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Gorno-Altaysk, 1924.
Alexander Yermolaev, Tanya’s grandfather, armed with the Executive Mandate of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, started his journey to Altay in 1920. His Party membership had been recently suspended “for
Alexander was an experienced military commander, 33 years old, and recently divorced. He was a man of actions and no doubt was glad to leave Pertograd (St. Petersburg) and it’s political bureaucracy behind, ready for a new life.
Being an admirer of the Decembrists, he easily accepted February (Bourgeois) Revolution of 1917 and joined the Socialists-Revolutionaries, known as SR – “
After the Bolshevik Revolution later the same year, he was advanced to the executive government positions that required mandatory membership in the Bolshevik Party. He became a member, but could not stop questioning some Bolshevik policies. “For violation of Party discipline,” his membership was suspended and restored, again and again… It was still the time when the Bolsheviks needed every one of the educated and military people who did not oppose their regime.
His last position in Petrograd was Military Commissar of the Higher Military Academy and the Inspector of Military Schools, which explained why he was tasked to organize Altay Military Engineering School – a totally unrealistic project at the time.
It was not his first trip to Siberia. Ten years earlier – then a young poruchik (lieutenant) from the Kiev Military Engineering School, the son and the grandson of Russian Army officers – he began his service in the Second Siberian Engineering Battalion. That
The disconnect between the local realities and imaginary plans of the central Bolshevik government became apparent from his first days in Barnaul, the capital of Altay. If the Bolshevik powers grew more or less stabilized in St. Petersburg, Altay was one of the many regions were fights between the Reds and their enemies continued up to 1920. Admiral Kolchak, who established an anti-communist government in Siberia, surrendered the main areas of Altay only a few months before Alexander arrived there.
In the 1920’s Altay, there were just not enough teenagers or young adults with the adequate level of education for the Engineering school, and the reasons for that was not only the hardships of the Civil War.
Altay and Siberia always had military draft quotes on a lower level than Central Russia, but since the beginning of the Great War of 1914, the requests for new soldiers increased significantly. It resulted in the draft riots and escapees fleeing to mountain villages or even to Mongolia. Siberian Cossacks and their descendants – the majority of the non-native Altay population – were very sensitive about their “inherited rights” in the Russian Empire. Many of them supported Kolchak and left when Bolsheviks took over.
Public safety and literacy was the real issue in Altay in 1920. It was a place for the teachers, humanitarians,
Every able person was in high demand. The very next day after arrival, Alexander became the Commander of Barnaul’s Military Patrols. The next week – The Head of the Altay’s Department of Technical Education and the temporary Head of another two Departments. The next year – the deputy People’s Commissar of Altay’s Secretariat of Education and the Board member of the Union of Altay Teachers. Each new assignment was accompanied by a comment in his Job-Log-Book – “without a release from prior assignments”.
To Alexander, it was like jumping back in time – to the post-Revolutionary St. Petersburg of 1918…
We wouldn’t have known the details of his life and work in the 1920s, if not for the documents in the partial NKVD (later, KGB) file that was returned to his daughter, Iskra, after the posthumous exoneration of Alexander Yermolaev in the 1960s.
In that file, there was his handwritten autobiography from 1935, a commander in reserve profile, a certificate for the rifle he had won at the shooting competition, even the scores from his 1908 class in the Nikolaev Real School, a copy of which was submitted to NKVD, and many more.
There was even a small personal letter on the blank of the Inspector General of the Petrograd Military Schools that read:
“September 25, 1920. Dear Alexander Alexandrovich, I received your letter from the road. Glad that you didn’t forget us. No significant changes here so far. Simashko left Academy, there will be Kloovs-Klyavik there. Enclosed please find an interesting document for your joy. Please, write to us from your new place. Yours, Simonov.”
We can only imagine why that letter was in his NKVD file, but it is too easy to assume what questions Alexander had to answer during his interrogations in 1936: “Tell us what was in that “interesting” document you received from Smirnov sixteen years ago? Why did you communicate with the Inspector General after you had left St. Petersburg?”…
Yes, there were millions of victims of the Bolshevik Red Purge. Many of those victims were the most active, visible, productive and recognizable people in the Bolshevik society. Yes, many of them are listed today in dedicated Books of Memory, and there is Museum of the GULAG History in Moscow.
But for us, Alexander Yermolaev is not just one of many. He is the only one, the one who suddenly disappeared from the lives of his daughter, Iskra, his wife, Maria, and his six step-children who found in him their new father. He disappeared but stayed with them in memories, and hopes, and hearts.
Many years later, Tanya, a small girl at that time, saw how Maria, her grandmother, assuming that Tanya was asleep, picked up the old tin icon with the image of Jesus from under her mattress, and talked to Alexander – she called him Sashenka, and wept, and prayed. She waited endlessly for his return.
Maria got that icon from her mother. Alexander, an atheist and agnostic, asked her once, “Why do you keep Jesus image on the wall? Your God deprived you of everything, destroyed your life, and you still worship him.” “But He sent YOU to me,” replied Maria and Alexander didn’t touch that subject again. We still keep that icon in the family.
Maria and Alexander met in the orphanage school in Shebalino while working there in 1924. Soon after the murder of her husband, Maria and her six children were evicted from their house, one of the largest in Shebalino. Maria started working in a boarding school because there were rooms available for the staff, and her children were allowed to attend classes.
