Red Hogwarts. Series 9. Students - Part Two

We continue to talk about the boys from the photo

Geologist

Next to Fadeev, Alexey Alexandrovich Blokhin, then, of course, just Alyosha. He is known incomparably worse than Fadeev, the biography, accordingly, was studied without details, therefore the story will be much shorter.


Alexey Blokhin

Alexey is older than his fellow practitioners - he was born on May 31, 1897, that is, in this photograph he is already twenty-five. He is generally the oldest in this photo - Ivan Apryatkin, a former leader of the trade union movement of Azerbaijan (second from the left in the bottom row), one year younger than him, born in 1898. All the others are jerks born in the 20th century.


Ivan Apryatkin

With Fadeev, Blokhin has an affinity of origin - both fathers began their working career as village teachers. Only if the elder Fadeev soon joined the People’s Population and after the first arrest he received the so-called “wolf passport”, depriving him of the right to live in many places of Russia and engage in teaching, then did the senior Svetlana and the teacher. He taught all his life in the village of Golovino, Kostroma district, where his children were born. When the first students grew up - he taught their children, children grew up - he taught grandchildren. And so 44 years in a row. A very simple recipe.

It was a completely different pre-revolutionary type, which turned out to be very tenacious - not revolutionaries, but the lower Russian intelligentsia, all their lives in the sweat of their own nourishing the inherited niva. Living among the people and nothing, by and large, not different from him, with him going through all the joy and hardships that fall out. All these priests, doctors, teachers - who feed the flock, each in its sector, and not requiring reward. Always dreaming: “If only children get the share easier,” and get out of touch to give children a normal education.

So it was with the Blokhins. Alexey learned from Papa in a village school, graduated in 1909 and entered the Kostroma First Gymnasium. Apparently, Alexey, like many people from the strata “whose children, except those who are gifted with brilliant abilities, should not at all strive for secondary and higher education” , studied fervently and finished the gymnasium in 1917 “with a medal”. Quotation, if someone did not recognize, was from the circular "On the reduction of gymnasium education," better known as the "Circular on Cooking Children."


First Kostroma gymnasium. As described by A.P. Smirnov: “It was a huge house with rooms similar to public barns. He stood on a mountain that led down to the Volga. ”

In 1917, Alexey entered the Moscow University in the Mathematics Department, but, as he later wrote in his autobiography, "could not find work and due to lack of funds, he stopped studying . " Studying at the university the family no longer pulled and could not. The failed student returns home and begins working as a teacher in the village of Bolshie Sally of the same Kostroma region. It seemed that the circle closed. All in all, it’s profit that the son settled for a teacher not in an ordinary village, but in a future regional center (on February 20, 1934, a resolution of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee will be issued, obliging "to transfer the administrative center of the Bolshesolsky district from the village of Babayka to the village of Great Salt" ).

But ... Revolution, Civil War. Alexey was mobilized into the Red Army, fighting for two years, and at the end of 1920, by order of the head of the Political Directorate of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, he was sent to the Moscow Mining Academy to study.

Member of the CPSU (b) since 1921, adopted by the Kostroma organization of the CPSU (b)

Student of the Mining Academy. He moved into a dorm room along with his younger brother Nikolai Blokhin, who also entered the metallurgical department of the Moscow Mining Academy (second from the right in the bottom row).


Nikolay Blokhin

Nuclear keeper

See the photo of a serious young man in the lower right corner? Yes, yes, in a pea jacket with two rows of shiny buttons. This is Yadershchik, who is also Vasily Semenovich Emelyanov, then, naturally, just Vasya.


Vasily Emelyanov

Russian, born in 1901, the same age with Fadeev. Grandson of Saratov landless peasant. The grandfather, Peter Antonovich, who had been interrupted by his day-work, spent his whole life, buried eight of the twelve children. Vasya's father, Semyon Petrovich, in search of a better life, moved to the Transcaucasus for oil fields - there, according to rumors, it was possible to make money and not die of hunger. At his new place, his father works as a carpenter in the village of Balakhani near Baku, where not only scorched earth or scarce water is hot air and it seemed to be saturated with oil.

Vasya is the oldest of six children, so he is the only child in the family who rarely, but still wore new shoes. All the others have already worn him. In return for this privilege, his whole life was painted in advance — like all the older children in working families, he, barely having entered into force, had to go to work — to help parents raise others. It was possible to jump out of this generations of trampled track in only one way - to catch a lucky bird by the tail and, more difficult, to keep it. At first, Vasya was lucky - the boy had very good abilities and he managed to pass the exams at a real school. Naturally, the family could not pay for education, so Vasya had only one chance not to fly out of the social elevator - to have fives in all subjects. The owner of the oil fields Benkendorf from the bounty donated to two free scholarships, and two of the most chubby beggars were exempt from payment.


