All Was Not Lost: Journey of a Russian Immigrant from Riga to Chicagoland

By Anatoly Bezkorovainy

The book is a Russian immigrant's life story, written for himself, though with the hope that others may also find it interesting (after Dr. N. I. Pirogov).  Chapter 1 begins with the family's chronicle in the Russian Empire, and how the author's parents ended up in Latvia following the Bolshevik revolution. It continues through the World War II years in Latvia, Germany and its post-war D. P. camps.  In Chapter 2, the author recollects his educational experiences in America, the usual struggles of his immigrant parents to make a new life in their adopted country, and their passage into the next world in 1975 and 1988. The next two chapters are concerned with the author’s work history as a scientist and professor of biochemistry at Rush Medical College in Chicago and elsewhere.

 

Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned with the spiritual persona of the author: his Russian ethnicity and his Orthodox faith, including history of Russian immigration and the Orthodox Church in the U. S.  The author’s interactions with these communities are reviewed, as are his attempts to defend Orthodoxy and Russia’s historical past in America’s news media via letters to the editor and publication of the Chicago Russian-American. Chapter 7 is devoted to the author’s family, i.e., life with his wife Marilyn and his sons Gregory and Alexander, plus his commentary on contemporary American society. His conservative world view, generated by his spiritual persona and behaviors of the "progressive" Soviet Union and its American followers,  are illustrated by his letters to the news media during the 1950-2000 decades.

 

The book carries a foreword by Dr. Gerasim Tikoff, a friend and retired cardiologist, and is illustrated by photographs from 19th century Russia and the author's life in Latvia, Germany and the U. S.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 22, 2008
• ISBN: 9781434364593

Anatoly Bezkorovainy

Anatoly Bezkorovainy was born in Riga, Latvia in 1935, of Russian parents, who had left Russia in the early 1920’s following the Bolshevik revolution. They were married in Riga in 1930. In 1944, the Bezkorovainys left Latvia for Germany, where, after the war, they stayed in a refugee camp, where Anatoly graduated from its Latvian elementary school, and attended a German high school.  In 1951, the family emigrated to the U.S., settling in Chicago, Illinois.    In 1953, Anatoly graduated from a Chicago public high school, then from University of Chicago in 1956.  He then entered the University of Illinois Graduate College, graduating in 1960 with a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry.  He then worked at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, then at the National Animal Disease Laboratory in Ames, Iowa.  In 1962, he became an Assistant Professor at Chicago's Rush University, where he stayed until his retirement in 2004.  There, Anatoly achieved the rank of full Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, served as an Associate Chairman of the Department and director of its educational programs. He now carries the rank of Professor Emeritus.  He is listed Marquis Who’s Who in America as a medical educator.  He has (co)authored 6 books and numerous research papers in the areas of iron metabolism, bacterial physiology and science history in Imperial Russia.  In 1992, he co-authored a book on the history of Chicago’s Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox parish.  Throughout his life, Anatoly has been a member of various Orthodox parishes and has participated in the activities of the Russian immigrant community in Chicago.   In 1964, Anatoly married Marilyn Grib.  They have two sons, Gregory and Alexander.  Anatoly and his wife live in retirement near Galena, Illinois. Occasionally, he gives lectures on biochemical topics at Rosalind Franklin University in North Chicago.

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© 2008 Anatoly Bezkorovainy. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/15/2022

ISBN: 978-1-4343-6458-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4343-6457-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4343-6459-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008901354

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

1. Russia, Latvia, and Germany

2. America

3. Employers, Responsibilities, and Colleagues

4. Scholarship and Service to the Scientific Community

5. On Being an Orthodox Christian

6. Russian Émigrés and the Ethos of Holy Russia

7. Living the American Dream

Epilogue

Acknowledgments and Permissions

FOREWORD

Woven into the fabric of American life are many vivid and unique threads of immigrant experiences. While much of this has been depicted elsewhere, Dr. Bezkorovainy’s remarkable life journey—geographic, personal, academic, and spiritual—in my view, is a noteworthy addition to the literature of the immigrant experience in the USA. He brings to this endeavor linguistic expertise (fluency in both English and Russian plus competencies in Latvian, German, and Latin), the collateral disciplines of an academic scientist and a trained attorney, as well as the beliefs of an Eastern Orthodox Christian. If one adds to these substrates an unusual degree of self reflection, a passion for life, a penchant for detail, and a treasure trove of family archival materials which have somehow been preserved despite the exigencies of war, distance, and time, we have the seeds of a unique autobiography.

While the pages herein might perhaps be enjoyed most by Dr. Bezkorovainy’s many family members, friends, and colleagues, I also believe this work has a more global appeal, even though not all may agree with some of the issues raised. Regardless of whether one subscribes to the melting pot or the salad bowl nature of the immigrant experience in our country, anyone interested in a unique account will be rewarded by partaking of the pages herein.

Gerasim Tikoff, M.D.

Emeritus Professor of Internal Medicine

Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine

Maywood, Illinois

June 28, 2007

PREFACE

When I told my brother, George, that I was planning to write an autobiographical opus, he answered by asking, who will read it? To answer this question, I will presume to borrow the following from Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov’s¹ autobiography: I am writing only for myself (1). Yet, like Pirogov, I hasten to add that I will have no objections if others read it, as well—especially my brother George. If anyone does, lectori benevolo salutem (greetings to the sympathetic reader). Having lived on this earth for over 70 years, gone through the second World War, and migrated from Eastern Europe through Germany to the US, it is time to remember and reflect on the various events and people I’ve encountered, to summarize, and to try to draw conclusions as to the meaning of it all.

