with her husband and daughter in the same apartment. Anna Vasil’evna was a parishioner of the Nikol’skii Cathedral and later arranged the baptismal of our daughter there. She lived without a pension, without charity, sewing clothes for acquaintances probably for money, cleaned the church, and looked after children.
Electricity was expensive for her, so she managed with a kerosene lamp (and she was not the only one in Petrograd). This Anna Vasil’evna also agreed to sew a wedding dress for my fiancee. Gold for the wedding rings was gath-
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ered: grandmother Brovtsyn’s old ring, taken form her hand a year ago at her funeral; old dental crowns, and fragments of yet another grandmother’s ring. We were afraid to go to a jeweler’s shop, but there, fortunately, they did not ask for last names and they did not steal the gold. We received beautiful rings. My wife still wears her ring to this day, but I exchanged mine for one-and-a-half kilos of meat from a woman who lived in the forests beyond Lakhta during the siege [of Leningrad].
Finally, my mother bought a sweet wine for entertaining after the wedding, white bread (at that time we ate only gray or black bread) and a little bit of ham at the Torgsin. There, over the course of several years, we had an account. It was money remitted by a New York insurance agency in gold rubles for my father’s policy, which the Soviet government, fortunately for us, won through a lawsuit in the interests of Russian pre-revolutionary investors and, largely, in its own interests. We were given half (in fact, I think even less). From this half, which was divided again in half, we received some three hundred gold rubles on account at Torgsin and three hundred in Soviet money.
The account of three hundred gold rubles at Torgsin was at that time enormous capital. Until the end of its existence in 1936, Torgsin sold groceries and materials according to the prices of 1914. Our family lived for four years on little extras of groceries from Torgsin. Otherwise, we would have been starving.
Toward the evening of June 1, everyone gathered together in the two-room apartment at Lakhta, in the home of Nastas’ia Vasil’evna Gardner: my mother, uncle, sister, who at that time was still a schoolgirl, Elizaveta Ivanovna Shliakova and Aleksei Andreevich Kruglov. Kruglov was a tenant of our Petrograd apartment, a wonderful person in many respects, senior lecturer at the department of organic chemistry of Petrograd University, a brilliantly talented man of the people. We knew him for years, but he never told us where he was from by birth. He probably had good reasons. Most likely he was of well-to-do peasants; the so-called “dekulakized” ones. I remember the enthusiasm with which he mocked Stalin, assuring us that after the title “Sun of All the Land and Workers of the World,” the Caucasus mountain-man would proclaim himself emperor of the Russian proletariat and all adjoining lands. Kruglov always recounted the latest political jokes, as did Elizaveta Ivanovna.
The time came to go through the forest from Nastas’ia Vasil’evna Gardner’s home to the church. We separated into two parties. One went to the seashore, then along the gulf and there turned through the forest in the direction of the church. The other went to the church straight from the Gardner home through the forest. It was a quiet, bright, northern evening. Motionless, thin clouds stood over the gulf. Water splashed barely audibly on the sandy
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shore. At nine in the evening we, my mother, my fiancee and I, and my sister, carefully opened the church doors and entered. The priest was already waiting for us. Kruglov, Elizaveta Ivanovna and my uncle arrived after a few minutes. The priest turned the key in the lock.
On the outside, the church had been covered by boards, painted in a dark green color, and was hardly noticeable among the greenery. The church did not have regular services, but religious rites were conducted there. The priest asked us to show our certificate from the registry office (department of registry of civic status). We did not have it. Then the priest asked us to register immediately after the ceremony. I promised, but I never fulfilled my promise.
The priest married us as in days of old: my uncle held a crown over my head, and Aleksei Andreevich Kruglov held one over my fiancee’s head. Several candles burned; the evening light of the northern sun still made its way through the stained glass of the church windows. The wedding ceremony is on the whole not long, and here, under the circumstances, the priest hurried. He put the rings on our fingers, congratulated us. And we quietly set out through the woods to the Lakhta home of Nastas’ia Vasil’evna Gardner. Now it was possible for everyone to walk together, no one would ask where we were coming from, and even if someone did ask, then after all, everyone had the right to head towards their own home, even under the new regime. At the dacha a wedding feast had been prepared for seven people. On the table was sweet wine from Torgsin, ham, white bread, and pastries.
Several days later I left on an expedition to Iakutsk, for the Ministry of Water Transport, and my wife—to a frontier region of the Ukraine.
Tat’iana Fesenko, Internal Dissenter
Tat’iana Fesenko (1915–1995) was born in Kiev before the Revolution into a family of that city’s intelligentsia. Her father was an engineer and a professor of chemistry who had been educated in Germany before World War I. She was a young girl when the Soviet Union was established and matured with a twin sensibility. She was a student at Kiev University completing an advanced degree in Russian literature when World War II began. During the war she was a refugee and subsequently came to the United States. Taken from her memoir
Luckily, I belong to the category of “working intelligentsia” and can get into an institution of higher education in the third round. I prepare earnestly for entry in the next year, hoping to obtain permission from the People’s Commissariat of Education to take the competitive examinations at age seventeen instead of eighteen. Simultaneously, taking advantage of Kolia’s absence, occasioned by practical training near Odessa, I hurriedly try to look prettier for my beloved’s arrival. But where should I begin? Of course, the weakest spot is my nose. It is by no means classical in form, and worst of all, covered with freckles. In my dreams I already visualize it as being of white marble, totally irresistible, but the reality is substantially worse. Because of an ignorant and overzealous application of hydrogen peroxide, my nose swelled up, became red, and the skin hung in shreds. And the freckles didn’t even think of disappearing. They sat like firmly hammered copper nails. As it became clear many years later, Kolia [diminutive of Nikolai] did not even notice them.
How quickly the heart beats on this happy early autumn day when the gate will bang and our old dog will bark furiously. Then, he’ll quiet down, and gently squealing, run up to the guest, humbly look at me with his blackthorn
