Introduction
It is very curious to feel oneself to be a witness to history.
Once upon a time I wanted to write a book entitled "Stepdaughter to the Ages," about Soviet Science Fiction. It nearly got finished, but I could never find a publisher, and I have always conceived of it in my own mind as The Book.
With pictures.
With examples of interesting plots from stories and novels.
With separate sections dealing with Utopias, Anti-Uutopias, and the Communist Utopia.
While writing the book I made a personal discovery, a discovery I suspect would not at all surprise today's literary critics
The fact is that even fifteen years ago literary criticism dealing with SF hardly even existed in Russia.. There were bibliographers, there were book reviewers, but those engaged in literary criticism as we more properly understand the term, who ponder the issues and actually create concepts of literary criticism, those people numbered just all of three. They know who they are.
Therefore I had no fear of making any discoveries there was no one around to declare they had been there first.
Now, of course, there exist many people specializing in SF; they are already arguing with each other and staking their claims to concepts.
I can only tip my hat to them.
They clap me on the shoulder, thinking it's not a shoulder but the corner of a deeply venerated book case.
Not long ago I met a man in his thirties, who asked rather naively but rather sincerely: "But aren't you dead?"
Therefore, I'm rather afraid of finishing the book about Soviet SF.
But I'll venture some of its theses, in as much as I haven't encountered my own point of view in any works of the professional literary critics. `
In consequence: think of the realm of fantastic literature as a sea, crossed by currents and datted by islands, which are all the possible literary movements, genres, and events.
But there is a realistic fiction, which now for some reason even the doyens of our SF workshop use the English word 'mainstream [mejnstrim]', as though science fiction were a badly smelling stream overgrown with thorns.
The mainstream includes in itself the class called historical prose.
Also called historical drama.
We'll call it historical belle lettres.
This would include Alexei Tolstoy's Peter The First, and the works of the late Roman Pikul, as well as many books by Heinrich Mann, , Schweig, Feuchtwanger, and much of Senkevich.
As a result my first thesis insists that historical prose as a species of literature is rather close to fantastic literature in general, to the point of almost being brothers, although with their signs reversed.
Fantastic literature makes use of fictional heroes existing in a created background.
Historical fiction turns to real heroes, but with fictionalized entourage.
And the more convincingly the author re-imagines the historical hero's world and his entourage, the reality in which they exist, the more successful will the historical novel be. Any attempt to honestly and meticulously reproduce worlds where Alexander the Great or Napoleon can act, will fundamentally spoil the novel for the reader. Even the attempt to force the characters to explain themselves in the language of those times frightens off the readers.
,It is desirable to make the entirely fictional, fantastic world of the historical novel's hero it as close to the world of the reader as possible, and the language which the contemporaries of Alexander the Great or Dmitry Doskoy speak it should be contemporary, digestible language.
The best of the historical writers, Feuchtwanger, Duma, or Alekei Tolstoy, knew this and poked fun at historical hyperaccuracy as constantly.
Well, in our time, and in our country, the relation to history as well as to belles lettres, has reached undreamed of heights.
The history of Russia, not to mention the not nearly so long history of the Soviet Union, was abolished and replaced by Joseph Stalin's "Short Course [essentially The Idiot's Guide to Communism, written in the 30s and re-written variously thereafter JHC]." We began to read in our schools a history of the human race which was literally fantastic (in all senses.) In it, for example, that representative of the Revolutionary Soviet Republic and victor over the White Guards Lev Trotsky became a traitor to the Homeland, and his murderer was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. In Soviet historical literature we find lacking not only the rules of formal logic but simple common sense. The "Encyclopedia of Civil War and the Intervention" was published right at the dawn of the Communist Empire; there is no article on 'Trotsky" in it, for the simple matter that he behaved so despicably they could not lower themselves to print his name on the same pages, and instead noted the feats of Skuro, Krasnov, Kornilov and so forth. Right after that is the long article "Trotskyism"; evidently, that base political movement originated with some other Trotsky, who had hidden himself away in Zurich for the duration of the war.
Generation followed generation for whom history was viewed as a form of mythology, in which, for example, the city of Berdyansk could at a moment's notice become the city of Zinoviev, thereafter revert to Berdyansk again, later take the name of Osipenko, and then become Berdyansk again. This is not an exception: try to remember the tribulations of Rybinsk Shcherbakov Andropov Rybinsk. The main rule in this game is what gets crossed out is something you'd better forget!
