My Russian Family

by Lilia Sariecheva

  Stalin was a driven man without a heart and yet people can remember back in the 1930s when Stalin ordered ice cream stores to be opened in all major cities so children could have ice cream in the hot summers. Every holiday from 1948 until his death in 1953, Stalin would order a large price reduction for food, which was a huge boost to poor and middle-class people. It gave a very joyful meaning to the holidays and made many people smile.

  My family had a rare radio that featured a built-in phonograph that played round black vinyl records. I can remember the radio broadcast in what must have been 1953 announcing, “Staples like macaroni and sugar now have a lower price for the holiday, thanks to Comrade Stalin!” I recall dancing around the room singing “macaroni, macaroni” as mom and a friend of hers clapped their hands and laughed with me. Macaroni was now entrenched in my vocabulary. Stalin died shortly thereafter.

  Contradictory is a fitting word to describe Joseph Stalin. Both my parents loved Stalin when they were young and innocent. He was a savior, intelligent and hardworking, someone to look up to and admire. Even during their 20s, 30s, and 40s, they held Stalin in high regard for his leadership in creating a strong and successful Russia, in spite of the fact that he had brought devastation to their families and friends. It was only later, as the wisdom of old age crept in, that my parents finally differentiated between dreams and reality.

  My Aunt Shurra

  Literal translation:

  Friends become known in times of trouble.

  Meaning:

  A friend in need is a friend indeed.

  37. Bitter Happiness

  I HAVE LIVED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR MANY years and I still have trouble understanding various customs and traditions. For example, what present does one give to the family matriarch? I cannot discern any guidelines for this important decision.

  Some traditions in Russia go back hundreds of years into antiquity. A present for a family matriarch is a headscarf; it is always correct and always well received. Other gifts are acceptable. However, if one has no idea of what to buy, then by all means purchase a suitable headscarf. The varieties are almost endless. There are silk, cotton, wool, and synthetic fabrics with numerous patterns and colors. In addition, there are indoor, outdoor, summer, and winter scarves. There are small triangles for just the top of the head and huge scarves that cover the head and wrap around the upper body.

  Russia’s famous song Orenburg’s Downy Headscarf involves a daughter knitting a headscarf for her mother. This song is full of love and tenderness for a kind old woman. The words describe a daughter’s thoughts about her most precious person in the whole wide world-her mommy. She sings,

  Dearest mommy,

  I’m ready to give you not only this downy headscarf, but also my heart and my life, if need be.

  When my mother Mareika listened to that song on the radio she always cried. My father and I would try to turn the radio off or change the station but she never let us. My mother would listen to that touching refrain clear to its end and I believe that she found some sweet pain from listening. I was too young to understand her feelings but now that she, my own beloved mother, is gone, I understand completely.

  Sometimes I sing that song myself and cry. My tears are bittersweet but I do not want to stop because I am remembering my mommy with needles deep in my heart.

  Lately I’ve been thinking about my mother’s fate, which was a small part of the fate of all Russians. While mother was in Mongolia, World War II ate away many lives, including her mother and older sister Vera. The last time Mareika saw any of her family members was in 1939. After 20 years of silence, my dad’s longtime efforts finally located two family members in December of 1959, mother’s younger sister Shurra and their only brother, Ivan. They were living in Latvia in a town called Tukums not far from Riga, the capitol.

  Dad arranged for Ivan to visit us in late winter of 1959 in Kasimov near Ryazan where my father was the KGB boss. Ivan was 28 years old and still single. His light blond hair and fair complexion was typical of the Chernei family. The young man was tall, thin, and unusually quiet. His face, with big eyes and a straight Grecian nose did not reveal any emotion. He never laughed, only slightly smiled when he heard my father’s hilarious jokes.

  What surprised me and made me feel close to him were his deep pale blue eyes. My mother was the only other person I have known with eyes like that. I asked mother, “Why does my brother Slahva have black eyes like Dad and I have just ordinary blue eyes, while your brother has eyes just like yours?”

