vice and loose living. It was rather preposterous and I had not the slightest idea what she was talking about. I was puzzled and greatly resented her anger. Even now I cannot quite understand my mother’s outburst. She was, on the whole, quite tolerant and not narrow-minded.
Back in Moscow at the end of the summer, I sometimes went sightseeing with Aunt Tori. One day, the Tsar and his family were to make a public appearance, walking the short distance from the Palace within the Kremlin enclosure to the Uspensky Sobor, one of the Kremlin cathedrals. The crowd was enormous. In front were the guards in a thick row. (The Tsar and his family were heavily guarded wherever they went. If they travelled by train, along the route soldiers were lined up every few yards and all the small stations heavily guarded.) The procession moved along a high platform erected between the Palace and the Sobor, so that in spite of the crowd everyone could catch a glimpse of them. Ahead went the Tsar and the Tsarina, followed by their four daughters, all dressed in white (it must have been late spring or early autumn). Behind them followed a big Cossack, carrying the young Tsarevich, who suffered from haemophilia and was at times very weak. He must have been about six years old then, about the same age as my brother.
The excitement among the crowd was enormous. The Tsar was the crowned head of the State and the Church but it is difficult to say why the appearance of the Imperial family always aroused so much interest. I doubt that he was really popular with the people, but neither did they blame him for the misery of the working class and the poverty of the peasants: his officials and servants were to blame. If only he knew what people thought ... But how could one get to him?! ‘Do Boga Vysoko, a do tsarya dalyoko’ – ‘God is high up, and the Tsar is far away’.
It was during the winter of 1911–12, after Aunt Tori had left us to get married, that I became dimly aware of tensions between my parents. Among their acquaintances was a couple who used to come to play cards and chat; the lamp with its silk lampshade with long fringes cast a bright light on the group around the table and a soft glow over the rest of the room. The woman was buxom, with a ready, loud laugh. They were telling each other jokes – jokes that I could not understand at all. There was a lot of laughter, especially from that couple. I sensed there was something behind their words that was not quite right, and I resented it. My father seemed to be responding in a lively manner, shedding his usual taciturn ways. Was there some attraction between him and that lively woman, who was so different from our delicately built mother? I never knew. But there were arguments and scenes between my parents around that time, after which my father sank, pale and exhausted, into a chair while my mother took refuge in faints.
Without wanting to do injustice to my mother, she did not always make life easy for my father. She was very much a child of her age – the end of the 19th century – brought up, it seems to me now, in the belief that it was a woman’s privilege to indulge in an occasional caprice and be spoilt by her husband. It was not objectionable to suffer from ‘nerves’ or to get slightly hysterical and faint. So life was probably not always easy for my father. But it was not always a bed of roses for her either: my father’s changes of career led to frequent moves from one town to another with all that this entailed, particularly the loss of friends.
As long as he lived my mother was totally dependent on him; she never did any important shopping without him. My father did all he could for her – even putting silver roubles at the bottom of glasses to induce her to take her medicine or tonic! And, on the whole, my parents got on very well together. After my father’s sudden and unexpected death a few years later, and my mother’s initial despair, she bravely faced the task of bringing up her three children through war and revolution, and trying to make a new life in Germany. I suspect that in the final analysis our delicate mother was the tougher of the two.
When Aunt Tori left, my parents had engaged a Russian governess for us. Margarita Petrovna was blonde and not very pretty. But she was kind and pleasant and I had the feeling, in retrospect, that she was rather lonely. She became very fond of me, probably because I was the eldest and therefore more interesting to her. At any rate, she devoted a great deal of time to me and also tried to curry special favours by feeding me with sweets and chocolates on top of the very generous rations my mother dished out to us. My mother had a special allowance for sweets, and every week bought a supply of the most delectable bonbons and chocolates. We took some to school every day with our sandwiches, and in the evening we had more sweets after supper. I don’t think it did our teeth much good.
About Margarita Petrovna: in the summer of 1912 I caught typhoid and for six weeks I had hardly anything to eat except rusks, clear soup and tea without milk – and that at the height of the strawberry season! I felt miserable and Margarita Petrovna entertained me as best she could. When I began to recuperate and was allowed to sit on the large balcony overlooking the garden, she fed me until I could eat no more, then laughed and teased me because I had eaten so much! That made me really furious.
That summer was also remarkable for my fierce fights and quarrels with my six-year-old brother Hardy, five and a half years my junior! The exact reasons for these quarrels I no longer remember. He may have begun to resent the authority I tried to exert over him. So we quarrelled and fought, and one day at the dacha practically went for each other with knives. Our mother was away in town helping my father in his business, and Margarita Petrovna was evidently powerless to control us. Helga stood by, crying, too frightened to interfere. I must have been bossy, because my sister and brother often called me governess. When reading, for example, or absorbed in some interesting occupation, I often called out ‘Helga, bring me some water’, ‘Hardy, open the door’, ‘Switch the light on’, and so on. (The word ‘please’ is not used half as much in Russian as in English – perhaps because it’s such a long word: pozhaluista.)