Alexander came to that school as a director and fell in love with Maria at first sight. She was a woman full of life, smart, educated, and beautiful, who loved to read, sing, play the guitar and never gave up. He was sure that she fell for him too, but she kept her distance despite all his efforts. One evening he decided to talk to her about his fillings and knocked at her door.
Maria and her children lived in a room (one room for all of them) with a large Russian stove in it. A Russian stove has a unique design, which deserves a separate chapter, if not a whole book. What important for our story is that the Russian stove has a large bed size shelf on the back of the oven. The stones kept the heat all night long and th shelf was often used as a bed for children or the elderly.
When Alexander entered Maria’s room, the first thing he saw was a dozen of children legs below the curtains on the stove bed. “My kids,” smiled Maria, and Alexander understood the reason for her hesitation. They talked until dawn, about his life, and about hers.
He told Maria about his dream of a military career, about his fondness for the Decembrists, about his mother and sisters who found a peaceful place in the village on the Baltic Sea, about his relatives in Moscow, who ran away from the Bolsheviks, and about his father, colonel Yermolaev of the Russian Imperial Army, who had been killed in one of the battles of Great War in 1915.
Maria told him about her first marriage and how the Bolsheviks from the local Soviet killed her husband for the family Red Deer farm, about her father-in-law, the merchant Popov, who had saved her and her children’s lives hiding them in a small village lost in the Altay Mountains, and how she happened to be in that school where they met.
She told about her father, Georgy Scherbakov. She found a resemblance between Alexander and her father, who was the Clerk and Registrar of Shebalino’s volost (county) for the thirty-five years. Maria’s father was one of the very few educated people in the volost when he was elected for that job in 1880. His re-elections reflected not only the respect he had earned for his administrative work but also his non-stop efforts to encourage education for children of all ages.
His children were an example. Maria’s two older brothers completed their education in Pushkin Real School in Bijsk, regional center, and returned to Shebalino to work in the volost, and later, Altay administration.
Maria, who got married when she was in her late teens, had completed the full equivalent of middle school, not counting music lessons and household crafts. Being from a privileged class family by both birth and marriage, she was never expected to do errands around the house – that was the servants’ job. But it was a common understanding that for the girls, however high they were in the social ladder, it was imperative to know how to do all kind of housework to be able to properly manage the servants later. Maria remembered how her mother guided her through all kinds of routine works from her earlier ages, and that knowledge helped her survive more than once.
Maria’s father passed away just before the Bolsheviks came to power – “They would’ve killed him either way if he had been alive,” said Maria. We do not know how Alexander responded to that, but we know that he married
We tend to believe that Alexander knew about the atrocities committed by Bolshevik mob and their leaders, which over time drove him – the one who desperately wanted to be the loyal and skilled promoter of the new society – to frustration, if not depression. His numerous suspensions of Party membership, in a way, reflected his refusals to do or approve what he did not consider right.
Unlike Alexander, Maria always disliked everything related to Bolshevik. That hatred grew even stronger when Alexander, her true love – Sashenka, she called him – disappeared in GULAG. Tanya remembered how Maria refused to live in a house that was in Revolution Street, or how she did not trust eating cheese named “Soviet”. When Stalin died, Maria took her “secret” icon from under the mattress and said with a malevolent smile: “Thank you for taking this Herod away. Why did it take you so long?”
But those times would come years later. In the 1920s, Maria learned not to express her feelings directly and used a bitter sarcasm instead, in Aesop style. She applied that to everything and everybody and polished it to a level when her sardonic phrases became proverbs within the family. There is no way, unfortunately, to present those expressions in English – so deep they are within the Russian folk-language traditions that a prolonged explanation would be required, spoiling their beauty.
In Alexander, Maria found what she needed the most – the understanding, the husband she could count on, and the partner she could relate. We do not think that Alexander shared her mistrust of the Soviet regime or her hatred for the Bolsheviks. From everything we know about him, he believed in the idea of the new society – the happiness and prosperity for all, seeing the barbarities as missteps or unavoidable side effects – a common misjudgment of Soviet regime by Russian intelligentsia.
In Maria, Alexander obtained what was missing in his life – the love and friendship, the family – the complete family, the home. His father, colonel Yermolaev, left for faraway military forepost when Alexander, the youngest among five siblings, was ten years old. Olga, his mother, called him Sashenka then, and Maria became the first since that time who called him Sashenka, too.
It was a remote similarity between his childhood in his family without father and Maria family, and he did everything to become a father to Maria’s children. They loved Alexander too – for his kindness, for his knowledge of so many things, and for his storytelling talent that they couldn’t have enough.
Before he met Maria, Alexander traveled around Altay organizing specialized schools, creating curriculums and teaching classes while hiring new staff, staying in each place for only a few months – he had already retired from active military duty and devoted himself to education. After the marriage, he requested an easier schedule and was appointed to direct an established boarding school in the fast-growing town Ulala, later Gorno-Altaysk, that became the administrative center of the Altai Mountains district.
They settled in a house overlooking one of the branches of the Katun-river, the same house where Iskra, Tanya’s mother, would be born two years later.
But that will be another story.
