Tamara Life in the Soviet Union and under Capitalism

By Tamara Bukhanov

This is the SECOND Edition of the book of the same title published in 2025.
The memoir "Tamara Life in the Soviet Union and under Capitalism" is written by a Russian who lived half her life under the Soviet regime and the other half in Canada. As the work is a letter to her granddaughter, now a small girl, Tamara's life, situations, and feelings are described as they were, without consideration for political correctness or to match to taste of the present time; it is the real life of an ordinary person.
The work is infused with details of everyday life, joyful and sad, with short stories and life experiences under both systems. The work gives Tamara's background; the roots of her family; the discovery of the suicide of her grandfather, a scientist-geneticist, kept secret in her family. At the end Tamara records notes from her return to Russia and Ukraine where her husband and she met people from different layers of the society to catch a glimpse of what happened after the Soviet Union collapsed.
The second edition has "Afterword, 2023" chapter added while the first Edition part is not altered intentionally. There are some additional thoughts and images appended in the new chapter. The author believe that pictures have a language of their own, captured moments that words might struggle to convey.
Author Tamara Bukhanov gives her opinion on both systems, her thoughts on various subjects provoke readers to examine their own opinions and views.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9780994915719

Book preview

Tamara  Life in the Soviet Union and under Capitalism

Copyright © 2023 by Tamara Bukhanov (Second Edition)

                  First Edition was published in 2015.

All Rights Reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission.

Published by Aramat Tree

Legal Deposit, Library & Archives Canada, 2023

ISBN  978-0-9949157-1-9

Design Aramat Tree

For my family, my daughter Karina,

my granddaughter Sasha, her children, and her children’s children

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: OUR ANCESTORS, 1885–1938

FAMILY ROOTS, MY FATHER’S SIDE (BATIRENKO)

MY MOTHER’S SIDE (FEDOTOV)

PART TWO: MY HISTORY

LIFE IN SOVIET TIMES: COMMUNIST REGIME, 1938–1977

EARLY YEARS: WAR TIME AND SCHOOL, 1938-1955.

STUDENT YEARS, 1938-1955

ADULT LIFE, 1961-1977

VACATIONS

EMIGRATION: WE LIVE RUSSIA, 1976–1977

LIFE IN THE WEST: VIENNA, ITALY, FEB. – OCT. 197

LIFE IN CANADA: CAPITALISM, 1977–2014

ARRIVING TO CANADA, FIRST YEARS, 1977-1980

SHIFT IN MY LIFE: WORKING AT AECL, 1980–1985

TEACHING AT SHERIDAN COLLEGE, 1984–1985

YORK UNIVERSITY, B.A. IN ART, 1990–1996

LIFE AFTER PENSION, 2002 TO THE PRESENT

PART THREE: DIARY, 2008–2014

PART FOUR: SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING

COMMUNISM AND CAPITALISM IN MY EYES

REPRESSION IN SOVIET TIMES……

THOUGHTS ON VARIOUS TOPICS

PART FIVE: TRAVEL NOTES, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, 2011

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

AFTERWORD

People in the West do not live so much by emotions as people in Russia do.

—Unknown

INTRODUCTION

This book is actually a long letter about my life to my granddaughter Sasha and my great-grandchildren. There are two people in my life who mean the whole universe to me: my daughter Karina and my granddaughter Sasha. A few years ago, when Sasha was four years old and I was seventy-two, a thought came to my mind that I did not have enough time left to tell Sasha about our family, her ancestors, my life, and life in general. So I started to collect some notes.

Some day in the future, Sasha, when you are in a calm, meditative mood or you feel lonely, you might be interested to know how your grandmother lived, what she thought and did, and where your family came from. I wish I had this kind of book from my grandmother, Baba Katya, or Great-Aunt Mukha (a fly in Russian), who were young at the beginning of the twentieth century. These two people spent a lot of time with me when I was a child; they both were very literate and kind to me. I will never know what they thought, how their days passed by what they ate, and what the world around them looked like to them. Why did they not write to me!

My family never told me that my grandfather, a known scientist, tragically left this world and I—what a shame! —discovered some details only in my seventies. Thus, Sasha, cherish these pages from your grandmother, Nana, and it would be terrific if you wrote your book yourself and passed it to your children. Think about it.

