On October 1, 1993, Alexandra Andreevna Yuryeva (Voronina), a native of Kharkiv, passed away in California at the age of 88.
A friend of Pablo Picasso’s first wife, Olga Khokhlova—a ballerina and artist who became one of the founders of a prestigious arts club in Palo Alto—is, ironically, better known as “the traitor’s wife.”
Vidkun Quisling—today, this name has become a byword and is used as a synonym for “collaborator” and “traitor.” Indeed, this Norwegian politician and statesman, a National Socialist who actively collaborated with Germany during World War II, committed a great deal of evil. However, few people today remember that Kharkiv played a significant role in his life. It was in our city that the Norwegian worked for the League of Nations’ humanitarian mission in the 1920s, saving residents from starvation. Both of his wives were from Kharkiv. Each of them left behind memoirs describing not only their life with Vidkun Quisling but also our beloved city. There’s no point in recounting the entire story here—it’s long enough for a multi-part melodrama. What interests us, however, are the accounts of people who witnessed everything firsthand and described the details of life in the first capital of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s.
In 2012, a magnificent book titled *From Kharkiv to Europe with a Traitor Husband* was published. It is based on the personal diaries of Quisling’s first wife, Alexandra Andreevna Yuryeva, which are preserved in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California, USA; excerpts from Kirsten Seaver’s work *In Quisling’s Shadow* (In: Kirsten A. Seaver, *Quisling’s Shadow*, Hoover Institution Press, 2007, Stanford University, Stanford, California) and her book in Norwegian (Quisling’s unge hustru, Gylendal Norsk Forlag ASA, 1999).
The memoirs of Alexandra, an educated young woman from a wealthy family who, by a twist of fate, found herself in Soviet Kharkiv and endured horrific famine and deprivation there, are written in an emotional, light, vivid, and lively style and are of considerable value. In them, we see our hometown in a completely different light.
The introduction to these memoirs is quite interesting:
I have absolutely no idea where to start, how to continue, or how to write about everything I’d like to in the right order. But I’d like to tell you everything I remember—everything that was good about this man, whose name is still associated with a stock that’s now worthless, with a venture that failed spectacularly and ingloriously. I’d like to share everything I can recall about the man who once became more precious to me than anyone else in the world: more precious than my mother, more precious than my homeland, more precious than my childhood friends, and more precious than anything that had surrounded me from the very first hour of my life on earth—my mother’s self-sacrificing love. I gave up everything, regretted nothing, and left with him for a country that was foreign to me—his country. And as I left, I did not look back with regret, did not glance at the mother I was leaving behind; I followed him to another mother—his mother. And I embraced his customs, habits, and way of life…
She goes on to write about her childhood:
I was born on August 20, 1905, in Sevastopol on the beautiful subtropical Crimean Peninsula to Dr. Andrei Sergeyevich Voronin, a private practitioner, and I grew up believing that people come into this world solely to live a long and happy life. When I was about three years old, we moved from Sevastopol to Yalta…
But then 1914 arrived, and World War I began. Alexandra’s family (Asya, as she was called at home) had to change their last name and move to Kharkiv. It is our beloved city that she will refer to as her “hometown” throughout her memoirs. Nowadays, it has become fashionable to include among the “great Kharkivites” those who were not born here but simply lived here for a while. At the same time, biographers often overlook the extent to which a person identified with their place of residence and whether they loved it at all. It is very gratifying that, thanks to this acknowledgment, recorded in Alexandra Voronina’s memoirs, we can today call her a Kharkiv native with 100% certainty. Alas, her work is virtually unknown in her homeland.
This is how she recalls her move “to a big, bustling city, where it was very cold in the winter and too hot and dusty in the summer.”
When World War I began in 1914, the von Kotzebue family in Russia renounced their German surname, changing it to Kossuch (for the same reason, the British royal family changed its surname from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor). I was still very young, so the change of surname meant nothing to me. Moving to Kharkiv shortly after the war began had a much greater impact on me than the momentous events unfolding around me. Later, the Bolsheviks made Kharkiv the capital of Ukraine, but at the time we moved there, Kharkiv was the center of the Kharkiv Governorate, whose governor-general was my mother’s relative, Mitrofan Kirillovich Katerinich. The reason for moving to Kharkiv was the need for a new treatment method developed by the renowned Kharkiv ophthalmologist Dr. Hirschman. I don’t know exactly when my father’s income from oil began to dwindle or dry up entirely, but apparently this was what, contrary to our original plan, prevented us from returning to Yalta, where we had left almost all of our belongings. Perhaps my father put off returning because he was drawn to life in the big city, where many of his friends from his college days still lived. In any case, I’m sure my parents had good reasons to trade our former comfortable and pleasant life in Crimea for life in a big, bustling city, where it was very cold in the winter and too hot and dusty in the summer.
