The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

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 fiancée’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 fiancée 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 fiancée’s sister lived 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 fiancée. Gold for the wedding rings was gath-

B. Brovtsyn, Dearly Beloved

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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].