Kommunalka Child

Nanda Milbreta

Copyright © 2020 Nanda Milbreta

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For requests regarding permissions or quantity sales (by trade bookstores, wholesalers, corporations, associations, educational institutions, and others), please contact the publisher by email or post at the address below.

Talisar Books

Wolfhezestraat 52

Den Haag, Netherlands, 2573NX

talisarbooks.com

talis@talisarpublishing.com

Text and illustrations by Nanda Milbreta.

Published by Talisar Books, a division of Talisar Publishing.

First printing November 2020.

Printed by Drukkerij Oproer in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Produced in The Netherlands.

ISBN (print): 978-9-0831-0060-9

ISBN (ebook): 978-9-0831-0061-6

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to all the children who grew up in the Soviet Union

Publisher’s note: For the best reading experience and to improve the clarity of illustrations, we recommend reading with a light background.

Part I

Meet my father

My mother and I were on our way home from the train station when we came upon a small crowd of pedestrians gathered around the statue of Lenin. We joined them to witness a man on a high crane shoot sparkles at Lenin’s feet. He was detaching the legs of the statue from the pedestal.

There had been no official warning about the demounting of Lenin. My mother quickly searched for a coin in her pocket and rushed to the phonebooth down the street. She called my father, who was taking an afternoon nap: ‘Quick, get all your film gear ready, they are dismantling the Lenin statue.’ My father ran as fast as he could with his heavy wooden tripod, his film rolls and a 35 mm camera. He got there just in time to set up his equipment.

He was the only person who filmed the notorious process of removing the Lenin statue in Riga, on August 24, 1991.1 My father worked as a professional cameraman at the Riga Film Studio. His film materials were used for documenting Latvian events in the Soviet Union. Even though occasionally he worked as a photographer and as a director of photography for cel and stop-motion animation, documentaries were his greatest passion.

In my early youth I rarely saw my father. He was always working and was often on the road for film shoots or to transport his film materials to Moscow. I had mixed feelings about his absence, as I knew that upon his return, my mother would report to him about my behaviour. Sometimes I spent days in fear, anticipating his punishment. When he got home, the time finally arrived—he laid me on his lap, pulled down my pants and spanked my butt with his hand. ‘There you go! There you go! Do you understand now?’ This went on and on until I confirmed that I understood that what I had done was bad. My mother only did the spanking if my father was gone for a very long time. She couldn’t bring herself to spank me by hand—instead, she used a belt. As she prepared to hit me, she closed her eyes and aimed for my naked butt. She mostly missed it, and I always felt that these were the lucky punishments, as hits to my back hurt far less.

When my father was home, we were not allowed to disturb him. If he saw us, he often shouted at us to ‘get lost in the woods’. It must have been a common quote among partisans, the secretive armed groups that fought against occupying forces in WWII. Sometimes, when he was in a good mood, the whole family went to the park to feed the ducks. He made jokes, tickled me, threw me up in the air, carried me on his shoulders and told stories about his past. I loved listening to my father’s adventures as a cameraman on film shoots for the Film Studio, or stories about his service in the Soviet army. As we were not allowed to have any pets, one of my favourite stories was about the mouse that moved into my father’s previous house. He called him Mister Fyfkin. My father told me that all he had to do was make a special little sound and Mister Fyfkin immediately appeared in a tiny hole in the wall. Then he ran towards my father and climbed up on his shoulder.

He didn’t talk much about politics, but at home he was openly against the Soviet regime. He always admonished us to never share these conversations with people outside. Once he told me that before I was born there was a lot of censoring, because of which it was now forbidden to read, translate, distribute and own many books. Only the Party Elite—party members who had special privileges and rights denied to most people—allowed to own books that were censored, which otherwise had to be destroyed down to the last copy.

My father had a lot of courage, and he rebelled against this system numerous times. When he told me the story of Ulysses by James Joyce, I didn’t know anything about the writer or his modernist novel, but I was so impressed by my father’s bravery that I never forgot the book. This literary work had been put on the censoring list, and so a good friend lent a copy to my father for a couple of days. My father knew what to do: determined to save the book, he photographed it page by page2.