Vasya Emelyanov with his father. 1912

Have you noticed that all the characters in this picture have a very similar fate? And here I am, I’m sorry, distracted and will be engaged in the fact that some of my readers certify "communist propaganda." Jokes, jokes, but in general the question is not idle. Almost all my heroes were sincere servants of the Revolution, ready to give everything, including life, in the name of the triumph of communism. Those who did not promise to donate, namely that they donated - the difference is fundamental.

An author writing about a real person should understand him. Not to share his beliefs is just not necessary at all - but it is necessary to understand how he thought and why he acted this way and not otherwise. Otherwise, all your work is meaningless, without this understanding it is impossible to write anything worthwhile. Even now I cannot say that I understood the motivation of my heroes one hundred percent, but I confess honestly - Vasily Yemelyanov helped me a lot with this.

After reading the memoirs of Yadershchik (and he is the only one in this photo who left memories), much has become clearer to me. And since my readers are not bad, I will not play a spoiled phone, and just quote a few excerpts from his terrible story about childhood in his ordinariness. Without any comments - as the ancient Romans said, it is reasonable enough:

Of the only wealth that the grandfather possessed, eight piles of children died out, four moved to Baku. They arrived at the height of the strike struggle of oil workers. It was 1905.

It was hard to live. Ninety-three pennies a day, which he received, it was necessary to feed and dress eight people, pay for housing.

During his entire working life, his father was able to buy only one three-piece suit: a jacket, trousers, and a vest. This was before his marriage. The wedding was supposed to wear boots and top three. All other years, his pants and shirts sewed his mother. Then all the wives of the workers were dressmakers. Sewing yourself was a lot cheaper.

...

The father often came back from work all in oil, with red sore eyes. In the house, built of hewn stones of limestone, laid on clay, there was no running water, no sewage, no lighting. There was a stove, heated by oil, food was cooked on it, and it also served as a means of heating. On the stove mother heated the water. Crouching in a galvanized pelvis, saving every mug of water, his father tried to wash off the oil. His oil-soaked hair stuck together. It was impossible to remove oil from the beard and hair of the head, and he washed them with kerosene.

Then, catching his breath, he approached me and, looking into my books and notebooks, with hope and longing, said:

“Maybe you’ll learn to be a scribe.” Still, the clerk has a clean job, not like our carpenters.



...

Life was monotonously monotonous, and the days were slow. Even now it seems to me that then - in 1913 and 1914, the days were much longer.
Time painfully long lasted until lunch, and from lunch to dinner. Lunches and dinners were surprisingly short.

In those years, I seem to have never been well fed. Therefore, probably, I remember this division of the day into two periods - before lunch and after lunch. Lunch and dinner in our family always consisted of one dish - soup or soup.

When the whole family gathered at the table, the mother put a large enamelled dish in the middle of the table, and everyone sitting with wooden spoons scooped up its contents.
The knife was one. He was put on the table in order to cut the bread. For the first time I received a separate plate in the student canteen of the Moscow Mining Academy in 1921. Before that, I didn’t have to use a plate, knife and fork - we simply didn’t have them, and besides, we didn’t need them. Such dishes, where a knife and fork were required, were not prepared in our family. In the Red Army I ate either from a soldier’s kettle or from a cistern — one canister for ten people.

The whole family had one towel. It hung at the washstand.

In all working families, they used the cheapest soap - usually a piece, a remnant, which remained after washing clothes. Now this soap is called economic.
The soap, packed in colored paper, was then called “personal” or “spirit”, it was not available at a price. Such soap fell into the hands very rarely. In our family, only aunts sometimes received a birthday present on a piece of such soap.

There were no toothbrushes or powder for cleaning the teeth in the factory - nobody cleaned the teeth at all.

2
Oil production well method. Photo by Alexander Michon

I do not remember that before the revolution, I or other family members had sometime purchased socks or stockings. They were always knitted by their mother, and she also darned them. Purchased were expensive. And when the socks or stockings could not be repaired anymore, we would open them and weave the threads into a ball. Coiled old yarn was used to knit new stockings.
My father did not wear stockings or socks at all - he used footcloths.

“Why, would you save enough socks?” One could hear from him when the mother offered to tie the socks for him.

Of the children, only the oldest received new shoes, others donned mine. In order to lengthen the term of the socks of his shoes, his father screwed iron plates on his heels and on the sole, which he chopped from old barrel hoops. The boots became heavy and, when walking, made an iron clang.