  Mother smiled as she pulled me down to sit beside her. She always was ready to broaden my horizons. “The only people I know with my exact shade of blue eyes are my brother Ivan and our mother Lena. My dear daughter, many things are unknown about eye color, but I can tell you this.” She shifted in her seat to get more comfortable. “There has been extensive research on eye color. The amount of a dark brown pigment called melanin in the iris of the eye determines color. Black eyes contain much melanin and pale blue eyes contain only small amounts.”

  “What about green eyes?”

  Mom continued, “Three main eye colors are explainable with models of the existing information: brown is dominant over green, which is dominant over blue. However, no one can explain gray, hazel, or multiple shades of blue, brown, green, and gray eyes. Or how eye color can change over time, or how two blue-eyed parents can produce a brown-eyed child.” Mother looked closely at me with a smile. “I can tell you this; poets have a better knowledge of eyes than scientists do.” That silenced me for a while but my curiosity grew. It was in ninth grade that I learned there are other unknown genes that can determine eye color but I was never satisfied that it could not be explained.

  It was more that just eye color that set Ivan apart. I intuitively understood that he felt some tension with everyone, even with my brother and me. Curiosity compelled me to ask my mother about him. She gave me the short answer, “He spent some years in a German concentration camp when he was little, about your age.”

  The summer after Ivan’s visit, my mother journeyed to Latvia to meet her family survivors. They were Ivan, Mom’s sister Shurra and her husband Misha, their son Vassily, and Mom’s niece Galena. Packing for the trip involved many presents for them. For some inexplicable reason, these included a soft Orenburg headscarf that had been stored on her closet shelf for a long, long time.

  After her visit with the relatives, Mother traveled from Latvia to St. Petersburg. She visited the huge common graves in the famous Piskaryovskoye Cemetery. In honor of the tens of thousands of dead from the German siege of the city, the government has turned the cemetery into a place of worship and beauty, surrounded by groves of birch trees. I revisited this sacred site in 2005. It is huge, awesome, and intimidating with floating strains of melancholy music from loudspeakers. It was there that mother left the downy Orenburg headscarf.

  Mass graves in Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, St. Petersburg.

  We all expected to see my mom excited and in a good mood when she returned from the trip to her lost and found relatives but she was sad. Even her always-rosy cheeks seemed like white rose petals.

  My bedroom adjoined my parents’ bedroom with a connecting door. I blush to admit that occasionally I “accidentally” overheard their conversations. They were talking in their bedroom the first night after Mom returned from Latvia. When I heard the words “concentration camp” I sat on the rug next to the door and listened. Mom’s story of her trip intrigued me. As I listened, I felt the hair on my head bristle and my heart beat faster. My body became hot as it usually did when I was afraid. The next morning my parents found me asleep on the rug by the door.

  What follows is the unforgettable story I heard that night.

  World War II combat started for Russia on June 22, 1941, with Hitler’s invasion, Operation Barbarossa. German Third Reich armies approached St. Petersburg from the south and the west. Their early blitzkrieg successes led them to believe that they had already won the war. Ger
many had the best armed forces in the world; their morale was high and their attitude arrogant. The subsequent siege of that noble city is also called the “900-day siege” and it lasted from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944-872 days.

  At that time the city was called Leningrad. However, to avoid reader confusion, we refer to it here as St. Petersburg, which was the city’s original name. It was renamed Petrograd from 1914 to 1924 and Leningrad from 1924 to 1993, and then renamed St. Petersburg, which it remains today. Wartime anti-German feelings triggered some of this name-changing because burg (German) and grad (Russian) both mean city.

  For St. Petersburg, surrender was not an option. The city would be defended at any cost. The 200,000 Red Army defenders and the 3 million civilian inhabitants of the city knew of the long dark history between Germans and Slavic people and they had heard the latest stories of the Wehrmacht brutality. The Russians prepared massive and effective antitank earth barricades, using mainly picks and shovels as they set about to defend their city. The Red Army had little artillery but they did have many heavy mortars and the 12-inch guns of the Russian Baltic Fleet floating nearby.

