Dancing Out of Darkness

by Kristina Rhianoff

  The day before the wedding my grandparents from both sides – my grandmother and my ‘new’ grandfather Boris and my dad’s mum Marina – all came to Vladivostok to see my parents get married. It wasn’t a big wedding but Mum said it was fun because my dad and his bandmates played and sang. It is the Russian way, I believe, to make the best of everything. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a lot, and at that time everyone was the same – it was all about having fun and making the best of a situation.

  My parents had to move out of the accommodation they were in as students because once they married they weren’t allowed to live in the student halls, so they had to find a flat to rent. Unfortunately, all the flats in the centre of Vladivostok, near the college, were really expensive so they had to move quite far out of the city in order to afford somewhere to live. An area on the outskirts was all that they could afford, and the flat they moved into was tiny. There was no furniture, no central heating and, due to a very dry summer causing the reservoir to dry up, there was no water either. This meant that my dad had to go out and fetch the water they needed so my mum could boil it and use it. He would have to walk for about twenty minutes each way, would carry the water back in two buckets, a trip he had to make three or four times a day. It was a tough time, and while I know my mum prepared for my arrival as well as she could, the only furniture they had was a big mattress on the floor and two chairs, which she put together for my crib.

  I’ll let her tell you in her own words about the day I came into the world…

  It was a beautiful, sunny September day when I started going into labour with Kristina. It wasn’t unusual for September to be a lovely warm month although to be honest, any thoughts of sunshine were quickly replaced by thoughts of pain when the labour began. It was 21 September and I called for a taxi to take me and Igor to the hospital. I was completely scared. I didn’t know what would happen or what to expect and I just felt so young and helpless. I was in labour for nineteen hours with my daughter and I lost a lot of blood during that time. At no point was I offered any sort of painkillers and I desperately wanted to see my mother but she lived so far away.

  Finally, after hours and hours of pain and exhaustion, on 22 September our daughter finally arrived in this world and it was all over. We were home two days later, back to our tiny little flat, and all I remember is that I cried the whole journey home. I was scared and I felt alone and I had a new baby to care for.

  I understand now how hard it must have been for two young students, newly married with a baby. My mum had tried to read all the books that were available at the time about how to raise a child but with no relatives around to help and no money to buy anything, it was hard. She was breastfeeding me, so I was getting the nutrition I needed, but three weeks after I was born, my dad said enough was enough – they couldn’t live like that any more. He gave my mum an ultimatum: either they sent me away to live with his mum in a city called Holmsk in Saxalin – which was three-hour flight from where we lived – or he would walk away. He couldn’t deal with it any more and was ready to leave.

  Mum was absolutely devastated. She was so scared that she would be left all on her own with a newborn that she made the heartbreaking decision to give me away…

  CHAPTER 2

  Pickling, preparing and performing

  So my parents flew to Holmsk and gave me away to my dad’s mother, Marina Pshenichnykh. She was a doctor but she wasn’t practising at that time, she was working as a nurse at a kindergarten so she could take me into nursery and look after me there. And she had raised my dad alone after his real dad walked out on them.

  I don’t know what happened there really, only that the surname I use, Rihanoff, comes from my dad’s father. To me it made sense to use the name Rihanoff. Some people say it is pronounced with an ‘R’, while others say it is with an ‘L’, Lihanoff. So why have I changed my name? In a sense I haven’t, I am still Kristina Pshenichnykh – Rihanoff is my stage name. When I joined the Dancing with the Stars tour years later, they told me that no one would be able to pronounce Pshenichnykh properly and with twelve letters, it was a bit of a mouthful. So I adopted the stage name Rihanoff. Had my dad’s father married my grandmother, she would have had the name Rihanoff, my father would then have had it and then my mother, when they married, would have used it. It made sense to me. As it was, Marina found herself another partner, a lovely man called Andrey. Everybody who knew him has told me that he would spend his days just carrying me in his arms all the time, and that to him I was his granddaughter. Unfortunately, he died from a heart attack before I was old enough to know him properly.

  So that was my first year – mostly spent with my grandmother and Andrey while my mum went back to studying. But it was hard for her and she missed me. Although she tried to visit me, Holmsk was still a three-hour flight away. When I was nine months old she couldn’t cope any longer and so she took me to stay with her mum and Boris, who lived slightly closer to her in a village called Kavalerovo. It meant that she could visit me more often and when she got her diploma and graduated with her degree in shipbuilding in 1979, she took me back properly to Vladivostok.

  I was a year and five months old when she started working at the shipbuilding company so she would leave me with a babysitter, who was able to take me to the local kindergarten.

