Yuri's Biography in His Own Words
January 28, 2023
I found several chapters of a memoir that Yuri started to write a while ago. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1.
I was born on the last hour of December 31, 1950, in Hospital number 3 in Kazan, the capital of the Tatar Soviet Socialist Autonomous Republic. Kazan was one of the biggest cities in the USSR in the 1950s, with over a million people of over fifty nationalities on the banks of the Volga River. My grandmother Marina was a medical doctor and a Division director at the Infectious Diseases Hospital. My mother, Olga, was a professor of microbiology, and my father, Nikolai, was a professor of biophysics at Kazan State University. Both were medical doctors who practiced medicine for a while but withdrew into research and teaching as Soviet socialized medicine, especially in the rural heartland, was a constant struggle for supplies and survival.
My birth started a life of surviving the improbable. My first problem, which I was unaware of until much later, was created immediately upon my delivery: I was registered as born in 1950, so I had already halved my chances of getting into the university and doubled my chances of ending up In the Soviet Army instead.
During my first years, I was in the bliss of ignorance about life's possible unpleasant surprises. I spent happy days in a cozy cocoon of love and comfort from my babushkas, parents, and nannies.
Our family lived in a spacious seven-room apartment in downtown Kazan on the second floor of a solid brick building built by a wealthy Tatar merchant for his family just before the Revolution. This merchant was lucky enough to escape the Red Terror with his big family and ended up in Turkey. His building was confiscated and turned into 38 mostly communal rooms with shared kitchens and tiny apartments populated by people of various ways and means.
Our family occupied the best apartment on the second floor, with a view of the Bulak River and the enormous Stalinist building of the Kazan Pedagogical Institute across the river. We were on the top of the building's hierarchy, inhabiting the most space, and belonging to, if not privileged, but respected medical class. Babushka Marina was also a recognized matriarch of the family who cared for all of us.
My parents worked, and so did my babushkas. The family could afford to hire me a nanny instead of sending me to the State-run day nursery. Most of these were known for neglect and disease. I was too young to remember all my nannies, but two really impressed my childhood - Paulina and Sophia Alexandrovna.
Paulina came from a peasant family who, like most peasant families in the USSR, lived in what we in America would consider dire penury. As they did not know better, they were pretty content with living in a picturesque rural setting in a shack together with animals, which were taken in the house during cold winters. They also had a small plot of land, which provided the family with basic staples like potatoes, cabbage, and beets. My beloved nanny Paulina represented the best of Russian peasantry - she treated my caprice with eternal endurance, always with a smile, always listening more than talking, suggesting rather than commandeering.
Her project was a success; after working for my family for about a year, she met a young man discharged from the army and married him both for love and a residence permit. She quit the dubious pleasure of being my nanny when I was five and joined the proletarian masses by getting hired by some factory. Paulina developed a real bondage with my family and me. She would often stop by our apartment for a cup of tea or a meal with my babushkas, ask me about my explorations and achievements, and talk about her family and factory life.
At this time, I already had another nanny - Sophia Alexandrovna, who my desperate family hired to take care of me, desperate in the sense that they could not handle me by themselves and could not find anybody else but Sophia Alexandrovna.
Sophia Alexandrovna, in another life, Princess Sophia Dzhavadova was in her sixties, a worn-out splinter of an illustrious empire. Married at 18 for just half a year to a brilliant Georgian Prince Mikhail Dovgadze, who Bolsheviks shot in 1918, she went through all "circles of hell."
Her real life ended at 25 after her voluntary return from emigration to France as she felt lonely and out of touch with French society; it was a grave mistake. Upon return, her life turned into a grim sequence of rape, humiliation, torture, and harassment. Like Solzhenitsyn, she went through numerous Gulags and exiles. She taught French in a small village school after "rehabilitation" during the Khrushchev's "thaw." Then she led the miserable life of a Soviet pensioner living in a small cubicle in a shared apartment with people who hated her with all the fervor of the truly proletarian class hatred.
She was a great nanny - telling stories about life as she knew it so long ago that she was unsure whether it was reality or a dream. She was the first to talk to me about God, patiently answering all my irreverent questions. She told me about her life in Paris in the 1920s but never about her hardships and humiliation.
One thing which impressed me greatly at that time was her telling me that she was so afraid of death and loved living, seeing the sunshine in the morning and feeling the freshness of the air in March. She looked strange in her self-sewn clothes, covered with self-made beets-based make-up produced during long lonesome evenings; no TVs and tickets to philharmonic or movie theaters were out of reach for her meager pension.When people laughed at her for the peculiar pretentious of her style, they didn't realize that she had a lot of taste that she could never accommodate on her meager income, coupled with drab and gray choices and pervasive shortages of almost everything in Soviet stores.
Sophia Alexandrovna was the first genuinely religious person that I met. She regularly attended the church and had a little altar with icons and a small burning icon lamp. Even then, under Khrushchev's "thawing" reforms, being religious and attending the church was a mortal sin from the government's point of view. Even my loving and caring babushkas were cautious about having her in our house and talking to me about Sophia Alexandrovna; they remembered only too well what could happen to people harboring class enemies.