She was very homesick, but her parents reassured the little girl that there were more opportunities for education and personal growth in the big city.
One of my father’s friends in Kharkiv, Dr. Surukchi, ran a well-known, upscale private clinic in Kharkiv, whose patients were members of the privileged classes. When the war began, Dr. Surukchi converted the clinic into a hospital to treat wounded soldiers, and he constantly asked my father to help him with this work. Dr. Surukchi had a way with people, and I remember very well when one of his friends, the famous and beloved Fyodor Chaliapin, came to the hospital to perform for the wounded soldiers. It was a major event.
Kharkiv still looked prosperous, and for a while our life was peaceful, even though the city was gradually filling up with wounded soldiers and refugees from the border regions. This was before the 1917 Revolution, when White Army troops were stationed there, and I had just turned 12. To comfort me when I longed for Yalta, my parents assured me that a city as large as Kharkiv, with its university and many different schools, offered me plenty of opportunities for further cultural development and education.
However, our beloved Kharkiv has always been a city of contrasts—a city of teachers, doctors, and world-renowned scientists, as well as sidewalks that are deadly dangerous.
When I was still a little girl, I was sent to a dance school where children from so-called respectable families were taught ballroom dancing and the art of moving gracefully and naturally. When I got older, my mom enrolled me in the Kharkiv Ballet School, which was for girls only. There were excellent teachers there—some with international reputations—and students were admitted on a competitive basis after rigorous auditions…
…The best part of the city where we lived was located at the very top of a mountain that was quite steep in places. All the streets leading downhill gradually lost their affluent, well-kept appearance and became poorer and poorer, and at the foot of the mountain they turned into a thoroughly destitute neighborhood with a large, dreary square where, in the good old days—especially in the summer—a market used to be held. There, men from the surrounding villages would bring magnificent goods—which now seemed out of reach—and all sorts of food to sell. From the very beginning of the turmoil, of course, no one had been spreading sand on these rather steep slopes or clearing the snow. There was no one left to look after the safety of the local residents, so the icy streets and sidewalks of all the city’s streets—and especially ours, which led downhill—were no less dangerous than the ice-covered slopes of the Alps…
In Kharkiv, the parents enrolled their daughter in L. V. Dombrovskaya’s girls’ gymnasium. At the time, it was a highly prestigious boarding school for children from noble families. Unexpectedly, the stable and orderly life of the Voronins was shattered overnight. The Revolution and the Civil War that followed left Alexandra with a profound emotional trauma that would last a lifetime—her recollections of those times are extremely disjointed.
…Soon it all came crashing down, melted away, and fell apart like jelly taken out of the fridge and left in the sun—the whole structure, the high school rules of conduct, everything! The maids vanished somewhere, the cook disappeared—everyone was gone. Mom found and rented two adjacent, adjoining apartments right in the city center, at 2 Sadovaya Street, on the corner of Teatralnaya Square. The famous Sinelnikov National Theater was located directly across from our house, on the other side of the square, which was considered the city park. To the right of the square stood a Lutheran church. On its tower was a large clock with gold hands and Roman numerals, which we could see from our window. I remember this well because we had to keep an eye on that clock after the Soviet authorities had firmly established their rule in Ukraine. They always found an excuse to declare a state of emergency and impose a strict curfew. We had to be home by nine o’clock in the evening, and since the new authorities had moved daylight saving time forward by three, four, or even five hours, I could see on the church clock that it was already 9 p.m., even though the sun was still high in the sky. Nevertheless, we had to stay home…
…Partly because I was still a child, and partly because every day was filled with rumors and fears, I can’t say exactly when I realized that a revolution had taken place, but I soon learned why it was called a revolution. The world I knew was turned upside down, filled with demonstrations, marches, and celebrations. Former staunch monarchists were now pinning red ribbons to their clothes and congratulating one another on the fall of the autocracy, expecting all evil to vanish instantly. At the same time, a general amnesty freed both political and criminal offenders; on the streets, they mingled with crowds of sailors and soldiers who had abandoned their ships and battlefields. Murders and robberies became commonplace, and it became unsafe to walk the city streets even during the day. Our house changed dramatically. The former storage rooms and servants’ quarters in the basement were converted into cheap housing for a completely different kind of people, distinct from those who lived upstairs. While the rest of Ukraine was being ravaged and devastated by the struggles of various political groups, Kharkiv remained under Soviet control from 1917 to 1919 and thus avoided the open battles and frequent changes of government that made life unbearable in other regions. Although my mother and I were temporarily shielded from the dangers of military operations and did not live in constant fear, our situation did not improve in the least after the abolition of the right to private enterprise, as well as with the disappearance of the regular police and the judicial system. Not only our living space, but also our personal supplies of food, clothing, and other property now had to be registered with the authorities. New tenants simply took our furniture and other possessions, which was devastating for us, since my mother and I, like many of our friends, were selling our own belongings just to put food on the table. World War I ended in November 1918, which coincided with the start of the White Army’s counteroffensives against the Soviet government. When the White Army managed to capture Kharkiv in 1919 after fierce fighting, and at the same time as their victorious advance on Moscow began to lose momentum, many long-time residents of Kharkiv began to leave the city, heading south in the hope of escaping further horrors. Mom decided that we, too, needed to leave for Crimea. She believed that there we would not only be able to find a safe place for ourselves but also, perhaps, attempt to flee to Romania or France, where we had relatives…
Who knows—whether it was for better or for worse—but Alexandra and her mother didn’t immigrate and decided to return.