I’ve lived in the US since 1951, since I was 16. I am, thus, an immigrant. I was born in Latvia of Russian parents, who left Russia after the Bolshevik coup. I, thus, grew up in a Russian home; my first language, both spoken and written, was Russian, and many people with whom I came in contact were Russian émigrés, be that in Latvia, Germany, or the US. And the one characteristic of theirs that I have always admired and appreciated was their instinct and willingness to write. This applies not only to the likes of Professor Pirogov but to simple peasants, as well. They wrote about anything and everything just because they could and wanted to, regardless of whether there was money to be made. Most of their writings were in Russian and concerning Russian themes: religion, politics, history—you name it—but especially autobiography. And that is why much of it was self-published. While I will further elaborate on this issue in Chapter 6, I do wish to mention, as a typical example, a recent (1998) book from Latvia by Dimitry Anokhin (2), who describes mostly cultural activities of the Russian minority in Latvia between the two World Wars. My father’s name appears on p. 56 as a member of the Russian Drama Theater administration. The book is essentially a history of Anokhin’s family in Latvia during its first independence of 1918-1940, published privately, most likely written by the author, by himself and for himself, though also of great interest to the descendants of people mentioned therein, like me.

So, the émigré Russian peasant and the intellectual alike had engaged copiously in writing about things near and dear to their hearts; ergo, why not me, since for the most part I shared their sentiments and their motives for writing? And throughout my adult life, I did engage in writing: scientific books, including a historical account of science in imperial Russia; multiple letters to the editor on a plethora of subjects, including matters Russian; articles in scientific publications, including articles on Russian science; and articles in the Chicago Russian-American, which I had the pleasure of editing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But this is the first opportunity that I’ve had time to write about me by myself, perhaps unashamedly motivated by sheer egoism, as per George Orwell (3). Among the differences between most Russian-émigré works and mine is that I am doing mine in English. This is so, in part, because my knowledge of the Russian language is not up to literary snuff. My formal education in a Russian school lasted all of two years, in Riga in 1942-1944. After that, it was writing in Latvian, then German, then English. To some extent, this is a reason for my intense dislike of the Soviet Union, which I have blamed for depriving me and my family of our native land, where I could have learned to write well in my native tongue and grown up without feeling guilty about who I was.

Let me elaborate on the latter point: throughout my life, I have been a foreigner in my places of residence. In Latvia, a former constituent of the Russian Empire and independent from 1918 to 1940, the Russians were a sizable minority. They were allowed to have their own primary and secondary schools (as were the Germans and Jews), and this liberal attitude persisted during the German occupation, as well (except for Jewish schools, of course). During the War, in 1944, as the Bolshevik armies were approaching my native city of Riga, our family left for Germany. There, being Latvian citizens, we lived in a Baltic Displaced Persons’ (DP) camp, where being a Krievs (Latvian for Russian) was a definite handicap and was much worse than having been a Krievs in Latvia. The German populace, to boot, often called all of us DPs die verfluechte Auslaender, the damned foreigners. So after about six years of that, we came to the United States, where things got much better, though even now, after being here for over 55 years, I am often asked, where are you from, referring to my accent, or what kind of a name is that, referring to my long Slavic last name. And so, I grew up with a minor case of an inferiority complex, with a feeling that somehow I did not belong wherever it was that I was living or going to school. Thus, being of Russian heritage and having the status of always being a foreigner were important issues in my life.

A third factor that was of great importance in my life has been my Orthodox faith, which I inherited from my forefathers. This and my Russian heritage can perhaps be combined into a single concept that some have called the ethos of Holy Russia. Lastly, my scientific training and my subsequent professional activities, in which I labored with great pleasure for many years, have greatly contributed to my mindset and the other two elements described above to fashion and shape me into this complex and admittedly peculiar persona I have become.

I have organized this volume into seven chapters plus an epilogue. The first two are chronologic accounts of my and my ancestors’ lives in Europe and America. The next two are concerned with my professional activities and may be a bit more technical than the others. For this, I apologize; however, having been in the teaching-research business for 44 years, it has been an important part of my life, and I can’t ignore it. The next two chapters deal with the US–Russian immigrant communities, their Orthodox faith, how I interacted with them, and how the idea of Holy Russia influenced their and my behaviors beyond the necessity to make a living.

My wife Marilyn has been my partner and supporter for many years, and I am much indebted to her for making my life so much more interesting and rewarding. Thus, the last chapter is devoted to our lives together since 1964, her immigrant ancestors’ background, to our extended family, and to our interaction with American society. The epilogue provides a summary of my story.

My life’s journey so far has been profoundly affected by various world events, starting with the turn of the 19th century and ending with the beginning of the 21st. Much has happened during those years, and in all chapters, I have tried to put my own and my ancestors’ life experiences into the context of world history. Along the way, I have written many letters to newspaper and magazine editors. Some have been published, others have not (especially the longer ones). Many of these are reproduced in this volume, as they may apply to the subject matter at hand.

My gratitude for invaluable assistance goes to my wife, Marilyn, who read and commented on each and every chapter of this volume; to Dr. Gerasim Tikoff for writing the foreword; to his wife and our good friend, Edie Tikoff, for suggesting the title for this book; to Vladimir Dobriakov of St. Petersburg, Russia, son of my cousin Alla Germanovna Dobriakova, for his help with our family’s genealogy; and to George Bookless of Galena, Illinois, for masterfully duplicating and enhancing my old family photos shown in Chapter 1. My son, Gregory, copyedited the manuscript. My brother, George, read my manuscript after all and made some invaluable suggestions, for which I am profoundly grateful. Every once in a while, I’ve tried to find Latin expressions that could aptly punctuate or embellish some of my passages or narratives. This I am doing as a tribute to one of my former colleagues, Dr. Ludwig Kornel (see Chapter 3), who has had a history very similar to that of mine and who is always able to quote a Latin adage to amplify practically every thought or opinion. I have always admired his ability to do so. I thank my goddaughter Elisabeth for giving me a small Russian-language book (4), from which I have extracted the sayings used herein. And so my story begins; scribere est agere (writing means acting).