He undertook similar illegal acts at work in an effort to save the visual historical evidence of the regime. The so-called ‘Artistic Committee’ would occasionally put out an order to destroy film footage that depicted censored content, such as traditional Latvian symbols. My father told me about one film that had to be edited multiple times to cut out all the shots that were taken in a room with white-and-purple striped wallpaper. According to the Artistic Committee, the colour combination was too reminiscent of the red-white-red of the Latvian flag. Being a patriot and hoping one day to see Latvia free again, in cases such as this my father took the brave step of preserving as much evidence as possible. If the order to destroy a specific film was issued, he first asked the girls at the lab to copy the film as a friendly favour. As ‘gratitude’ he gave them a box of chocolates and liquor. In the Soviet Union, nothing could be achieved without a bottle of alcohol. This was called a ‘gratitude’.

Then he exchanged the film rolls, preparing the film copy for the destruction. To avoid any suspicious behaviour, he swung the heavy can with the original film on his finger as if it were empty while he smuggled it home. Then he travelled to Moscow with the copy, where it was destroyed.

Getting under the nails of the KGB

My father was a fan of Duke Ellington. When in 1971 Duke announced a tour with his jazz orchestra in the Soviet Union3, my father, who was then in his twenties, had to find a way to attend the concert. In the Soviet Union, exclusive things such as this were only accessible to Party Elites and those who happened to have the right connections. As a cameraman, my father had shot film material for the Composer’s Union, and that’s the connection he used to get himself tickets to two of the Ellington concerts, one in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and one in Minsk.

After attending the Leningrad concert, he decided to bring his camera to the Minsk one. During the show, my father stood up, walked towards the stage and started filming. When the security guard noticed this, he walked up to my father and grabbed his shoulder.

‘Stop filming.’ He shook my father and repeated his warning: ‘stop filming immediately.’ My father knew that the security guard couldn’t make any big dramatic movements without disturbing the concert, and he used this to his advantage. ‘Let’s sort things out after the concert, when I’m done,’ he said.

After the concert, my father started talking to Duke Ellington and was even invited to an after-party. A KGB agent followed my father all the way to Duke’s apartment.

When my father returned to Riga, he received a warning from the KGB office for his reckless behaviour, and he had to write a formal explanation of his actions. My father’s excuse was that he ‘wasn’t really filming, but only testing the RIR screen.’ My father loved to provoke the authorities by using technical terminology that people outside of his specialisation didn’t know to make them feel incompetent. This time he got away with only a warning on his record and an order to hand in the film material for destruction. My father asked one of his colleagues to make an illegal copy of his film from the Duke Ellington concert, which he handed in personally in Moscow. This was of course accompanied with a little bottle of gratitude and a fake expression of shame and regret on his face.

In 1973, about a year and a half after this incident, another rebellious act by my father cost him more. At the Soviet Latvian Song Festival4 he saw a KGB agent carrying a symbol that everyone recognised, an umbrella wrapped in the newspaper PRAVDA (the official newspaper of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union; the word means ‘truth’ in Russian), trying to get a seat in the front row. My father chased him away, saying that the front rows were reserved for press-members, choir conductors and cameramen. The KGB agent left.

The next day my father was called in the director’s office at the Film Studio. When he went to the office, next to the director sat that same KGB agent from the concert, who recognised him immediately. ‘That’s the one,’ he said.

In light of the fact that he already had a warning on his record, standing up to the KGB this time cost my father his job. His camera was confiscated for a year and he was downgraded to ‘cameraman assistant’.

Meet my mother

My mother told me that she had blue blood and that she was an aristocrat. She didn’t explain any details about her blood condition, but in some way it was linked to eating small portions of high-quality food, exclusively with silver cutlery. She had relatives in America and Russia that regularly sent packages with delicacies, which made eating caviar a regular thing. She said that even in her early childhood she refused to use cutlery that wasn’t made of silver. She was a fourth-generation Riga native, and she was arrogant about it. When she argued with my father, she liked to remind him that in contrast to her, he had only moved to Riga in his early childhood. I found this remark very cruel, as my father’s parents were living in Riga when his mother was pregnant with my father. WWII was coming to an end, and they decided to flee the country. That didn’t work out—they got stuck in the countryside, where my father ended up being born.

