Chapter 1-1. The Kinerts Family – the addition after December 20, 2006

In the beginning of this chapter, I wrote:

"This is how the connection between our family and its closest relatives was forever severed. Many years later, during the perestroika, I wanted to learn something about the Kinerts. Where are they, is there anybody alive there? I even thought of buying a tour to Finland , and find out whatever is possible. But I did not go and did not even consider it seriously. What makes me believe they are still in Finland? Maybe they moved to another country in the very beginning. Even if someone remained in Finland, only Asteya and her brother may still be living, but Asteya may have got married and changed her name, and as for her brother I did not know for sure even his year of birth and first name."

I wrote this in 2001 when I was desperately trying to restore in my memory those scarce details that I knew about my parents' past, which they had always concealed from us children. Even my mother – the last person who could tell me something, died in 1971.

And all of a sudden, on December 20, 2006, Natasha called me from work saying she had a wonderful present to give me in the evening. On that day, she came home unusually early, and soon afterwards her second cousin Yury Miller appeared, with a bottle of wine. Natasha was preparing something to eat, Yury was uncorking the bottle, and I was given three pages of text to read, entitled The Russian Connection .

From the first words I read, I realized that a really incredible thing happened: Kinerts, our closest relatives (father's brother Vladimir and his wife Maria, my mother's sister) have been found! In the very beginning of the 1920-s, they fled to Finland from the revolution with their children – my cousins Alik and Asteya. The pages I was given to read represented the text placed on an Australian website of the Scottish Clan Kinnaird (where the Kinerts presumably originated) by Alik's son, Stefan Kinert, with a dim hope that someone will eventually find and read it. We live in the 21 st century, and owing to one of its greatest achievements, the Internet, Natasha has succeeded in finding the Kinerts. When working on our family website and placing there my memoirs and the old photos of my parents and the Kinerts, she finally did what she could have probably done much earlier but for some reason it did not happen: she started to search for the Kinerts on the Internet, and immediately found Stefan's text. Within a few hours, she found the updated e-mail address of Stefan, who turned out to be a resident of a suburb of Stockholm , and got in touch with him. If it happened when I started to write my memoirs, it could be still possible to meet Asteya who died only a short time ago, in 2003!

Having forgotten Yury and Natasha, I immersed myself in reading. I understood that neither uncle Volodya, nor aunt Manya are alive (which was quite natural). The surprising thing was that aunt Manya died in 1986 in Sweden at the age of 100. After uncle Volodya's death in 1956 she moved from Finland to Sweden to live with Alik (who was called Dick in the family, because when he was a kid and learned to speak, he used to point to his bellybutton and say ”dirka” which in Russian means hole. So that is how he got his name Dicka or Dick). I have also learned that the Kinerts' family continued to live in their house in Tabor (Taaperi) till the beginning of WWII. It turned out that Alik was a Finnish officer and took part in the war against the USSR. To these pages, Stefan's letter was attached. Stefan wrote that this was the best Christmas present for him and enclosed photos of my father, Maria, Asteya… After I have finished reading and re-reading, we started discussing what had happened. Not every day you happen to find a lot of real blood relatives, living away from Russia and not even speaking Russian! From that very moment, Natasha established regular e-mail communication with Stefan. By the way, in one of his first e-mails Stefan told us that aunt Manya called him Styopka, and we are calling him between us by this name.

With each new message from Styopka it became clearer that the scarce details about my family that I managed to gather were inaccurate and insufficient. From Styopka we learned about the life of the Kinerts family after they crossed the Finnish border in the 1920-s. Styopka sent us photos, letters, a family tree made by Asteya and other documents.

Below is a very brief description of the Kinerts' life from their flight from Russia back in the 1920-s and to 2007. I tried to write in short, but I had numerous questions. I now understand quite well why neither my parents nor my grandmother have ever told me or Oleg about our family. In the terrible 1930-s when my father was executed (he could not survive because he had a too highly-placed position) and when Oleg was killed in the prime of his life (I think this was accidental, he had a chance of survival), my mother and I survived. If the authorities knew about the Kinerts or about my grandmother's family, we would not have survived either.