References Cited

1. RUSSIA, LATVIA, AND GERMANY

The Ancestors

The Bezkorovainy (My Father’s) Clan

Following the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, my father’s niece, Olga Nikolayevna Mamotko,² of what today is the city of Korolev (Moscow region), was able to locate me in Lincolnwood, Illinois through the good offices of the International Red Cross. I was not even aware of her existence, as my father, Ignaty (Ignatius) Anatolievich Bezkorovainy, left Russia for the then-independent Latvia in 1920 to get away from the Bolsheviks. His mother, sisters, and other relatives all remained in Russia, and from that point on, little, if any, contact was made between my father and his family. I, thus, got an extensive update on living and deceased relatives on my father’s side from Olga Nikolayevna, who also supplied me with photographs I did not have, as well as some documentation and newspaper clippings. I am much indebted to her and to my other relatives, especially Alla Germanovna Dobriakova (another cousin) and her family from St. Petersburg. Much information given in this chapter also comes from the reminiscences of my father and documents that he had managed to bring with him in 1920.³

Yet, I feel a little guilty for not digging deeper (e.g., in Russian or Ukrainian archives) for more information on my ancestors, especially in view of what others have done. For instance, I was quite impressed by a book authored by John Egerton (1), who traced the origins of a Kentucky family to one John Ledford, Sr., born in 1724 in England and who came to America in 1738 at the age of 14. My narrative, on the other hand, starts about 100 years later. Maybe someday, I’ll have more, but for now, I will relate my (our) story as I have it.

The name, Bezkorovainy, is a Ukrainian name, and the origins of our family are to be sought in that region of the world. It has been spelled several other ways, e.g., Bezkaravainy, Bezkoravainy, Bezkarovainy, and then some. It seems the basic meaning of the name comes from two words: "bez, meaning without (in Russian); and karavay," a large round bread that was baked and decorated on festive occasions, especially marriage feasts. Nowadays, our name, with all its variations on the theme, can be found throughout both Russia and Ukraine. My St. Petersburg relatives tell me that my great-great-grandfather Vasily (Basil) Bezkorovainy (Figure 1-1) was the governor of Russia’s Kherson province (in today’s Ukraine) in the 1830s or 1840s and was very harsh with various types of revolutionaries. He was not well liked. He and his wife Elizaveta (Elisabeth) had several children, including Ignaty Vasilievich, my great grandfather, and Andrey Vasilievich. Andrey, in what capacity I do not know, was apparently instrumental in containing a plague or cholera epidemic in Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea, which was, at that time, located in Kherson province. He was decorated with the order of St. Ann, 4th class, for his work. Ignaty Vasilievich Bezkorovainy was a high-ranking bureaucrat in the tsar’s government with the title of deistvitel’ny tainy sovetnik. Of the 14 Russian civil service ranks, this was next to the highest (2nd). Its German equivalent would be something like Obergeheimrat. He was awarded the orders of St. Andrew, the First-Called; St. Vladimir, First Class; and St. Ann on a ribbon. Though I have documentation showing Ignaty’s high rank in the Russian civil service, exactly what he was doing I do not know for sure. It is said that he was the governor of a Siberian province or region in the Yenisey river area at one time. Other information suggests he was the director of a department dealing with the empire’s highways, waterways, and public buildings in the Ministry of Transportation. Figure 1-2 shows a photograph of Ignaty Vasilievich with his decorations. He died in 1877 and his wife Eugenia in 1886. Both are buried in the cemetery of the Novodevichy Monastery in St. Petersburg.

Ignaty Vasilievich Bezkorovainy had several children: Elizaveta (Elisabeth); Alexander, d. 1907 and Ekaterina (Catherine), d. 1885, both of whom are buried at the Novodevichy Monastery cemetery; Ivan, d. 1888, buried at the Voikovo cemetery in St. Petersburg; and Anatoly Ignatievich Bezkorovainy, my grandfather and namesake, d. 1905. My grandfather was educated in St. Petersburg’s Corps of Pages and was graduated in 1872 (see Figure 1-3 for a photo of the graduating class). Before graduating, students from this elite military academy served in ceremonial capacities with the tsar’s court wearing very distinctive uniforms, as shown in Figure 1-4. Most of the graduates went on to serve in the military; others, like my grandfather, went into civil service. The photo shown in Figure 1-3 comes from a 1912 issue of Novoye Vremya, which reported on the 40-year reunion of the 1872 Corps of Pages graduating class. It also published a photo of the still living graduates, shown in Figure 1-5. Not too many of those shown in the 1872 photo were alive in 1912.

My grandfather’s life’s journey was a rocky one. As indicated above, he went into the imperial civil service rather than the military. In a document entitled, "Formulyarny spisok o sluzhbe ..." (official list of services ...), dated April 23, 1876, he is listed as an 1872 graduate of the Corps of Pages and as having the rank of collegium secretary (10th of the 14 civil service ranks) in the Ministry of Transportation, Department of Highways and Waterways. The document also says his work was satisfactory and that, so far, he had done nothing to prevent the awarding of the order of St. Vladimir, 4th class, after 35 years of service. According to the same document and ref. 2, his parents (Ignaty and Eugenia) owned no estates but did have conditional rights (possessionnoye pravo) to some property in Siberia, which apparently contained iron mines and smelting operations. Also, gold had been discovered on that property. This conditional ownership required that industrial operations continue uninterrupted on the land (the purpose of this type of rights was to promote industry in the empire), otherwise the property would revert back to public ownership. Though Anatoly Ignatievich owned no estates, he did own several apartment buildings in St. Petersburg.

