Simonov and Obolensky families.

[Nadya_Arapov]

Kirill Mikhailovich Simonov is better known by his nom de plume, Konstantin Simonov. He was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright, with a most unusual background. An aristocrat by birth and a Communist by conviction.

I would love to see photographs of his ancestors. At the moment I have only photographs of Konstantin and his second wife, the actress Valentina Serova.



His character was described in this way during an NPR interview with the author Orlando Figes, whose book “The Whisperers,” has Simonov as a central figure.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17376494

“Simonov was a complex character. From his parents he inherited the public-service values of the aristocracy and, in particular, its ethos of military duty and obedience which in his mind became assimilated to the Soviet virtues of public activism and patriotic sacrifice, enabling him to take his place in the Stalinist hierarchy of command. Simonov had many admirable human qualities. If it was possible to be a 'good Stalinist', he might be counted in that category. He was honest and sincere, orderly and strictly disciplined, though not without considerable warmth and charm. An activist by education and by temperament, he lost himself in the Soviet system at an early age and lacked the means to liberate himself from its moral pressures and demands. In this sense Simonov embodied all the moral conflicts and dilemmas of his generation — those whose lives were overshadowed by the Stalinist regime — and to understand his thoughts and actions is perhaps to understand his times.”

His story certainly doesn’t follow the usual pattern of the lives of other members of the former nobility post-Revolution.

His father was Maj. Gen. Mikhail Simonov, Chief of Staff of the 4th Army Corps. In 1912 Mikhail married Princess Alexandra Leonidovna “Alinka” Obolenskaya (1890-1975), the daughter of Prince Leonid Nikolayevich Obolensky (1843-1910) and Daria Ivanovna Schmidt (1850- Leningrad 1923). According to “The Whisperers,” by Orlando Figes (2007), Alinka retained her aristocratic ideals, expecting people to be courteous, loyal to their friends, and highly principled.

Konstantin (Kirill) was born in 1915 at St. Petersburg. During WWI his father, an expert of military fortifications, was stationed in Poland. Mikhail disappeared in 1917. No one is certain where he was during the next four years, possibly fighting with the Polish Army or the Whites. Alinka was in St. Petersburg with Konstantin during the worst of the Revolution, when aristocrats and the bourgeois were being evicted from their homes, arrested, murdered, robbed, or harmed in others ways. Alinka was evicted from her apartment in 1919. Where she lived after that I do not know.  Alinka found work as a bookkeeper in a Soviet office. Many other former noblewomen, in order to survive, worked as translators, accountants and secretaries in various Soviet ministries.

As famine and disease gripped St. Petersburg Alinka petitioned the Soviets to be allowed to join her widowed sister Lyudmila in Ryazan. Lyudmila’s husband, Maximillian Tiedemann, was killed in action in 1917, and she was still living near his former barracks there. Relocating was not a simple process as many urbanites were fleeing the cities in the hope of finding food. Alinka was finally granted permission in late 1918/early 1919.

After four years of silence, Alinka finally received word from Mikhail in 1921. Mikhail wrote telling Alinka that he was in Warsaw and that he had become a Polish citizen. He begged her to bring Konstantin and live with him there. Alinka refused. She used a minor illness of Konstantin’s as an excuse to avoid leaving. According to Konstantin: “My mother reacted with sad incomprehension to the Russian post-Revolutionary emigration, even though she had friends and relatives who had fled abroad. She simply could not understand how it was possible to leave Russia.”  They would later falsely claim that Mikhail had been “lost in the war,” never admitting to any contact with him after that.

Only one of Alinka’s siblings, her brother Prince Nikolai, fled abroad after the Revolution. A graduate of St. Petersburg University, prior to the Revolution he worked for the Interior Ministry. He died in Paris, France in 1960.

[Nadya_Arapov]

In the early 1920s Ryazan was a town of 40,000. At its hub was the military school which the Bolsheviks had appropriated and used to train their commanders during the Civil War. One of the instructors there was Alexander Ivanischev, a railway worker’s son. During WWI he had been wounded twice and gassed on three occasions. He was recruited into the Red Army by Trotsky. In 1921 he married Alinka and became Konstantin’s step-father. He was described as kind, but very strict. Alinka threw herself headlong into the life of a Red Army officer’s wife, even serving on several committees with other officers’ wives.