Since not all the plates were well fixed, some were squishing and ringing, which reminded me of the sound of shackles, which I heard once when prisoners were being driven along the street.

In the very first months after the revolution, I changed my shoes to the soldiers' shoes, volunteered for the Red Guard, and never wore shoes with a "shrill ringing".


Before sending to the Polish front. Sits (in the second row from the left) V. Emelyanov. 1920
...

Hungry days of 1920. There are 8 children in the family - two very small. The youngest, Kostya, is three years old. Bread give a small slice for the day. How much is in it - in this piece? It was said that one eighth of a pound. May be so. There is nothing to add to the bread. Adults, it is true, could get some soup somewhere else in the dining room, but there was nothing to bring home except bread. I did not eat the bread that I received; I brought it to Brother Kosta.
All adults tried to stretch the resulting piece of bread for the whole day. They cut it into small slices and hid it.

Kostya also hid his lobules, he did not eat everything at once.

Until now, I have an image of a boy with surprisingly serious eyes on a pale, without bloodshed face. For days he sat on a wooden rocking horse, which his father had built for him and, hugging the horse's neck with both hands, quietly swayed.
I do not remember him asking for something or crying.

The children of the workers learned patience from the cradle.

...

Of the children - two could not be saved. First Nina died, and then Kostya.

Our family did not have the habit of crying and wailing. But I saw my mother peeking a corner of her apron to her eyes.

Having buried the children, the father walked gloomily for a long time.

Usually, after returning from work, having washed and combed his hair, he either told that he had an interesting job or asked to read a newspaper.

Now he is silent. Silently walked around the room, looked around, and it seemed to me that he was looking for something.

Sometimes he sternly said: “I did not save. Strength was not enough "- and left the house.

Like Alexey Blokhin, Vasily Emelyanov did not keep his bird. Life with its unshakable realism indifferently pushed the upstart back into the grooved rut. The dream of education collapsed, at the age of 15 Vasya had to quit the real school and the free scholarship, and go to work at the oil fields - the father alone could not pull out the younger children and the situation in the family became worse and worse.


V. Emelyanov in the classroom, where he studied half a century ago.

But soon after that, an event occurred that criss-crossed the plans of millions of people — in February 1917 a revolution occurred in Russia. And in October - one more. Then, in 1917, immediately after the October Revolution, the 16-year-old Vasily Yemelyanov, a fighter of the Red Guard detachment in Azerbaijan, his father and younger brother, 15-year-old Nicholas, went with him to volunteer for the revolution. Six months near the Persian border in the village of Molassanna, where in 1918 the company was deployed, in which Yemelyanov served. Then Vasya - in the armed detachments of the Baku commune. After the seizure of Baku by the Turkish-Azerbaijani Caucasian Islamic Army and the establishment of the power of the Musavatists, in the Bolshevik underground. There he enters the party, at the age of 18 he is elected secretary of the underground party cell of the telephone station workers.


The payment book of V. Emelyanov at the telephone station in Baku. 1920

In general, all the same ordinary biography at an unusual time. Underground. The consignment. Fighting group local party cells. Active participation in the Baku uprising and the armed seizure of the city. Participation in the suppression of insurgency remnants of the Wild Division. Application for sending to the Polish front. But Vasya did not get to war with Pilsudski - Emelyanov collapsed with malaria and was sent for treatment at the hospital. Farther…



Then he himself described what happened in his memoirs: “I was in a military hospital when I received a notice that I was being offered to go to study. Malaria. Attacks every other day. Quinine was not - I watered quinine peel extract. There was a constant ringing in the ears, and bitter taste in the mouth and complete atrophy of the taste sensations. But I learned well what was once said by my grandfather: "If there were bones, the meat will always increase." I went to study in Moscow with Tevosyan. ”

Yes, Vanya Tevosyan did not forget his old comrade in the Baku underground, with whom they, under the Musavit, tried to pass exams for the real school course. In the early 20s, Tevosyan brought a whole delegation of young Baku communists to the Mining Academy. In addition to Emelyanov, the Baku community included the already mentioned Vanya Apryatkin and Felix Zilber (second from the right in the upper row), son of the classic of Latvian literature Maurice Edward Zilber, better known under the writer pseudonym Sudrabu Edzhus. Felix's father was not only a writer, but a well-known revolutionary, and after actively participating in the revolution of 1905, he was forced to flee Riga and 11 years to teach in Baku.


Felix Zilber

However, it is time to get acquainted with this mysterious Vanya Tevosyan. See in the lower right corner a Caucasian guy in a leather jacket? It's him.