In the Web of History: Old Russia and Soviet Union

With Unique Insight into Nikita Khrushchev's Politically Formative Years as a Communist Politician and a Rising Party Leader

Olga Gladky Verro, Oliver W. Kellogg

• Publisher: OGVAM Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781949748048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the Web of History is an engaging odyssey of a family caught in the whirlwind of catastrophic historical events and wars sweeping across the 20th century Russia and Soviet Union. It brings to life the not-so-distant past how history, people and events influenced and shaped the family fate.

It is a rich source for memoir readers who value an authentic voice of real people sharing their thoughts, aspirations and struggles to overcome adversities in their lives.

It is a storehouse for inquisitive readers who choose to immerse themselves into the world of historical memoirs to discover details of daily life, customs and traditions that have been lost with time and vanished from the memory of new generations.

And there is a rare bonus for the curious readers, history buffs and historians – the unique insight of Nikita Khrushchev’s teacher into his politically formative years as a communist politician and a rising Party Leader.

In the Web of History is the first book of a monumental work of Historical Family Memoirs where readers are introduced to the beginning of a tumultuous odyssey of a family—one of the millions of families—relentlessly hounded from place to place in their native Ukraine by the State watchdogs. The Gladkys: Orest—pursued by Bolshevik state police as “the enemy of the people” owing to his age 16 Civil War service in the White Army; Antonina, his teacher wife, who had Nikita Khrushchev as a student; their engineering student daughter, Olga, who at the end of the family odyssey became author memoirist.

In the Web of History is a treasure of up-close, intensely personal accounts of Russian and Soviet Union history as lived, documented, and remembered in detail by the Gladky family—whose name is Legion. It is a saga of a family—of the new intelligentsia—who, from the Russian Revolution, the savage bitterness of Civil War, the Communist, Bolshevik dictatorship, and Stalin’s persecutions, became pawns of history.

The events, written and narrated as remembered by mother, father and daughter add the authentic voice to their stories that are personal in detail and historical in scope. It is a compelling narrative consistently fascinating, frequently riveting, that speaks with verifiable historical accuracy and evokes novel-like response in the reader.

PART ONE

Life in Old Russia

The Origins of the
Berezhnoy Family

As Remembered by Antonina G. Gladky

The origins of the Berezhnoy family can be traced to the village of Nikolskoye in the Nikolsky Rural District of the Isyumsky Provincial District that was then under the jurisdiction of the Kharkovsky Province. It was located in the southeastern part of Russia, which long ago was known as Malorussia¹ or Okraina² and later became known by its present name Ukraina, or the Ukraine. The village got its name from the family name of its first landowner, Nikolsky, who long ago had received this land along with a number of peasant serfs from the Tsar as a reward for his services to the Crown. This was the customary recompense in feudal Russia for many years until the Agrarian Reform of 1861 liberated the serfs.

During this period of serfdom, peasant serfs were attached to the lord of the manor who owned them, and, according to the existing law, could sell them and punish them at his own discretion. It was well known that in feudal Russia some despotic serf-owners mistreated their subjects, used harsh corporal punishment, and divided serfs’ families by selling their members to other landlords located far from their native villages.

But the peasants in Nikolskoye had no such bad recollections about several generations of landlords in their village. They didn’t remember that anyone was ever sold, and the original serfs’ families remained in the village for many years; they didn’t recall, either, that any of their landlords used corporal punishment or in any way mistreated their subjects. Also, there was no record of any mutinies in the history of the village.

It appears that for many years the landlords in Nikolskoye treated their serfs fairly and provided for their subjects according to the prevalent customs. Their interest was to have healthy, strong, and contented serfs to work on their land and to take care of the manor. Then they could expect the serfs to perform their duties according to the existing rules. This way, the serf-owners preserved their status quo, to which they believed they were entitled, and the serfs accepted their status quo, to which they believed they were born. For several generations the wise landlords in Nikolskoye had maintained this equilibrium.

