MY FAMILY HISTORY, part 1

On the left: my grandfather’s parents, Maria and Ivan (ca. 1960)
On the right: my grandmother’s parents, Andrey and Elizaveta (ca. 1950).
Below: my grandfather, Nikolai (ca. 1945).

I want to share with you the history of the two previous generations of my family on my father’s side, the story of my great-grandparents and grandparents. The narrative below sheds light on the chain of unlikely events that eventually led to my birth in Southern Russia, Rostov region, the traditional land of Don Cossacks nearly forty years ago. This chronicle was compiled and written down by my father, Leonid Izyumenko, to pass down to me and my sister. I am publishing it on Steem with his permission.

FROM UKRAINE AND RUSSIA TO SIBERIA

My two great-grandparents of the Izyumenko branch of the family tree were born the citizens of the Russian Empire. In their youth they witnessed the fall of the empire and the birth of Soviet Russia, which later became the core part of the Soviet Union.

My great-grandfather Ivan Izyumenko was born in 1903 in Ukraine. Probably in Mykolaiv in Southern Ukraine, although I also heard another version from my great-uncle Ivan about the Poltava Governorate (the modern Poltava Oblast in Ukraine) being his father’s place of origin. My great-grandmother Maria (née Tiabina, later Izyumenko) was born in 1898 in Russia, in Tambov Governorate.

Somehow both their families ended up in Western Siberia – in a tiny village of Ol'gino in Omsk Governorate. Curiously enough, Ol'gino is situated in the Poltava district of the Omsk Region. The first 35 families who arrived there in May 1896 were all from the same village in Poltava Governorate in Ukraine, as were the settlers who had arrived a year earlier and founded the district’s centre, the village of Poltavka. This makes the version of my great-grandfather’s origin in Poltava region of Ukraine seem more likely.

(I heard different explanations for their move to Siberia from my relatives, but the mass colonisation of that land, envisioned and executed by Pyotr Stolypin, the 3^rd Prime Minister of Russia, is one likely explanation. The timing checks out, too.)

When my great-grandmother Maria was a little girl, she met a Kazakh hermit known to be a seer, who lived away from people and only visited nearby villages to get food in exchange of foretelling of one’s future. She brought him a few chicken eggs and he told her that she would become a mother of many, but three of her children would be taken by water. Keep reading to see if his prediction came true.

A YOUNG WIDOW

Maria married early and in 1922 gave birth to a son Leonid. Her husband died in a tragic accident involving some piece of agricultural machinery and she was left alone with a baby-boy on her hands. A year later, in 1923, my great-grandfather Ivan married her and adopted the little Leonid. Together they moved to the village of Vishnevka in the same region. On January 25^th 1924 they got another son, my grandfather Nikolai. A year later Maria’s first son Leonid died from pneumonia. So when the couple got another boy in 1926, they christened him Leonid, in loving memory of the departed eldest son. Between 1928 and 1938 Maria would give birth to four more children: Anna, Nina (1931), Lidia (1934) and Ivan (my great-uncle).

FROM HUNGER AND COLD TO PARADISE ON EARTH

Life in rural Siberia in the first half of the 20^th century was tough. Feeding six children and surviving in the harsh climate was not an easy thing to do. In spring of 1941 my great-grandfather Ivan decided to visit his remaining relatives in Ukraine and see what life was like there. When he arrived in the warm and abundant country of his ancestors and saw fruit trees in full bloom, Ivan thought he discovered a paradise on earth. He decided to move his family from Siberia back to Ukraine.

Ivan arrived back to Vishnevka in May 1941 and all he could see of his family’s house was the chimney stack sticking out from under the heaps of snow that had buried the house. Ivan went mad with worry and shouted into the chimney stack: “It’s me, your father, I am back! Are you still alive?” He heard his children crying and started digging furiously in the snow with his bare hands, making a tunnel towards the entrance of the house. Meanwhile, Maria was trying to push-open the door and started digging towards her husband. Once they had dug the tunnel, Ivan rolled into the house, with two sacks of foods, candies and presents from Ukraine on his heel. Seeing his nearly starved wife and children, he began to sob and cried: “Here you are about to starve to death, buried under the snow, all the while apricot trees are blooming in Ukraine! Let’s pack, we are moving there together!”

DRAMATIC JOURNEY

Packing didn’t take long: all their possessions were stuffed into two sacks made of women’s shawls. Ivan, Maria, and their six children – Nikolai, Leonid, Anna, Nina, Lidia, and Ivan were ready to embark on a 3,300 km / 2,050 mi journey. The seventh child, yet unborn and unbeknown to them at that time, would make the journey with them, inside Maria’s belly. Another family from their village decided to join them; they had relatives in Southern Russia, in the town of Morozovsk, so they could travel part of the way together.

First by horse-drawn sleigh to the train station in Isilkul 120 km / 75 mi west of Omsk, then by train to Central Russia, following by a steamboat down the river Volga to Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd). The children, never having seen such large river in their lives, were ecstatic. My grandfather Nikolai and his brother Leonid were having fun, jumping from the boat into the river. They would catch the rope trailing from the boat and draw themselves back onboard.

Once the two families came ashore in Stalingrad, Ivan went to the railway station to buy tickets to Ukraine. On his way to the station he noticed many tense faces and frantic activity of the locals. When he tried to buy train tickets to Mykolaiv, the ticket clerk asked Ivan bitterly if he was in a hurry to meet the Germans. Remember: this was way before the smartphones and the Internet, so my great-grandfather had no way of knowing that while he and his family were travelling by boat, the Nazi Germany invaded Belarus and Ukraine and that German troops were rapidly progressing towards the central parts of Russia.

to be continued…