CHAPTER ONE

Echoes of a Native Land
Two Centuries of a Russian Village

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By SERGE SCHMEMANN
Alfred A. Knopf

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A Corner of Russia

This is the story of a Russian village, known at different times over its three centuries of recorded history as Goryainovo, Karovo, Sergiyevskoye, and now Koltsovo. It lies by the Oka River in the ancient Russian heartland, 90 miles south of Moscow, near the city of Kaluga. It is a village to which I was originally drawn because before the Russian Revolution it had been part of an estate owned by my mother's family. But the Soviet government's long refusal to let me go there turned my curiosity into a mission. I finally reached Koltsovo only when Communist rule began to wane. I came to know the people; I immersed myself in the local lore; I even bought a log house there. Koltsovo became my little corner of Russia-my entry into the charm, beauty, and romance of that vast northern land, and also its backwardness, cruelty, and suffering.

I first arrived in Russia with my family in 1980, but ten years passed before I reached the village. By then the stern ideological taboos of the Soviet era were lifting, and people in the village were starting to lose their fear of talking to foreigners. Gradually, they opened up their memories and their history: how the women fooled the German occupiers who wanted to chop down the stately larches of the Alley of Love, how the old drunk Prokhor Fomichyov took the church apart after the war to trade bricks for vodka. Some went further back and remembered how in the thirties the Bolsheviks sent industrious peasants into exile and herded the rest into collectives. A retired teacher even remembered how before the revolution the peasants would stop to listen to the great "silver bell" at the church, and how village girls would gape at the bows and smocks of the young mistresses on their way to Sunday worship. The people talked about the present, too-about how youths left the village as soon as they finished school, and only the old people and the drunks stayed on; how the love child of the albino accountant was beaten to death by his son in a drunken brawl; how nobody knew what to make of the new "democracy"; how the collective farm was selling off cattle to pay off its mounting debts while the director built himself a big new house.

The first person I met in the village was Lev Vasilievich Savitsky, the retired head of an orphanage that had operated there after the war, and a staunch Communist. He told me how a KGB agent had come out there a few years earlier because some foreign correspondent was trying to visit Koltsovo, claiming that his ancestors came from there. Lev Vasilievich said the agent and the village leaders concluded that the place was too rundown to show a foreign reporter, that he would only write how things had gotten worse under the Communists. And so I learned at last the real reason I had been barred so long from Koltsovo. When I told Lev Vasilievich that I was that inquisitive reporter, he fell silent, and for a while he eyed me with suspicion and unease.

Lev Vasilievich told me that the manor house had burned down in 1923, and all that remained of the old estate was a gutted bell tower, a crumbling stable, and the former parish school. The school had been a teachers' training institute after the revolution and an orphanage after the war; it was now a weekend "rest base" for workers from the giant turbine works in Kaluga, 25 miles to the west. The village and the lands were eventually formed into a kolkhoz, or Soviet collective farm, named Suvorov after the eighteenth-century Russian military commander. The kolkhoz produced milk and meat, though mostly it gobbled up government subsidies without ever turning a kopek of profit. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the collective farms were officially freed of tight government controls, the Suvorov Kolkhoz changed its name to the Koltsovo Agricultural Association and began gobbling up bank loans instead of government credits.

But on my first visit, that was not what I wanted to know. I wanted only to see beauty and romance, to walk where my ancestors had walked, to catch the echoes of a native land. It was the height of summer, I was in Russia on a brief visit, freedom was coming to the land, and the place was beautiful-a timeless Russian landscape of birches, winding rivers, log houses, and vast expanses. Lev Vasilievich's grandson, Roma, his patched pants rolled up Tom Sawyer-style, led me to the places my own grandfather had so lovingly described: the old park planted two hundred years ago with ordered rows of linden trees; the lane of soaring larches known as the Alley of Love, which led past the Round Meadow, a low hill deliberately left wild for honeybees; the icy "Robbers' Spring," whose waters my grandfather had tapped for the house; the steep descent through the oaks and birches of the Zaraza forest, which abruptly opened onto a stunning vista of the Oka River winding through lush flood meadows, bluffs, and forests of birch.