I want to tell you what I know about life; I will try to lead you through my life. Obviously, you will live in another world and you will find the way we lived strange; however, some points, some experiences might be interesting to you and I hope will help. If only a candle had known what the candle-end knows.

You will not find any big, exciting events in this book. I am not a drug addict survivor, nor a Holocaust survivor, nor a survivor of a terrible disease. I am not a celebrity and I have not had extraordinary experiences in life. I am rather a survivor of living life itself. I am an ordinary person who happened to live in the second half of the twentieth century and at the beginning of twenty-first century. I was born right before the Second World War, (1939–1945, the deadliest conflict in human history, which involved millions and millions people from many countries). I lived half my life in the Soviet Union, in communist society, and the other half in the capitalist world.

Do not laugh at my writing and me. Do not think that I am old (you are saying, You are old, Nana, your face has wrinkles) and that my writing should be buried forever in an upper shelf. If you are not ready to read now, close the book and read it in a couple of years. Do not forget that I was young at one time, that I had crazy ideas and feelings that you have, whatever your age is now when you are reading this book. Also, do not forget that one day you will be old, as I am now.

When people in older age write about their life, they must avoid falling into the traps of the older we are, the more beautiful we were, and of being grumpy and overcritical. As one story goes, I saw the Queen. Some years later, it becomes I was in the palace one day, then after a few years more, I had a tea with the Queen, and finally, I was the Queen. I am joking, but there is some truth in it. So I try to be honest in my recollections.

Another problem in writing about my life is the period when I lived in the Soviet Union.1 After the Soviet Union collapsed (in 1991) and freedom of expression became a personal right, masses of books and articles about this time in history emerged. The authors claimed their truth. In the beginning, this literature was very rude, written with bad language and many slanders. The people compensated for frustration in their life (mainly frustration about their present life, by the way), and blamed the past for their failures. The more horrors in their life in the Soviet Union they described, the better. Later this kind of information became more sophisticated; they claimed some facts, statistics, the language became more literate, more convincing, and gradually the past became changed completely. This changed past has become the truth. Do these authors gain some profit from their horrors? Prestige? Popularity? Maybe simple satisfaction, inner satisfaction. Now the whole era looks like a bizarre world.

I did not like this literature and stopped reading it, questioning the facts, not allowing myself to be influenced by some TV shows. Here, in this book, I describe my life there as I lived it, as I felt it at that time, what I loved at that time, but not through the prism of the current political assessment. I realize that other people had experiences different from mine, but mind you, I did not live in isolation. I lived with people around me. Many people crossed my path, so it is not a reflection of my life only. There were people, real patriots, dissidents, who saw the flaws in the Soviet system and fought the establishment at that time, but not the authors of all horror books who write in the cozy surroundings of their home abroad with a cup of coffee, who left the Soviet Union for economic reasons.

Another thing is what you want to see and what you are able to see. Two friends met at a cafe. They greeted each other and asked if it was difficult to find the place. One man said, Oh, it was very easy. I stopped one man who told me to go along the main street, past a big opera house, then to turn left at an antique book store on the corner, then along a small street right after the art nouveau building, then left again, and here I am. The other man said that he got directions from a man he stopped on the street and he did not have problems either. This man said that I had to go along this street, then turn left not far from a big liquor store. After I passed a couple of tattoo parlours and a strip club, I should turn left again and here I am.

Notes

As I write, sometimes I address Sasha. She is Alexandra Chloe Hodgson and Sasha is the short name for Alexandra or Alexandr in Russian language. It is simply easier for me to express myself that way. When I describe my past life, my comments from today are in italics. Also, to make it easier comprehend time, I insert dates in brackets and explain terms and events in footnotes.

PART ONE: OUR ANCESTORS, 1885–1938

It is one of those sunny early spring days. The trees have started to put out new green leaves and blue snowdrops burst from the earth in the parks. There is not much bare earth along the streets, it is big city with many trees but not many flower beds. The brownish piles of snow are still scattered here and there, and melt water is running along the curbs and down the hill towards the Kharkov River. The air is still chilly but already there is a scent of spring. At our corner on Pushkinskaya Street stands a babyshka, an older woman, selling lilies of the valley and snowdrops. She has small bouquets neatly tied and stacked at the bottom of a bucket with a little of water in it. Almost nobody is buying, but the flowers at the corner are a good sign that the city is gradually returning to normal life.

