Razumikhina, the daughter of a railway engineer and a distant relative, who was then studying medicine in St Petersburg. The couple bought a large and comfortable wooden house in the elite dacha resort of Olgino on the Gulf of Finland near St Petersburg. Three daughters were born: Veronika in 1912, Valentina in 1915 and Yevgeniia in 1922. It was a close and intimate family. As a father, Yevgeniia recalls, Pavel was ‘attentive, patient and loving’, and at Olgino they ‘lived a happy life, with music, painting and evenings of reading as a family’. There were long summer walks, and lazy meals that were beautifully prepared by the nanny Annushka, who had nursed Zina as a child. The Vittenburgs were often joined by artists and writers, like the famous children’s writer Kornei Chukovsky, who spent several summers at their house. This Chekhovian existence continued throughout the 1920s.

The Vittenburgs were driven by a strong ethos of public service, which was almost the defining feature of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia. After 1917, Zina used her medical training to set up a hospital in the neighbouring town of Lakhta, where she treated patients free of charge. Pavel, elected chairman of the Lakhta Council in 1917, organized a school to teach technology to children of the labouring poor. ‘He was always working,’ Yevgeniia recalls. ‘If he was not writing, he was planning explorations for the Polar Commission or organizing papers for the Geological Museum. He was always doing something and rarely could relax.’ Pavel was committed to the cause of polar exploration and geology, then still in its infancy, in which the Soviet Union led the world. Polar explorers were portrayed as heroes in Soviet books and films, and during the 1920s, the Soviet government invested a large share of its scientific budget in geological surveys of potential mining operations in the Arctic zone. Pavel was not interested in politics but he welcomed the attention from the Soviet regime and the opportunity it gave him to pursue his science in an organized and disciplined environment. ‘The past ten years have been a heroic period of polar exploration,’ Pavel wrote in 1927, shortly before leaving Olgino to carry out a survey of the gold-fields at Kolyma. ‘The future promises even greater achievements.’91

The Vittenburg family at Olgino, 1925

Another elite couple who adapted to Soviet conditions in this way were the parents of the writer Konstantin Simonov, who stands at the centre of this book. Simonov was another child of 1917. His mother Aleksandra descended from the Obolenskys, a grand and ancient clan of princely bureaucrats and landowners, who occupied a prominent position in the Imperial system, although her father Leonid, like many noblemen, had entered commerce in the 1870s. Born in 1890, and a graduate of the Smolny Institute, Aleksandra was a woman of the ‘old order’, whose aristocratic attitudes were frequently at odds with Soviet ways. Tall and imposing, ‘Alinka’, as she was known within the family, had old-fashioned notions of ‘correct behaviour’ – rules of conduct she passed down to her son, who was well known for his gentlemanly manners throughout his life (even at the height of his career in the Stalinist establishment). Alinka expected people to be courteous, especially to women, loyal to their friends and constant in their principles. She was ‘a pedagogue’, recalls her grandson, and ‘never tired of telling other people how they should behave’.92

In 1914, Aleksandra married Mikhail Simonov, a colonel of the General Staff who was almost twice her age, and a year later Konstantin was born.* An expert on military fortifications, Mikhail fought in Poland in the First World War, rising to become a general-major in the Fifth Army and the chief of staff of the 4th Army Corps. In 1917, he disappeared. For the next four years, Aleksandra did not hear from Mikhail, who was, it seems, in Poland on some secret mission that prevented him from making contact with his family in Soviet Russia. Perhaps he joined the Polish Army, or possibly the Whites, with whom the Poles were allied in the Russian Civil War. In any case he was reluctant to return to Russia, where his status as a tsarist general, if not as a counter-revolutionary, might well lead, at the very least, to his arrest by the Bolsheviks. It is unclear how much Aleksandra knew about the activities of her husband. Whatever she knew, she concealed it from her son, no doubt to protect his interests. In 1921, Mikhail wrote to Aleksandra from Poland. He begged her to come with their son and live with him in Warsaw, where he had become a Polish citizen. Aleksandra could not make up her mind what to do. She took seriously her marriage vows, and Mikhail was gravely ill. But in the end she was too much of a patriot to leave Russia. ‘My mother reacted with sad incomprehension to the Russian post-revolutionary emigration, even though she had friends and relatives who had fled abroad,’ recalled Simonov in later years. ‘She simply could not understand how it was possible to leave Russia.’93

Aleksandra joined the army of young women from noble and bourgeois families who worked as typists, accountants and translators in the offices of the new Soviet government. In the autumn of 1918, she was evicted from her apartment in Petrograd. It was the height of the Red Terror, the Bolshevik campaign against the old elites, when ‘former people’ like the Obolenskys, ruined nobles and members of the ‘bourgeoisie’ were kicked out of their homes and stripped of all their property, put to work in labour teams, or arrested and imprisoned by the Cheka as ‘hostages’ in the Civil War against the Whites. After many months of unsuccessful petitioning to the Soviet, Aleksandra and the boy Konstantin left Petrograd for Riazan, 200 kilometres south-east of the Soviet capital, where they lived with Aleksandra’s older sister Liudmila, the widow of an artillery captain killed during the First World War, whose regiment was based in the Riazan garrison. They were among the millions of urban-dwellers who fled the hungry cities in the Civil War to be closer to supplies of food.94

Riazan was a town of about 40,000 residents in the early 1920s. One of its main institutions was the Military School, established by the Bolsheviks to train commanders for the Red Army in the Civil War. Among its staff was Aleksandr Ivanishev, a colonel in the tsarist army, wounded twice (and three times the victim of a poison-gas attack) in the First World War, who had been enrolled by Trotsky in the Red Army as a commander. Aleksandra married Ivanishev in 1921. For a daughter of the elite Obolensky clan, it was no doubt a case of marrying down: Aleksandr was the son of a humble railway worker. But Aleksandra had fallen on hard times and in her husband’s military ethos she found a reflection of the principles of her own noble class, not least its ideals of public service, from which, it seems, she took some comfort in these uncertain circumstances.95

Aleksandr was a consummate ‘military man’ – punctual, conscientious, orderly and strictly disciplined – although kind and gentle-hearted in nature. He ran the household in Riazan like a regiment, recalls Konstantin:

Our family lived in the officers’ barracks. We were surrounded by military personnel, and the military way of life ruled our every step. The morning and evening parades took place on the square in front of our house. Mother was involved in various army committees with the other wives of officers. When guests came to our house the talk was always about the army. In the evenings my stepfather drew up plans for military exercises. Sometimes I helped him. Discipline in the family was strict, purely military. Everything was planned by the hour, with orders given to the .00. You could not be late. You could not refuse a task. You had to learn to hold your tongue. Even the smallest lie was strictly frowned upon. In accordance with their service ethic, my mother and father introduced a strict division of labour in our home. From the age of six or seven, I was burdened with more and more responsibilities. I dusted, washed the floor, helped wash the dishes, cleaned the potatoes, took care of the kerosene and fetched the bread and milk.96

This upbringing had a crucial influence on Simonov. The military values which he assimilated as a child (‘obedience and conscientiousness, a readiness to overcome all obstacles, the imperative to say “yes” or “no”, to love strongly, and to hate as well’, as he himself defined these qualities) prepared him to embrace the quasi- military Soviet system of political command in the 1930s and 1940s.

At thirteen years I knew:

That what is said is meant.

Yes is yes. No is no.

To argue is in vain.

I knew the meaning of duty.

I knew what sacrifices were.

I knew what courage could achieve,

There is no mercy for cowardice!

(From ‘Father’, 1956)97

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