In the evening, I sat under an apple tree outside Lev Vasilievich's house, blissfully drinking in the old stories and gossip with my hot tea. The laughter of children playing in the unpaved street mingled with the summer din of frogs, crickets, and birds. I felt I had been here before, on a glorious day just like this one, a century earlier, which my grandfather Sergei Osorgin described in his memoirs:

In the summer, the windows all open, evening tea would be set on the terrace, and my sister Maria and I would sit on the steps, listening as Mama played my favorite nocturne of Chopin, and the evening bells would be ringing: It is already dark, only a pale-yellow streak remains in the western sky, the continuous thin trill of a small frog rises from the pond by the barn, and from the nearby village of Goryainovo wafts a peasant song, "Oh you day, this my day, finish quickly. . . ." I'm happy, totally happy, but I long for something even more wonderful . . . the sweet, romantic sadness of Chopin, what music! and how Mama plays! The watery trill sounds on, the stars of the Big Dipper grow brighter, the strong aroma of roses, sweet peas, and mignonettes, "Oh you day, this my day, finish quickly. . . ." My God, I thank You that all this was, and that it all still lives in my soul.

It was my grandfather's description of a youth spent here that first prompted me to search for this corner of Russia. When I finally gained access to it I learned that all the extraordinary resources of the world's first police state had failed to eradicate the past. It lived on behind the imposed ideological formulas and slogans, clandestine little truths cautiously stored in closed archives and in the deep recesses of people's memories.

In Koltsovo, the premier repository was Alexandra Nikitichna Trunin. In her seventies when I met her, Alexandra Nikitichna had settled in Koltsovo after the war to work in the orphanage. Her background as a history teacher soon combined with her boundless curiosity to establish her as the unchallenged authority on local lore-what the Russians call a krayeved, literally "knower of the region." In the 1960s, Alexandra Nikitichna set up a one-room museum in what was then the orphanage, filling it with photos, poems, and letters from local people who had made a mark in Soviet society. An ardent and honest Communist for most of her life, she earnestly rejoiced in Soviet triumphs and achievements. But there were also things that Alexandra Nikitichna kept to herself-things that could not be put in her museum.

Also in the sixties, workers dismantling a chimney of the burned-down manor house found an urn full of letters and photos, presumably concealed there by the Osorgins, my mother's family, before they were expelled. There were letters from "the boys at the front" and a postcard from one of the girls to her mother about a suitor she could not shake off. The letters circulated in the village and disappeared, Alexandra Nikitichna said. Only a few photos survived-cracked and faded snapshots of ladies in long gowns and children in a field. In the seventies, Alexandra Nikitichna's brother was secretly scanning Western short-wave radio broadcasts (a risky but common enterprise in those days) and came upon an interview with an Osorgin in Paris, talking about Sergiyevskoye. He understood that the discussion was of the former estate in Koltsovo and told his sister. In the informal seminars she held on local lore, however, Alexandra Nikitichna toed the official line, that the former landowners had been rapacious feudal exploiters.

Not all prerevolutionary history was taboo, however. If little was said about the Osorgins, everybody knew about the man who had owned these lands before them, General Kar: a certified villain of Russian history. According to the prevailing legend, Kar was a cruel Englishman in the service of Empress Catherine the Great who was banished to this estate by her for abandoning his command and fleeing before the armies of the rebellious peasant Pugachev. Alexander Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, immortalized Kar's infamy in his history of the rebellion, and centuries of local embellishments turned the general into a truly evil figure. Exiled to his estate here, it was said, Kar used a barrel of ill-gotten gold to build himself a grand mansion modeled on an English fort. Then he had his serfs burrow a tunnel to the Oka River so he could escape if any of his many enemies came after him. All the serfs who worked on the tunnel disappeared, it was said, and when some local boys found the tunnel in the 1920s, they claimed to have seen crucified skeletons inside. According to Pushkin, Kar met an appropriate end-he was torn apart by enraged serfs. Then his devout and long-suffering widow, a princess born, built a beautiful church on the estate to expiate his sins.

Local legend did not stop there. Kar's estate was eventually inherited by his son Sergei, a sadistic wastrel who was supposed to have taken his pleasure with peasant girls and then killed them and dumped their bodies in the forest. This was why, Alexandra Nikitichna told me, the forest was called Zaraza-Contagion. Sergei went on to lose the estate in a game of cards to Mikhail Gerasimovich Osorgin, a military man who went mad on his very first visit to the property when he realized that Kar's pious mother was buried in the estate church, and so Sergei Kar had in effect gambled away his own mother! A few years ago, Alexandra Nikitichna said, workers digging on the site of the old church came upon a skeleton draped in fine black cloth, with precious rings on the bones of the fingers. The rings disappeared, and local kids were caught playing soccer with the skull.