I am eight or nine years old. I have just come from school. I wear a tubeteika,2 a skullcap from Uzbekistan, which I am very proud of. My old shoes are completely wet because I had great fun jumping over streams, and sometimes I landed right in the water. Smaller children put paper boats in the water and zealously watched which ones would float furthest down without been stuck in debris. My brother and I are on our own till our parents come home after work. We are free to do anything we want: and we want mostly to play with other children from our dvor (the courtyard surrounded by the five-storey building where we live).

Then there is a knock at the door; it is our grandmother Baba Katya who was at the pharmacy nearby and decided to check on us. First she looks to see if there is something to eat for us. A piece of bread with drops of sunflower oil and salt on it and a little fried potato will do till evening when our mother comes. Baba Katya is softly smiling, but her eyes are full of worry; she asks if everything is all right with our parents and at school. She has to go to help Uncle Stasic’s family with whom she lives.

My brother and I rush downstairs; we can play with other children who are already in the dvor. I watch Baba Katya crossing the dvor. How small she looks, how vulnerable; her head and shoulders droop. There are many things to do with the children. We sit on the railings and talk and talk about very important matters.

The sun is setting behind the building, and unexpectedly I see my father entering the dvor. He came home very early today for some reason. I run to him, he lifts me above his head, and he swings me round and round. I am flying. My tubeteika falls to the ground. And I am flying, flying. I am happy.

Kharkov, Pushkinskaya street, Baba Katya, Uncle Stasic, my father … visions from my faraway past. Who are these people who have vanished from the face of the earth? What do I know about them, and what do I know about my family?

FAMILY ROOTS, MY FATHER’S SIDE  (BATIRENKO)

What do I know about the Batirenkos? My grandfather, Vasiliy Georgievich Batirenko, and my grandmother, Ekaterina Grigorievna Batirenko (née Chernova), Baba Katya, were both of Greek origin. Their parents, my grand grandparents, were from the small town of Mangush, several kilometres from the city of Mariupol, near the Sea of Azov, now Ukraine, in Donetsk region. History says that this town was founded in 1779 by Christian Greeks who were brought from the Crimean Khanate. The Khanate itself was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783.

The Greeks did well in business, and as I understand, the family was well established. During the Russian October Revolution in 1917, the family was dispossessed as kulaks.3 My mother bantered with my father, asking if he remembered that several carts of belongings were taken from their estate during the Revolution. When Baba Katya had a stroke, I visited her in hospital. Her mind was wandering to the past and she told me, "Do not leave; it is not too late. I will order the coachman to harness a fast troika4 for you." She also mentioned servants. These comments sounded very strange to me, a Soviet girl. I knew nothing about my grandparents’ life before the Revolution. Everything was silent in our family about that life; nobody asked and nobody said anything. What a pity!

The Greek settlements were close to Crimea’s Tatars, so maybe that provides a clue about why the family name in some documents was Batir. After the Revolution, their Greek origin, let alone connections to Tatars, was scrupulously guarded in our family. The name Batir was changed to Batirenko, so that it sounded Ukrainian. The Greek nationality was indicated only in my father’s military document, but otherwise everywhere we were Russians, reflecting my mother’s side.

After my grandparents married, they with my grandfather’s sister, my Great-Aunt Maria Mukha, and Great-Aunts Lyuba, Sarah, and Marusya from my grandmother’s side continued to live in Mangush for some time. It is interesting that there was an imperial decree, dated 5 October 1906, that cancelled restrictions on the rights of previously naturalized citizens and gave them the freedom to choose a place of residence on an equal basis with other classes. My grandmother’s passport, dated 1910, has this note. The Revolution made all equal in this respect, although the indication of nationality in passports was left intact.

After the Revolution and dispossession, as I understand it, my Great-Aunts Lyuba, Sarah, and Marusya moved to Mariupol. My grandfather and grandmother, and Great-Aunt Maria Mukha, moved to Kharkov (Ukraine).

There is not much left from my Greek roots. Baba Katya, my Great-Aunt Mukha, and Great-Aunts Lyuba, Sarah, and Marusya spoke what I thought was Greek a few times. Baba Katya taught me three or four lines of a song, which I remember even now. I sang this song to Greeks, but they said it was not Greek. I sang this song to Turks, and they said it was not Turkish. It was the same with the Tatars. Baba Katya taught me how to dance with slow movements and play with your hands at the same time. Also she emphasized that I had to play with my lips during the dance. Again, nobody recognized such a strange dance or the language. I asked my father before his death what language they spoke. He gave me several words, which I wrote down somewhere, but they were lost.

