Self-Portrait of a Russian Feminist

Iwas born in 1958 and grew up in Moscow as the daughter of a single mother, who was a pharmacist. In my childhood, my maternal grandmother and grandfather lived with us. He was Lithuanian, and she was Jewish. My mother was their only child, as I was hers—we were two generations of single daughters.

We never lived with him—my parents were not married. My father was from a German aristocratic family in Gatchina. His parents had emigrated during the Revolution, and as the son of a baron he had a very difficult life. He organized amateur concerts, which were very common at the time, but because of his background he could never get a permanent job in Moscow. He was a Christian, and I was called after his mother, who was Ukrainian. So I am quite an ethnic mixture. But my parents never lived together.

When they met, my father was married. His wife was very ill, and he couldn’t leave her. When she died, he wanted to live with us, but my mother would not accept this. Her own situation was very difficult: she was living with me and her two parents in a single room in a communal flat. My grandparents hated him. He was twenty-nine years older than her—the same age as my grandfather—so one would expect them to be prejudiced against him. The neighbours, of course, gossiped about the whole story. So my parents never really had a satisfactory place to meet, or live together. My mother could more or less cope with this before I was born, but by the time I arrived I think she was just very tired, and decided she could not keep up the relationship amid so much uncertainty and hostility, but must devote all her energies to me.