Of course, there was a buried treasure. Sometime in the 1960s, Alexandra Nikitichna said, a man arrived with two beautiful daughters and settled in the abandoned stable, in the linden park. Every night he dug in the park; then one day they were gone, leaving behind an unfilled hole. Who he was, or what he found, nobody ever learned.

Alas, when I began to research the history of the place I often found that the facts did not measure up to the legend. It turned out that General Kar was of Scottish, not English, descent and he was probably less a coward than a victim of court intrigue. The forest was named Zaraza not because of decomposing maidens but after an archaic meaning of the word, "steep and uneven ground," which it certainly is. But what is truth? The facts of history? The version the Bolsheviks imposed? Or the legends that live among people? In the Soviet Union, "history" as science always bore the stigma of ideology, while the legends at least had the dignity of age.

* * *

What is true is that after Mikhail Gerasimovich Osorgin took over the estate, three generations of Osorgins were raised on it and formed an almost mystical bond with their Sergiyevskoye, the name by which they knew it. My grandfather Sergei Mikhailovich was the second son of the last owner of Sergiyevskoye. Born in 1888, he spent his childhood there. Many years and changes later, bent over with asthma but still full of humor and life, in a New York City apartment overlooking the George Washington Bridge, he took out his vintage Russian typewriter and began to write.

"My dear children and grandchildren, I would like to pass on to you the memories of my youth, those distant years of complete happiness." He wrote of the passing seasons and the holidays, of the harmony of a patrimonial order and the beauties of his corner of Russia: "It is a known fact that the finest stretch of our beautiful Oka river is between Kaluga and Serpukhov, where the river flows east and both banks are high, and therefore especially lovely. We lived right at that part of the Oka."

A romantic, witty, and deeply religious man, Sergei elevated the Sergiyevskoye of his childhood to a universal, spiritual home: "I believe everyone in a hidden corner of his soul has his Sergiyevskoye. For the Russians it does not have to be in Russia, or in France for the French: It is there where the soul first opened to receive God's universe and its marvels. . . . Sergiyevskoye is that lost worldly paradise for which we all yearn, believing that if only we could return, we would be happy."

I grew up with his stories. Before I was old enough to know there was a Soviet Union, I knew there was a Sergiyevskoye, where the forests were full of mushrooms, where my grandfather and his brother built a gravity pump to bring water from the Robbers' Spring, where wolves roamed hungry in the winter, and where one autumn day my grandfather shot himself in the leg with a pistol and the local doctor tried (and failed) to dig the bullet out with sewing scissors.

Of course, it is to be expected that people who have had a happy childhood will describe in loving terms the place where they grew up. But Sergiyevskoye appeared to exercise a similar spell on many others. One worldly cousin of the Osorgins, Prince Grigory Nikolayevich Trubetskoi, Tsar Nicholas II's ambassador to Serbia, came to Sergiyevskoye a few months after the 1917 revolution. The visit had a powerful emotional effect on him, perhaps because he had just completed a harrowing trip from southern Russia through areas ravaged by civil war, and found himself in an idyllic remnant of a world he knew was dying.

"All who came to them [the Osorgins] felt themselves in Sergiyevskoye as in a spiritual sanatorium," he wrote. "The Osorgins loved their Sergiyevskoye as one can only love a close and precious being, and they especially cherished its natural beauty, which indeed was marvelous."

The Bolsheviks had already taken away the Osorgins' lands and part of their house, but they stayed on, believing they would be safe among friendly and loyal peasants until the revolutionary blight passed. People from the village continued coming to them as before, for medical treatment and for counsel, and later to bring them flour, sugar, kerosene, and cloth.

Trubetskoi painted a remarkably affectionate portrait of the family-close, loving, musical, devout, generous, cultured-and of a corner of Russia that remained harmonious and good even as the rest of the country was falling apart.

