My Russian Family

by Lilia Sariecheva

  People, including Tania, understood this policy and accepted it with no complaints; they felt that it was right. Tania found employment shoveling coal into the furnace of a large building. A small room, probably a former storage room, was included in the deal so she and her three children moved into their new home without furniture. Fearing that she would lose even this small place if she left Moscow, she stayed. She kept the job and the room until her husband joined them in early 1947. This time was not easy for Tania. Her food ration and her money were both scant but people shared with each other and Tania soon acquired mattresses and cooking supplies. Coal dust always covered Tania at work and she eventually developed a cough that brought up black-specked mucus from her lungs. Upon his return, her husband obtained a position as a chauffer in the Kremlin. Tania could quit working and they moved into a house.

  Tania was a strong young woman and the cough eventually left her. Her husband Ivan Petrovich Kyrrin, who we called Uncle Vanya, was quite handsome and, although Tania was not highly educated or particularly beautiful, she was attractive and feminine with gentle manners and of excellent character. Her husband loved and respected her and considered himself lucky to have her. It speaks highly of Ivan that he was qualified to work at the Kremlin as a chauffer. One of the many requirements of becoming a Kremlin chauffer was a skill in the martial arts. After the war, Ivan taught some of his deadly skills to my father who was some twenty years younger. One of Ivan’s chauffeuring friends was Victor Mikhailov, the ex-USSR boxing champion. My uncle Ivan drove some interesting people, including Comrade Kruzhkov, a member of the Central Committee and head of culture in the USSR. Ivan was later a driver for another member of the Central Committee, the world-famous author Mikhail Sholokhov who wrote, among other novels, the masterpiece called And Quiet Flows the Don. Sholokhov was an open and simple man who preferred to live in his village and only came to Moscow for Communist Party business. My uncle and Sholokhov became friends and Uncle Ivan spent time in his home and was a frequent dinner guest. Sholokhov was thoughtful and generous and it was an honor to have him touch our family.

  My Uncle Vanya, the Kremlin chauffer, late 1930s.

  Together, Tania and Ivan made a good life and had five children. The family remained in Moscow and they were always very close to my parents, my brother, and me. We frequently shared holidays, visits, and problems.

  I was starting a new life in the United States of America when our Aunt Tania died peacefully at the ripe old age of 90 and still living in Moscow. Her difficulties simply made her a stronger woman.

  29. Home, Sweet Home!

  Mareika enjoyed seeing the numerous birch trees covered with hoarfrost as her father-in-law Ivan Cupreyanovich Sariechev drove her home in a horse-drawn farm sleigh from the rural train station to the small village of Arscent’evo.

  After more than two weeks of traveling in stuffy train cars, the young woman was ready to sing halleluiah to the fresh air, the weak winter sun, and the prickly wind. She had been out of the Soviet Union for four and a half years. It felt so good to be back and even though these were unfamiliar surroundings for her, it was still Mother Russia.

  That evening, all of the neighbors of my grandparents Varvara and Ivan came to meet and congratulate Mareika on the happy conclusion of her arduous journey and, of course, to see the baby boy. They had waited patiently and watched as the sleigh returned with the travelers. The villagers allowed a settling-in period of several hours and then it was visiting time. They could wait no longer. It was emotional and difficult for the visitors who wanted to say good things. The bride was still recovering from the ravaging effects of typhus and the beginnings of dystrophy. The poor baby boy was sickly, pale, and thin, with bowed legs, a large stomach, and a head that appeared too large for his body. How could their hero Mikhail end up with a family like this? Years later mother remembers that she weighed 36 kilograms (80 pounds) and a standard Russian joke was that she had a “sheep’s weight” which was a way to trivialize and accept a serious weight problem. Even Mikhail, still in Mongolia, was down to 57 kilograms (125 pounds) due to the stressful life and poor food where they lived. The food was good in 1939 and 1940 but as the war progressed the quality of the food had became worse. It was not just my parents who looked like death warmed over; the entire Soviet contingent at their base looked about the same.

  The following morning, Mom left my brother with her mother-in-law and headed to the vegetable storage shed with her sister-in-law Maria Ivanovna Sariecheva, known as Manya. Both Manya and Mareika had the exact same official name and both were born in 1922. They became best friends and helped each other with everything. In later years, they became like two mothers to me.

  Manya expressed surprise at my mother’s rich and expensive clothes. Fine clothes had been available in the military store in pre-war Mongolia but with the advent of the war the supply dried up. However, by that time mother had a good supply of clothing and shoes. The clothing was well-tailored and made of quality material, and it lasted for many years. The fur hats, jackets, and coats lasted some twenty years. My mother was uncomfortable wearing them around the poor villagers but they were all that she had. Manya was a typical wartime country girl with only the poorest of clothes. People were living very meagerly. A popular slogan was “Everything for the front, everything for victory!” Peasants did not have money because no one was paid for their work; various goods sufficed as the medium of exchange.