  The Germans quickly gained control of the land south of the city from the Gulf of Finland on the west to Lake Ladoga on the east. By early November the enemy had destroyed the roads and rails, and had cut the phone lines. One option for the Wehrmacht was to level the entire city. They offered the territory to the Finns if they would do it but their obstinate allies declined. In addition, the strong buildings and the maze of canals and waterways would make street fighting a nightmare. So, finally, the policy became a “hermetical seal” around the city to starve it into submission.

  Fuel and ammunition were in short supply for the Red Army. Supplies were typically nonexistent for civilians, as everything went to the military. Lake Ladoga allowed some barge traffic in summer and truck and sled traffic on the lake ice in winter to maintain the city’s arms factories and minimal food. The Wehrmacht planes stayed active in attacking the supply routes. It was difficult to mount an effective defense against the strong and well supplied fascist German army. However, a siege favored the Russians with their courage, obstinacy, cunning in camouflage, and patience in ambush.

  My maternal grandmother Lena and all her children except Mom lived in St. Petersburg. At the start of the siege in September of 1941, Lena was about 43 years old and Vera, her oldest daughter, was about 22. Shurra, her youngest daughter, was 14 and her only son Ivan was nine years old. The fate of Vera’s husband Grigorie was unknown as he never returned after being mobilized into the Red Army at the start of the war. Vera’s daughter Galena was around six months old.

  Aunt Vera with baby Galena, St. Petersburg, 1941.

  My Grandmother Lena starved to death the first winter. She refused to eat, saving the food for her children and granddaughter. Vera was a machine operator at a military plant. Three women kept two machines that produced artillery shells functioning 24 hours a day by working 16-hour days. Their payment was a little bit of bread every three days.

  Starvation had swept away Vera’s strength. She was too weak to walk home every day so every three days she left baby Galena at her work station as she walked to their apartment to share her food ration with her brother and sister. Vera was in her early 20s but she walked slowly as though she were an old woman and she often had to stop and rest on the snowdrifts. At the factory she slept on the floor by her machinery. Most of the working women with babies kept them by their side. Vera’s baby daughter Galena was close by in a wooden box. From time to time Vera would nurse her but Vera had only a modest amount of milk and the baby was always hungry. At first the baby cried and then she became feeble and stopped crying. The young mother knew that her baby was becoming weaker day by day. Little Galena never smiled or made a noise. She was very skinny and her small face looked like an old woman’s face with thin skin and wrinkles.

  A bomb from Fascist planes ended the young mother’s life. It caught her on the way home with her bread ration. My Aunt Vera’s body was vaporized and several eyewitnesses found not a trace.

  38. The Trip to Hades

  Now there were only three of them: Shurra, Ivan, and little Galena. They were children fighting to survive without adults in a harsh environment.

  It is said that the young mostly regret things they did rather than things they didn’t do. Age appears to reverse this tendency as older people generally regret what they didn’t do, not what they did. Does a war change this?

  The teenaged Shurra went to the military plant to find her baby niece Galena. She took a sled because she was too frail to carry the baby the long distance back to the apartment. Some of the older weaker neighbors in the building gave up their fight to live and gave Shurra their last pieces of bread and their bread coupons. It was a very long wait in the cold street to exchange the coupons for bread.

  Her young brother Ivan would go out on scrounging trips looking for wood to have a fire in the kitchen. The apartment buildings operated without gas or electricity during the siege. All available wooden fences were broken up and hauled to kitchens for fires. These fires even consumed wood floors in homes. Furniture, pianos, and even books were sacrificed. Little was more important than a fire during a Russian winter. All the trees were cut up. Typically, people were very protective of the white birch trees, a national icon, but even the birch trees became firewood.

