In April the welcoming smell of spring would be in the air. Winters are harsh in the steppe lands of Russia. With strong winds and very little vegetation to break its force, the timber houses had only the protection of shuttered windows to keep out the worst of the cold and the sand driven by the ever restless winds that roar across the plains. Vasily, as a young priest without a father’s protection and only the church’s stipend to live on, would have lived a very simple life.
By April, the birch trees would have their first flush of green and I see in my mind’s eye the happy young parents returning to their small house down an avenue of trees that show the promise of summer. The happy couple with their group of friends would carry their small baby daughter home from the baptism. With joy in her heart, Anna would hold the well-swaddled Julia close — her first born, a strong and healthy child.
I am intrigued that the first child was born at least four years after the parents’ marriage. Was Anna Andreevna not a robust woman? Perhaps there were other babies before Julia who did not survive.
A bare 16 months later in August 1901, their second child, a son Boris, is born. He was baptised not at his father’s church, though Vasily and Anna are still living in Biryuchya Kosa, but at the more prestigious St Mikhail the Archangel in Astrakhan. This is the church in which Boris’s grandfather Mikhail had been baptised back in 1848. His father did not officiate at Boris’s baptism but the godparents of his sister Julia were once again chosen.
Vasily was still priest at St Vasily’s Church in Biryuchya Kosa and he and Anna are still living in that village, but chose to have their second child baptised in a church in Astrakhan. Why? Was their son considered more important so a bigger, perhaps more significant church was considered more appropriate? Did Vasily’s mother, Aleksandra, particularly request that the first son of her eldest son be baptised in the same church as her husband?
Boris is the closest sibling in age to Julia and the only sibling Julia ever mentioned to her family many years later. She spoke of him as a half-brother, although their baptismal records show that he and Julia were full brother and sister.
In late 1903, storm clouds are brewing in the Orlov family.
By the end of December 1903, the church authorities made a pronouncement. The Archive reference explains: By the decision of the Astrakhan Diocesan leadership, on the basis of articles 171 and 185 of the Consistory Regulations, Vasily Orlov was stripped of his priestly rank along with all rights and privileges, due to ‘found proofs of adulterous violations of the sacred institution of marriage’.
Vasily’s love, or lust, for a woman, or women, other than his wife was to make a dramatic change to his family’s future. What embarrassment and distress this church edict must have caused both Vasily and Anna — to be so publicly shamed. Vasily was to lose his career in the church, his livelihood and the respect of his community, and bring humiliation on his family. The women passing in the street rustling their skirts and clicking their tongues in contempt, his past colleagues tuning their backs in shocked disapproval. But this was a man, like his father before him, who was determined to make something of himself. Both he and the family survived this public disgrace.
In July 1904, the Astrakhan Police Department issued a perpetual passport to Vasily according him the status of ‘personal honourable citizen’, a title given to some Russian urban inhabitants prior to the 1917 Revolution. By November, Vasily has applied, and been accepted, for the job of scribe by the Department of Caspian-Volga Fisheries and Seal Resource Management. The family has now moved to Astrakhan and Vasily is a public servant working in his father’s old department.
Vasily appears to have made peace with his wife Anna. After a four-year gap, their third child was born, a second daughter, Lidia. She was baptised in Astrakhan, not in the Church of St Mikhail the Archangel, but at the Trinity Church. Vasily is described as ‘Personal honourable citizen Vasily Mikhailovich Orlov’. Andrei Murygin is once again godfather but Klavdia Travina is godmother. Could she be Vasily’s younger sister Klavdia?
In March 1905 the state relieved Vasily of the legal consequences of the stripping of his priesthood, but prevented him from ever being granted a ‘civil rank’ (according to the Table of Ranks) within the Astrakhan diocese. The Table of Ranks was a pre-Revolution structure of positions and ranks in military and government service. Henceforth, Vasily would be referred to as ‘a person having no rank’. A bitter pill to have to swallow for an ambitious man.
This state edict did not prevent him from rising in the ranks of his second career choice. He had, after all, had an excellent education as a child culminating in six years of study at a seminary. His level of education was to stand him in good stead during the time he spent in Public Service. By 1906 he became an accountant in the statistical unit of the Department. Then, in 1909, he was appointed chief clerk of the secretariat of the Committee of Caspian–Volga Fisheries and Seal Resource Management.
By now his last child (with Anna) had arrived — Arkady, his fourth child and second son, was born late in 1908. He was baptised at the same church as his older brother, the Church of St Mikhail the Archangel in Astrakhan. Arkady’s godfather was Astrakhan merchant Vasily Leontevich Gondrev and his godmother was Paraskeva Leontevna Murygina, widow of Andrei Vasilevich Murygin (who had been godfather to all of the older children).
It has been suggested by the Archives Office that Andrei Murygin, godfather to the first three children, could have been Anna’s father, but they were not able to provide evidence of this.
