What does the grandson of an executioner-chekist feel?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Vladimir Yakovlev:

I was named after my grandfather.

My grandfather, Vladimir Yakovlev, was a murderer, a bloody executioner, a Chekist. Among his many victims were his own parents.

My grandfather shot his father for speculation. His mother, my great-grandmother, having learned about this, hanged herself.

My happiest childhood memories are associated with an old, spacious apartment on Novokuzetskaya, which our family was very proud of. This apartment, as I learned later, was not bought or built, but requisitioned - that is, taken by force - from a wealthy merchant family in Zamoskvoretsk.

I remember the old carved sideboard I used to climb into for jam. And a large cozy sofa on which my grandmother and I in the evenings, wrapped in a blanket, read fairy tales. And two huge leather chairs, which, according to family tradition, were used only for the most important conversations.

As I found out later, my grandmother, whom I loved very much, had successfully worked as a professional agent provocateur for most of her life. Born a noblewoman, she used her background to forge connections and provoke friends to frankness. Based on the results of the conversations, I wrote service reports.

The sofa, on which I listened to fairy tales, and armchairs, and a sideboard, and all the other furniture in the apartment, my grandparents did not buy. They simply chose them for themselves in a special warehouse, where property from the apartments of the shot Muscovites was delivered.

From this warehouse, the Chekists furnished their apartments for free.

Under a thin film of ignorance, my happy childhood memories are saturated with the spirit of robbery, murder, violence and betrayal. Soaked in blood.

Why am I the only one?

All of us who grew up in Russia are the grandchildren of victims and executioners. Everything is absolutely, everything without exception. There were no victims in your family? So there were executioners. There were no executioners? So there were victims. There were no victims or executioners? So there are secrets.

Don't even hesitate!

It seems to me that we greatly underestimate the impact of the tragedies of the Russian past on the psyche of today's generations. Our psyche. To this day, when we say goodbye, we say to each other - "Goodbye!", Not realizing that "date" is actually a prison word. In ordinary life, there are meetings, dates are in prison.

To this day, we easily write in sms: "I will write when I am free!"

When will I RELEASE …

When assessing the scale of the tragedies of the Russian past, we usually count the dead. But in order to assess the scale of the impact of these tragedies on the psyche of future generations, it is necessary to count not the dead, but the survivors.

The dead are dead. The survivors became our parents and the parents of our parents.

Survivors are widowed, orphaned, lost loved ones, exiled, dispossessed, expelled from the country, who killed for their own salvation, for the sake of ideas or for the sake of victories, betrayed and betrayed, ruined, sold conscience, turned into executioners, tortured and tortured, raped, mutilated, robbed, forced to inform, drunken from hopeless grief, feelings of guilt or lost faith, humiliated, past mortal hunger, captivity, occupation, camps.

The dead are tens of millions. There are hundreds of millions of survivors. Hundreds of millions of those who passed on their fear, their pain, their sense of a constant threat emanating from the outside world - to children, who, in turn, adding their own suffering to this pain, transferred this fear to us.

Just statistically, today in Russia there is not a single family that, in one way or another, would not bear the grave consequences of the atrocities unprecedented in their scale, which continued in the country for a century.

Have you ever thought about the extent to which this life experience of three consecutive generations of your DIRECT ancestors affects your personal, today's perception of the world? Your wife? Your children?

If not, think about it.

It took me years to understand my family history. But now I know better where my eternal unreasonable fear came from? Or exaggerated secrecy. Or an absolute inability to trust and build intimate relationships.

Or the constant feeling of guilt that has haunted me since childhood, as long as I can remember.

At school we were told about the atrocities of the German fascists. At the institute - about the atrocities of the Chinese Red Guards or the Cambodian Khmer Rouge.

They just forgot to tell us that the zone of the most terrible in the history of mankind, unprecedented in scale and duration of genocide, was not Germany, not China or Kombodia, but our own country.

And not distant Chinese or Koreans survived this horror of the most terrible genocide in the history of mankind, but three consecutive generations of YOUR PERSONAL family.

We often think that the best way to protect ourselves from the past is not to disturb it, not to delve into the history of the family, not to dig into the horrors that happened to our relatives.

It seems to us that it is better not to know. In fact, it is worse. Much.

What we don't know continues to influence us, through childhood memories, through relationships with parents. Simply, not knowing, we are not aware of this influence and therefore are powerless to resist it.

The worst consequence of hereditary trauma is the inability to recognize it. And, as a consequence, the inability to realize to what extent this trauma distorts our current perception of reality.

It doesn't matter what exactly for each of us today is the personification of this fear, who exactly each of us today sees as a threat - America, the Kremlin, Ukraine, homosexuals or Turks, “depraved” Europe, the fifth column or just a boss at work or a policeman at subway entrance.

It is important - are we aware of the extent to which our current personal fears, personal perception of an external threat - are in reality only ghosts of the past, the existence of which we are so afraid to admit?

… In the 19th, in devastation and hunger, my killer grandfather was dying of consumption. Felix Dzerzhinsky saved him from death, who brought from somewhere, most likely from another “special” warehouse, a box of French sardines in oil. Grandfather ate them for a month and, only because of this, he survived.

Does this mean that I owe my life to Dzerzhinsky?

And, if so, how to live with it?