Coming back to the Kinerts' family: before the revolution of 1917, uncle Volodya's parents Alexander Fedorovich Kinert and Augusta Fedorovna (born Tiedemann) had a small manor called Tabor on the lake of Suulajarvi (today, the lake of Nakhimovskoe, see map), where they usually spend summers with the children. According to Styopka, before the revolution, when Finland still belonged to Russia , Alexander Fedorovich was an important figure close to the Tsar's family – he was a manager of the Tsar's estate Lahda near the Ladoga lake, as well as one of the directors of the Second Russian Insurance Company established in 1835. After the revolution of 1917, Finland declared its independence and was recognized by Lenin's government. In October 1917, Tabor became Finnish. It is therefore quite understandable that the Kinerts decided to flee to Tabor, where they had a safe refuge and where they knew all the surroundings very well.

And now let us come back to the New Year night of 1921. In complete darkness, the family started on their journey, hoping to cross the border while the border police was celebrating the holiday. Unfortunately, their guide decided to celebrate the New Year as well, and the flight turned out to be quite dramatic. Aunt Manya said many years later that they crossed the border several times, both ways, they heard the voices of the border policemen and the dogs' barking, and they thought they would be caught. However, after long wanderings in the darkness, uncle Volodya, 8-year old Asteya, and aunt Manya with 3-year old Alik in her lap, cold and hungry, have safely entered Finland and reached Tabor. According to Asteya's son, Asteya remembered the taste of the warm semolina the children were given in the elementary school where the children were placed immediately upon their arrival.

Here I will stop for a moment the description of the Kinerts' life and mention some mistakes I made in the 1 st chapter of my memoirs that Styopka's mails helped correct. Here are some of them:

1. It turned out that my mother's brother Vasya was younger than Marina (who I thought was the youngest child in the family) by 6 years.

2. I thought that Vladimir Kinert and my father were approximately the same age, but it turned out that uncle Volodya was 10 years younger than Vyacheslav.

3. From the photo of very young Valeria that I had I decided that she was much younger than her brothers. I even doubted that in the photo showing the visit of my father and mother to Tabor after their marriage – to Alexander Fedorovich and Augusta Fedorovna, it was Valya sitting with them at the table (this is true, it turned out later that it was Maria Kinert sitting there). I thought Valya was much younger. It turned out that Valya was only a couple of years younger than her brother Vladimir being born in about 1891.

One photo sent by Styopka has completely puzzled me. It showed almost the entire Kinerts family in Tabor in 1925. Beside Alik, Asteya, Maria and Vladimir there were three older women sitting at the table, and Natasha and I at first thought they were some Finnish neighbors. However, when we asked Styopka, he said that the woman beside Asteya is Lyusya Kononov, the sister of Avgustina, and two other women on the right are Avgustina and Valeria. I was in shock because I saw Valya in approximately 1928 when she stayed with us on her way from Khevsuretiya to Petrograd, and I had a completely different image of her in my mind. When I looked at the photo more attentively, I realized that Styopka was right – I recognized Valya. But in this photo she looked much older, than the Valya who took me to Torgsin to buy a white beret and talked fascinatingly about her trip to Khevsuretiya, although the photo was made three years before our meeting. In addition, I had no idea that Valya visited Tabor when it belonged to Finland , and it was a shock for me to learn that the Russian relatives had visited the Kinerts after their flight to Finland . Most probably, this can be explained by the fact that during NEP the USSR borders were still not completely hermetic, and it was possible to cross them without great difficulty. Styopka wrote that as far as he knows, the visitors from the USSR came to Tabor several times, the last time being in about 1928. This was the end of NEP, and the borders were then locked hermetically, and not only people, but even information from the other side could not penetrate the iron curtain, and any communication with anyone in another country was considered a crime. When I learned about Valya, I felt for the first time that I know practically nothing about my parents' young years, except for the fact that they knew how to keep silence. Nevertheless, I will not re-write that chapter – first, because it was already published, and second, because I have lived with my incorrect knowledge till December 20, 2006. So let this chapter remain both on paper, and on the Internet. After all, without this incorrect information Natasha would not have started her search, and Stefan's article about his Russian family would have hanged on the Internet like a dead letter, and real blood relatives from Russia , Finland and Sweden would not have learned about each other's existence.