Back in town, Margarita Petrovna continued to spoil me and on cold winter nights she would take me into her bed and talk with me before sending me back to my own. One night she decided to enlighten me about sexual relations between men and women. It did not bother me, and in any case I did not believe her. However, my parents must have noticed something, and probably objected to her taking me into her bed. She had to go, under the pretext that we spoke too much Russian and were forgetting our German. I think it almost broke her heart.
Towards the end of that summer we joined our father on a combined business and holiday journey to the Volga region and the Urals. Travelling in those days was no simple matter. Part of our journey was by train. There were no dining cars or even snack bars as far as I was aware. But we had a great basket with all sorts of food, plates, cups, as well as a tea pot. At larger stations my father jumped off the train and rushed to the tap for boiling water. And all along the route there were peasants selling food: roasted chickens, sausages, pickles, fruit. All this one often shared with one’s fellow passengers. At night, the backs of the seats would be raised and the lower seats extended so that two large double beds were made where we could sleep. Sometimes we put up for the night at the nearest railway hotel or inn.
The journey by ship on the Volga was much more fun than the cramped railway compartment. We visited the towns of Saratov, Samara, Kazan, Zlatoust and Chelyabinsk in the Urals, (these are their old names, most of them changed since then), and visited some of the famous monasteries. I remember next to nothing about the towns, and not much about the river itself, but I have vivid memories of the monasteries, and of the friendly nuns and the elaborate and beautiful embroideries and laces they made. They also made simple silver and enamelled crosses to wear on a chain, rings and small boxes. And their churches, as so many in Tsarist times, were adorned with splendid icons, set as usual in gold and silver frames studded with precious stones. In either Zlatoust or Cheliabinsk we visited an iron-ore works, or rather a factory that produced household and decorative objects from cast iron, and somewhere on the way my father bought me a small pyramid made of local semi-precious stones and quartz, which I cherished for many years. The smell of methylated spirit always brings back memories of this journey. My mother travelled with a small spirit lamp on which she would heat her curler tongs to curl the hair over her forehead.
Another experience which has stayed with me over the years occurred in Kazan, where my father had some business to attend to. We had rented some rooms from a young working-class couple: pleasant and tidy people, the husband a skilled and industrious worker. One night we were awakened by the terrific noise of crockery being smashed, furniture being broken, shouting and crying. I could not understand what was happening, but next morning I learnt that the husband got blind drunk every few weeks, smashed the whole place to pieces and beat up his wife, who then could not go out for several days. When he had sobered up he was crushed with remorse – until his next drinking bout. The memory of it haunted me for a long time.
It is perhaps no wonder, therefore, that for years to come I was always rather chary when passing the noisy drink parlours (pivnye) in Moscow, or if I encountered a drunken worker in the street. Even years later in Germany I did not like to pass a pub with a beer-drinking crowd inside, preferring to cross the road. Little did I know that in time I would be a regular visitor to the back room of just such a pub, at many an instructive and inspiring political meeting.
After Margarita Petrovna had left, it was back to school for my sister and myself. Our parents chose the German Peter and Paul School – probably not so much because it was a German school (there had been some talk about sending me to a Russian school which specialised in art) but because of its good reputation among the private, fee-paying schools. Although the school had to conform to the requirements of the Russian education system, and was subject to the regulations and restrictions imposed on all schools by the Ministry of Enlightenment, our school had, it seemed, a freer hand in the appointment of the teaching staff. since it was actually run by the German community.
The German community was made up, firstly, of Germans from the Reich – the German Empire – who, together with their families, had settled more or less permanently in Tsarist Russia, and who occupied the most important and remunerative jobs in industry and commerce. They maintained their ties with Germany and did not particularly assimilate into Russian society – some of the women, after years in Russia, still did not speak the language. One reason for their success was the almost total absence of a Russian middle class. There were the wealthy merchants – the older generation, almost uneducated but shrewd in business, and the younger ones, some of them patrons of the arts. Then there was the Russian intelligentsia – the writers, essayists, teachers and artists – chafing under the censorship and other restrictions, such as the ban on travel abroad, imposed by the Tsarist government throughout the 19th century.
There were also the Russian or Baltic Germans. They owed no allegiance to the Reich. They were, like other nationalities in Russia, subjects of the Tsar (not citizens), spoke Russian, and adapted much more easily to Russian customs. We had the best of both worlds, since my parents retained much of the Baltic way of life, while at the same time falling in with that of the Russians proper. For example we celebrated both birthdays and namesdays, like the Russians. I always had a garden party in the summer on St Margarita’s day. We laid stress on Christmas, but also fell in with the lavish Russian celebrations of Easter.
And there were the Volga-Germans, mostly prosperous farmers and landowners, who kept closely together but often sent their children to Russian schools. They were the descendants of German immigrants who settled in Russia in the 18th century encouraged by Catherine the Great, herself a native of Germany. And they were still conscious of their ancestry: some fought on the German side in the Baltic provinces during the war of intervention and civil war after the 1917 Revolution.