One of my grandfather's four sisters, Maria Osorgin, was talented at drawing, and she recorded one of the last summers at Sergiyevskoye in a series of exquisite silhouette sketches. The cook still discusses the menu with the mistress; the girls work in the garden in their long skirts and straw hats; my grandfather, stooped by a wound he suffered on the German front, sits in a wicker chair alongside his childhood love and fiancée, Sonia Gagarin; his father, Mikhail Mikhailovich, still the barin-the local lord-strolls about magisterially with his patriarchal beard, his large dog, Neron, and his pants rolled up country-style.

Trubetskoi, a member of an aristocratic family prominent in the final chapter of tsarist Russia for its ardently liberal politics, found the last communion with the old order wrenching: "Will I really never see Sergiyevskoye again? I cannot accept this. Such corners of Russian life, so suffused with an Old Testament, loving, and firm spirit, must not disappear. How many simple people found in Sergiyevskoye a beacon of light for moral and material assistance! How many of their friends and acquaintances, having suffered in life's storms, found respite at the hospitable hearth of this peaceful cloister! The loss of such refuges, however few they may be-or perhaps because they are so few-would be an irreplaceable one for Russia. The only consolation is that the good seeds sowed for so many years in this fertile soil cannot perish without trace: 'their memory is from generation to generation.' "

The Osorgins' life at Sergiyevskoye came to an end in October 1918. The local Bolshevik committee came and ordered them out, giving them three days to leave. Old servants and peasants were overcome by grief and confusion. The night watchman complained that "from so much thinking I've developed a nymphozoria in my head"-a condition no one had heard of until then. The bailiff fussed about, preparing provisions and arranging for six young men to accompany the Osorgins all the way to Moscow. Arseny Georgievich Dzhuverovich, a Serbian doctor who had worked at Sergiyevskoye throughout the war in the hospital the Osorgins had set up in their house, came out from Kaluga to say goodbye and wept like a child. The last surviving former serf, the 90-year-old laundress, stood with tears streaming down her face, making the sign of the cross over the departing masters.

One of those who watched them leave was a village girl named Ninochka. Many years later, as Nina Georgievna Semyonova, a staunch Communist and the retired administrator of the Moskva Hotel, near the Kremlin, she heard about me and wrote for me a series of poignant vignettes from her youth. One was a description of the exit of the last barin of Sergiyevskoye, whom she knew as "Mikhal Mikhalych." She calls the village Karovo, as it was called under General Kar and continued to be called by local people.

The last time I saw Osorgin was when he was leaving Karovo after the confiscation of his estate and all his property and land. I remember the day of the departure. . . . He stood on one of the large carts on which their things were piled, those things they were allowed to keep. Mikhal Mikhalych spoke briefly to those gathered around the carts. I was thirteen then, and of all the things he said, I remember only this: He pointed to everything around him-the central building, the wings, the linden grove-and he said, "I knew this would come to pass. Take care of all this: You can have an excellent sanatorium or health facility here. Use it, but don't destroy it." In those days manor houses were burning everywhere. Many women were crying.

He bowed in all four directions and said, "Forgive me if ever I hurt or insulted any of you." The muzhiks [peasant men] furtively wiped away their tears. Finally the carts left. Many accompanied them to the Ferzikovo station and helped load the train.

What happened afterward to the Osorgins was a typical saga of the "former people," as the Soviets branded the gentry, officials, and intelligentsia of the fallen tsarist order. The old Osorgins and three of their children moved to a Moscow suburb now called Peredelkino, where their house became a center for other relatives who had stayed on in Soviet Russia. After their youngest son, Georgy, was executed by the Bolsheviks, the Osorgins quit Russia and made their way to Paris with two of their daughters and Georgy's widow. There, in 1931, they were reunited with their three other children, including my grandfather Sergei. He had gone to southern Russia after the revolution, got married, then left for Europe with his wife when the White armies collapsed. My mother was born in Baden-Baden, Germany, in 1923.

Nina Semyonova died in 1993. I never did meet her, though I have many pages of the notes she wrote for me, in a hand that grew progressively larger as her eyesight failed, all diligently bound, signed, and dated. She came from a different universe than my grandfather, but her Koltsovo was as dear to her as his Sergiyevskoye was to him. "My motherland, Russia, is the same for us all," she wrote. "But every one of us has a small corner of this vast motherland, our own motherland, where we were born, raised, went to school, and set off on life's path. My motherland is the village of Koltsovo."