  My mum’s job was a big thing in Russia at that time. Every day when she left work, she would have her bag checked for documents, photos or sketches that she might have made of the ships or submarines. The Soviet Union was so secretive and didn’t trust anyone, so it was a daily ritual for it to check nothing about its great navy was being leaked by an employee. The city had been closed for over thirty years due to it being the main marine base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, but my parents never said it was a bad time for them. They both had a decent wage, more than doctors and teachers during Soviet Union times, and they also enjoyed lots of privileges from the professional unions. These included free travel and also free trips to ‘health spas’, which was where you could get checked over by a doctor and relax for a week. I did lots of those trips with my parents when I was a bit older and they were great fun.

  You couldn’t really complain about that, now could you?

  The year my mum graduated and got her job was also the year my grandfather Boris was given a flat by the government because of his job as a geologist. That was very normal in the days of the Soviet Union: the government did provide for you and Boris was rewarded for his work and given a flat in Vladivostok. But he told them it needed to be a big flat as he had a big family, so they provided him with a large enough apartment for all six of us to live in – him, my grandmother, my mother, my father, me and my grandmother’s other daughter, Valeria. My grandmother had her when she was forty-one years old so actually she is only a few years older than me and although she is technically my aunt and my mum’s sister, I grew up thinking she was my sister.

  We grew up together and went to the same school, with Valeria taking me to my classes. People would say, ‘Oh, you are an only child, poor you!’ but I grew up with her like a sister. She would walk me to school, we would gossip and play together, fight constantly and generally act like siblings; we were so close. Every New Year’s Eve we would put on a show for my parents and grandparents and make them sit down and watch us. It was a tradition and my aunt and I loved to perform for them. We would act out a Russian fairytale and I would be the princess and she would often be the evil queen. And then when they had all gone to bed we would sneak out of our rooms to peek at our presents under the New Year’s tree.

  I loved living as a big family under one roof – it was a typical arrangement for families in Russia at that time – and I was very happy. There were three rooms and up until I was five years old I stayed in my parents’ room with them, then I moved in with Valeria. My grandmother and Boris slept in the sitting room as it was the largest room.

  It was one of the happiest times of my childhood and I felt loved and cared for b
y everyone. My grandmother was the kindest woman you could ever meet, always on my side. I think I was quite a rebellious child but she would always stick up for me.

  Unfortunately, my parents had quite a turbulent relationship. They were both young and didn’t really know what to do and what not to do in front of me. They knew I was always being looked after by my grandparents so it gave them a bit of freedom to go out a lot and party, knowing I was home and that I would be looked after and fed and put to bed.

  The biggest problem was that my dad was always caught up in his music and perhaps the idea of family wasn’t something he put a lot of thought into. He grew up as an only child raised by a single mum and she was always telling him what a wonderful musician he could be. I think, although it is natural for a mother to encourage a child, constantly telling him that he could be famous musician and a world-famous composer filled his head with a lot of dreams. His music was also influenced by her, as she had gone to Cuba in the 1960s – it was a country that had a very strong relationship with Russia. I remember my grandmother telling me about her memories of Cuba: she said that nobody ever seemed to work, they just sang and danced outside all day long! She couldn’t understand how they could survive because they just seemed to be out dancing on the streets all day. It also meant that my dad was influenced a lot by that laid-back lifestyle, and in his music by Cuban songs. There was no Beatles music or anything else in Soviet Russia back then – you weren’t allowed to play foreign music on the radio because it was considered propaganda so the only sort of foreign songs that could be played were Cuban. Dad once told me that he and his friends would sneak into one of his mate’s garages and secretly listen to Voice of America. They would take in dictionaries and try to translate the words in the songs without being caught.

  One of my earliest memories was when I must have been about three years old, dancing to Cuban music performed by my dad. And that was when I started to dance. At the house I was always dancing in front of my parents while my dad would play with ten of his mates, who would all have different instruments. He studied guitar at the local music school near where he grew up and had a real love and passion for music and singing from a young age. I think I have definitely inherited a love of song, dance and performance from him. His music was his first love and eventually I suppose that is what broke up his relationship with my mother: he put music in front of everything else.

  To begin with, I didn’t really understand what the arguments were about. I was a daddy’s girl and if ever he was playing for a local music festival or a wedding – and he played at lots of weddings – my mum would take me and I would go and dance in front of everyone and in front of him on stage. To me he was my big star – there was my dad, playing on a stage! And the best thing was that he would sometimes take me up onto the stage too, which is where I may have got my love of performing. Lights, camera, action! I felt connected with him on that level, whereas my mum was always the strict one, the one making me do my homework or clean the flat. She was the one who would yell at me if I failed to do something on time – she was a very organised sort of woman and there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room with her. It was perhaps why I saw Dad as more of a friend and ally; I just wanted to spend time with him, dancing and listening to him sing. But of course it was a selfish way to live. He would think about his music and his band to such an extent that there wasn’t much left for him to give my mum or me.