Although our school was a German school we had a fair sprinkling of Russian children and a limited number of Jewish children. In Moscow and St Petersburg only 10 per cent of a school’s pupil intake could be Jewish. Of these, only those who finished school with distinction (a gold medal) were admitted to universities or higher technical colleges. And, of course, it was only the wealthy Jews, medical doctors or academics, who had the right of residence in Moscow and St Petersburg. The rest of the Jewish population lived predominantly in Byelorussia, the eastern part of Poland then belonging to Russia, and the southern Ukraine, in and around Odessa. Most of them, at any rate in the Western parts of Russia, were small traders or artisans. All were frequently subjected to violent pogroms, sometimes indirectly instigated, and certainly tolerated, by the authorities, when Jews were beaten up and their small shops and dwellings smashed. They could be called up for army service, but could not, as a rule, become officers. Many a young man fled to England or the USA to avoid being drafted into the army.
But if it was not easy for a Jewish child to get a proper education, it was even more difficult, though for different reasons, for a Russian working-class or peasant child. The majority had at best a few years of elementary schooling. Illiteracy was widespread, especially in the villages, because few parents could afford to see a child through school (let alone university) and only the state secondary schools in the towns were free. Yet we find many examples in Russian literature of mothers – more than fathers – working hard and starving themselves to make it possible for their sons to study. And it is equally well-known from the literature how hard some of the Russian students worked at night to make it possible to graduate from a university or Technical High School.
As for women, it was not unusual for middle-class girls to attend at least the Women’s Institute for Higher Education. My mother, difficult as it would have been for her to make it possible, was very disappointed when I decided to study music instead of going to university. I have always considered myself lucky to have gone to the Peter and Paul School. Though officially under the auspices of the old Maria Feodorovna, Tsar Nicholas’ mother, it was not entirely run by the reactionary Tsarist bureaucrats. The girls’ school was a large, three-storey brick building, standing in its own grounds. It had spacious, light classrooms, wide staircases, long corridors and a large hall for special occasions. Every morning we were greeted by the chief janitor, Anton, who at the start of each new school year directed us to our respective classrooms. There was no assembly in the morning, though religious instruction was compulsory and taken by the clergy of the various denominations.
When I was in Moscow in 1961, I retraced my steps and found the school. It was surrounded by a high wooden fence and I saw a woman open a small door and go in. I followed her into a small enclosure where a soldier with a rifle was sitting at a table. ‘What do you want?’ he barked at me. I explained that this had been a school forty-odd years before. ‘Well, it is not a school now,’ he explained rudely, upon which I quickly retreated and shut the door lest I found myself in trouble. I remembered that during the First World War our school building had been confiscated by the army. Maybe it was still occupied by them.
The two boys’ schools, one a grammar, the other a realnaya with the emphasis on maths and science, were a few minutes’ walk away. They had a huge gymnasium with the most modern equipment and we were looking forward to being able to use it for our own physical training instruction. Alas, it was not to be – it too was taken over by the army as an army hospital ward.
All pupils in schools in Russia wore and still do wear uniform: the girls usually dark brown dresses and black aprons – white ones for special occasions – and the boys, at that time, a plain grey tunic with a high collar and brass buttons. Most teachers too wore uniform. School hours were from nine in the morning to two in the afternoon, or three in the higher forms when we stayed on for optional lessons such as dancing. The dances were very different from now. Then it was the waltz, the polka, the krakoviak, or other figure dances whose names I have forgotten. I was no good at physical training, but I loved dancing, and after every ballet performance I attended I desperately tried to stand on my toes, though without ballet shoes. There were ten-minute breaks between the lessons, and a half-hour break at midday, when we had our sandwiches or, for those who lived near enough, a hot snack brought by somebody from home. At 3 p.m. there was proper dinner at home.
Some time during the afternoon we did our homework, after which we were allowed out. I had a good memory and learnt easily, especially poetry, though unfortunately I forgot it just as quickly. My other interests were history, literature and writing essays. Among the many teachers we had during those eight years were many who, in spite of the regulations imposed by the authorities, were able to give us a knowledge of and longing for a free society. I remember them with warm feelings to this day.
There was our class supervisor, a woman teacher who moved up with us every year: Lyubov Nikolayevna Nagler, middle-aged and unmarried. Her main task was to see to our general behaviour, teach us discipline, keep the register, and help us in one way or another when needed. She was really devoted to us, knew how to handle us and taught us many things we never heard from other teachers. She told us about the wonderful free and open-air schools in Germany, which seemed to us like a dream. She also organised visits to the opera, the ballet, and the Maly Theatre, where the classics were put on at special afternoon performances for schools. It was an exhilarating experience to see the theatres filled with row on row of teenagers, all in their school uniforms, enthusiastically cheering and shouting ‘bravo’ or ‘bis, bis’ – the French expression for ‘Again, again’. It was probably my first experience of being not just an individual, but feeling part of a whole.