What happened to Sergiyevskoye after the revolution was also in many ways typical. In the first flush of building a brave new world, the Bolsheviks took over the big house for a farming commune, the First Workers' Agricultural Commune. On May 1, 1923, the manor house burned to the ground. The official version was that it had been destroyed by "reactionary bandits and former White Guardsmen." In fact it was torched by resentful peasants while the kommunary, the original settlers of the new communes, were out celebrating May Day. The peasants hated the commune for appropriating the best lands and equipment.

The subsequent history of the village was the usual one of collectivization, purges, and the steady consolidation of Communist control. Eight of the fifteen families living on the ridge around Alexandra Nikitichna's house were expelled in the 1930s, when the Bolsheviks cracked down on the kulaks ("fists"), the category into which they put any relatively successful or independent peasant. God knows, none of them here were rich; at most, they had an extra horse or a small grinding stone of their own. Some villagers were drawn into the apparatus of coercion. Misha Tinyakov joined the Cheka-the precursor of the KGB-and came to arrest the Osorgins after the revolution. Seryozha Golubkov joined the Cheka out of patriotism. Naïvely, he protested against the ruthless methods the "Chekisty" were using; soon after, his family was told that he had shot himself.

The last manager of the Osorgin estate, Nikolai Shutov, was run out of town by the Bolsheviks as a kulak, though a grandson and two granddaughters were still living in the village when I last visited. One of the granddaughters, now in her eighties, proudly described to me his end. It was during the war. He was walking down the road, an old man, when some German soldiers came by and tried to take away his carved walking stick as a souvenir. When he resisted, they smashed in his skull with his stick.

As elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, World War II is the proudest memory among the old people. Most of the men fought at the front, and the women labored in the rear. Koltsovo briefly fell under German occupation and afterward served as a base for a Red Army air reconnaissance unit. After the war, an orphanage was opened in the old parish school for the countless children left homeless by the war. Alexandra Nikitichna recalled the problems that arose when the young waifs began reaching adolescence. Not knowing how else to keep the boys and girls in line, she took the boys aside and explained that if they kissed a girl, one thing would inevitably lead to the next, and the boy would be shot. And what, I asked her, did you tell the girls? Alexandra Nikitichna hid her face in embarrassed laughter: "That if they got pregnant, I would be shot." Some of her former wards-foster children, really-still write her, she said.

Even in the best of times, life was never easy here. Much of what seemed quaint to me on my first visit was bondage to the villagers. The huge wood-burning stoves required endless work; drinking water had to be carried in buckets from a distant tap; the outhouse stood in ankle-deep mud; and potatoes, beets, and onions were grown not as a hobby but to survive. The road to Koltsovo was paved only after my first visit in 1990; before that, there were days when the nearest town, Ferzikovo, 8 miles away, could be reached only by tractor. The village shop was always bare, and even the most basic staple-the dark, crumbly bread-was not always available. When it was, it quickly sold out, because under the convoluted Soviet pricing system, it was cheaper to feed hogs and chickens with baked bread than with grain. Alcoholism, the most widespread Russian disease, was rampant.

This backwardness stemmed as much from Soviet policy as from tradition. Alexei Andreyevich Lagutin, Alexandra Nikitichna's gentle and hard-working neighbor, hated to see good land go to waste, so when he settled in Koltsovo he plowed some empty land by the river and planted it with melons, tomatoes, cabbage, and other fruits and vegetables, which he shared freely with the orphanage and other villagers. The kolkhoz director was furious: "What are you trying to do, show us up?" He made Alexei Andreyevich an electrician. Alexei Andreyevich never learned to curb his love of growing things, however. His kitchen garden was a marvel of productivity, and whenever I came I would find him experimenting with some new variety.

Once, while his wife was preparing tea, he pulled out an old concertina, ran his stubby, work-hardened fingers over the keys, and magically drew a romantic tango from the vintage bellows. In the first years after the war, he recalled, when it seemed as if their "bright future" was finally within reach, the villagers would gather in the linden park on a summer night and dance to his music. They were all gone now, he said; only he and his wife and a few others remained. Alexei Andreyevich fell ill in the spring of 1994. His wife got word to me to bring some medicine, but I arrived too late. He had been impossible in the clinic, she said, insisting that she bring fresh food for all the patients. She also said he repeatedly asked after me: "When is Sergei Alexandrovich coming? I have so much more I need to tell him."

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