02 Jul Leib Averbukh (1900 – 1976). 2: Marrying into Parasitic Class. WWII
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Leningrad: Out with the Parasitic Class!
Single again, Leib was renting a bed until he found an inexpensive room in a communal apartment near Nevsky Prospect, on Vtoraya Sovietskaya Street, (2nd Soviet – in Russian, vtoraya means 2nd). For obvious reasons, i.e. ban on religion, the street had been renamed from Vtoraya Rozhdestvenskaya Street (Rozhdestvo, in Russian, means Christmas).
Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, that sprawling two-story building belonged to Ivan Kvasheninnikov, a first-guild merchant, the top merchant category. His wife, at marriage time a lady-in-waiting to somebody in the Tsar’s family, had contributed nobility to his social standing and a healthy dowry to the expansion of his business.
The stores, the warehouse, and the carriage took up the ground floor. The stairs to the second floor ended with a door to an oval-shaped foyer with built-in oval mirrors framed in gilt filigree. The living quarters consisted of a 500-square-foot ball-living-dining room that fit comfortably a table sitting twenty, a gargantuan grand piano, and a cozy dancing area; a reception room; the parents’ bedroom; and a room with a run-of-the-mill grand piano for each of the six children. The children’s nanny was the only servant who ever lived on the premises in the room behind the kitchen accessible through the entrance for domestics and deliveries. She stayed with the family at her old age.
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Bolshevik leaders, all intellectuals, lost no time in announcing the arrival of the promised dictatorship of proletariat and the end to private ownership. They relegated bourgeois and intelligentsia to the lishentsy status aka “former people” and therefore not eligible for bread ration or for higher education or for good jobs. Instead of freeloading, namely reading, teaching, preaching, and such, lishentsy and their children were obligated to redeem themselves by acquiring callouses on their hands. Concealment of social origin, even if education and manners would make it possible, was severely punished. Hammer and sickle on the flag conveyed who the bosses were. Days after Lenin died, St. Petersburg became Leningrad (though the pet name, Peter, endured).
The new regime set up some offices on the ground floor of the Kvasheninnikov’s building; the original contents classified as fruit of exploitation were expropriated for the benefit of the proletariat. The second floor underwent the obligatory “compression” (uplotneniye) whereby the six children’s rooms got assigned to five proletarian families and a prostitute to be reformed; the grand pianos in them got chopped up for firewood.
The Kvasheninnikovs bartered most of their personal possessions for food and kerosene. The family was left with mere basics, photo albums in fancy velvety covers, and the three rooms opening into the foyer. The parents settled in their bedroom. The oldest daughter, Maria, nicknamed Musya, and the youngest, Katya, shared the reception room. The younger son, Nikolai, a nonentity and a virulent anti-Semite, made out like a bandit: by special decree, the People’s Commissariat for Education designated him and his wife caretakers of the huge grand piano, “the treasured property of the working people,” in the ball-living-dining room and awarded them a monthly allowance for maintaining the instrument. (The parents’ furs placed in the right proletarian hands helped draft the decree. Thus, these two lishentsy held on to their bourgeois digs and survived. They had not tuned the grand piano for forty years because the allowance was their only source of income. They did not live to see the instrument discarded in the 1960s.)
When the nanny died, her former wards laid claim to her tiny dining table; they placed it in the foyer where they had their meals. The rest of her belongings went to the new neighbors who then demolished the room to make it uninhabitable.
*****
The older son of the family, Ivan Jr., Vanya to the family, a university-educated economist re-born as a committed revolutionary, became an advisor to one of Stalin’s henchmen. He had a wife, a biologist and one of the first women with a Soviet Ph.D, and daughter. In the purges of the 1930s he was executed as the enemy of the people for owning books of a Marxist economist of whom Stalin did not approve.
(From the database of the victims of Stalin’s purges: “Kvasheninnikov Ivan Ivanovich, born in 1893, a native and resident of Leningrad, Russian, with higher education, former member of the Communist Party, chief engineer of the Central Office of Signaling and Communications of the People’s Commissariat of Railways of the USSR (fired on June 22, 1937), residing at: Fonarniy Lane, building 1, apartment 43a. Arrested on September 6, 1937. Sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on November 16, 1937, for “counter-revolutionary organizational activities and treason to the Motherland”. Shot in Moscow on November 16, 1937.”)
Vanya’s little daughter was placed into an orphanage for the children of the enemies of the people. His wife was exiled like most wives of traitors of the motherland; but she received an additional sentence for working with Nikolai Vavilov, a prominent geneticist that Stalin did not favor and who died in the Gulag.
(Stalin fancied himself an expert in every field of study; as such, he rejected genetics, a discipline that implied that the communist ideology required assistance from genes in its mission to create a new breed of humans. In 1948, the Soviet Agricultural Academy declared genetics a pseudo-science. Leib insisted that Stalin’s real motivation was to distract from his own problematic genetic baggage, namely his father’s alcoholism and abuse.
Cybernetics, the science of managing and exchanging information, met with a similar fate: in the Dictionary of Philosophy published in 1954 it was defined as a reactionary pseudo-science.)
The family’s younger son, Nikolay, and his wife occupied the dining room; he was remembered as a nonentity and a virulent anti-Semite. They would have been relocated to a small room elsewhere, had they not been charged with responsibility for the grand piano, a valuable property of the proletarian state. And, anyway, no proletarian family would have been considered worthy of such huge quarters. So, they were allowed to stay on.