When we were older, Lyubov Nikolayevna once invited the whole form to her home: an exquisite two-roomed flat furnished entirely in the style of the French Empire, with elegant chairs covered with silk, graceful tables, glass cabinets with delightful china and porcelain figurines, obviously the remains of a once-aristocratic family. She died, after falling from a moving tram, around the time I finished school. We were all very sad.
My favourite teacher, however, was Vladimir Nikolayevich Bunin. Like most of the male teachers he usually wore uniform – black with braid and brass buttons. But he, too, was a liberal, who seemed to chafe under the strict school regime. He often told us of schools abroad and of their different teaching methods. At that age we did not feel the restrictions in the same way as the teachers, but the tenor of what they said made us sensitive to the pervading atmosphere. The teachers obviously found the strict programmes, the system of government inspectors and other rules irksome.
Vladimir Nikolayevich Bunin did have some shortcomings: he could be very sarcastic and had his favourites among his pupils, which I thought was not right even though I was one of them. He also liked to give us nicknames. I acquired mine when one day another teacher reprimanded a pupil for something she had not done. She obviously did not want to expose the real culprit, who did not own up herself. I was incensed. In spite of my shyness, I impulsively raised my voice in protest against the unfounded accusation (without naming the real culprit). The next lesson was taken by Vladimir Nikolayevich, in the course of which he called out: ‘Aiderman’. Nobody stirred. Then he pointed to me and said: ‘Well, aren’t you the aiderman here, since you speak out for the others?’ And that nickname stuck to me till the end of my schooldays. I like to think that I had a kind of inborn sense of fairness and justice.
Vladimir Nikolayevich could grip the entire class with his talks on Russian literature, history, and even grammar. And he could hold even the dullest pupil enthralled when reading a prose passage from the classics (I remember in particular Gogol’s beautiful, poetic description of the river Dniepr) or when reciting poetry such as Pushkin’s ballad about Knyaz (Prince) Kurbski, who left his country and went over to the Poles, because he could no longer bear the arbitrary and ruthless rule of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. You could hear the barely whispered words of Kurbski, as he lay dying, in the farthest comer of the classroom, and nobody stirred when Bunin had finished and Kurbski was dead. Bunin instilled in me a lasting love for Russian history and literature as no other teacher could have done.
A few years later, when I was fifteen, he accused me of ‘obviously having boys on my mind’ rather than essays or other homework. Nothing was further from my mind, though it was true that – temporarily – I had rather slackened in my work: I was engrossed in reading the classics, such as Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, or the liberal essayists such as Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Belinsky and others, and was totally absorbed.
Our German teacher in the higher forms was another fascinating, though not exactly likeable person. Previously we had had Herr Krebs, a tall, thin morose man with a big moustache, who sat stiffly at his desk, somewhat aloof but given to fits of fury. One day he failed to appear and we learned that he had committed suicide. It was rather a shock for us. His replacement was another neurotic and somewhat unapproachable teacher, stocky, with penetrating pale blue eyes. He was intense and yet detached, lecturing while staring into the distance above our heads. Yet he was immensely interesting, often digressing into Greek mythology, ancient Persian literature and art and telling us with great intensity of the ‘music of the stars’. Not that we actually believed him, but we sat fascinated by his words.
We could choose to study English for two years and these lessons were taught by Miss Ashford, who was Irish. We did not take her class too seriously, and she was quite serene about it, smiling indulgently and benevolently when we fluently informed her: ‘I am sorry I could not learn my lesson because I was ill.’ Still, we retained something, including the children’s song ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’.
A complete contrast to her, and to most of the teachers, was tiny Madame de Jean, who without any imagination whatsoever made us rattle down French verbs purely automatically, without connecting them to sentences in any way. It was a compulsory subject for several of our years at school, and we did learn something despite her dry and rigid teaching methods.
Once the First World War began some of the older teachers were called up and replaced by very young ones, fresh from their universities, all very shy and somewhat unsure of themselves. There was Rybakov – thin, clean-shaven, a little stiff – who used to entrench himself behind his desk and history books, clinging to the class register for our names, and testing our homework page by page from the book. Since he never moved around the classroom, it was quite easy to read up the pages quickly at the beginning of his lesson, or even prop up the book against the back of the pupil in front and read from it. Young Ivanov valiantly struggled with chemistry experiments in our rather poorly equipped laboratory, under the watchful and mocking eyes of some twenty young girls, who were delighted when an experiment did not come off. On the other hand, the history of art was made interesting and lively by a devoted young teacher who, after the Revolution, became Head of the Icon department of the famous Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. I met him there, unexpectedly, in 1931. He told me then that the majority of the young teachers were sympathetic to the Bolshevik Revolution. When I asked him why they did not try to influence us, he said they went as far as they could within the school regulations, particularly during our last school year, 1917–18, but few of us seemed to understand or respond to their message.
As a teacher he was such a contrast to our art teacher in the lower forms, Miss Kropotkina. Poor Miss Kropotkina! She was a rather wretched and neglected-looking creature and dressed without any care. She did not have an easy time with us since she had no authority whatever. As soon as she entered the classroom, near-hell broke loose: catcalls, whistling, inky paper balls flying through the air, little explosive bangs from some rubbery material which we used to erase soft pencil marks on our drawings and which we blew up until it burst. How the poor creature stood all this is a mystery to me. She probably did not complain about us, because she feared for her job. But we never realised this.