  Water was available from the Neva River and its many canals. The problem for many people was that it was many kilometers away. People used baby carriages, children’s wagons, and sleds to haul buckets of water. It was workable in the summer but during the winter it was extremely difficult, usually an all-day trip for several people. In the freezing wind and cold, many people died making that essential trip.

  Health and sanitation were disasters. Soap, disinfectants, vaccinations, emergency room supplies, kerosene, matches and so forth were nonexistent. No one took baths or showers. They were filthy and swarming with body lice. Infections were common, and treatment for wounds from bomb fragments and shrapnel was haphazard. Colds, flu, and pneumonia were largely untreated and frequently fatal. In the spring of 1942, the populace of the once beautiful metropolis of St. Petersburg were melting into their graves like snow in the sun.

  The long and fierce siege of the large city turned it into a death camp. Civilian deaths from many months of severe food shortages greatly reduced the population. Food rationing was at a starvation level. Disease, exposure to the cold, and German artillery all left their mark. Together, they killed an estimated 650,000 of the original three million St. Petersburg civilians in just the year 1942.

  The inhabitants of St. Petersburg were hoping and praying for aid from their fellow countrymen. They started to refer to the rest of Russia as the Big Land or Greater Land. Soviet pilots made flights from the Big Land to airdrop food and supplies and offer some support to the defending Red Army. However, the German Luftwaffe was present in large numbers.

  Springtime airdrops included packets of seeds for the winter survivors. Shurra, Ivan, and little Galena had packets of beet, cabbage, rutabaga, turnip, and other vegetable seeds. It gave them hope for the future and they planted with a smile. It was not easy work as they were exhausted from dystrophy but they knew that if they did not work they would die the next winter. Little green patches began to appear all over the city as people planted their tiny gardens with sweat and hope!

  Even during the summer, people were dying of starvation every day. As spring brought plant growth, people were eating grass, leaves from bushes, and various plants, some of which were poisonous. This caused many more deaths. One fortunate day, Ivan found some goosefoot plants behind a rubbish heap. He brought home several armloads of the weed and they enjoyed soup for many days. The children even called these miserable dinners “feasts.”

  Unfortunately, the young farmers did not enjoy a good harvest from the seeds, as many seeds did not sprout. However, the crops did help them survive until January of 194
3 when the food was almost gone and no more was available. Two-year-old Galena was becoming weaker and her aunt and uncle were very worried. Sixteen-year-old Shurra and 11-year-old Ivan faced the reality of their future. If their big sister Vera or grandmother Lena had still been alive, they could probably survive in St. Petersburg. But Vera and Lena were dead. They decided that the only option was to walk out of St. Petersburg to the Big Land.

  Life in St. Petersburg was worsening. All able bodied people were on the front lines or otherwise involved in the city’s defense, although a few militia received assignments to catch criminals. Criminals had the freedom to rob people openly of their valuables, especially bread and bread coupons. The best defense was to venture out only in groups. That did not always help as the criminals were physically stronger and sometimes had weapons. When the militia did catch these men, they had the authority to execute them on the spot without a trial. Justice was swift!

  Rumors of cannibalism spread around the neighborhood like spider webs. It was said that some mothers ate their dead children’s bodies. Even more chilling, criminals supposedly killed people for any food they might have and then cannibalized them. More and more often, small children disappeared from their own homes while their mothers were working at plants or waiting in lines for bread. Their fate was not in doubt.

  It was rumored that if you had gold, diamonds, or other valuables, you could pay off the right person and get a ride in a truck to the Big Land via winter roads over the frozen ice of Ladoga Lake. These trucks brought in supplies and carried people out. There were reports that all the bosses and commanders’ families had evacuated earlier or were high on the priority evacuation list. Of course, there were successful evacuations of many schoolchildren and orphans in the fearful chaotic days prior to the arrival of the Germans. But once the siege started, the rest of the people, including their children, had little choice but to stay in the city.