Sometime in the 1870s, I am told, my grandfather got married and, as a wedding present, gave his new wife one of his apartment buildings, which is situated on Mokhovaya street. His wife, however, soon ran off to Paris with an officer of the hussars and was not heard from thereafter. I don’t know what happened to her wedding present immediately after she left, but today, it houses a performing arts institute. In those days, it was impossible to get a divorce unless both parties had agreed thereto, and his wife was nowhere to be found. Later, grandpa apparently fell madly in love with an actress of the Mariinsky theater by the name of Maria Ilyinichna Levitskaya, my grandmother (d. 1934), whose father (Fr. Ilya or Elijah) was a priest in the city of Kungur located in the Perm province of Russia. He was of Polish nationality. Figure 1-6 shows my grandparents, probably in the early 1880s. Since they could not marry officially, they went into what we now call a common-law marriage, which resulted in the birth of several children, five of whom survived into adulthood. These included my father, Ignaty Anatolievich Bezkorovainy. He was the youngest, born in 1899, just five years before his father died. The other four were girls, Eugenia (1881-1951), Maria (1888-1961), Elizaveta (1890-1923), and Zinaida (b. 1891, d. in the 1980s). I never met any of them. Eugenia became a physician, graduating from the Bestuzhev Medical College for women, which was associated with St. Petersburg University. In the Soviet era, she was a professor of medicine at the Perm University. Since all five children were illegitimate, my grandfather proceeded to legally adopt all of them and endow them with all the rights and privileges of his status in Russian society. According to my father’s baptismal certificate (issued in 1903), he was christened in the St. Simeon church in St. Petersburg on January 27 (Julian calendar), 1900. His mother is listed as a priest’s daughter, Maria Levitskaya. His godfathers were Major General Dimitry Petrovich Zuyev (see Figures 1-3 and 1-5) and Lieut. Colonel Nikolai Mikhailovich Sulima (see Figure 1-3). Both were classmates of my grandfather’s at the Corps of Pages. His godmothers were Elizaveta Ignatievna Bezkorovainaya (my father’s aunt, i.e., daughter of my great grandfather Ignaty Vasilievich) and my father’s sister Elizaveta Anatolievna, listed as a hereditary noblewoman and daughter of my grandfather Anatoly. The same document indicates that my father was officially (by court order) adopted by my grandfather with the right to use the name Bezkorovainy and the patronymic Anatolievich. Another document, dated December 5, 1905, certifies that my father was awarded honorary citizenship by the Department of Heraldry of the Governing Senate, an appointed executive body of the empire (Appendix 1-1). Honorary citizenship was automatic for members of the nobility and their progeny and was also awarded to accomplished members of various trade and merchant classes, professors, etc. It was associated with certain rights, such as that to run and become elected to offices in various city and provincial governments.

There is very little information about the activities of my grandfather Anatoly during the last years of his life. I am told he was a bit of a playboy, loved the good life, etc. A very telling picture, Figure 1-7, shows him in the company of his cronies near the St. Petersburg race track (hippodrome). The thing that seems to have killed him was a decision of the Governing Senate, which acted as Russia’s supreme court, among other things, in regard to the properties in Siberia he had inherited from his parents, Ignaty and Eugenia. Apparently, the ore-refining operations there had ceased to function, and the land was seized and returned to public ownership as provided for by the law. My grandfather, however, maintained that income from the gold diggings still belonged to him, since gold in that area was discovered through the efforts of his mother, Eugenia, or her appointees. Figure 1-8 shows my grandfather in the company of two Chinese visitors in Tomsk, the capital of Siberia, apparently while visiting his industrial domain. He had my grandmother and their daughter, Eugenia, along with him. Having won his case in one court, then losing in another on appeal, the case finally came before the Senate, which ruled in favor of the state (2). Thus, even the nobility was not above the law in the empire, and my grandfather had to cede all his Siberian property rights back to the state.

On the death of my grandfather, my grandmother took the children, who were still with her (including my father), and moved back to her home town of Perm. There, she opened a tailoring shop and a sewing school for girls. Thusly, she supported her family. My father went to school in Perm and graduated (passed his final exams) from high school (gimnaziya) in 1919. His grades on the graduation certificate are shown in Appendix 1-2, with five being the top grade (equivalent to A) and three being satisfactory. He was pretty good in math, science, and religion, and so-so in foreign languages. According to a certificate dated November 3, 1919, he was enrolled as a student in the medical faculty of Perm University and was excused from military service (it is unclear if this was the Soviet or a White Russian regime) until he was finished with his studies. A certificate dated February 2, 1920, issued by the Soviet regime, indicates that he was leaving the university of his own free will. He left Perm for a city called Podolsk, near Moscow, where he went to work for an optical instrument plant (a branch of the Zeiss company) that had been evacuated from Riga, in today’s Latvia, during World War I. I have a magnifying glass and a compass made by that factory, which my father had brought with him to America. On August 20, 1920, in Podolsk, my father married a Latvian woman by the name of Amalia Jurgis. On their marriage certificate, Riga, Latvia is indicated as their permanent address. My father had never been to Riga, yet he managed to get a certificate from his plant’s administration that he had been employed by them in 1914 when the plant was still located in Riga. In addition, my father managed to get another certificate stating that he had been a volunteer fireman in Riga and was evacuated with all the equipment to St. Petersburg during World War I. All this was, of course, fiction and was designed to secure an exit permit from the Soviet regime for travel to the then-independent Latvia. All these certificates and attestations were stamped with official-looking seals and were signed (usually illegibly) by impressive-sounding officials. And they worked: my father, with his wife Amalia, was able to leave Russia and settle in Riga. On Amalia’s petition, the two of them were divorced in 1925 due to irreconcilable differences, and Amalia died of tuberculosis in 1927. It is not too clear why my father wanted to leave Perm and Russia so badly. He was supposedly a medical student at the Perm University and thus had a good future ahead of him, Bolshevik regime notwithstanding (doctors can do well under any regime). Nobody else in his family left Russia, as so many Russians did after the Bolshevik revolution. It is possible that he had something to do with the anti-Bolshevik forces of Admiral Kolchak, which operated in the Perm area around 1919, and that his Perm University certificates (on plain paper, with rubber stamps and illegible signatures) were forgeries. When the Soviets occupied Latvia in 1940, he was suspected of being involved in just that, and he barely escaped being deported to Siberia. Yet he never spoke about any of these things. At any rate, the Riga phase of my father’s life began in 1920 and is related in greater detail later in this chapter.