Our gym classes were equally useless. We did not change, not even our high-laced shoes, and there was very little equipment. Our gym teacher had a simple method: whoever could not jump over a rope, which was gradually moved up higher, or could not do an exercise on the ladders fixed against the walls, had to sit it out until nobody could jump any higher or do the next difficult exercise. Being on the plump side, I sat out most of the time.
Then there was the formidable Fräulein Röntgen, our headmistress, a shortish, but stately person, who carried her generous bosom before her with great dignity, and who walked erect and stiff ‘as if she had swallowed a walking stick’, as we used to say in Russian. She would solemnly glide up and down the corridors and hall during the breaks and we had to curtsy to her, whereupon she would nod benevolently, and occasionally stop to ask a question. This was particularly vexing if you were in the middle of a good giggle and could not compose yourself quickly enough.
I was very indignant on one occasion when she suggested that a particular girl I was friendly with was not quite suitable company for me. It was a clear case of class distinction. Fanny Schenk, a tall, lanky girl with a slightly apologetic air, came from a rather poor family with numerous children. They were clearly not well off, and she probably attended school on a scholarship. Her dress was old and worn and she did not seem keen on lessons. On the other hand, she knew more about life, love and many other things than any of us. She was reprimanded once in class for not having learned her lesson, whereupon it transpired that her parents could not afford to buy all the necessary school books. I told my mother, who immediately bought the required book, which I gave to Fanny, saying that I had two copies. After that she attached herself to me, and though it was probably compassion more than real friendship, I greatly resented Fräulein Röntgen’s interference.
My best friend for several years was Manya Behrens, the daughter of well-to-do German parents. They lived about halfway between the school and our flat, in a large apartment house standing well back from the road. At that time it seemed rather splendid to me. When I saw it again in 1961 it didn’t look so grand after all.
I wish I could remember all the things we talked about. She once asked me whether we were rich. I was rather non-plussed by her question, as I had never given the matter any thought. I told her I thought we were, though I must have noticed the difference between our flat and theirs, the fact that they had two maids and we had only one, or that they went to a well-known holiday resort near Moscow while we went to a more modest place. But we never lacked anything at home, as far as we children were aware. Most of our birthday and Christmas wishes were granted and there were visits to the theatre and circus.
Manya’s happy childhood was brutally interrupted when the whole family was exiled to Siberia at the beginning of the 1914–18 war, with most other German families. She was only about thirteen or fourteen at the time. I didn’t see her again until 1918, when she seemed very mature, reserved, but somewhat bitter about the experience and her interrupted education. Then we lost touch with each other. Her family moved to Germany and there was no postal communication between the Soviet Republic and the West European states for several years.
Then, in 1921, I accidentally met her again in Berlin. I learned then from Manya that her parents had separated, her brother was studying somewhere in Germany and she herself lived with her mother, who was dying of cancer, in a furnished room. She was supplementing their scanty living by doing embroidery. At that time there was a vogue in Berlin for hand-sewn and embroidered lingerie, so she always had work. When I was out of work for a short time I joined her on the small balcony of their room sewing or embroidering camiknickers, having persuaded myself that I could not possibly wear machine-sewn underwear either. This fad of mine did not last long! Their room was always untidy and dismal. Her mother was never out of bed, and Manya herself shuffled around in slippers and a sloppy dressing gown, or an old skirt and blouse. She had one tailor-made navy blue suit and a couple of good silk blouses, and when she went out she looked as elegant and as well-groomed as any lady of leisure.
We became quite close again at that time and she told me a great deal about her love life and adventures. Manya had never been particularly pretty, yet there was something about her that attracted men. She only had to sit in a cafe for ten minutes before a man would make passes at her from another table. And if she liked the look of him, she would have no hesitation in making an appointment with him and, before long, going to bed with him. I watched her when occasionally we spent an hour or so in a cafe in Berlin’s ‘West End’. She seemed to behave immaculately: there was no smiling, no coquetry, but something clicked. I never knew and never asked whether she was doing this for kicks or for money. After her mother’s death she married a White-Russian emigré, a former Tsarist officer considerably older than herself, who was running a lingerie and haberdashery shop. I think she was glad of some care and protection and was very loyal to him, helping him in the shop and keeping house for him. But, deep down, something seemed to have been broken in her.
One of the more interesting girls in our class was Lida Zuyeva, one of seven or eight children in a wealthy Moscow merchant family. She wore diamond earrings and occasionally a diamond ring, which we felt was not quite the done thing, although we admired the jewellery. It was rather surprising that our headmistress did not object. Lida Zuyeva’s father had amassed great riches in business and they owned a mansion house in the expensive quarter, around the Arbat. On special occasions such as Christmas, they had lavish parties when the large dining and drawing rooms were thrown open; the table, which could seat twenty-four people, sparkled with cut glass and silver, and was laden with the most expensive and delicious food. At Christmas the glittering tree stood in the middle of the drawing room, reaching from the floor to the high ceiling. Yet when I visited Lida informally, the whole family sat around a table in a back room, and the grandmother, an old peasant, ate with her fingers. But they were a hospitable and pleasant family.
