The Russian Century

everywhere, to the very edge of the marshes, were modest, small, sweet, Russian blueberries. One could also find mushrooms if one knew places in the seaside Finnish forest.

At the Lakhta station, as I recall, women vendors would come out to the trains with dozens of “White” mushrooms [boleti] in wooden baskets.

Lakhta is not far from Staraia Derevnia, on the outskirts of Petrograd, about several versts in all from it. It is separated from Staraia Derevnia by a vast and swampy marsh that is covered by stunted shrubbery, and is flooded by waters from the gulf pushed inland by the November west winds. The railroad from Staraia Derevnia to Lakhta skirts the marsh and runs along a road paved with cobblestones. Many dachas are located along the cobblestone road and the several streets that cross it, leading towards the seashore. In the old days these were rented to Petersburg city-dwellers. One of the cross streets, Gardnerovskaia, is connected with the history of my family.

John Gardner, master of the oakum business, came from England to Russian in the previous [19th] century. His profession was the caulking of the planks of newly built ships with oakum. Having founded his own business and conscientiously filling the orders of the Admiralty, old man Gardner became rich, as Russia became rich at the end of the previous century and the beginning of this one. At Lakhta, John Gardner built about ten dachas. He gave a red dacha to his son, Genrikh Ivanovich, the father of my cousins. Another, a big dacha with two annexes, he gave to his son Fedor Ivanovich, a sickly fellow for many years, who was looked after by a Russian woman, Nastas’ia Vasil’evna. After a time she became Mrs. Gardner, but the only English she ever learned was to call her pooch “doggie.” On the wall of her sitting room hung a portrait of Lord Kitchener, about whom she knew very little. However, she was very proud of this portrait.

Old man Gardner left nothing to his daughter Zhanetta Ivanovna. Zhanetta Ivanovna, a slender, tall, and stately lady, who must have been beautiful in youth, married well, settled in Moscow, and had no need of a dacha in Lakhta. She married Bruno Vasil’evich Farikh, a man of prominence in pre-revolu-tionary Moscow, who was in the insurance business. Their two sons had good careers in Soviet times. The elder somehow received a university education and became a well-known engineer, with a specialization in the machine-tool industry. The younger, Fabio Farikh, became a prominent Soviet arctic pilot. Later, he was shot as a man of foreign origins. The very same fate befell his brother, Bruno, as well.

By the beginning of the thirties, only one Gardner dacha remained—all the rest having been burned in 1917— the dacha belonging to Nastas’ia Vasil’evna Gardner. My fate was also connected with her home.

B. Brovtsyn, Dearly Beloved

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Having been found to be a British national, she was expelled, poor thing, beyond the borders of the USSR shortly before the Soviet-German war. The English created a shelter in Estonia for such Russian-English persons, where Nastas’ia Vasil’evna, not knowing one word of English, except for the word “doggie,” suffered among other half-English people. Finally, having refused British citizenship, she managed to return to the USSR. She was not permitted to go to Lakhta, since her home had already been confiscated and divided into communal apartments. She was given a room in a communal apartment in Petrograd, and on the eve of the war she was sent to Siberia.

In the beginning of the ’30s, my family and I lived peacefully, but with great difficulty. Every summer my mother’s brother rented one of the two-room apartments in N.V. Gardner’s dacha. He lived there with his common- law wife, Elizaveta Ivanovna Shliakova, who was a resident of Petersburg. His lawful wife, having sent their daughter to her sister’s abroad, went herself to France in 1929 with a Soviet visa, naively hoping that my uncle, who received the rank of midshipman of the Imperial Fleet in 1916, would join the merchant marine and on the first foreign voyage jump ship. However, he never even thought of doing this. The fate and character of my uncle reminded me of Dr. Zhivago in Pasternak’s novel, although Elizaveta Ivanovna was a real Soviet worker, an accountant at Elektrotok [electric generation department], and not a romantic Lara, and my uncle was not a poet. However, he was indecisive and resigned to his fate, completely like Yurii Zhivago. When he was mobilized and sent to the Volga flotilla to fight against the whites, he resigned himself to this as well, instead of escaping south to join Denikin [commanding general of the White Army].

Not far from Nastas’ia Vasil’evna’s dacha at the shore of the gulf stood a half-deserted church in the forest. My uncle knew the priest. Soviet life was such that to attend church, while not completely dangerous, was all the same risky. It was 1934. My aunt (once removed) on my father’s side, Lidiia Petro-vna Engel’ke, having provided me with the fundamentals of a religious education, had died long ago. Grandmother Brovtsyn outlived her son (my father) by two years and died in 1933, when I was away on an expedition to Sakhalin. My mother and my uncle remained Lutherans. In my rather small world there were no remaining Orthodox. The external situation, the burdens of life, and the closed churches were not conducive for contact with religion. I did not go to church. In earlier times on Easter, for many years in a row, my friends and I tried to get into the Trinity Cathedral, located on the grounds of the Izmailovskii Regiment, or into the Nikol’skii Cathedral near the Mariin-skii Theater. But the crowd was always so large even outside the cathedrals, that not once did I manage to be at Easter service inside a church.

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Chapter Twenty

Shortly after the New Year of 1934, I proposed to my future wife, Nina Sergeevna Miagkova. We were at that time little more than twenty years old; we were captivated by hydrology, the science of rivers, and took part in expeditions. Nina had just graduated from Petrograd [Leningrad] University.

Birth, marriage, and death are the milestones of the beginning, middle, and end of a person’s journey through life. An Orthodox person’s beginning coincides with the sacrament of baptism, the middle with the sacrament of marriage, and the end with extreme unction. Before me stood a task: how to secretly fulfill the sacrament of marriage so that no one would suspect anything at work and that no difficulties, with possibly lethal consequences, would arise. My fiancee’s position was even more dangerous. She had been working for two years in the military section of the State Institute of Hydrology. Among the duties of my bride, a field hydrologist of the SIH, was the investigation of the western Soviet borders, for clarification of the condition of the roads, the extent of their ability to carry traffic, and the nature of vast marshes and lowlands adjacent to the western border of Belorussia. If the SIH had found out about her intentions to marry in a church, she would have been deprived of her security clearance, and she would not have been able to do field work. Not that the fact of visiting a church or attending a wedding was important for the authorities, but rather they were interested in a person’s mindset, his mood. Everything connected with the church was considered disloyal by the authorities and aroused distrust in them.

My uncle talked it over with the priest of the Lakhta church. The priest agreed to marry us and suggested that we come towards evening, when almost no people would be around. We chose the first of June 1934 as the day of our wedding.

It turned out that there was no white fabric for a bridal dress, and no one to sew it, and no gold for the wedding rings. Sweet wine, for a toast to the betrothed, could not be obtained anywhere (at that time it was known not as buying but as “obtaining.”) And I only knew of champagne from my mother’s stories. My fiancee bought, from one of her colleagues, vouchers for Torgsin [foreign goods store], where she purchased white silk. On Fontanka at Nikol’skii Lane, in a former servants’ room, lived a crippled old woman, Anna Vasil’evna. My fiancee’s sister lived