All the landlords in feudal Russia provided sustenance and living quarters for their serfs, but each landlord had his own system of taking care of his subjects. Nikolskoye was a prosperous village, and peasant serfs lived with their families in cottages on land owned by the lord of the manor. They depended on their owner for their basic provisions. They then had to supplement their family’s needs by cultivating small vegetable and fruit gardens near their cottages and by keeping a few chickens in their sheds. And some, who were also skillful at the trades of carpentry, blacksmithing, or wheel and barrel making, exchanged their services with other peasants for whatever they needed. In general, bartering was a common way of getting needed products and services among peasant serfs.

Having heard³ what was happening to serfs owned by cruel and despotic landlords in some villages, Nikolskoye’s peasant serfs considered themselves lucky and used to say, “We should be grateful to our good barin⁴ who feeds us and treats us fairly as we deserve to be treated.”

1. The Small Russia.

2. The outer boundary of the country.

3. As recounted by Antonina G. Berezhnaya Gladky, who heard it from her grandmother Anna Berezhnaya.

4. This is how Russian peasants addressed their landlords.

The Ancestry of the
Berezhnoy Family

As Remembered by Antonina G. Gladky

The village of Nikolskoye was located in a valley¹ near a small river, a tributary of the River Torets.² The peasants’ neat, clay-walled, whitewashed cottages peeped out like white handkerchiefs from the dense cherry trees that surrounded them. Thatched roofs resembled big straw hats sitting atop the white walls of the cottages that stood on high clay zavalinkas³ and small windows winked here and there reflecting the sun’s rays. Fences made from interwoven branches looked like huge baskets scattered in picturesque shapes along the streets. These fences divided the vegetable and fruit gardens and courtyards from the dusty unpaved roads, where a horse pulling a slow, squeaky cart rarely disturbed barefoot children in plain linen shirts playing a simple game of trundling hoops.

On the southeastern edge of the village, the scattered peasant cottages ran down toward the riverbank, stopping on a small hill where the sun’s rays bathed the multicolored carpet of melon fields. Farther down, near the river’s shore, the waters of the river nourished flourishing vegetable gardens that belonged to the lord of the manor.

For many years several generations of one family of serfs lived in one of the cottages near the banks of the river. The original landowner had given their ancestor the surname “Berezhnoy,”⁴ which was appropriate since it meant “the river-shore-dweller.” The Berezhnoys were not field serfs who tilled the soil. Rather, they were manor serfs responsible for the maintenance of the manor and the manor house of the barin.

Usually, the landlord selected as his manor serfs the keen-witted peasants who were masters of one or more trades, who were good laborers, and who were strong and healthy. Traditionally, the position of a manor serf was passed on from father to son, if the son demonstrated that he would be good at that kind of work when he, as a boy, helped his father with the chores.

The ancestral names of the serf families were preserved by the peasants by word of mouth from one generation to another. It was known that in the last decades of the 1700s, Ivan⁴ Berezhnoy was the manor serf of landlord Nikolsky. Ivan had inherited from his father the surname Berezhnoy, the position of manor serf, and the right to live in his cottage. Later, Ivan’s son Osyp followed in his father’s footsteps. Osyp’s son, Danil, began working as a young boy alongside his father for the barin.

Danil Berezhnoy⁵ married Anna, the daughter of another manor serf named David. They lived with Danil’s parents and served at the manor. By his merit, Danil earned the right to inherit all the privileges of the manor serf after his father’s death.

But Danil had a better destiny than his father, Osyp, did. He received his freedom while he was still young, shortly after his father’s death. The freedom came about a year after his marriage to Anna, and soon after the birth of their first son, Stepan, who grew up a free man.

As a result of the Agrarian Reform of 1861, when serfdom in Russia was abolished by a decree issued by Tsar Alexander II, Danil received from his landlord ownership of the cottage, the same one he lived in as a manor serf, along with the adjoining courtyard and garden, and he continued to live there as a free peasant with his family.

Additionally, the village community, called Mir, received a portion of the landowner’s land, which was then divided into strips for each family unit. Danil received a strip of land in the fields and began to till the soil for himself. For the use of the land, all free peasants had to pay the government a tollage, a tax levied in kind, consisting of a certain portion of their crop.

Now that the peasants had received their freedom and with it the land to cultivate, they also assumed the full responsibility of providing for their families, a new task that most peasants in Nikolskoye took in stride.