There were two other Russian girls in our form. One was Tanya Pshenitsyna. She was rather ugly but had beautiful grey eyes and was very bright and intelligent, near the top of the class. Later, in the winter of 1917–18, when the school was reorganised by the Bolsheviks, she was one of the most active members of our school club and its various debating circles. But I particularly remember her close friend Zhenya Pomeltzova. The two were quite unlike each other, except that Zhenya, too, was very intelligent and one of the top students. She was tall, slim, pale-faced and looked rather aristocratic. She had a very pleasant voice and excelled in reciting poetry.
1912 was the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the serfs (not yet quite complete, but nevertheless a milestone in the history of the Russian peasantry). The school was going to have a celebration in the big hall in the presence of all the pupils, teachers and parents. Bunin decided that our form should recite a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov, a 19th century poet whose aim had been to improve social conditions, especially those of the peasants. The poem chosen described a group of bearded, illiterate peasants sitting around a table in a dimly lit hut, listening to a child (about my age) slowly spelling out the Tsar’s decree on the abolition of serfdom, with her finger following the lines word by word. The choice of who should recite it was between Zhenya and, surprisingly, me. Bunin may have had a preference, but he left the final choice to the rest of the form, and they voted for me. Maybe the subject of the poem, and the way it was written, had inspired me to overcome my usual shyness, but I suspect that my more robust looks and rosy cheeks also contributed to their decision. I was very excited and my mother was absolutely delighted that her daughter would stand on the rostrum.
The celebration was only three days off when I totally lost my voice! I was upset, but not as much as my mother. I spent most of those three days over a bowl of hot water scented with some herbs, breathing in the steamy air under a blanket. It was obviously ‘nerves’. Miraculously I regained my voice on the eve of the day and all went well.
The last two summers before the war, and as it turned out the last we ever spent in the countryside, were particularly enjoyable and memorable. We spent both in the same resort, not far from the outskirts of Moscow. A 25-minute ride on a horsedrawn tram along the forest of Sokolniki took us to the village of Bogorodskoye, then a 15-minute walk through the woods brought us to the resort, with its private and rented villas and houses.
Sokolniki, or at any rate a large part of it, is now an exhibition ground and a recreation park with a small theatre. During the British Trade Fair in 1961 I tried to retrace my steps to the resort of Bogorodskoye, but found everything changed. Instead of the beautiful old trees of the forest – the chestnuts, oaks and elms – there were only young saplings and no undergrowth. Could it be that the forest was cut down for firewood during the war? Speaking Russian without a foreign accent, I did not want to ask too many questions and so draw attention to myself, which would reveal my ignorance of Soviet life. I walked on, but the road became more and more built-up and unfamiliar, so I gave up.
It was of course different in the two hotels I stayed in, where I was in a way under the protection of the British organisers of the trade fair. The hotel staff were friendly and curious about life in England. I did not ask questions about their lives, but I got an inkling when chambermaids asked me to give them nylon stockings, inexpensive slippers, sewing needles or other things one thought nothing of buying in the West.
At the trade fair itself, it was easy to get into conversation by offering English cigarettes. Then the questions started. I particularly remember a group of admiring young people at a stall showing shoes with pointed toes and high stiletto heels, then fashionable in England, and another occasion when a group of students surrounded me in the park and started to ask questions about schools and universities in England. Suddenly a man pushed himself forward and provocatively asked what the British people thought of the very first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin. I had no reason to deny that he was greatly admired. The man then asked me, even more provocatively, what was being done in Great Britain in the field of astronautical research, of which I quite genuinely knew nothing. With his hat and different-style coat he did not look like an ordinary Soviet citizen and I began to feel a little uncomfortable. Then the young people came to my rescue by criticising him and stopping him from continuing his interrogation.
I may have been oversensitive but I could not help being suspicious – and anxious – when one of my interpreter colleagues, an Estonian who had escaped to the West during the war and left a child behind with relatives, suddenly disappeared and I was told she had returned to England. I used to get phone calls in my room in the middle of the night, without anybody on the other end uttering a sound. When I complained, I was told it must be a ‘wrong connection’. I shared my room with a young English secretary who was eager to explore Moscow’s nightlife, so I asked to move to the room left empty by the Estonian interpreter. The young secretary was never again disturbed by the night-time phone calls: the ‘wrong connections’ were duly transferred to my new room. Eventually I began to answer in English, and on the last day, shortly before my departure, a ‘goodbye’ call came, again without anybody saying anything. So I got rather rude (in Russian). Was somebody waiting to see whether I would say ‘Oh hallo, is it you, Masha or Ivan, where and when can we meet? I have something for you’
Those weeks in Moscow were quite a nervous strain – I had no relatives or friends there and did not know a soul – but it was an experience: I was no longer starry-eyed and could observe things more soberly, with interest, but no trace of nostalgia. I had lived in the West, particularly in England, too long for that. I had done what I had always wanted to do: to see Russia and Moscow once more. But on the flight back I nearly burst into tears of nervous relief as we passed over the Soviet-Polish border.