  It was a terrible marriage – my parents were always fighting, shouting and yelling at each other. My grandmother and grandfather were always there and able to take care of me so in a way, if it was making me sad or upset, at least I had them. I remember there were times when my dad would leave for a couple of weeks and not come home at all. He would just go and nobody would know where he had gone and then all of a sudden he would reappear and the fighting would start again. He was constantly going, coming home and then leaving again. I later found out he was with his mates and playing his music and that was all he cared about; he wasn’t putting a lot of effort into building a relationship with me.

  But I was young and so whom did I blame? My mum, of course. She was the strict one, the one making me clean or read, or do boring stuff. I blamed her for the fact that my dad was leaving the house for weeks on end, when I just wanted him to be around. In my childish mind, I blamed her when he wasn’t there. The problem was they were both very strong-minded people who wanted certain things in life. Dad, especially, may not have envisaged that he would be married so young and have a child, when all he wanted to be was a famous musician. He might have felt in some kind of way that he had been robbed of that chance.

  *****

  There are perhaps many people who didn’t live in Soviet Russia during the early 1980s who believe that it was a very grim and terrible place and time. But actually my mum said life was very stable there. It was guaranteed you would have a paycheck at the end of the month, you would have your medical treatments for free, education was free and you got your accommodation, all of which were granted to you by the places at which you worked. You didn’t have to worry, it was all very stable; nobody lived feeling scared of tomorrow.

  But there were some restrictions. We had vouchers for certain foods, like meat and poultry, and you only received a certain number of kilograms of meat per person per week. It meant that when you went to the shop to get the meat, the whole family had to queue to make sure that you got the most you could – the most to which you were entitled as a family. Sometimes the queues were quite long, especially before big holidays like Christmas and New Year. On those occasions we always went along as a family to queue and take the meat home. We would make all this delicious food, like pelmeni, which are Russian-style dumplings with meat inside. You could freeze them and then eat them after a big holiday and they would be so filling! That is why everyone stayed in line for the meat – all six of us – because it wasn’t just about eating, it was the tradition of preparing the meat, storing it and getting the most out of every scrap.

  Of course, sometimes the queues would be long and it would be very boring to wait there – not much fun, especially for a child! Some shops would put up signs announcing something like the meat would go on sale at 5pm, so people would come and line up earlier to be first so that when the time came, the line would be huge! But you couldn’t do anything else; just wait.

  There was a lot of canned food available, and given that we lived by the sea, I remember there was always plenty of tinned seaweed in our flat. It was almost a staple meal: we had lots of seaweed salads as my mum would buy cans and cans of the stuff and she would always be making it into salads to feed to me during the winter. She told me it was good for me (and it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, I promise).

  The local agriculture system was good as we had lots of fruit and vegetables from the farms in the summer but in winter, as a family, we always made plenty of pickled foods. Pickling was one of my mum and grandmother’s specialities. They had special recipes to make the sauce and they would literally pickle everything in it – cucumbers, tomatoes, parsnips and peppers and all sorts of other foods, so that in winter, when there wasn’t fresh stuff available, we were still able to have fruit and vegetables.

  My grandmother and Grandfather Boris had a little summer house about an hour away by train from where we lived, where they would grow a lot of vegetables too and I would spend much time there in the summer. We would catch the train out of Vladivostok to the summer house to look after what was growing there or to plant new things for the season. We had all the berries – including strawberries and blueberries – and of course, tomatoes and cucumbers and potatoes, too. Basically, we grew everything, and then we would gather it to store at home on the balcony of our flat for winter time. So fruit and vegetables would be pickled and my mother and grandmother would also make marmalade for winter. It was our way of surviving: we prepared for winter in the summer and everything was made from scratch.

  Cheese was another product that was limited by t
he state to a weight in kilograms per person so again, you had to queue for it, but it was available. And we love cottage cheese in Russia – I remember eating lots and lots of it! I suppose the only noticeable thing about food in Soviet Russia at that time was there wasn’t much variety. But it didn’t matter; everyone had food all year round because we made sure we prepared and stored it properly. In fact, rather than being short on food, the complete opposite was true – our tables were always so full of food, and after big holidays we would eat leftovers for more than a week. Nothing was ever wasted – we used everything, and it was all cooked from scratch and either eaten or preserved. Cooking was a big tradition, too: my mother and grandmother learnt how to do the pickling and preserving when they were young. In school, during the lessons in ‘household studies’ where the boys and girls would be separated, the girls would learn cookery skills and how to prepare food for winter.