Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

At the beginning of the 1950s my twelve-year-old mother walked to her old Moscow school one morning, with its wide parade staircase, the polished banister rails rising in caressing curves. From above, on the top landing, Vitya, my mother’s neighbor, hung over the rails and shouted down: “Gureeevich! What’s your grandmother’s name?” Both my mother and Vitya knew full well that grandmother was called Sarra Abramovna — just Sarra alone was putting the knife in, but Sarra Abramovna… It was a doubled roar, like two rampant lions, shamelessly unambiguous, SARRAABRAMOVNA! It stood out like a sore thumb: living with a name like that was really just hysterically silly.

1.

Aleksandr to Sarra Ginzburg in Pochinky, December 24, 1905

Next to grandmother on the photograph we used to call “Babushka on the Barricades” there is a person whose face will appear from time to time in the archive. His full name isn’t ever given in the correspondence. Grandmother’s girlfriends mockingly called him Sancho Pancho, in reference to Don Quixote’s companion with his undying devotion.

This postcard has a stormy seascape on the front by the painter Aivazovsky, a picture that graced the walls of Russian living rooms and community halls for decades: the soapy-green underside of the sea, a huge wave cresting over the shattered remains of a mast to which the drowning seafarers are clutching. A boat is sinking in the distance. Above the picture someone has added by hand: Greetings from Nizhny!

Sara,

You wrote and told us to send word of how things are and what we are up to. I think it would be better if you came to see us as soon as possible. You’d see what we are up to for yourself and you could also join in the heated political discussions we are having here. Haven’t you had enough of being fattened up by your family? I’m slightly annoyed that my throat doesn’t hurt any more, I’d like someone to look after me again.

What were they arguing about with the Socialist Revolutionaries that December? And who was arguing? Judging by Great-Grandmother’s circle of acquaintances, Sancho, like her other friends, was close to the Bolsheviks, and it seems likely they were discussing the necessity of revolutionary terrorism. Just before that, after the October Manifesto in 1905, the Socialist Revolutionary Party announced its own Combat Organization. The Bolsheviks insisted that an increase in terrorism and expropriation was essential; the SRs felt differently. But the Bolsheviks pressed ahead without them and between Autumn 1905 and Autumn 1906, 3611 civil servants were assassinated.

Sarra used to go home from school for the holidays to Pochinky, to her father and sisters “to be fattened up.” She was a student in Nizhny Novgorod, at the best gymnasium in the town, and her friends also studied there. This particular new friend made the classic mistake in writing her name: Sara, instead of Sarra. But it seems she did travel to see him and stood next to him on the Barricades, with her black eye and her absurd bonnet in disarray on the side of her head. The day Aleksandr sent her this postcard there was rioting at the Sormovsky Factory and the snowy streets were blocked with whatever came to hand — wooden boxes, office cabinets. The Governor of Nizhny had already sent an urgent message to the capital: “Dangerous situation in the town. There could be trouble tomorrow. We have no troops.” On December 29, the date on the Pochinky postmark, the protesters were already shooting from cannons.

2.

Platon to Sarra Ginzburg (in prison), February 9, 1907

A barefoot harpist with burning eyes and a mane of black hair sits on a deserted and melancholy shoreline. A text reads: N. Zikhel , Solace in Music .

Hallo, Comrade Sarra! I’m no musician and a very poor singer, but music and poetry have always brought me great consolation and delight. I know from “Little Sarra” that you sing and love poetry so I’m sending this postcard to you in your fortress. I like the execution of the picture and I like its subject. This embodiment of beauty speaks to the bruised soul, and perhaps it will find a place in yours. I do believe, despite everything, that you won’t be held for long, and although we hardly live in a time of fairy tales, there is still hope! The leftists and the opposition have sustained a victory in the Duma. This speaks of a victory over those dark forces and perhaps we won’t have to wait long for the “dawn of enchanting happiness.”

Tyranny = suffering in the name of Russia’s new dawn. The future is bright, comrade!

Be of joyful faith, and bear your part bravely.

I shake your hand. Platon.

Two years had passed. Sarra Ginzburg had been arrested for handing out illegal literature and she was in prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. “Little Sarra” must be Great-Grandmother’s lifelong close friend, Sarra Sverdlova, who was also the sister of the ruthless Communist Yakov Sverdlov.

Platon was the party nickname for a rather brilliant man, Ivan Adolfovich Teodorovich, the son and grandson of Polish political rebels, a professional revolutionary, Lenin’s friend and advisor, and a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Ten years after this he became the first Soviet People’s Commissar for Manufacturing, and then almost immediately left the Soviet People’s Commissariat as a protest against War Communism. Thirty years later, on September 20, 1937, he was shot, after being sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court.

The Second State Duma had just been elected, the first had lasted a mere seventy-two days. The second unhappy attempt at Russian parliament lasted for thirty days longer before being disbanded. There genuinely were a lot of leftists in the parliament, making up more than a third. It’s a strange experience to read the lists of deputies from that Second Duma: they include a huge number of peasants (169), 35 laborers, and only 6 manufacturers, 20 priests, 38 teachers, and even a single poet, Eduard Treimanis-Zvargul, who lived in Riga and wrote in Latvian. Comrade Platon had also put himself up for election, but hadn’t been elected.

3.

Aleksandr to Sarra Ginzburg, August 12, 1907. Portrait of a Woman.

Dearest Sara, isn’t she a beauty! Just like you! When I look at such a beautiful face I realize what a powerful force women are, especially in our male lives. Just for her, just for one of her smiles, we would go into any battle, we’d undergo torture and death. She is the Tsaritsa, the ruler of life and everything in it; the best and most wonderful things in life belong to women, because women are the most wonderful and beautiful of all nature’s creations! What utter joy to be the man who makes her wonderful eyes light up with the fire of passion, or glitter with mad merriment and intoxicating beauty… Even the Gods would envy that man. I want to be that man, I want that so desperately…