The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

I and the companions of my childhood years were not destiny’s favorites. Rather, we were its stepchildren. My life in my father’s house was no better and generally not much worse than the lives of my peers.

My father was born into a family of serfs and as a boy helped his elders in all the common peasant labors. Even in deep old age he loved to show off his skill at mowing. And he did mow like a master. But his father, my grandfather (whom I, the youngest, had never seen), upon gaining his freedom made a firm decision to free his son from the onerous fate of a peasant. So my father was sent away to a district four-year vocational school. Having successfully finished the course of study, he received grandfather’s blessing to enter the tsar’s service, in an extremely responsible position yet, that of a junior assistant to the clerk of the district treasury. Beginning with that, he slowly, gradually and patiently rose up the ladder of the service hierarchy to clerk, head clerk, aide to the manager, bookkeeper, manager, and finally at the age of forty, district treasurer, the highest pinnacle of his service anthill.

In parallel to his responsibilities he ascended the Table of Ranks. He dreamt of receiving the Order of St. Vladimir, which would have made him a squire of the gentry. And he did achieve it along with the rank of Collegiate Counselor, which upon retirement was reduced to State Counselor and thus kept him from being addressed as “your excellency.”

By all the signs, he married successfully and happily. The only meaningful memories of our mother were preserved only by the eldest of us, Vladimir, who was ten when she died. I was the youngest and last. Some of mother’s favorite books were preserved after her death. They revealed her to be unusually cultivated for our backwater. These books belonged to the vanguard literature of her time, the sixties and early 1870’s. There were also copies The Russian Word, The Cause, The Spark and an occasional issue of Herzen’s The Bell [politically progressive or radical publications].

Once I found an item which our stepmother accidentally left on the table, but I was too young to appreciate it. It was, as I later understood, a traditional old album of the kind common in Pushkin’s time. I was struck by its unusual calligraphy which could have only been produced by a soft goose quill of earlier days, with its exquisite alternation of fine lines and bold strokes, with its dandyish and ornate signatures, some of which were works of art in their own right.

My eldest brother and sister later revealed that they had found evidence of mother’s familiarity with literature in the album. But the album was not in our hands for long. Our stepmother noticed its disappearance and grew very angry when she found us poring over it. She took it away from us and we never saw it again.

My father’s level of education was not very high. However, in a provincial backwater he stood out above the average. In his forties, as I remember him

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Chapter One

best, he was the “soul of society” in the full meaning of that phrase. He was expansive in nature, hospitable and good-natured. He loved to receive and entertain guests, and many people seeing a “light in his window” would drop by, seeking comfort and relief from their cares. He was accomplished and agile with a billiard cue, a hunting rifle, and the fishing rod. He was considered a professor of whist and “preference” [a card game generically similar to whist and bridge].

In societal issues, he had not advanced very far. But he was absolutely firm on one issue: land ultimately was to be turned over to the peasants, for they were the true children of the earth with true filial love. The gentry was on the land for vain and self-indulgent reasons. They defiled the land, making it a means of oppressing the peasant. They stuck out between the peasant and the land as superfluous and useless, and getting rid of them would constitute a venerable act. It was clear that this attitude was deeply seated in his consciousness, ingested with the milk of his mother, showing the imprint of his rural origin. He never covered up the deficiencies of his education nor his lack of good manners and all that which was considered good breeding. He loved to repeat—whether from a sense of self-abasement or from plebeian pride—that he was “a peasant, a peasant born, and would die a peasant.”