My Great-Aunts Lyuba, Sarah, and Marusya continued to live in Mariupol to the end of their lives; they never married. My mother, my brother, Baba Katya, and I often took summer vacations in Mariupol in the late 1950s. Later on, when my daughter Karina was born, we took her to the Azov Sea as well. There we lived in Great-Aunt Lyuba’s small flat. The flat was part of a complex of several one-storey houses, adjacent to each other, surrounding a small yard, a dvor. Everybody from a dvor knew each other. We slept on folding camp-cots. During the day, all the curtains were pulled closed, not to let the heat in. At around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the children and even adults had what was called a dead hour. They took a rest or slept. In other words, it was an afternoon siesta.

Every morning and evening we went to a beach. My mother and most people at that time strongly believed in the curative power of sea air and water. It was a small city, with big mulberry trees on narrow streets, quite a sea resort, in an old-fashioned way. In the evenings, all households watered the small flowerbeds in front of their flats and then men and women sat on the benches in silence or talked in low voices.

On several occasions, all relatives, including all my great-aunts, gathered. The focus of these gatherings was making and eating chebureks. Everyone participated in making them; Baba Katya and Great-Aunt Lyuba made dough, which my mother and I rolled into blintzes approximately six inches in diameter. On one half of it we put a small amount of ground meat with spices. Then we flipped the other half of the blintz over to cover the meat and sealed the edges with our fingers. On the stove in a big pan there was olive oil boiling. We dropped in chebureks one by one and watched them until they were ready. The dough must be brownish, but not burned. The meat must be cooked. My grandmother and the great-aunts knew what they were doing. The chebureks were very tasty, the meat inside had a lot of juice, and the dough was crunchy. Great-Aunt Sarah and Great-Aunt Marusya also specialized in making jams, varenie, made of gooseberries, rose petals, or cherries. Varenie differs from jam by its consistency; the fruit are whole and floating in syrup. I loved varenie made from rose petals.

That is all that I remember from my Greek roots. In general, the Batirenkos family were quite assimilated with the Russians well before the Revolution. Nevertheless during the Second World War when Stalin ordered Crimea’s Tatars to leave the territory within twenty-four hours (the Tatars were blamed for co-operating with the Nazis), it was quite dangerous to have Greek nationality on your passport.

The Batirenkos, my grandparents, had three sons. The eldest was Stanislav Vasilievich Batirenko (born in 1910), then my father, Sergey Vasilievich Batirenko (born in 1911), and the youngest, Anatoliy Vasilievich Batirenko, Tolya (born in 1913).

Uncle Anatoliy was killed during the Second World War. He was a very lively and loving boy who never stopped joking. Baba Katya told me that at one time he came home and insisted that in a store they were selling eggs with sauce in cans. If only they knew that now marinated eggs are indeed sold in cans.

The family received only one card from him at the front, except for the notification of his death. The card said, Here the rains are heavier than you have ever seen in your life. He referred to bombing and bullets. Only this card. No grave, nothing. One day you have a son, you think about him, you worry about him: next day, one piece of paper. That was it; the man disappeared from the earth. That was what wars did. In The Book of Memory of Kharkov Region there is a note that reads, Batirenko Anatoliy Vasilievich, a private, missing in action in December 1943.

My Grandfather, Vasiliy Georgievich Batirenko, (1885–1936)

The story of my grandfather shocked me. At the age of seventy-three I found out that my grandfather was a prominent scientist who took his life when he was fifty-one years old.

I did not know my grandfathers; one was dead for a long time before I came into this world, and the other (from my mother’s side) died when I was two years old. Both left tragically. I knew almost nothing about my grandfathers. We lived our lives, we were busy, and our family never talked about them.

In 2011, after I had been in Canada for almost thirty-eight years, my husband Jake and I took a trip back to Russia and Ukraine. It was actually the fiftieth anniversary of graduating from the University of Kharkov. In Kharkov I met my Cousin Anatoliy and his grown-up sons. During one cozy gathering when we talked about our life, and our grandfather’s name was mentioned, with some contradictions about who knew what about him, Cousin Anatoliy said that somewhere he had a bunch of family documents. Dima, Cousin Anatoliy’s son, promised to find and scan the documents and send them to me. Back in Canada one month later, I received an email with twenty-eight copies of birth certificates, letters, passports, and old photos.