And now let us come back to the Kinerts' life after the flight (see Marti's speech at Asteya's funeral for more details). Uncle Volodya who was an engineer found a job at the paper pulp plant in Pitkaranta, and the family settled nearby, still spending its summers in Tabor. When Asteya, who had quickly learned Finnish (she was even offered to skip a class), finished the middle school, she enrolled in the secondary school in Vyborg (there was only middle school in Pitkaranta), where boys and girls studied together. She finished school with excellent grades. Higher educational institutions were mainly located in Helsinki and only the rich people could afford them. Asteya started working in the Vyborg department of the SOK company. In the same time she made a trip to Paris where her (and mine) uncle Misha lived. The trip made a strong impression on Asteya. At first she had to cross the Baltic sea, and then took a train to Paris. After the trip her interest in culture, arts and foreign languages became even stronger. Traveling became her passion, although she could not actualize it often enough.

The “winter” war with the USSR that started in 1939 and grew into the WWII in which Germany lost have made serious changes to the Finland 's borders. Vyborg and the entire Ladoga Lake became Soviet. The Vyborg department of SOK, in which Asteya worked, had to move to central Finland, to Vaajakoski, and Asteya moved with the company. In Vaajakoski she met her future husband who worked in the same company – Kaarlo Markkanen. They got married in 1944. In 1945, their son Marti was born, and in 1946 Hannu. Asteya had to quit her job to take care of the house and the family. I have an impression that it was not the easiest or nicest time for her.

Meanwhile, Uncle Volodya and Aunt Manya, after a couple of moves, have settled in Leppavaara not far from Helsinki where Uncle Volodya worked at a cable company that later grew into the famous Nokia. Asteya with children visited her parents often. She also liked visiting Stockholm where her brother Alik's family lived with their 5 children.

In 1957, Asteya's husband died, and she hade to move with the children to an apartment building and start working for SOK again. Her life was not easy, filled with work and 2 children. When and how Asteya's younger son Hannu died, we still do not know.

In 1978 at the age of 65 Asteya retired and lived alone in Vaajakoski till the age of 85 (till 1998). When it became too hard for her to live alone she moved to Virrat close to her son, and the mother of her son's wife Ulla helped her a lot. On March 1, 2001 Asteya fell in her home and ended up in a hospital. The health center of Virrat and its good treatment was her home for the last two years. Asteya died in February 2003 at the age of 90.

It seems to me that the female line of our family was characterized by longevity, probably bestowed by my grandmother, Olga Vladimirovna Kirilina. Although she died at the age of 77, she did not die of age, but of hunger, during the siege of Leningrad , having survived her daughter Marina. Despite the hard life, shared by all female representatives of the family, almost all women had a long life. Aunt Manya died at the age of 100, my mother, having suffered the terrible death of her husband and son, lived to 87, Asteya, who had also buried husband and son, died at 90. And finally, I who will be 93 in 4 months, can still make long 10km walks when I am in Russia , and here in Israel I walk the dog every day for an hour in a mountainous region, and I still do some house chores.

With regard to the flight of the Kinerts, Natasha at some point said that probably they should have taken Oleg with them, instead of Asteya: then Oleg would have survived, and Asteya would have been able to have higher education, granted she would have survived as me and my mother. It seems to me that Asteya's life in Finland after her happy years at Tabor was not so easy. Being obviously very capable, she was unable to get higher education, and she had to work from her early years, while my college years seemed to me the most happy and trouble free, and they gave me wonderful friends for my entire life (all the terrible things started after my graduation).