The soil in that part of Ukraine, called chernozem, or black earth, was naturally rich and produced a plentiful crop. On their allotted land, the peasants planted wheat, rye, sunflowers, and potatoes, which made them self-sufficient in their basic needs for bread, potatoes and oil for their families. Each peasant family also planted some other kind of grain, such as rye, oats, corn, buckwheat, or millet. Those grains were also part of their food staples and provided feed for poultry and livestock. Some also planted hemp for weaving cloth. These products they bartered with one another, an old custom of the peasant serfs that continued for many years among the free peasants. Now that they were free, they also took their products to sell at the markets of the nearby towns of Isyum and Slavyansk.

All the peasants in the village cultivated, around their cottages, small vegetable gardens, as they had done before receiving their freedom. There they planted peas, beans, onions, garlic, dill, and parsley. Cherry and apple trees surrounding the cottages of Nikolskoye provided fruit for family consumption and for sale at the market.

Also, now that the landlord no longer had serfs, he leased out vegetable garden lots close to the river. Since it was not far from their cottage, Danil and Anna took the opportunity to lease a lot on the sunny side of the riverbank. There the soil was rich, and water from the river for watering their garden was close by. On the gently sloping hillside they planted melons, watermelons, and pumpkins. Further down, near the shore, they had a vegetable garden, where they grew a variety of vegetables: cabbage, cucumbers, carrots, and sweet peppers.

After the serfs became free peasants, the life in the village slowly underwent some changes. The Nikolsky Rural District had a small Office in the village and was in charge of government administrative business. Besides enforcing the government’s laws, recruiting for military service, and maintaining order in the village, now it was also collecting taxes from the peasants.

The State religion was Christian—Russian Orthodox⁶—and the church continued to function as a repository of all local civil registries of births, christenings, marriages, and deaths. All family contracts were legalized—for the government and for the community—in the church after they were consecrated before God, by being blessed by the Batyushka,⁷ as the Parson was referred to.

The Orthodox Church remained the center of social, spiritual, and community life in the village: all the peasants attended Sunday services; all christenings and marriages were celebrated there, and funeral services were performed there. The peasants also consulted both Batyushka and Matushka⁸ about such matters as what name to give their newborns, about the engagements of their daughters, or about any other matter of a personal nature.

The village church and the Parson were now in charge of the religious education of the peasant boys. They were taught to recite prayers as well as to learn the Old Church Slavonic alphabet, which would then enable them to practice rudimentary reading from the Bible and the New Testament. Attendance was not compulsory, and every father was free to decide whether or not his son should attend lessons and for how long he would send him there to learn.

However, not all changes that happened after the liberation of serfs produced the best results for everybody. After receiving their freedom and the strip of land, not all peasants in Nikolskoye prospered at the same pace. Some were not ambitious and were satisfied to provide only food for the family; some were just lazy and neglected their fields, resulting in bad crops; some got sick and couldn’t take care of their land; some had big families with small children and couldn’t produce enough to sell on the market. But the worst problem now was that the peasants had money to spend, and some of that money went into buying alcohol that before was not as easily accessible to serfs. Some spent all their money on vodka and samogon⁹ and had to sell their strip of land, becoming farmhands. Working for hire for the landlord and for the other peasants, they barely could provide for their families.

But Danil and Anna were ambitious; they worked hard and were among those peasants in Nikolskoye who were successful in their farming business. They didn’t have a big family and many children to feed. But most important, Danil kept himself sober, although he liked to have a glass of vodka on Sundays and holidays.

1. As remembered by Antonina G. Berezhnaya Gladky (portions heard from her father, Gavriyl Danilovich Berezh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• In the Web of History
• Olga Gladky Verro Author Memoirist
• Note on Spelling of Russian Names
• Prologue
• Part One: Life in Old Russia
• Part Two: Revolution and Civil War
• Part Three: The Bolsheviks Seize Power
• Part Four: Life in the Socialist Soviet Union
• Part Five: Stalin’s Dictatorship
• Part Six: Germany Invades the Soviet Union
• Appendix
• Back Cover