I learned from my mother that city people look down on those who come from smaller towns.

In my mother’s passport it said ‘Nationality: Russian’5, but she spoke very good Latvian, with just a slight Russian accent. When the Soviet Union fell apart, I learned at school to see Russians as our national enemies, to the point that I felt very ashamed about my Russian roots. If my mother spoke to me on the street, I waited to answer until nobody could hear us speak Russian.

All I know about my mother’s ancestry is that she was raised by a Russian single mother, who in turn came from the household of a renowned Jewish surgeon, also working as a director of a hospital and a Latvian mother who changed her name to a Russian one because it gave her more safety during the occupation. When I first heard this story I couldn’t understand how exactly a Jewish father and a Latvian mother could create a Russian child, but the language they spoke at home was Russian, and that seemed to be enough to make the child count as ‘Russian’. My mother never knew her father, but I can recall her once saying that he was a Russian soldier, which to my understanding makes my mother at most only one-third Russian.

I never saw any of her family photographs. When I once asked if she wanted to find out more about her father, my mother got angry. ‘He was never there for me. Why would I want to know him?’ I never brought it up again.

From time to time my mother dwelled in the past and told stories about her youth. She loved to talk about how when she was young she trained in gymnastics, and how at sixteen, she started modelling on the catwalk. This is only speculation, but I’m guessing that it is because she grew up in an environment where appearance was so important that she became obsessed with being skinny—but then again, her preoccupation with weight could also be because of her aristocratic eating habits. Whatever the reason, nothing disgusted my mother more than obese people, and in her mind even people in a normal weight range were considered overweight. For years, my mother was convinced that I was overweight, although I just remember being hungry all the time. She pointed to the imprints on my ankles that were created by the elastics of my socks; this was enough evidence in her mind to prove that I was too fat.

In the 60’s and 70’s my mother was a hippie, but she swore she never did any drugs. She just loved the music—The Beatles, ABBA—and the bell-bottom pants. Some of her girlfriends dated marines, who travelled to the West and snuck LPs back into the Soviet Union and organized underground parties that my mother liked to attend.

My mother’s biggest dream was to become a ballerina. But because she descended from a family of medics, she had no choice but to choose a more scientific profession. My mother ended up studying chemistry in Leningrad, and later she became a professional chemist in the chemical laboratory of the Riga Film Studio, the same place where my father was working. Both my parents took inexplicable pride in being a professional, and they were disgusted by amateurs. Throughout my youth, they pushed me and my sisters to become professionals at something. In my parents’ eyes, a person could only be a professional if they obtained a diploma. They constantly reminded us that things executed by amateurs were always done at a poor level, with no taste. If somebody happened to defend amateurs by saying that they are nice people, both my parents would always respond with the exact same sentence: ‘being a good person is not a profession.’

My mother got hired at the Riga Film Studio to develop 35 mm film negatives and look for defects in the filmed material. She often worked in the dark, and even at home she avoided using bright lights. Her eyes were so well-trained at noticing the tiniest errors that she could spot a kopek coin on a dark street from half a block away. She took me to her laboratory a couple of times, and I still have very vivid memories of her mixing chemicals in a chemical dish. As I witnessed the liquids change colour, I imagined that my mother’s work was witchcraft.

My mother always hid her real age and never celebrated her birthdays. In my early teens I once accidentally found a copy of her passport and was surprised to see that she was only three and a half years younger than my father. Once on her birthday I made the mistake of bringing her flowers—she refused to take them and locked herself in her room. For her, a birthday only meant ageing, although to my eyes she always looked very young.