Returning, for the moment, to my father’s siblings, all four girls received good educations. Maria and Elizaveta went into the performing arts, like their mother. Maria finished the St. Petersburg Conservatory under Alexander Glazunov and became a concert pianist. Elizaveta graduated from the Imperial School of Ballet and became a ballerina at the Marinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, she had a hidden congenital heart problem, and she died of a heart attack on stage during a performance. Zinaida became a telegraphist and later participated in the Russian civil war as a communications operator with the Bolshevik Third Army. In 1920, she married one of her fellow soldiers, by the name of Leonid Katayev, who died in 1936. They had one daughter, Elena (b. 1920).

My aunt Maria Anatolievna married an operatic baritone by the name of German (Herman) Erfurt, whose father, Wilhelm Erfurt von Reichenbach, was of German nationality and his mother of Georgian. Maria and German had three children, my cousins all, Alla (b. 1915), Tamara (b. 1920), and Anatoly (1917-1919). Mr. Erfurt was drafted during World War I, during which he was wounded pretty badly and became disabled, so on his recovery, he was assigned to administer a military hospital train. During Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, he was accused of being a German spy (evidence: he had a German name), was arrested, and was executed in 1938. In fact, Mr. Erfurt was no spy. He had been a member of the nobility and an officer in the tsar’s army during World War I, and that was more than enough to warrant extermination. His family, my aunt Maria and cousins Alla and Tamara, were exiled to Siberia, where my aunt Maria was performing on the piano and teaching music, while Alla was teaching German. Alla and Tamara were allowed to return home shortly before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, just in time to catch the 900-day blockade of Leningrad. During that time, Alla Germanovna was teaching school and was in charge of a civilian firefighting unit, for which she earned several decorations. After the war, she married Vladimir Vladimirovich Dobriakov (1910-1951), a navigator in the Soviet merchant fleet before the war and a captain of a warship during the war. His ship led an attack toward Tallin, which helped break the German naval blockade of Leningrad. He returned to the merchant marine after the war but became disabled when his ship was blown up by a German mine, a relic from the war. He died soon after this mishap at the age of 41 as a result of his injuries. His wife Alla continued working as a teacher and raising their son Vladimir (b. 1948), who was only three when his father died. Today, Alla Germanovna, her sister Tamara, and Alla’s son Vladimir, with his wife Elena and their son, whom I call Vladimir Jr., reside in a very desirable section of St. Petersburg, on the banks of a little river called Moika, and only a block or two away from the Hermitage museum. A few houses away is the Pushkin museum, an apartment where Alexander Pushkin, the best-known Russian poet, lived and wrote his poetry. And a couple of blocks away is the Church on Spilled Blood, built on the spot where Alexander II was killed by leftist terrorists. Alla has retired from her teaching work, having earned many kudos for her 40+ years of service. Her son, Vladimir, a former acting director and an excellent pianist to boot, is now working for a Finnish firm as a technical director, while Vladimir Jr. is a university student. My wife Marilyn and I had the pleasure of visiting them on a couple of occasions (see Chapter 5).

Eugenia Anatolievna, my father’s sister the doctor, was the mother of my cousin Olga, who tracked me down after the fall of Soviet Union. She was married to Nikolai (Nicholas) Balakshin, who was the son of Innokenty Balakshin (a dentist) and Anna Levitskaya, sister of Maria Levitskaya, my grandmother. Thus, both my father and his sister Eugenia were first cousins of Nikolai Balakshin. As such, Eugenia and Nikolai could not be married by the Church. Yet, married they were, by going to a provincial town, where nobody knew them, Vologda, I believe (Figure 1-9). This marriage produced four offspring, my cousin Olga (the youngest, 1924-2000), Nikolai, the eldest (b. 1911), Eugene (d. 1992), and Anatoly (d. 1965). Cousin Olga’s father, Nikolai Balakshin, had a very interesting history, as related in the January 9, 1980 issue of the Kirov Pravda. His parents apparently owned a theater company, and when they were in Odessa in the late 19th century, Nikolai, a 14-year-old boy, was shanghaied by an English sailor and put to work as a deckhand on an English ship. He got away in England and spent some time in the company of English homeless boys eking out a living by hunting and gathering, as it were. Hearing Russian spoken by a group of Russian workers on a London street, he asked for their help and, thus, was returned home in 1897. After a couple of years, after he had worked as a sailor on Russian merchant ships, he was accepted as a student into a seafaring school in Rostov on Don. It seems that my grandfather, who, in his job, was associated with matters relating to rivers and seas, was able to pull some strings and get him accepted, along with his friend, George Sedov; this, according to my cousin Olga. Having finished the course, both Nikolai and Sedov worked as navigators on merchant ships, and during the Russo-Japanese war, both were drafted and commissioned as lieutenants in the Russian navy. Nikolai was assigned to Admiral Nebogatov’s squadron, his ship was sunk by the Japanese, and he was taken prisoner. After two years, he returned to Russia and resumed his naval service. Sedov was commander of a flotilla on the Amur river. After the war, both Nikolai and his friend Sedov were assigned to hydrography duties on the Arctic Ocean, and their experience in those parts gave them the idea of rediscovering the North Pole. At that time, Robert E. Peary, in 1909, was the only person who had reached it, though quite a few came close to doing so. In 1911, Sedov and Nikolai began a campaign to obtain permission and funding to mount an expedition to the pole. Permission was eventually given, albeit reluctantly, to Sedov but not to Nikolai. This version of the story was, in part, disputed by my cousin, Alla Germanovna, who said that Nikolai Balakshin was not refused permission to accompany Sedov on the North Pole discovery trek. Instead, it was Nikolai’s wife, Eugenia, who, on seeing the vessel, St. Foka (see below) that had been assigned to make that voyage, told him that he wasn’t going anywhere on a tub like that. This was around the time of the birth of their first child, Nikolai Jr. (1911), and it stands to reason that a woman, either ready to give birth or already with an infant son, would rather have her husband near her than on some ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. So Nikolai stayed and continued his service in the Russian navy throughout World War I, and during the Russian civil war, he fought on side of the Bolsheviks in a Caspian Sea flotilla commanded by Raskolnikov. He died in 1935.