By January 1911, Vasily was back in the statistical unit as a senior accountant. Then in 1912, he was transferred to the legal unit of the Department but within weeks of his transfer he resigned. There is nothing in any of the archival papers that explains why he took this step. He was not long away from the department, however, as in 1913, Vasily Orlov returned to the service as an assistant fisheries supervisor. Later that year, he was appointed manager of the fish industry levies collection unit. About this time, Vasily was awarded a bronze medal commemorating the 300 year anniversary of the House of the Romanovs.
One possible answer to the question of why Vasily resigned in 1912 is that his wife Anna was dying or had died. We know that by 1913 he was back at work and had a new wife, Marina Ivanovna Prokurolova, a farmer’s daughter. The Archives Office could not find any records of Anna’s death, or of Vasily’s marriage to Marina or of any children from this second marriage. One can only speculate on this new relationship. Was it Marina with whom he had an affair before being defrocked as a priest all those years ago? Or, is she a new love that he found after Anna’s death?
In mid-1916, Vasily was appointed chief of the steam vessel unit of his department. Because of the importance of this work, Vasily was exempted from call-up during World War I.
Russia had been in an increasing state of turmoil since the 1914 general strike in Saint Petersburg. In 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and a Provisional Government was formed. The October Revolution later that year saw the Bolsheviks take over Saint Petersburg (renamed Petrograd in 1914) and the Winter Palace, the last holdout of the Provisional Government. The Council of People’s Commissars, led by Lenin, was now in control of Russia. Confusion reigned.
In 1918, a treaty between Germany and Russia removed Russia from World War I, the Bolshevik Party changed its name to the Communist Party, the capital of Russia was changed from Saint Petersburg to Moscow and the Russian civil war began. The imprisoned Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed. Dark days are ahead, not only in the big cities, but also in the less strategically important areas of rural Russia. Uncertainty and unrest had brought a state of fear even to Astrakhan.
By the 1920s the Russian civil war was over. Stalin was in charge and some sort of stability was evident in Russia.
The Astrakhan Archives Office provided no information about the doings of great-grandfather Vasily after 1916. This may be because they thought they had done enough research on the matter or, much more
likely, there were no further records to be found. Many municipal and church records were lost or destroyed during the turbulent days of the Revolution. With the suppression of religion after the Revolution, churches were no longer allowed to issue birth, marriage and death certificates. Births, deaths and marriages were supposed to be registered with the State Civil Registry Office, although this was probably pretty hit and miss in the early years of Soviet Russia and, given the complexity and unpredictability of the Russian methodology for filing such records, it can still be a challenge to find them.
However, the Archives Office did say: It is known that the son of V Orlov, probably the older son Boris, in 1912 entered the 1st Astrakhan gymnasium (secondary school). And Daughter of V Orlov, Julia, entered a paramedics course in 1916. It is also known that Julia married Gustav Gustav[ovich] Braier of the Evangelical faith, resident of the city of Zhabenets of Lodzinsky uezd [district] of Petvovsk gubernia [province]’. However, the actual marriage record was not found.
The city of Lodz is in central Poland which, at the time of Gustav’s birth, would have been under Russian control. We believe that Zhabenets was just to the north of Lodz, but we have not yet been able to track down any record of Gustav’s family or his birth.
The last of the archival papers, and for me the most important, is the birth/baptismal certificate stating that ‘On 9 August 1918 Julia gave birth to a daughter Nonna. She was baptised in the Trinity Church of Astrakhan on 2 September 1918.’ The godfather is listed as Vasily Mikhailovich Orlov, citizen of the city of Astrakhan and the godmother is Paraskeva Matveevna Murygina. My mother was indeed born in Astrakhan and her parents were apparently married.
What a journey she and her parents were to make. According to Julia, nine-month-old Nona was swaddled in rugs stitched with gold pieces and the three of them left Russia forever to seek their fortune and a new life in a country on the other side of the world.
When my grandmother Julia first arrived in Perth, I wonder whether she ever saw the similarity between Perth and her childhood home in Astrakhan. I did. Both cities are built on sand, both cities sit alongside a large body of water, the Caspian Sea beside Astrakhan, and the Indian Ocean beside Perth. Their respective rivers are an integral part of the landscape of each city. In both cities, the climate is in some part governed by the nearness to the sea. The importance of water and what it can and does produce is woven into the tapestry of life in each city. Even the climate has its similarities, with hot dry winds in summer and cold wet winds in winter. Perth’s winters, however, do not have the intensity, or the ferocity, of Astrakhan’s bleak winter blizzards.
Julia never spoke of her parents or of her siblings to her younger children other than admitting to a brother called Boris. Whatever her motivation, anger, disappointment or just disinterest, she never spoke willingly of her family, of her life in Russia or, to our knowledge, tried to make contact with her siblings or any family member after she left Russia.
Nona spoke Russian, but the two younger girls did not. After Nona left home to live with Denis, Julia lost her only Russian-speaking child — and the last close contact with her homeland.
I never heard my mother speak Russian, own to Russian heritage or indeed speak about her youth. Perhaps that is not surprising for, by the time I was old enough to remember, she had a passport indicating she was British and of British lineage.