But to return to Bogorodskoye and to our summer dacha. These rented houses were usually unfurnished, and the move there and back – with essential furniture, bedding, pots, pans and what-not – was quite an upheaval. The furniture left behind, lamps, pictures and everything else, was covered with dust-sheets. Only my father’s room was left intact, though Bogorodskoye was near enough for him to come out every day. In the country it was a lazy life, full of leisure and pleasure, especially for us children, in spite of the vexing task of having to do some school homework lest we forgot what we had learned in the winter. But mostly it was relaxation and summer pleasures.
A welcome caller at the house on hot summer days was the ice-cream man who came with his van and tubs of different kinds of ice cream, which was ladled out into a dishes which we hurriedly brought out to him. Occasionally we helped with the preparations for making jam, pickling mushrooms or gherkins, cabbage and other things for the winter. A boring but not difficult task. The berries and mushrooms were sold in large quantities by the peasant women, who brought them in from the village in large flat baskets made from the bark of birch trees.
This same pliable bark was also used for the villagers’ summer footwear: a kind of flat shoe held in place with some binding around the ankle and calf; and, instead of socks or stockings, they wrapped narrow strips of cotton cloth around their feet and calves (like soldiers also did in those days). In rainy weather, or when going to town, the men wore knee-high leather boots with the trousers tucked in. Their cotton shirts, which had to be pulled over their heads, had high collars, and the trimmed or embroidered openings were buttoned up, not in the middle, but on the left-hand side of the chest. These shirts were worn over the trousers and held round the waist with a belt or a cord. Landlords, members of the intelligentsia, students and writers (Tolstoy, for example) also wore these shirts. The peasants and students also wore caps in the summer. The peasant women wore long, loose dresses and embroidered blouses with full sleeves, and often colourful scarves on their heads as protection against the sun.
Jam was made in huge, flat copper pans. The contents had to be frequently stirred and skimmed, and we children usually hung around, not to help but to eat the skimmed foam. Sometimes we were sent to collect milk from one of the peasants in special clay jugs. We could watch the cows being milked and taste the warm, frothy milk after it had been filtered through a thin, cotton cloth. At home it was stored, like all perishable food, in an underground cellar in the back garden. This was lined with wood and in winter packed with ice. To get in, one opened a trapdoor and climbed down a ladder.
Helping with the jam- and pickle-making was not an arduous task and occupied little of our lazy existence. We woke up in the morning with the sun streaming into the room and jumped out of bed ready for the day’s activities: we played croquet in the garden, rocked in a hammock, and read to our hearts’ desire. On the rare rainy days we played Snakes and Ladders or card games. Otherwise we went swimming in a river or the swimming pool, or went for long walks through the dense forest to gather the many kinds of berries and mushrooms which grew there – although somehow I only found just enough to cover the bottom of my basket.
There was so much else to see: the play of light and shade on the leaves and the ground, the song of birds, the red squirrels dashing from branch to branch ... perhaps it was just that I was too lazy to search for berries and bend down for mushrooms. Equally pleasant were the walks through green fields with their rich variety of wild flowers, through a cornfield swaying in the breeze, full of red poppies and deep blue cornflowers, insects humming in the heat of the sun. Overcome with drowsiness, we would lie down in the corn or the grass and watch the clouds sailing through the deep blue sky, with snatches of songs from a group of peasant girls drifting through the air. I liked the woods and the forests, but the long stretches of flat land, whether seen on foot or from the window of a moving train, always gave me a feeling of vastness and freedom, a feeling which I have never quite lost.
I liked best the golden days of autumn. No image evoked by these words is as strong as that of our early morning rides to school along the edge of the Sokolniki woods, with the golden, red and brown foliage of the trees. School started in mid-August and if the weather was good we stayed on in the country into September. We had to get up pretty early to get to school on time, but what a delight it was: the brisk walk through the small wood, over rustling autumn leaves and the soft needles of the conifers, before boarding the horse-drawn tram.
In the summer we used the vast green playground, with a football pitch, tennis courts and swings. We all loved the swings, especially one we called the Maypole, with strong ropes fixed to rotating hooks at the top of a pole and slings in which we sat, ran several steps, then pushed ourselves up to ‘fly’ for a few seconds in the air. If a willing grown-up was around, you could get a special push-up and fly over the heads of the other children.