George Sedov (1877-1914) became a Soviet hero. The Rostov school where he and Nikolai Balakshin studied navigation is now named the Sedov School of Seamanship. The fishing village where he was born was renamed from Kryvaya Kosa (Bended Scythe) to Sedov Settlement, and a bay in Novaya Zemlya is now named Sedov Bay. These posthumous honors were bestowed on Sedov not because he had reached the North Pole (he did not) but because the Bolsheviks wanted to highlight his difficulties with getting permission from the tsarist military (Sedov was a naval officer, after all), his love of country, and his personal heroism and perseverance. According to a manuscript (I don’t know if it was ever published anywhere) by Nikolai Nikolayevich Balakshin, Olga’s brother, who was a senior captain in the Soviet navy, Sedov encountered nothing but hostility and resistance from his superiors, the press, and the tsar himself for his quest to go to the North Pole. Nevertheless, he was able to procure a sturdy sailing/steamer vessel, named St. Foka, and financing from various private sources, plus 10,000 rubles from the personal funds of Tsar Nicholas II (that personal gift sure does not sound like hostility to me). He hired a loyal crew, a doctor, and several scientific cadres, and, with a number of dogs on board, left the port of Archangel’sk on August 28, 1912 for Franz-Josef Land. The idea was to set up a base there, come back for more supplies, then proceed to the pole. But things did not go according to plan. They couldn’t get past Novaya Zemlya because of heavy ice until after having been there one year, and then they were stuck on Franz-Josef Land for another year. Supplies became exhausted; many, including Sedov, came down with scurvy, but Sedov, as sick as he was, decided to try to reach the pole anyway, with two sailors via dog sled (24 dogs). They left on February 15, 1914, the rest of the crew staying with the ice-bound ship. Sedov died on March 5, 1914, about three kilometers from Rudolf Island. He was buried on Rudolf Island by his two companions, and his grave was not rediscovered until 1938. The two sailors made it back to the ship, which returned to Murmansk toward the end of August, 1914, after the start of World War I.

In retrospect, the Russian military was right to oppose Sedov’s venture. This was not a slam-dunk affair that could be accomplished with a wooden crate like St. Foka, as opposed to an icebreaker. There was no excuse for having scurvy on board. Prevention measures against this disease (citrus fruit) had been known for at least a century. There were no backup arrangements, and apparently no radio communications, available. There were no weather prediction methodologies or facilities along the way. Russia was not prepared to spend such a necessarily enormous resource for an expedition of dubious value in view of the looming geopolitical crises of that era. The adventure was almost guaranteed to fail. Yet Sedov’s persistence and enthusiasm were difficult to overcome, and the expedition went ahead. With all the kudos and praises for the Soviet system for allegedly acting otherwise with respect to Arctic exploration, plus demonization of Sedov’s bourgeois (private) backers and the tsar’s 10,000 rubles, one wonders if the purpose of comrade Nikolai’s article was to memorialize Sedov’s enormous, albeit foolish, courage and perseverance or, instead, to glorify the Soviet regime. Just like Chairman Mao’s Chinese communist regime that demanded expressions of fealty even in scientific publications (e.g., the little red book inspired us to perform the synthesis of ...), the Soviet Union demanded constant praises and hallelujahs from its writers. But one could get too heavy on the saccharine, as Captain Nikolai Nikolayevich Balakshin did.

I will now end this section by saying a few words about cousin Olga Nikolayevna, a remarkable lady in her own right. During World War II, she served as a radio operator in the Soviet marines. She enlisted voluntarily before she was 18 by falsifying her age. She took part in several landings in the Baltic Sea area, mostly in Finland (Finland in early World War II was a German ally and participated in the 900-day siege of Leningrad) as a diversionary measure to draw away German/Finnish troops from elsewhere on the front. Consequently, not too many of her fellow troopers came back alive. Her future husband, Alexander Mamotko (1920-1986), was one of her comrades. Both survived and were married after the war. After the war, Olga went to medical school and, like her mother, became a physician. Her first job was to take care of inhabitants on the Sakhalin and Kurile Islands. She had to travel by airplane, reindeer-drawn sled, dog-sled, and jeep to reach certain outlying areas. Eventually, she came to the Kaliningrad (now Korolev) area near Moscow, where her husband obtained a job in the rocketry industry. They had one daughter, Svetlana (b. 1945). Svetlana was married to Peter Chernorubashkin, who was associated with the Soviet navy and was stationed in the Murmansk area. After Peter’s retirement, around 1999, they moved to Korolev and came to live in Olga’s apartment.

Before her retirement, Olga’s main job involved taking care of workers in the local space technology industry, though she also took care of patients in the Fedoskino village, which is well known (along with the Palekh, Mstera, and Kholui villages) for its painted lacquered boxes. She gave me a couple of items that had been given to her by her grateful patients: a large box with a depiction of a young man wooing a young lady by a village well and a painting on wood showing a troika race. She also gave me a couple of Japanese pieces, an ivory figurine and a painted metallic box, that her father, Nikolai Balakshin, had brought back to Russia from his two-year prisoner-of-war stint in Japan in 1905-1906. My wife and I were able to visit her on our first trip to Russia in 1994, and, subsequently, she visited us twice, in 1995 and 1998. We saw her for the last time in 2000 on one of our other trips to Russia (Figure 1-10). She was not too happy with her relatives. She complained that they were locking her up in her room and were taking her money away from her. It looked as if she had acquired a bit of dementia, since all signs pointed to a very loving attitude of Svetlana toward her mother. Olga passed away in 2000 as result of a stroke about three weeks after we saw her. Peter, Svetlana’s husband, passed away soon thereafter. Vechnaya pamiat’ (memory eternal) to both.