  Manya was a shy, quiet woman, dependable, well-liked, capable, gentle, and soft, but not one to overtly express love or strong emotions. She was a well-proportioned, large-framed, and shapely woman worthy of a second glance. As a young baby, her mother Varvara laid her on top of the kitchen table to change her diapers and due to a momentary diversion from another child, the baby tumbled to the hard wooden floor. A tearful examination revealed only a minor bruise and no one else remembered the incident. But Granny Varvara never again left a baby alone on top of a table. Ten years later, during the starvation years of the early 1930s, a doctor in Ryazan diagnosed bone tuberculosis in Manya and believed it was related to the original injury and poor nutrition. Manya recovered but she retained an awkward gait when she walked and she couldn’t run or dance for almost five years. This complication caused her to become shy.

  The city girl Mareika did not have any working clothes. She politely turned down Varvara and Manya’s offers to borrow some of theirs. Wanting to look good for her husband’s relatives and friends, the offered clothes seemed like rags to Mareika. In addition, the shorter and skinny Mareika looked like a stick compared to these two large working people. She donned her cherry-colored, high-fashioned wool dress, fur coat, stylish hat, and her knee-high valenki (thick felt boots). She would have to hold her sister-in-law’s hand for support as she hobbled along through mud and snow in the lightweight bulky boots covered with protective rubber galoshes. Her legs looked like two pencils in two water glasses.

  The vegetable storage site that belonged to the collective farm was a vast hole in the ground covered with a slanted log roof and a dirt floor, which was now mostly mud. This pit housed a wide variety of root crops belonging to the collective farm, including potatoes, beets, turnips, carrots, and other hardy vegetables. The women were sorting out the ones that had gone bad and it was cold, dirty work. Their fingers soon became numb but the conversation and laughter lightened the burden, a special skill that women have fine-tuned over eons.

  All the young women and girls in the village were working there. They welcomed Mareika, as she was the wife of Mikhail who was the dream man of many of them. They marveled at Mareika’s fancy clothing, the likes of which most of the women had never seen.

  I visited Arscent’evo in 1992 and by this time, the village was deserted during the winters, but some people returned in the spring and summer to tend large gardens. These former village women talked with me during my visit and they vividly remembered that scene fifty years earlier since there was such a sharp contrast between Mareika
, who looked so bad, and her clothes that looked so great.

  It became apparent that Mareika needed more appropriate clothes for the work she was doing. A young slender pretty woman named Varoonka with corn-flower blue eyes offered Mareika some of her working clothes since she was close to Mareika’s size. Mareika accepted her offer and accompanied Varoonka to her home only twenty meters away, to replace her ostentatious clothes. Varoonka’s two small kids, about five and seven years old, were playing alone at home. When Mareika took off her fancy furs and hat, the younger girl caressed them and kept saying, “Kitty, kitty.”

  Mareika and Varoonka liked each other very much from their first meeting and became close friends until Varoonka’s death twenty years later. Mareika started to live the village life. She worked every day with the others in the collective farm without a salary and she made many friends. It was not difficult for her because she had an open heart. She put on a few kilograms and regained her feminine figure. Her hair grew out and she lost the stressed look of a typhus survivor with a sickly son and a distant husband. Her girlfriends continually borrowed her fancy clothes for special occasions. Everybody enjoyed listening to her stories about life in the big cities like St. Petersburg and Novgorod and exotic places in Mongolia. Life in the cities was like a waterfall, while life in the village was comparable to a quiet pond.

  One evening Mother was visiting a friend and as they talked, her friend’s mother pulled out a worn dress with a large hem at the bottom. The woman had a needle and she was teasing out some thread from inside the hem where it would not show from the outside. Mother asked, “Why are you doing that?”

  “I need some thread to mend some clothes.”

  “Can’t you buy thread in town?”

  “Only on the black market and it is too expensive.”

  Mother had a good supply of wooden spools of thread and from then on she used them as gifts for the village women.

  This incident led her to another story from the village. Before the war, one of the girls liked to wear cotton stockings that covered her legs from toe to thigh. When they developed holes in the toes or heels she would throw them away but her mother picked them out of the rubbish pile and saved them. She would throw them over the rafters on the second floor where they waved gaily at no one. Neither the mother nor the daughter was motivated to darn the stockings. After the war started, stockings like almost everything else were simply not available. The girl was thankful to her mother for saving them because she used them to repair her newer stockings as they became threadbare.

  That winter of 1944 my mother developed a terrible toothache in a left, upper molar. She was having a difficult time and decided that she had to make the long journey to a dentist in Ryazan. My granny Varvara learned of this and called Polya who was a poor elderly woman living in the village.

  I remember Polya from the 1950s. She always wore a long gray dress with a darker gray apron and she had a pug nose. She was approximately 50 years old at that time, though I remember her as being ancient. She was a good-hearted woman who had lived a difficult life.

  Polya immediately came to our house and told my mother that she could remove the pain. However, it would take three hours before the pain disappeared and during that time the pain would increase to an almost unbearable level. The pain would never return, she said, and later on small pieces of that tooth would break off until the tooth was completely gone. Polya asked my mom, “Do you understand and do you want me to proceed?”