I was born on the last hour of December 31, 1950, in Hospital number 3 in Kazan, the capital of the Tatar Soviet Socialist Autonomous Republic. Kazan was one of the biggest cities in the USSR in the 1950s, with over a million people of over fifty nationalities on the banks of the Volga River. My grandmother Marina was a medical doctor and a Division director at the Infectious Diseases Hospital. My mother, Olga, was a professor of microbiology, and my father, Nikolai, was a professor of biophysics at Kazan State University. Both were medical doctors who practiced medicine for a while but withdrew into research and teaching as Soviet socialized medicine, especially in the rural heartland, was a constant struggle for supplies and survival.
My birth started a life of surviving the improbable. My first problem, which I was unaware of until much later, was created immediately upon my delivery: I was registered as born in 1950, so I had already halved my chances of getting into the university and doubled my chances of ending up In the Soviet Army instead.
During my first years, I was in the bliss of ignorance about life's possible unpleasant surprises. I spent happy days in a cozy cocoon of love and comfort from my babushkas, parents, and nannies.
Our family lived in a spacious seven-room apartment in downtown Kazan on the second floor of a solid brick building built by a wealthy Tatar merchant for his family just before the Revolution. This merchant was lucky enough to escape the Red Terror with his big family and ended up in Turkey. His building was confiscated and turned into 38 mostly communal rooms with shared kitchens and tiny apartments populated by people of various ways and means.
Our family occupied the best apartment on the second floor, with a view of the Bulak River and the enormous Stalinist building of the Kazan Pedagogical Institute across the river. We were on the top of the building's hierarchy, inhabiting the most space, and belonging to, if not privileged, but respected medical class. Babushka Marina was also a recognized matriarch of the family who cared for all of us.
My parents worked, and so did my babushkas. The family could afford to hire me a nanny instead of sending me to the State-run day nursery. Most of these were known for neglect and disease. I was too young to remember all my nannies, but two really impressed my childhood - Paulina and Sophia Alexandrovna.
Paulina came from a peasant family who, like most peasant families in the USSR, lived in what we in America would consider dire penury. As they did not know better, they were pretty content with living in a picturesque rural setting in a shack together with animals, which were taken in the house during cold winters. They also had a small plot of land, which provided the family with basic staples like potatoes, cabbage, and beets. My beloved nanny Paulina represented the best of Russian peasantry - she treated my caprice with eternal endurance, always with a smile, always listening more than talking, suggesting rather than commandeering.
Her project was a success; after working for my family for about a year, she met a young man discharged from the army and married him both for love and a residence permit. She quit the dubious pleasure of being my nanny when I was five and joined the proletarian masses by getting hired by some factory. Paulina developed a real bondage with my family and me. She would often stop by our apartment for a cup of tea or a meal with my babushkas, ask me about my explorations and achievements, and talk about her family and factory life.
At this time, I already had another nanny - Sophia Alexandrovna, who my desperate family hired to take care of me, desperate in the sense that they could not handle me by themselves and could not find anybody else but Sophia Alexandrovna.
Sophia Alexandrovna, in another life, Princess Sophia Dzhavadova was in her sixties, a worn-out splinter of an illustrious empire. Married at 18 for just half a year to a brilliant Georgian Prince Mikhail Dovgadze, who Bolsheviks shot in 1918, she went through all "circles of hell."
Her real life ended at 25 after her voluntary return from emigration to France as she felt lonely and out of touch with French society; it was a grave mistake. Upon return, her life turned into a grim sequence of rape, humiliation, torture, and harassment. Like Solzhenitsyn, she went through numerous Gulags and exiles. She taught French in a small village school after "rehabilitation" during the Khrushchev's "thaw." Then she led the miserable life of a Soviet pensioner living in a small cubicle in a shared apartment with people who hated her with all the fervor of the truly proletarian class hatred.
She was a great nanny - telling stories about life as she knew it so long ago that she was unsure whether it was reality or a dream. She was the first to talk to me about God, patiently answering all my irreverent questions. She told me about her life in Paris in the 1920s but never about her hardships and humiliation.
One thing which impressed me greatly at that time was her telling me that she was so afraid of death and loved living, seeing the sunshine in the morning and feeling the freshness of the air in March. She looked strange in her self-sewn clothes, covered with self-made beets-based make-up produced during long lonesome evenings; no TVs and tickets to philharmonic or movie theaters were out of reach for her meager pension.When people laughed at her for the peculiar pretentious of her style, they didn't realize that she had a lot of taste that she could never accommodate on her meager income, coupled with drab and gray choices and pervasive shortages of almost everything in Soviet stores.
Sophia Alexandrovna was the first genuinely religious person that I met. She regularly attended the church and had a little altar with icons and a small burning icon lamp. Even then, under Khrushchev's "thawing" reforms, being religious and attending the church was a mortal sin from the government's point of view. Even my loving and caring babushkas were cautious about having her in our house and talking to me about Sophia Alexandrovna; they remembered only too well what could happen to people harboring class enemies.