The first copy was a typed letter, a spravka (reference), from my grandfather dated 21 February 1935. It started, I was charged with … on the first of July 1930 for six years according to the clause 54.7 without limitation in rights. Then he listed where he had worked after his conviction and which scientific treatises he wrote. Clause 54.7 is an act of sabotage against the state.

Then, there was a small sheet, a certificate of his death, dated 23 October 1936. In the column titled Year and Cause of Death, there was a handwritten note: 51 years old, poisoning by strychnine. (Strychnine is a highly toxic alkaloid used as a pesticide, particularly for killing rats and other rodents. Strychnine, when inhaled, swallowed, or absorbed through eyes or mouth, causes a poisoning which results in muscular convulsions and eventually death through asphyxia).

I could not find peace in my heart and mind; why did I not know anything? So many years had passed. Everyone from whom I could have gotten some details—my parents, my grandmother, my great-aunts—was dead already. Then, on the spur of the moment, when I was on the Internet, I typed (in Russian) Batirenko genetics. This surname is very rare. To my great surprise, I found five pages of entries for the works of Batirenko Vasiliy Georgevich. One entry even offered his book for sale for $10. Obviously I rushed to buy the book, not without difficulties, because it was an antique and could not be brought abroad. There was only one response to my request in English, but I could not open it to read the full text. The note said, outstanding contributors to scientific thought and accomplishment in genetics, … to a somewhat greater extent than durum wheat (V. G. Batirenko). I gathered this was an allegation that my grandfather worked on some sort of wheat that caused a great loss of harvest. In the record of the interrogation of academic Vavilov, an internationally known scientist, there is a reference to my grandfather. I will return to this issue in a later chapter about repression in the Soviet Union.

My grandfather was a geneticist, and in those Soviet times, genetics was taboo. People who worked in this field were considered enemies of the people. Genetics was thought to be against the people and against the idea of the Revolution that we are the creators of our own lives, not by what we inherited from our parents. The Revolution wanted to remove the idea from people’s minds that children of aristocrats are destined to be aristocrats, and that the lot of the poor and uneducated cannot be changed. It was the revolutionary idea; it helped the people feel that they could do everything.

It is regrettable that the goals of many scientific pursuits were bluntly distorted, many scientists were forced to quit their research, and many of them were prosecuted. The science of genetics was incorrectly interpreted: we cannot escape what is in us, but obviously that has nothing to do with aristocrats.

In the e-mail package was a copy of a handwritten letter: two pages filled with very small characters, with the stamp of the All-Union Institute of Applied Botanic and New Cultured Plants, Leningrad, dated 9 February 1927. The letter was from P. M. Zhukovskiy, later a corresponding member of the Academy of Science of the USSR Academy, to my grandfather. In it they discussed an article my grandfather submitted for publication, about organizational problems in the institute, praising their director, academic N. I. Vavilov, and expressing disappointment with a book by V. V. Talanov, the deputy director of the institute. It is a private letter, but what style, what respect is revealed in how these two men addressed each other and how they express their points of view. It is only one glimpse into the life of my grandfather on a private level; I cherish this letter very much.

Also, my grandfather had arguments with academic T. D. Lysenko, a Communist Party darling. Did it contribute to the fate of my grandfather?

Should I blame my family for being silent about my grandfather, their silence almost burying his respect and his memory? No, I cannot blame my family. Everybody feared the KGB,5 everybody knew how dangerous it was. The best thing was silence so that the children were not jeopardized.

Should I blame myself—an adult who can control what I say and where, already in Canada, with my parents still here on Earth, who could have asked my father for details? I was not interested; I did not ask. This is a shame. Now I am eager to have a word, a small note from my grandfather. Why did he commit suicide? What did he think? I took his portrait from one of the documents; I enlarged it and put it in a frame. He was a very handsome man. People in old photos have such dignity.

Besides these shocking revelations, I gathered from the documents that in 1899 my grandfather finished two-grade Mangush school. It is interesting that in his school report, he had the highest marks (5) for all subjects, except two, for which he had 4. I smiled to myself; I had similar marks for Russian grammar and literature. He was admitted to the Emperor Alexander II Polytechnic Institute, in the city of Kiev in 1907, which he finished in 1912. During the rest of his life he worked at various places, including holding the post of professor at Poltavskiy Agricultural Institute (1929) just before he was convicted.