  Mother responded, “Yes!”

  Polya turned to my granny, “Bring me some salt.”

  When Varvara returned with a salt container, Polya told mom, “Lie down over here. Now open your mouth wide.” Polya poured some salt on the tooth and chanted a mantra. As she started to leave, she paused with her hand on the doorknob and said, “I ask you again, are you ready for three hours of intense pain?”

  Mother signified yes and Polya departed. She took no money or payment for her effort, as she believed that to do so would render her work useless; it would somehow invalidate her skill. However, Polya was a poor woman and the villagers found ways to repay her with food, clothing, and comfort. Mother suffered mightily for three hours and then the pain left, never to return. Some days later, she would notice from time to time, small bits of tooth in her mouth which she would spit out. Finally, as forecast, her molar completely and painlessly was gone!

  My father never believed this. He thought it was some kind of trick and that Polya might have used some scientifically proven poultice instead of the salt-possibly arsenic. However, Polya would not have access to poisons such as arsenic.

  Mother lost a tooth and it would have been better to visit a dentist and save it. All things being equal, which they never are, a trip to a dentist was the preferred choice. But at the time this happened, there was a winter storm and mother was not in condition to wait out the storm and then make that long trip to Ryazan. She was also still recovering from typhus, a difficult train trip across most of Russia, and a diet that was not especially nutritious. Polya’s skills were considered by the villagers as an emergency alternative to dentistry.

  Little Slahva slowly became a healthy and happy baby but it was a long process. He began to talk very early and brought much happiness to his mom, his aunt, and his grand parents. He was cute like his father in his childhood. During harvest, Mareika took her son to the fields. She layered a blanket into a large basket, placed the baby in it, and kept him near her on a furrow. Sometimes he left his basket and played with potatoes which were being hand harvested. All of his clothes were homemade, as baby clothes were not available. The boy never saw candy but carrots were his favorite food. Mom later noticed that my brother was holding a carrot in all the pictures taken during his childhood in the village.

  Mareika recovering in Arscent’evo, spring of 1944.

  Brother Slahva with ever present carrot, autumn of 1944.

  Life in the small village was peaceful and far from the relentless war that was rumbling thousands of kilometers away.

  • • • • •

  While his wife and son were in Arscent’evo, Mikhail was ordered to report to a special school in Novosibirsk, the large city midway between Moscow and Mongolia. This school was under SMERSH (short for SMERt’ SHpionam) translated as “Death to Spies.” The Directorate of Special Departments of the NKVD, a predecessor of the KGB, created SMERSH the previous year, on April 19, 1943. SMERSH was the name of counterintelligence departments formed to secure the rear of the Red Army by arresting traitors, deserters, spies, and criminal elements. A certain Victor Abakumov headed the unit with absolute power, as he reported directly to Stalin. Two other units were also created, one dealing with the Soviet Navy and the other within the NKVD itself.

  The main opponent of SMERSH in its counterintelligence activities was the German military foreign information and counterintelligence department known as Abwehr, which was active in both World War I and II. SMERSH did an excellent job of finding spies both among soldiers liberated from captivity and from the population of gained territories, such as Eastern Europe. It also investigated with impunity anyone within the NKVD. SMERSH often sent agents out to find and kill defectors and double agents, and to hunt down enemies of the people outside of Soviet territory. SMERSH had the assignment of finding Adolf Hitler. According to some reports, the partially burned corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun were transported and secretly buried at SMERSH’s Magdeburg headquarters until exhumed and dispersed in April 1970. Other reports indicated that Hitler escaped and lived out his life in South America.

  My father reported to the SMERSH School with many other officer candidates from most of the 15 Republics of the USSR. Some unknown villains robbed my father after his first few days of classes. They stole his uniform great coat and other clothes, personal items such as chocolate and cigarettes, and even the sheets off his bunk. The money to replace all of this would come out of his own pocket. This robbery was strange because it occurred in a rest
ricted area with only student-officers, the teaching staff, and security-cleared cleaning and maintenance crews having access to it. Mikhail had been concentrating on his studies but now he started paying more attention to his surroundings.

  Since my father was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was one of six officers appointed by the school commander as a Communist Party organizer for each of the six groups of student-officers. Mikhail bided his time, learning what he could and working to understand the situation. He also worked hard to excel in his studies, as was his style.

  One thing that became obvious to Mikhail was that officers from countries like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Armenia could speak acceptable Russian, but most had only rudimentary skills in writing Russian. That put the men in a difficult position. It raised questions about their qualifications for the school and their ability to complete the requirements for the difficult course work.

  The assistant commander scheduled a school meeting one evening from nine to 11 o’clock for all the teaching staff and student-officers. This meeting became very tense with my father leading the charge against what he considered laziness and corruption among the teachers. The assistant commander was in charge of the class schedules as well as the cleaning and maintenance crews who had been doing the stealing. He tried to defend himself but it was becoming obvious that his incompetence was a major factor. The discussion became very heated and a senior staff teacher ordered my father and the other Soviet officers to take on the extra duty of improving the writing abilities of the other student-officers.