My mother enjoyed dressing up nicely. She said she only had one item of everything—one blouse, one skirt, one pair of pants, one dress and one sweater—but that all her clothes were nice. None of her garments were bought recently, but she knew how to take good care of them. Any money she had for clothes, she always spent on her shoes. She wore only high heels, ‘like any self-respecting woman.’ Considering that her body was always at least 5 cm off the ground, and preferably 12 cm, my mother was exceptionally graceful when navigating the cobblestoned city streets with a pram and grocery bags on her shoulders.

The Soviet defect

My little sister once had a homework assignment at school in which she had to describe how our parents met. This is the story she heard from my father:

‘Our father was on a trip to Estonia with his film crew. It was a rainy day. Their car was approaching a crossroad when suddenly a lumber truck appeared in front of them—the two cars collided. Seatbelts were not commonly used and so my father was launched through the front window. Their car somersaulted in the air several times. Out of reflex as a cameraman, and probably in shock, my father started filming. Soon after, he fell unconscious. The next thing he remembers, he was laying in the back of their car. He wasn’t sure who put him there.

After the accident, my father’s colleagues, and even his second wife, thought he had suffered brain damage, and nobody counted on him ever being able to return back to work. Sometime after the car accident he finally returned to work and went to the film lab, where he met a very pretty young girl in bright red pants and bright red lipstick. Her colleagues considered her good-looking, but dumb—my father seemed to be the only one who noticed that she was actually very intelligent and had a curious mind. The girl had already seen my father’s film materials from the car accident and was the only one eager to hear his story. She wanted to know how it was possible to even survive such a collision, let alone document the immediate events after the accident.’

I’ve never heard my mother’s side of the story, but I do know that she was very concerned about the standards of the Soviet society, and that she worried she would be seen as an old spinster. She was desperate to get married to alleviate pressure from society. They dated for about a year before getting married. The reason for postponing their wedding was my mother’s requirement that my father finish his education and get his diploma. When my father wrapped up his studies, my parents finally set a wedding date.

In contrast to my mother’s expectations, their wedding day was not the most beautiful day of her life. There was no white dress, no celebration, no guests and no wedding picture.

For her wedding day, my mother bought a beautiful, long satin skirt with a print of shiny ruby red and emerald green shapes. In my early youth she wore it quite often, and I always gave her compliments, even though every time I realised right away that it brought up sad memories about her wedding day. My mother always told me that her relationship with my father was a ‘brak’, an ‘unfortunate defect’. The first time I remember hearing the word ‘brak’ was when my mother tried to close a broken zipper on my coat. I only knew that the word meant ‘defect’, and so my mother’s complaint about her defect with my father made no sense.

I later learned that the Russian word ‘brak’ had two meanings: ‘marriage’ and ‘defect’. So when I asked her why she voluntarily signed up for something broken, she didn’t realise that I had been lost in translation. Her moments of complaint were monologues, where my role was to sit and listen. She always repeated that the defect was only still in place for me and my sisters, and that she stayed for our happiness. She said that it was only thanks to her sacrifices that me and my siblings could build a bright future filled with opportunities. I had to promise several times that I was going to study hard, do well in life and ensure that my parents receive good care in their old age.

According to my mother’s stories, for my father their defect was just another formality. On the day when my parents’ defect became official, they exchanged rings and registered their partnership in the wedding registry that everybody referred to as ZAGS6. My mother never forgave my father for leaving for a work trip the day after their wedding day. They never had a honeymoon. There was no sparkle of love between them—I mostly saw them argue with each other. However, when me or my sisters asked why they don’t divorce each other, they said that divorces only happen in bad families. We were a good family.

Three children were created as a result of my parents’ defect. Most of the time I felt like a nuisance to the point that I wondered why my parents even bothered to have children. When I spoke about it to my mother, she explained that as a married couple they needed to contribute to society by growing the population. In the Soviet regime, the growth of the population was highly promoted and financially supported. ‘What do you mean by growing population?’ I asked her. ‘Well, the first two children replace their parents, and the third one grows the population,’ she explained. ‘Honestly, I only wanted one child,’ she added in a bitter voice. I was her second child.

