Ancestors and Me
Volume I of autobiography with historical contemplations
Lots of things happened before I was born. Lots of things will happen after I die. I don't know what will happen later. But I know some of what happened before. Across a few next texts, I will fill you in on the history of my life. We'll start with the people who were before me, as their legacies influenced me for better or worse and predestined my starting position in this life.
Disclaimer: new and seasoned readers of mine would be better off knowing my position on using names of people and locations, as the romanization of Cyrillic names is very chaotic and often politicized. For geographic names, I use the version which is used in modern times, according to the local language laws, Wikipedia consensus, and vocabulary of English. For people's names, I use the version which is suitable to the citizenship of a person. Rules of Ukrainian and Russian languages force to ukrainize and russify Ukrainian and Russian names. That’s why while Dmytro and Dmitry are technically the same name, in Ukrainian they can only say Dmytro, and in Russian only Dmitry. Ukrainian and Russian nationalists often bring this rule into English which is overt politicization in my opinion. So for me, here and elsewhere, it's Dmytro Korchynsky and Dmitry Medvedev.
Since I’m fatherless for more than one generation, never knew any grandfathers, and only barely spoke with my father in early childhood, I know a lot more about ancestors on the maternal line than on the paternal one. The oldest photo of my ancestor I have is from 1910. That’s my great grandfather on the maternal line Prokofiy (name) Davydovych (patronymic) Kanishchev(surname). Thus we can deduce that the oldest known ancestor, great-great-grandfather, was called David Kanishchev. Of him, I know nothing. Prokofiy however was the owner of a sugar factory in Valuyki, Belgorod oblast. Previously obscure location, which is sadly now more recognized due to it being a base of the Russian army in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. He had seven children and painted Orthodox icons as a hobby. The factory was seized by Communists shortly after the October Revolution and then completely destroyed during World War II. He wasn’t purged or repressed despite his bourgeois nature, nor did he emigrate. He ended his days working as a railroad controller, living in one of those huts in the middle of nowhere, the kind you can often see while traveling across the former Soviet Union on a train.
Among his children, my grandmother Vera was the youngest. She was born together with a twin brother, who died at the age of 5. She had partial strabismus, and one of her eyes was slanting. She was perceived as a witch and wasn’t considered attractive. This apparently produced huge misandry, since to me she always bragged how she only had sex five times in her entire life because sex is un-Christian, demeaning, and damaging to women. A claim disputed by some of her girlfriends. True or not, she did gave birth to my mother late, at the age of 40. Outside of marriage, to an ethnic Jew named Ilya Gorokhovsky. Mother never saw her with any men and she actively tried to suppress my mom’s disco ventures, raging and screaming whenever mom wanted to go outside after dark.
Grandmom was not open at all about her experiences during WWII. Her favorite story was about how she was saved from the German airfighter bullets by a sickle, which was in her backpack while she was in a wheat field. This story she re-told yearly. What else was she doing and where - is a mystery, since the second most frequent story was about her elder sister being in Mongolia at the time.
The war delayed her student years. The choice of place for it was interesting - Lviv. This was already at the time when her surviving brothers and sisters settled either in Kharkiv (3 of them) or in Moscow (2). She found herself among the first waves of Soviet Russians in a freshly occupied Galicia. Needless to say, it did not end good. After finishing Lviv Economic Institute and getting degree in food merchandising, she was tasked with transporting a a truck full of potatoes from point A to point B across Galicia. She was ambushed by the "banderites", UPA rebels, who seized the cargo. Soviet courts did not believe her and decided she colluded and got something out of it. The only thing she got was a lifetime ban on employment in the sphere of economics. So she relocated to Kharkiv and worked at the local bearing plant for the rest of her life, getting the order “Hero of Labour” for long uninterrupted employment.
Seems like her personal life was unremarkable for the next 20 years. The main reason she decided to have a child was to not die alone. She never intended to have a family, never intended to marry and disposed of my mom's biological father fairly quickly after impregnation, breaking the wardrobe doors with his body during the last quarrel. With him being Jewish and having a slim bones and with her being anti-Semitic (before and after this affair) that wasn't a big deal. Probably the best use of her awfully scandalous temper was at the work. Since never ever did she stop berating higher-ups for smallest laziness or corruption, constantly writing complaints and denunciations to all the possible organs, from local police to the KGB HQ in Moscow. She helped a lot of thankless workers this way while earning the hate of all the established white collars. She suffered greatly financially for this, since the higher-ups made sure she never receives any bonuses thankless workers occasionally had.
About the paternal line I only know that my father's father comes from a bloodline of repressed Don Cossacks, who were forcibly relocated to the Shepetivka, Khemelnytsky region. And his mother line is from a Western Ukrainian peasantry. In the late 70s he relocated from Shepetivka to Kharkiv to study and that's where the Volume II of my story will begin - "Perestroika and Me".
A vaunted lineage