However, it is time to come back to the story of our close relatives. I have already mentioned that several months after the end of the WWII and their second flight, this time from Tabor, Uncle Volodya and Aunt Manya settled in the town of Leppavaara near Helsinki. Their house with the apple garden was the favorite place for all the grandchildren, both on Asteya's and on Alik's side. At his mother's funeral, Asteya's son Marti mentioned it with great warmth as the wonderful “grandmother's house” for all the children. In this house, Uncle Volodya and Aunt Manya lived till Uncle Volodya's death in 1956 at the age of 70. He died peacefully in his sleep, surviving my father who perished in 1938, by almost 20 years.

After her husband's death, Aunt Manya moved to her son Alik who had by then settled with his family in Sweden , in a suburb of Stockholm. Aunt Manya was obviously an extremely strong and vigorous woman. Having moved to Alik's place, she spent a lot of time with her grandchildren, especially Styopka and Bosse. She told them much about the relatives in Russia and she even tried (although with little success) to teach Styopka Russian. Styopka said that he felt sorry for not having mastered Russian, and not having learnt more about the family's history. Styopka sent us Aunt Manya's photo at the age of 99, i.e. just a year before her death. This photo made a strong impression on Natasha and me. Aunt Manya is sitting on the sofa, an elderly but still very beautiful lady, well dressed, with her calm face which one can endlessly admire.

Alik's life during the WWII was full of adventures. By the beginning of the war, Alik was 22. He went to the war as a Finnish officer. Styopka writes that Alik was also a photographer (see here ). During the war he was an intelligence officer and he frequently crossed the front line making serious problems for the Soviets. Once on his way from the front in a train Alik met his future wife Doris whom he protected from soldiers who had not seen a pretty woman in months. They got married still during the war, in a hurry, not yet aware that the war and Karelia will soon be lost. They bought a small 1-room flat in Helsinki where Doris gave birth to a son, Jorma. Once a bomb hit their house, but fortunately Doris with Jorma in her lap, pregnant with her second son (Bosse), was in the shelter and survived. In the end of the war, the family moved to Sweden under the Stella Polaris operation (see below).

Alik and Doris had 5 children. Here is what Styopka writes about them:

My oldest brother Jorma was born in 1943 and the only one of us who was born in Finland. He has even been to Tabor as a very small baby. He is a sea captain and is out several months at the time. He has 3 boys, Bjorn, Mats and Ulf and one daughter Sara. All of the boys live in the north of Sweden close to their parents. They are all married and have a lot of children that even I don't know all of them. Sara lives in Germany and is studying economics (I think...?) Jorma's wife Gudrun has just retired from work as personnel manager in the municipality. They live in a very beautiful part of Sweden that has been proclaimed as a "World Heritage" by the UNESCO in 2000. The photo is taken with my phone camera when I spent a week onboard his cargo ship. Very often he has Russian crew so he's the one in the family that gets to practice some Russian now and then.

Bosse (Bo-Lennart) was born 1944 and as young he and I were very close. Now I don't get to se him very often even thou we live less than 100 kilometers away from each other. He's is a teacher and works with children with social problems. His wife Ann-Britt is a kindergarten teacher. They have three sons as well. Matthias, Magnus and Marcus. Matthias has two sons and Magnus just got married. I didn't seem to have any photos of Bosse here at work. I'll have to get back to you about that. He is worth seeing. :-)

Christer was born 1946 and died in 1995. He had diabetes. He was a pastor and lived in Germany , and that is also where his three children live. Tobias in the south, Therese in Berlin and Heidi close to Koln. Christer's wife Gisela lives with her new man outside Hanover . I have more contact with the children than I have with Gisela. They are also much into music, especially the girls. Heidi visited us only a few weeks ago and presented her firstborn to us - Emil. One of those kids you get to love at once.

After Christer, Stefan was born in 1950. He owns a small insurance broker company, is married to Mona and has 3 children – Natalie (married), Jonatan and Nina.

More from Stefan's letter:

Maj-Len is my little sister (b. 1953) and also my life sorrow. For some reason she don't want to have contact with any of us. She had great difficulties in school but managed with very hard work to get an exam to become a child nurse. She is not married and has no children. She lives across the city and what I hear from people that se her, she is a very shy person.