Figure 1-11 summarizes the relationships of individuals described in the above section of this chapter.

The Solovey-Pavlichenko (My Mother’s) Clan

I know much less about the family history of my mother, Olga Aleksandrovna Bezkorovainy, nee Solovey-Pavlichenko, than of my father. She left home as a teenager and apparently never bothered to question her parents about their forbears. My aunt, Vera Aleksandrovna Kijauskas, 94 years of age as of 2006, was able to remember a few facts, such as her deceased brothers’ names, but very little beyond that. I do, however, have a few documents pertaining to this part of our history, found in my mother’s effects after her death in 1988, and they were of some help. Thus, my grandfather’s baptismal certificate indicates he was christened on April 2, 1873 (b. March 25, 1873) at St. Sergius Orthodox church in the town of Vekshni (Viekshniai), County of Shavli (Shauliai), in today’s Lithuania. At that time, of course, it was a part of the Russian Empire. He was given the name of Aleksandr (Alexander). His father was a farmer by the name of Adam Lvovich Solovey, of Orthodox faith, and his mother, Adam’s lawful wife, was Regina Ivanovna, of Roman Catholic faith. She was apparently a Lithuanian. My grandfather’s family had a farm in Lithuania, located in a small village called Ferma near the town of Viekshniai. The inhabitants of Ferma were Russians, whereas the population of Viekshniai was mixed: Lithuanians, Russians, and Jews. Tradition has it that after the third partition of Poland, during the reign of Catherine the Great in Russia (end of the 18th century), when Lithuania came under the dominion of the Russian Empire, a number of Ukrainian peasants were allocated land and settled in those parts to keep an eye on the local population. Throughout the years, and into the 1940s when my brother and I used to spend our summers on grandpa’s farm, the people of Ferma had retained their Russian character, Orthodox faith, and culture. And just like in Latvia, the three ethnic groups in that region lived peacefully with each other, until the Bolshevik and later the German invasions of the 1940s changed all that.

My grandmother, Aleksandr Adamovich’s wife, Anna Yurievna, was born on June 6, 1886 and baptized on June 18 at the Alexander Nevsky Orthodox church in the city of Vladikavkaz in the Caucasus region of Russia. Her father was Yury (George) Yurievich Alkevich, of Roman Catholic faith, and her mother was his lawful wife Anna Ivanovna, of Orthodox faith. I do not know the nationality of Yury Alkevich, but my guess is he was Lithuanian, with a name of Alkevicius. My grandfather was apparently working in the Caucasus at the time he met my grandmother; I was told that he was a representative of the Singer sewing machine company in that region. Anyway, my grandmother, Anna, and grandfather were married April 27, 1908 in the Ascension Orthodox Church in Vladikavkaz. Figure 1-12 is a photo of the two of them taken in 1908 in Vladikavkaz. An interesting aspect of the marriage document is the mention of a witness by the name of Ernest Damberg, a townsman (meshtchanin) from the city of Riga. Ernest Damberg (b. 1876) was of Baltic-German origin yet apparently of Orthodox faith, and he was married to my grandfather’s sister Elizaveta in 1902. We used to call her Auntie Lisa. Since they were already married in 1908, it is possible that Auntie Lisa was also present. Mr. Damberg (we used to call him Uncle Ernest) was a businessman, who owned various commercial enterprises, including a paper goods factory in Riga and apparently the Singer sewing machine agency in the Caucasus, for which my grandfather worked.

One year after my grandparents were married, on April 13, 1909, my mother Olga Aleksandrovna Solovey was born in Baku (in today’s Azerbaijan) and was baptized there at the Nativity of Virgin Mary Orthodox Church on April 26, 1909. The second child was my aunt Vera, now living in Phoenix, Arizona. She was born in 1912 in Vladikavkaz. It is interesting to note that Vera Aleksandrovna’s baptismal record, as well as the marriage record of my grandparents, were excerpted from the pertinent church books in 1916. The documents showed that the usual tax payment for the excerpts was waived, because my grandfather had been drafted into the army to fight the Turks in World War I. Another item that appears for the first time in my aunt Vera’s baptismal document is my grandfather’s double (hyphenated) name: Solovey-Pavlichenko. In the previous documents, i.e., his birth and marriage records and my mother’s baptismal certificate, he is listed as simply Solovey (translated: nightingale). Was there a significance to that? I don’t know, but my mother used the hyphenated last name as her maiden name in all her passports and other documents. After the two girls, two boys were born, Michael and Vladimir, both of whom died of childhood diseases during the revolution and civil war of 1917-1920. Figure 1-13 shows my grandmother with Auntie Vera, one of the boys, and my mother, taken probably in 1917 or 1918. So looking back at all of this, my mother, and, therefore, my brother and I, was part Lithuanian, she more so than her two sons. But my brother and I also have some Polish blood from our father’s grandfather, Archpriest Elijah Levitsky. Unscientifically speaking, I figure that about 2/8 of my genes are Lithuanian and 1/8 Polish and 5/8 Russian (or is it Ukrainian?). How’s that for diversity?