After we had been contacted by our Russian relatives in Perth, my brother Tony told me that he remembered our mother singing to him in what he now knew to be Russian when he was a very young child. Whether this was a true memory or just wishful thinking, who knows, but I would like to think she did.
After all the documents from Russia were translated, we sent copies to our immediate family and to all the cousins in Perth. It caused great excitement and interest among my relatives in Perth. Like me, they now know with certainty where our Russian roots lie.
The information from the Russian Archives Office answered many of our questions. We, or maybe our children, will — I hope — return one day to Astrakhan to seek out more information and to learn more of our collective heritage.
There is also another journey I would like to make before I die. I want to return to the small English village of Milverton where this story really began. To once again look out across the beautiful river valley that stretches all the way to the city of Taunton. My father chose this little village in the heart of Britain to call his home and it is a typically English village and he could call himself, if not in the beginning then at the end, the quintessential English gentleman.
And at the end …
There is an old Russian saying: ‘With lies you may get ahead in the world — but you can never go back.’ After Denis ‘disappeared’ off the radar of the Emerson family in 1942, he never visited his family in England again nor, to my knowledge, did he ever tell any of them of his marriage, that he had three children and was living a new life with a new background in a country on the other side of the world. To so completely cut yourself off from family, childhood friends and your first born child seems a radical step to take to preserve a false identity. Denis set out to, and did, make something of himself, did lead an interesting life and mix with interesting people — but what a price to pay. For the preservation of the man he became, he was prepared to not only lose his own past but to deprive his children of theirs.
If I had never made that journey to Milverton in 1984, I would probably never have proved conclusively that the story of my parents’ birth and early life was pure fiction and I would never have started on that long journey of discovery that has taken up so much of my life. Was it worth it? Yes, it was.
I have not solved all the riddles, the whys and wherefores of our many journeys from one country to another or the fluctuation of our family fortunes. Nor could I say that finding Denis’s family has led me to a greater understanding of his motives for changing his name and constructing a false past. And certainly I still grieve over the fact that my mother’s past was hidden from me for so long and that I was never given the opportunity to meet my Russian grandmother.
The relationship between my father and me was always a complex and not a happy one. Blood ties bound us, shared experiences cemented that relationship, but to know the man, that’s another thing entirely. Even if I knew all the facts of my past, I would never be able to walk in my father’s shoes. He determined how his life would play out and only he knew all the ins and outs of the many false stories he spun over the 90-odd years of his life. But in the end the very telling of this story has been for me a cathartic and rewarding experience. Our travels through different lands gave me an insight into the way others live, into other cultures and other worlds so different from our own. Most importantly, it gave me a half-sister, many, many cousins, a history and a past.
As a young child, I was excitable, curious, always on the go, altogether too dramatic for Denis’s taste. When he was annoyed with me and considered that I was disrupting his orderly quiet life, he would call me a ‘Stormy Petrel’. I was deeply hurt by this even though I had no idea what a stormy petrel was. I only knew that the term meant that he considered me a troublesome influence in the family. When I was older, I looked the term up and found to my surprise that a stormy petrel or storm petrel is a very small sea bird. It is found in all oceans and over most seas of the world. I could not for the life of me understand why he would liken his young restless daughter to this rather obscure sea bird.
While writing this book I came across a very famous poem by well-known Russian author Maxim Gorky, called ‘The Song of the Stormy Petrel’. It is an allegorical poem that became known as the Battle Anthem of the Russian Revolution. The poem tells the story of a plucky little bird that stood up to the storm (the Tsar or Russia) when all other birds cowered in fright. Since reading the English translation of the poem, I have been quite happy to think of myself as that plucky little bird. Could my Russian mother have known of the poem? Could she have first used the term f
or me, her feisty little daughter? If she did, maybe it was not in too derogatory a sense? I would like to think so.
In the writing of this book I have had the opportunity to travel far and wide across the world — not only in fact but in spirit too. My mind has roamed at will from the soft green fields of England to the wide grass plains of Russia, to the coconut palms and lush jungles of Malaysia and then, back home, to the temperate grasslands at the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. The story is done, and the stormy petrel can rest awhile.
Acknowledgements
This book had a long gestation — over three decades for the research and over three years for the writing. It has taken courage, determination and dedicated research, and a lot of my time. Quite simply I could not have done it without the help and support of my soul mate Lindsay. His is the eye for detail and the mind that focuses on the accurate. I could never get away with a fudgy bit of evidence. It was correct or it was out. For his lifetime of help — thank you.
Others in the family have pulled out their red pens and done many hours of slash and burn. Thanks Stephen, Sophie and Tim. Your advice was gratefully accepted and happily acted upon. To the very few other friends who knew I was writing this book, thanks for your forbearance when I said I was too busy to come out and play.
To my mentor Peter Stanley for his encouragement, sage advice and a very kind foreword — I am your admirer forever!
Though they may never read this, my grateful thanks go to the people at the Astrakhan Archives who, for the pittance of a few hundred roubles, gave me a whole new family. And to the two brilliant Russian speakers Bill Everett and Kirill Chashchin who, for no roubles and at the drop of a hat, translated all the material from Astrakhan.
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