Of the four Kvasheninnikov girls, one died young. Katya never married. Tatyana, nicknamed Tata, married a short nondescript professor who taught seven languages, including Chinese. They lived near the university in one room of a large apartment that used to belong to him. The professor refused to have children, nor did he believe in protection; Tata underwent an astronomical number of abortions that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Terrifyingly, her paleness blended with the whiteness of the bed sheets.
Musya was married off at eighteen to a well-to-do merchant. Shortly after the revolution he disappeared during an inspection of his properties; their little daughter died of typhus. Amid the civil war Musya married a high-ranking White Army officer who eventually sent word from Crimea that he was escaping to Constantinople. Kicked out into the street as a wife of a counterrevolutionary, Musya returned to her childhood home. She and Katya worked as cleaners at a hospital. Following their father’s death in the late 1920s, the sisters moved in with their mother to save on heating and advertised the reception room for rent. They called those years “time of silent despair.”
Marrying Aristocracy
Leib and Musya dated secretly, meeting after work on the outskirts of the city to avoid running into former knights and counts. Her family, she admitted, held their collective nose where Jews were concerned. A personal relationship with one was unthinkable. Particularly with a renter. Particularly with a renter born of uneducated parents and not yet ten years removed from a backwater town where he had worn strange clothes and had not spoken Russian.
When he started making plans to move out to simplify Musya’s life she decided to take the plunge. She chose her birthday party to announce their engagement. Her mother, siblings, cousins, and friends had all met Leib and liked him, in an abstract way people liked a servant, but were taken aback by his presence at the table.
Musya introduced Leib not as the neutral Lev or the friendly Lyova but, defiantly, with the warm intimate Lyovushka. The refined company did not react visibly. Musya’s mother covered her face with her fan. Katya nodded approvingly. The language professor, spoke first, “I have to tell you, Lev, your manners are impeccable. May I ask who taught you manners?” Leib responded courteously, “My illiterate mother.” Musya savored this story, and every time concluded it with the same chuckle, “At that moment I knew how dangerous the Averbukhs could be.”
To get married, Leib needed a birth certificate. Recordkeeping rules that had not coalesced yet allowed him to state his age as four years older, the same as Musya’s. Always a gentleman.
Sheina-Gitel never learned about his second marriage, either. In her letters she pleaded with him to find an appropriate shidduch while she was alive. To his sisters, Musya remained a respected but alien wife of a beloved brother. She understood. She never accompanied Leib on his visits to them but sent thoughtful presents for their grandchildren.
Great Patriotic War. Siege of Leningrad.
By the time Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Leib held a position of a head bookkeeper at a large plant. He had taught Musya and Katya basic bookkeeping, so they had office jobs and were eligible for food rations.
The army appointed him head of finance for a brigade. For the first year of the siege his brigade was stationed a few kilometers from Leningrad. By hook or by crook he got several half-day leaves to bring his bread ration to Musya. In order not to be robbed he tied the loaf to his body by wrapping the legs of his kalsony around his chest under his greatcoat.
Leib had enough time to hand over the bread to Musya and head back. On one such trip in the winter, he found his ex-wife with Musya. She came over hoping to learn news of him. Swollen from hunger and bundled up in shawls and coats they looked alike. Without a word, Leib cut the loaf in half with a kitchen cleaver and left. I asked if his ex-wife had survived the siege; he did not know.
Leib’s title at the brigade called for the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Since Leib was not a member of the Communist Party, his superiors were not able to promote him above the rank of major. No amount of cajoling could convince him to join the Party, even after his superior officer told him in private that the step was a formality. “I do not consider myself worthy yet,” was the same obstinate reply.
In war time, such obstinacy, no matter how properly worded, might have resulted in court martial. Leib was surprised, disappointed even, with my terror at the idea, “To become a Party member to avoid court-martial? There was a war, I could have been killed anyway. Maybe if I had children… As it was, nobody depended on me, my wife was able-bodied. To join murderers and live with myself after that?” He lifted his foot and pinched up his pant leg, “Areintroten?” Translated into Russian, this word could mean joining a group or stepping into something unpleasant; Leib’s expression left no doubt which meaning he had in mind.
Post-War.
After the war, Leib worked as head bookkeeper at an engineering firm. When it built a high-rise for its employees it assigned Leib, who had already retired, a two-room apartment there. He was beloved by his superiors and subordinates alike. To his bewilderment, they presented him one day with an then-fancy, engraved clock (they used his Russified name and patronymic Lev Vladimirovich, not the official Gersh-Leib Volfovich that they probably did not know about). “Why would they do that for absolutely no reason?” he wondered. “I must not be curmudgeon enough.”
Gift to Leib Averbukh. “To the highly respected Lev Vladimirovich from coworkers.1953”
The building was located a long streetcar ride from the center of the city, but it was worth it for a private apartment, a private kitchen, a private bathroom. No sharing with strange families, one of them a mandatory prostitute.
Soon after the move Musya began exhibiting symptoms of dementia. Leib took care of her until she required lifting. She did not recognize him any longer but he visited her at the nursing home every day, in any weather, for three years, until her last day. He refused to let me see her, “I want you to remember her the way she was.”
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Next: Leib Averbukh. 3. Lessons in Common Sense. Shopping. Outings
Read about Leib’s parents and siblings in Averbukh, Kuppershmidt
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