And here is what Styopka writes about his father's attitude to Russia :

My father worked for the Secret Intelligence and was not very popular with the Soviets as he caused them a lot of problems. So much so that when the war was coming to an end there was a lot of retributions. The Russians put pressure on the Finnish government to hand over the intelligence staff among others. My father along with 2.000 other Intelligence men from Finland were invited to move to Sweden in order to start what came to be the Swedish Radio Intelligence (Forsvarets RadioAnstalt - FRA). In 1944, three overcrowded ships (6.000 people altogether) with a lot of radio equipment arrived at three different cities along the Swedish coastline. These cities were for Gavle, Sundsvall and Harnosand. There was one very stormy night during the operation. It was called "Stella Polaris". This episode has been described in books, films and TV-programs. My own family came to the city of Harnosand . Later they moved to the suburbs of Stockholm and that's where I was born.

My father made it quite well in the new country. He spent the rest of his life working in FRA as a code expert. He also worked for the Secret Police as an interpreter and taught language to military agents. Dick was fluent in Russian, Finnish, and Swedish and spoke English and some German.

My daddy wasn't too proud of being Russian. We lived in a small country and the threat against us was always the big bear in the east – the Soviet Union . My father never let me forget that. Even as a grown up I see to that the car is filled up every night, and I sleep very light. Aleksander kept several guns close to the bed. I am not that paranoid but his fear and anxiety is something that I can feel anytime.

My father was in the war. Fighting for the Finnish side and values he strongly believed in. He was a diligent photographer so a part of my job sending you photos from before they fled Russia is to sort out the ones you can have interest in. His mother tongue was Russian so he came to use as Intelligent officer. He along with a few other officers built up the Swedish Secret Intelligence when he came to Sweden after the war. In an alliance free country like Sweden the Secret Intelligence has a different task than it has in many other countries. You could say less aggressive and more protective to put it short…

He could never accept that Karelia was Russian soil. But when I asked him if he considered himself being Russian, Finnish or Swedish, he said with no hesitation Russian!! When I asked Astrid the same question she hesitated and said: I lived most of my life in Finland so I think I'm Finnish.

A little story that maybe gives you a glimpse of my father's character and feelings against what he would always call “the Bolsheviks”.

My father, Atyja, Jorma, Ulf (Jorma's son), Bosse and myself went back to Russia in 1993. But we only visited Karelia and Tabor. My father saw KGB everywhere. There in the middle of nowhere we found the house ground, the cellar and, believe it or not, blackcurrant bushes. They now were standing in the middle of a forest.

What was tilled land when the Kinerts lived in Karelia was now wasteland. As we were trying to find where in the woods the house used to be, we meet an old man living in an even older scraped bus. I guess he was trying to be nice so he asked my father; “Excuse me, sir, are you lost?” My father turned to him and said: “No, my good man, you are!”

But the story did not end there. It later turned out that the old man (his name was Vadim Feklichev) lived in the bus in the woods only in summer time, while the rest of the year he lived in St. Petersburg . He was a sailor, and although he had never been to Sweden , he spoke Swedish well. Having learned that Vyacheslav Korzun in whom the visitors were interested took part in the Russian Japanese war, Feklichev offered his help in finding some information about Korzun in the RUSSIAN State Naval Archives (RSNA) in St. Petersburg . He kept his promise and sent Alik an archive reference about V. Korzun's naval service including his short biography till 1919 when he moved to civil service. This archive reference proved to be more complete than the information I had previously found in my father's papers. I added the reference to my father's biography.

With this funny story about our newly found relatives' trip to Tabor in 1993 I could finish the description of my relatives' story. However, thanks to the “new” relatives I have learned many new things not only about their life after the flight from Russia, but also about other family members about whom I did not know anything at all because of my parents' justifiable concern about my safety. These are the brothers and sisters of my grandmother who lived in Tsarskoe Selo, their children and my own Uncle Misha who emigrated and died in Paris . This new information I am adding to the 1st Chapter of my memoirs...