One such willing assistant was Ivan Zhitkov who was about eighteen, the eldest son in a family of seven children. His mother was a good-looking woman with a broad Russian face. Her husband was considerably older, tall, gaunt and grim. They were an educated family and cared a great deal about their children’s education. Tanya, the only girl, was tall, handsome, vivacious and always ready to join in and enjoy anything that was going. She caught her foot on a large rusty nail, never recovered from what we were told was blood poisoning and died within a year. The next in line was Sergei, a serious boy who kept himself very much to himself. The youngest were twins, the same age as our brother, who were cared for by a nanny. They were not much in evidence – unlike their two brothers Kiril and Andrei, who were about eleven and thirteen years old when we first met them. Kiril was the black sheep of the family. They were in the care of a middle-aged spinsterish-looking German governess, a somewhat helpless disciplinarian, whose voice forever sounded in the playground: ‘Kiril, Andrei, come here.’ More often than not they did not come. Very soon Kiril became my hero for two summers.
What attracted me to him? His non-conformity? His ruffled looks? He had his mother’s strong build and broad face, though his hair stood out in all directions and his clothes were always tom and untidy. But his parents, especially his father, eventually had had enough of their son being expelled from one school after another and decided on drastic steps to complete his education. In the late summer of 1914 he was dispatched to Hamburg in Germany, to a well-known tough school, appropriately called, I think, the Grey House (das Graue Haus) or the Rough House (das Rauhe Haus). He hated the idea of going there, and I was sorry too. Little did his parents know that within a short time the First World War would break out and Kiril would be cut off.
But the school did not dampen his spirit. When he was fifteen he escaped from school, made his way through enemy territory, across the Baltic Sea to neutral Sweden and, from there, to Finland and finally Russia. It took him months and months. He found our new address (we had moved twice) and came to visit us once. I later heard that he was killed in the Caucasus during the Civil War, but I was never quite sure which side he was on. Sergei made his way into Germany, as did Ivan who appeared quite unexpectedly in Berlin when we too were living there.
A companion of a very different kind during those last two pre-war summers was Lyolya. She was in her last year at our school and stayed with us on some sort of au-pair basis, to keep us company and to keep an eye on us when my mother was busy or in town with my father. Lyolya must have been seventeen. She had the most wonderful hair, brushed straight back to a plait the thickness of a child’s arm and so long that she could sit on it. She was strong, happy, and very intelligent. I soon grew to admire and love her and, though she was four years older than me, we became good friends and had many lengthy discussions about everything from trivial happenings on the playground to the meaning of life. I had by that time read many of the Russian classics and could hold my own with her. I can see us now, sitting on an old tree trunk, philosophising about God and the universe, questions that greatly occupied me at that time.
In the summer of 1914 I also became aware of the wider world and its problems and politics. There was excitement and consternation among the grown-ups when my father came home one day with the news that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. Everybody feared it would mean war. A few weeks later, at the beginning of August, the First World War began. Austro-Hungary attacked Serbia; since Serbia was a Slav country, Russia was bound to come to its aid, and, one by one, practically every country in Europe followed them into the war. Fed on school history and tales of glorious battles and victories, I began to feel very patriotic and imagined the Russian armies marching triumphantly to the battlefields, while the women tended the wounded and sent parcels to the front.
I could only have got such feelings and fantasies from books and newspapers, for there was no display of such sentiments at home. My father was a moderate liberal, who read the Russkoye Slovo (The Russian Word), a mildly conservative newspaper, and occasionally the Russkiye Vedomosti (The Russian Gazette), a more liberal paper favoured by the intelligentsia. At any rate, no sooner was he back from town in the late afternoon than Lyolya and I snatched the paper from him and together read the reports on the aftermath of the assassination. Then the axe fell and war was declared.
At first nothing changed and, for most of us, war meant no more than reports in the newspapers. But one day the local policeman knocked on our door and demanded to speak to Lyolya. To Lyolya? Why? It was to inform her that she was immediately to return to her mother and that they would all be deported to Siberia. We were thunderstruck. Were Lyolya and her family enemy aliens who could not be trusted to live in the capital city of Russia? It was preposterous, unbelievable. But the order was there and Lyolya had to leave amidst tears on all sides. Her mother had been married to a German and had thus become, together with the two daughters, a subject of the German Reich. After her husband’s death, years earlier, she had not bothered officially to become a Russian subject once more. Neither she nor her eldest daughter spoke a word of German. Only Lyolya had attended the German school. Now they had to leave their home and their living and go to unknown and distant Siberia. When school started again, we learnt that many of our schoolmates and their parents shared the same fate – including my close friend Manya Behrens.
After the war, when they were able to return from Siberia, they told us sad and strange tales about their lives in remote villages and towns, in simple timber houses or peasant huts, with next to nothing to do. Food was cheap, but there was hardly anything else to be had. Nevertheless they had managed to organise some sort of schooling for their children. But three to four years of this primitive life had obviously been a great strain, and left their mark on children and grown-ups alike.
The outbreak of the war and the death of my father soon afterwards marked the end of our carefree childhood. It was also the beginning of the end of the so-called ‘good old days’ hitherto enjoyed by relatively few. The cataclysm of war and the revolution in Russia changed our lives, the social, economic and political life of Russia and, to a greater or lesser extent, the whole of Europe and the rest of the world.
Margaret Dewar Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 18 February 2023