While living with his step-father’s sister and her invalid husband, a retired general, Konstantin witnessed firsthand the ransacking of their home by the secret police. They were suspected (falsely) of counter-revolutionary sympathies. How did Konstantin rationalize this? It was a “mistake,” and the tactics were necessary, in his mind, because there were genuine enemies elsewhere. Mistakes, you see, couldn’t be avoided from time-to-time, he reasoned.

Konstantin embraced his new life as a soviet. He left secondary school at just 14, against his parents’ wishes, and enrolled in the Factory Apprentice School (FZU). It provided him with both an academic and technical education. He understood that as an aristocrat, a “former person,” he would almost certainly be refused entry into university. By attending the FZU he helped forge a new identity for himself as a proletarian, opening the door to higher education. He began writing poetry while studying engineering in Moscow.

He worked as a war correspondent during the 30s and 40s, but continued to write creatively. He authored his first play “The History of One Love,” in 1940. During WWII he served as a colonel in the Red Army, writing for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. He wrote three plays during this time and several poems, including the popular war-time poem “Wait for Me,” which he dedicated to his wife Valentina Serova (1917-1975). Valentina was a film actress famous throughout Russia at that time. The marriage, marred by her affairs, ended in divorce.

After the war Konstantin worked at several diplomatic missions abroad. It should be remembered that only those deemed trustworthy by the Soviets were allowed to travel abroad in any capacity. He also worked for a time as a Pravda correspondent stationed in Tashkent. His first novel “Comrade in Arms,” was published in 1952. He went on to work as a newspaper editor and finally as secretary of Union of Writers. He was awarded the title Hero of Socialist Labor in 1974, three Orders of Lenin, the Lenin Prize, and the USSR State Prize. He died in Moscow in 1979 remaining a loyal Communist until the last.

Reading about him I was struck by this letter he wrote to his mother’s sister Sophia in 1929.

“Dear Auntie Sonia,

…I have been so busy. I am a member of four clubs. I’m on the governing committee of two of them…Besides that I’m a member of the Commission of Soviet Competition, the reading group, the school’s editorial board…I’m also an instructor in the collective assistance, a member of the management committee (they kept tabs on the political activities and opinions of other students)…at the moment I’m organizing anti-religious propaganda…”

I can only imagine what his ancestors (or his uncle in Paris) would have thought of that letter. “Dear Auntie Sonia” just eight years later became one of the government’s “mistakes.” She was exiled to a Siberian gulag where she died in 1937. How, I wonder, did her nephew rationalize this?

As for Alinka’s other sibling’s: Lyudmila never remarried and died in Moscow in 1955; her other sister Princess Daria, unmarried like Sophia, died at Orenburg in 1937, where she had apparently been exiled by the Soviets.

Sophia wasn’t the only Obolensky victim of the new government. Alinka’s first cousin Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich Obolensky died in Moscow in 1918 (the cause unknown to me). His daughter Princess Olga (b. 1886) disappeared after 1919. Olga’s first husband Alexei Khanjenkov was murdered by the Bolsheviks at Kiev in 1919. What became of Olga’s second husband after 1919 is also unknown. Prince Dmitri’s sons Alexander and Vladimir were also murdered by the Bolsheviks. Vladimir was murdered at Ryazan in February 1918 (did Alinka know this?). Alexander was murdered later that year in St. Petersburg.

Here is one of Konstantin’s poems:

But when I come to free myself
From this hallucination,
I shall defend you when I hear
Their words of condemnation.
"Why do you number up her sins?
She's neither wrong nor right!
She's not a woman, she's a force,
A tempest in the night;
And feeling the approaching threat,
I went to meet the storm!
I did not stay, like you, indoors,
Where it was dry and warm

[ashdean]

Thankyou Nadya..a fascinating life