Following World War I and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, grandfather Aleksandr apparently joined the anti-Bolshevik forces of General Denikin. He was in charge of procuring food and other supplies for the army. After the defeat of the Whites by the Reds, he and his family did not evacuate to Crimea, as most of his comrades did, because one or both of the boys were ill. The boys passed away, and my grandparents, with the two girls, traveled to Moscow, where they remained for a number of years. It was not clear how grandpa escaped being arrested (or worse) by the Bolsheviks. But he somehow did escape their attention and stayed underground, so to speak, while in Moscow. His wife, on the other hand, was working as a manager of a children’s home, so her daughters had enough to eat most of the time. I was told that one day in Moscow, in the early 1920s, my grandmother saw Mr. Ernest Damberg on the street. Mr. Damberg, it turned out, had become commercial attaché of the Latvian legation in Moscow, and he managed to get my grandmother and the girls out of Russia and to Viekshniai in Lithuania in 1925, where grandpa had his farm. How grandpa got there, I do not know, but it must have been an interesting story. Shown in Appendix 1-3 is my grandmother’s foreign passport, issued by the Soviets and showing her and the two girls on the photograph. Grandpa is conspicuously absent. The passport contains a transit visa from the Latvians and says that their destination is Viekshniai, Lithuania. So, in 1925, my grandparents settled on their farm in Viekshniai and remained there until they passed on. My grandfather died in 1961 and my grandmother in 1979. Their land was, of course, expropriated and assigned to a collective farm following the Bolshevik takeover of Lithuania in 1945, though they were allowed to keep their house and orchard. They were receiving a small pension from the government, which my mother supplemented by sending packages with various items (e.g., fabric) that they could sell. Figure 1-14 shows my grandparents in 1956 in their front yard. It is ironic that my grandmother, before her death, wrote a will, properly sealed and delivered, leaving her house and orchard to my mother and Aunt Vera. Officially, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, my brother and I could now claim half of my grandparents’ farm. Neither my mother had nor my brother and I have any intention of doing so. I believe that Sasha Solovey’s widow (see below) or their descendants now reside in that house. They are more than welcome to it.

As far as the two girls were concerned, they did not stay on the farm but left for Riga to live under the wing of Elizaveta Adamovna Damberg, their aunt. Figure 1-15 shows the two sisters in 1926. The Dambergs were well to do, they owned several apartment buildings in Riga, as well as Uncle Ernest’s paper goods factory, and they even owned a car (a Fiat). My mother was 16 and her sister, Vera, was 13 when they left for Riga; both went to middle schools and stayed with Auntie Lisa, whose photo is shown in Figure 1-16. It was taken in 1932, apparently in connection with a costume party. In 1927, after finishing her middle school, my mother became an apprentice-hairdresser in Mr. Gustav Intenberg’s beauty salon in Riga. In 1929, she finished her apprenticeship and remained to work in Mr. Intenberg’s shop until 1933, when she switched her employment to the Klemy beauty salon. She remained there until our departure for Germany in 1944. My mother’s sister continued her education in a Russian-language gimnaziya, and after graduation, she met and married a Lithuanian man by the name of Jonas (John) Kijauskas. The couple settled in Kaunas, Lithuania, where Mr. Kijauskas was apparently the owner of a movie theater and some other properties. We later called him, a la Anton Chekhov’s character, Uncle Vanya. In 1939, they had a daughter, named Eleanor, Nora for short. Both cousin Nora and my brother and I spent two or three summers in the early 1940s on our grandfather’s farm in Viekshniai. And otherwise, as well, the fates of our two families were very similar: on the approach of the Bolshevik armies in 1944, both families left for Germany, where we lived not too far from each other most of the time, and, later, both families went to the US, settling in Chicago. Unfortunately, Auntie Vera and Uncle Vanya were divorced, Auntie Vera, with her daughter Nora, moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where they now live, and Uncle Vanya got re-married. He died in 1976 at the age of 80. He was an exceptionally kind and generous man, and I liked him very much.

The Damberg family also ended up in Germany after World War II. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty was signed in 1939 and Eastern Europe was divided between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, all Baltic Germans were given the opportunity to leave the Baltic states for Germany. This was called repatriation of the Volksdeutsche, as they were known in Germany. Most if not all left, of course; who would want to stay in the Soviet Union? They numbered about 750,000 (3, p. 132). They were resettled in various parts of Germany and other German-occupied countries. Mr. Damberg’s family was given quarters and provided with an opportunity to reopen his paper goods factory in Lodz (renamed Litmannstadt) in German-occupied Poland. Their daughter, Natalie, married a German fellow by the name of Otto Oehmcke. They had a daughter, Victoria, who eventually became a medical nurse. As the Bolshevik armies were closing in on Polish cities toward the end of World War II, the Dambergs moved into Germany proper toward the end of 1944: first to Chemnitz, where we lived (see below), and then to Neuenmarkt in Bavaria, where we all moved after we were bombed out of Chemnitz. After the war, Natalie and her family ended up in Lueneburg, a town near Hamburg, while the rest of us landed in the German province of Schleswig-Holstein: my family in Eutin and the Dambergs in Luebeck. Figure 1-17 shows the Damberg family in Luebeck in 1957. Auntie Lisa died in 1958, and Uncle Ernest died in the late 1960s. He was over 90 years old when he passed on. My mother corresponded with him well into the 1960s. There were numerous other relatives of both my maternal grandfather and grandmother remaining in Russia and Lithuania, but I have information on only one family: Alexander (Sasha) and Maria (Manya) Solovey.

Sasha Solovey was my grandfather’s nephew, son of his brother. He and his wife were my grandparents’ neighbors and looked after them while they were alive, especially my grandmother, who was bedridden for most of the two years before she died. Sasha was a very religious man. In his correspondence with my mother, he always had quotes from the New Testament or excerpts from other religious texts. No greeting cards with religious motifs could be had in the Soviet Union, but that didn’t stop Sasha: he made his own, samizdat cards, so to speak. Figure 1-18 shows Sasha and Manya at my grandparents’ graves after the passing of my grandmother. Sasha passed away in the 1980s.

Life in Independent and Occupied Latvia

Exodus From Russia After the Bolshevik Coup

Both my father and mother were displaced Russians, as were so many of their brethren following the Bolshevik revolution. According to Gilbert (3, p. 107), over a million Russians fled Bolshevik rule in Russia after the revolution and the subsequent civil war. Other estimates place the total number at more