That is all that I know. Was he a reserved person, was he a loving, mild-mannered person, did he suffer a lot after he took strychnine? What did my father know about his father, my grandfather, Vasiliy Georgievich Batirenko? Again it is shameful that we know so very little about our grandparents!

My Grandmother, Ekaterina Grigorievna Batirenko, (1886–1968), Baba Katya, And Other Relatives

How strange it is! I thought that I knew my grandmother, for whom I still have very warm feelings. I do visualize her in her old age, but I do not have much to tell you about her. Very strange. Have I forgotten her? Or did I actually know her?

She was a petite woman, with a pleasant smile on her face all the time. She wore a coat—dark blue, quite bulky, and long—and a small, dark blue beret. Sweet Baba Katya! I think she always tried to have a candy in one of her deep coat pockets for my brother and me. She spoke softly, never raised her voice. But I remember her only when she was old. She was a quite healthy person, who died at eighty-two with most of her teeth, which was very unusual in the age without fluoride; we had only tooth powder made of crushed chalk. She was sick for several months after a stroke before her death, but otherwise I was not aware that she h ad illnesses.

I have an old photo, dated 1913, taken in a studio with a field on a painted background. Ekaterina Grigorievna Batirenko, Baba Katya, sits on the left, and on the right is Maria Grigorievna Batirenko, my great-aunt, nicknamed Mukha, my grandfather’s sister. Between them is my father, aged two, in a girl’s dress, and his elder brother, Uncle Stacik (Stanislav Vasilievich) dressed as a boy. Standing is my Great-Aunt Lyuba. All women are in whitish, long dresses with laces and belts. Their hair is parted down the middle of the tops of their heads and smoothly pulled back. Their posture is calm and serene. Their hands are relaxed. Now, we are supposed to smile and say Cheese and appear happy when we are photographed; not one hundred years ago.

The women at that time were docile, mainly doing household work, bringing up children. My grandmother had no job outside of the house in her entire life. She was dependant on her husband. After my grandfather died, she lived with her eldest son and his family, obviously dependant on them.

So, after the kulaks were dispossessed, the family of my grandfather Vasiliy Georgievich Batirenko left Mangush and settled in Kharkov. Kharkov, the second-largest city in Ukraine, was the capital from 1919 to 1935, a vibrant city with many universities and scientific institutes. The city’s landmark buildings represent artistic trends in architecture, constructivism,6 and many buildings done in art deco style.

My recollection starts from Pushkinskaya Street in Kharkov, where my father family got a flat in the Hydro Building in central Kharkov. His elder brother’s family, with whom my father was very close, had a flat on Krasnosnamenoi Street just fifteen minutes from our place. The two families were very close, especially because their children, my Cousin Olga and I, were approximately the same age.

So Baba Katya lived with the family of her eldest son, Stanislav. Great-Aunt Mukha lived in the same flat on the fifth floor. There were no elevators, and there was no peace in this arrangement—too crowded. The three women—Baba Katya, Great-Aunt Mukha, and Raisa (Uncle Stanislav Vasilievich’s wife) did not get along. When I came to them, Baba Katya and Great-Aunt Mukha tried to keep me to themselves. So I had to visit each room separately, eat what they put on the table, and listen to what they had to say about books.

Baba Katya and Great-Aunt Mukha were both very literate. They were the ones who gave me my love and understanding of books, of written words, while my parents worked all their lives from morning to night. I cherish the gifts they gave me: very old photographs of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekov, and a book about Anton Chekhov.

Strange, we carried heavy luggage with us full with books when we immigrated to Canada.

I have—and I hope you, Sasha, will keep—the book about Anton Chekhov. It was published in 1957 and it has many photos. Sasha, this book helped me to prove a point to your father, Peter, one day. We saw Soulpepper’s production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Sonya, a character in the play, belongs to the nobility, but she is poor and honest. Sonya and Uncle Vanya do not fit into the industrialized world and suffer, of course.

The director made Sonya wear an apron and a village shawl. In the play, Sonya was dusting rooms all the time. It was a very primitive interpretation and destroyed the subtlety of Chekhov’s play. Peter was adamant that it was the correct approach, till I found in Baba Katya’s book a photo from the Mariinsky