…When we finally returned to Kharkiv, it had once again fallen under Bolshevik control, and a campaign of terror had resumed. However, what distressed us most was that several more rooms had been confiscated during our absence. Most of our belongings, except for the grand piano and a few other heavy items, had been moved into a small room that had once been the nanny’s bedroom and had now become our only home.
Later in her memoirs, the future “traitor’s wife” describes in great detail all the hardships of her first years living in Soviet Kharkiv. An inquisitive reader, upon reading them, can learn about the widespread practice of denunciations, the arbitrariness of the “new authorities,” and a kind female commissar.
Alexander Andreevna also mentions the South Station, which is familiar to many of us. This is how eerie it remained in her memory from the early 1920s:
People often felt that life would be a little more comfortable somewhere else, so they would often migrate in entire villages—with sick old people and small children swollen from hunger—filling the train stations as they waited for trains they could squeeze onto. Trains ran irregularly; there was no schedule, and sometimes none came for several days. And since the entire population of Russia was leaving their old homes in search of something better, the train stations were, of course, overflowing with these unfortunate people. Many had to spend several weeks at the station, and all the waiting rooms were occupied by this homeless crowd. Everything swirled like a gray, ugly mass; many slept with all their possessions—consisting of nothing more than a single sack and some greasy bundles—tucked beneath them, for fear of theft. Without exception, their faces were full of anguish, even in their sleep. Often they moaned loudly or screamed in terror, but no one paid any attention to it. The din in these foul-smelling halls was such that no one could tell who was screaming in a delirium and who was screaming because they had, perhaps, been robbed. Children—very young, filthy, with bellies swollen from hunger, looking like little spiders—were crawling around right there. No one was watching them. Often, there was simply no one left to watch over them. Many such abandoned children had appeared at that time. The older ones sometimes even managed to play and run, leaping over whatever came in their way. And if they had the chance, they’d steal something—usually food—from inattentive passengers, which is why these children looked a little better than the very youngest ones. A small child couldn’t steal. If the adults didn’t feed him, he was as good as gone. A few hours before the train’s arrival at the station, word would somehow spread that the train was about to arrive, and the entire crowd would move like a living, impenetrable wall toward the platforms, which were already packed with people. Finally, the train approached, and before the engineer could bring this entire, creaking convoy of freight cars to a stop, the whole crowd—amid curses, cries, and shouts—rushed forward, trying to jump into a car while it was still moving. The goal of this onslaught was singular—to find themselves inside that long-awaited car at any cost. No wonder that I and the relatives of those with whom my mother had set out on the journey were terribly anxious and imagined all sorts of horrors. The cars filled up with lightning speed, mainly with those who were stronger, younger, and more agile than the rest. The weak, the elderly, or those who hadn’t yet learned to push their way forward with loud curses, clearing a path mainly with their fists, took every nook and cranny or step they could cling to. Once again, it was the stronger ones who rode on the roof. The rest of the travelers sat or stood on the buffers, the couplers between cars, and so on. It was not uncommon for these “external” passengers to fall off while the train was moving, having lost the strength to hold on to the icy cast-iron parts of the cars—or, in the summer, perhaps simply from utter exhaustion. Many people died in this way back then. But no one seemed to be deterred by such a dangerous journey, since there was no other option…
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