As my father wanted to be the only breadwinner in the family, my mother became an involuntary housewife. She hated every single moment of performing household tasks, and yet she was stuck in this lifestyle for ten years as she raised three children, only occasionally taking an opportunity to do some small jobs. By the time she was finally able to return back to work, the Soviet Union had fallen apart and the Film Studio had been closed down. When my younger sister was old enough, my mother felt urgency in regaining her financial independence. She completed a course in accountancy and briefly worked as an accountant. She even completed a whole new master’s degree, possibly even two. The fact that I don’t know the exact details of this is a result of us never really talking to each other.

It goes both ways—aside from some of my educational highlights, she didn’t know much about my life either. I only know that eventually, years after the fall of the Soviet Union, my mother landed a job in a library, but not just any library. It was at the tax office. In post-Soviet society, avoiding tax payments was such a common thing that my mother didn’t dare to tell anyone that she worked at the tax office. She was afraid that people would think that she would report them for avoiding their tax payments. By sticking to the title of ‘librarian’ she felt like she would leave the impression of a trustworthy person.

Meet my mother’s mother

In the periods when my father was gone for work, occasionally my mother would mention the cool guys she met during her study years in Leningrad. When she talked about them, her face briefly lit up. Her encounters from the past sounded promising and fun—for all she knew, she had missed a boatload of opportunities. All those great people had moved on with their lives and gotten married. My mother often cried to me that because her own mother hated men, she ended up in an unhappy marriage with my father, as he was the only man who could handle her mother. Any romantic relationship that my mother tried to have got ruined.

One of my mother’s most-repeated stories was how every time that she was about to go on a date, her mother instantly became so ill that she felt as if she was laying on her deathbed. She demanded care for the final moments of her life. This strange behaviour might explain why my parents got married without her consent. My mother’s mother continued acting like this even after my parents got married. My father recalled one specific time when she had called the ambulance because she was dying. When the ambulance arrived, my father heard the old woman yelling at somebody on the phone, so he decided to ambush her. He let the ambulance quietly enter her room. When she noticed the medics, she dropped the horn of the phone and in an amateurish theatrical manner she raised her hand to her forehead and fell into bed as if she had dropped dead.

When telling me these stories, my mother never referred to her mother by her name or by the title ‘your grandmother’. It took me years until I finally understood that the stories about the character ‘my mother’s mother’ were actually about my very own grandmother.

In many folktales, grandmothers were portrayed as the kind, smiling ladies that sit in a rocking chair telling stories to their grandchildren and knitting woollen socks. In kindergarten and primary school, when I started interacting with other children, I heard them say adorable things about their grandparents, especially their grandmothers. Their grandparents were great at cooking delicious food, making jam and pickled veggies, reading and telling stories, knitting and sewing clothes. I didn’t have any of that. For all I knew, my grandparents were non-existent. In my early youth, my biggest wish was to have a grandmother.

I used to think
that all homes have names
and ours was Kommunalka

I spent the first nine years of my life living on Karl Marx Street in a gorgeous five-storey Art Nouveau building in the centre of Riga, right in front of the St. Gertrude Old Church, around the corner from Lenin Street7. My parents told me that before communists occupied Latvia, the house where I grew up had belonged to aristocrats. Even though it had turned dark grey from layers of dust and was in urgent need of maintenance, the building radiated an exceptional beauty. For years I admired the details of the facade. There were floating decorative lines, flowers and devilish-looking heads. Our apartment was situated on the so-called ‘bel-etage’, the floor right above the basement (but not quite at ground level). Compared to the rest of the building, the bel-etage had the highest ceiling. The basement of our house had full-size windows that were exactly half below and half above the ground. When I was growing up, I was always fascinated by the basement, but I never found out what it was used for.

My parents called our apartment ‘Kommunalka’, and because of that I believed that every apartment had its own name. ‘Kommunalka’ is Russian slang for the term ‘communal apartment’. With the rise of communism, the population of Riga grew very rapidly due to the immigration of guest factory- and care-workers from other countries in the Soviet Union, causing a housing shortage. Kommunalkas were the communist way of solving this issue.