Certainly every one of us has gotten into our hands at some time pre-war books in which certain surnames were blackened out with ink, often repeatedly. Those surnames no longer existed. I was always curious to find out who it was who had 'killed' the previous conscientious reader? I held the pages up against the light and most of the time could see nothing they had been inked out of existence. And if you happen to be young, don't just suppose that these acts were a prerogative of the Stalinist Era. Toward the end of 1953 all subscribers to the "Great Soviet Encyclopedia" received envelopes which informed them what had to be done with the article "Beria" which had managed to get into the Encyclopedia. In its place they were to paste in an article on "The Bering Sea;" which had evidently been ignored by simple oversight and hadn't been written in time.
So the pages ripped from the Encyclopedia flew into the waste buckets and yet one more name was excised from the relevant histories and text books of true Leninists.
Orwell, in his masterful work, conceived of the Ministry of Truth, where the file copies of past newspapers were corrected in reality.
That was SF. This was a game.
The Party and government of our country corrected reality on a far greater scale and far more decisively, than Orwell dreamed. And a lot more fantastically too.
I am touching on these times in these musings in order, in part, to understand why the works of Fomenkin are so popular, as well as Kasparov, the one an academic specializing in math, the other an academic specializing in chess, as well as a whole series of non-academics, who participate in today's whitewashing of history.
In as much as I lived in the preceding epochs, in the Epoch of Socialist Slavery, in the period of Socialist Feudalism, and then under Socialism With A Human Face, I remember a lot of things that I was supposed to forget.
The chief principal of a professional fortune teller may be formulated as: everyone remembers only those predictions which came true. A thousand times a fortune teller can spout nonsense, and his naive listeners forget it. On the thousandth and one time by happenstance or because the guy mispoke in the first place his prediction is right on target. So naturally the fortune teller acquires a reputation for himself as a sage.
Perhaps you have heard how the Great Nostradamus did everything possible not to put any actual dates into his quatrains? But the quatrains number in the hundreds, and through oversight some five or six do in fact have dates attached. No one, other than the noted historian Eduard Berzin, has bothered to play any attention to these five or six. Does it surprise you that of Nostradamus's predictions which specified actual dates, not a single one of them came true?
So quite naturally all the rest are treated as predictions that came true. And the lies fly onward down the centuries.
The same statements can be made for the fanatics of sects specializing in predictions of the coming end of the world. We announce that the death of mankind is set for next Wednesday so everyone should rush out into the streets because only we can save them.
Wednesday, nothing happens.
"That's exactly right!" the head of the sect announces then. "Just as it should be. Thanks to us the end of the world has been put off until next year. And would you please fill the collection box as we pass by?"
As a result, if our Party and government were busy with predictions of the coming of Communism and Universal Joy by the means of lowering prices for accordions by six percent, then everywhere the postdictors of the past grew unofficially, like weeds, because the consciousness of the Soviet citizen was so shattered by the unreliability of history and its multiplicity, that he was ready to place in doubt not only the role of Martov, Trotsky, or Tukachevsky in the formation of the state, but the existence of Alexander the Great and the Khazar Khanate as well.
These are not fairy stories.
The Academician Rybakov excavated Tmutarakan', found a synagogue there, and declared it an Orthodox Cathedral. The Academician Mikhail Postnikov "also one of the mathematicians," brought us at the magazine Znanie-Sila [Knowledge is Strength,] a young adult popular science magazine-JHC] reams of paper that proved that the solar eclipses hadn't taken place when it was thought they had, and that therefore that various events in ancient history hadn't taken place when it was thought they had. Possibly, they had never taken place.
I well understand how awkward it can be for some professional who has developed a passionate interest in a different field. And often if, in his own field, he maintains the greatest devotion to Knowledge, there is a chance that in the throes of passion lapses into Faith.
The principal of Faith, gloriously applied not only to science, but to utterly mundane affairs, turned the socialist camp into the camp of Virtual Reality, and the inhabitant of this camp (his head as low and out of the crossfire as he could put it) desperately attempting to predict what the authorities would demand came to regard history as a form of fairy tale with changing rules.
The principle of postdicting the past is the primary principle of the soviet state.
The second principle was Paradise on Earth.
Here we find ourselves adrift in the sea of imprecise terms.
It is conventionally accepted that a Utopia is a wondrous place toward which we might strive. An anti-utopia is a state structure one wants to try to avoid at all costs.
Having said the above, we find ourselves as it were in a Soviet understanding of history.
Let me explain.
A person who finds himself living a horrible life in this world came up with religion. That is a system of just rewards and punishments. You, wretch, have made me endure want and humiliation for my entire life, but after death it will avail you nothing; the devil will roast you on a spit (Christianity)or you will return in the form of a noxious worm (Buddhism and other eastern religions), and it makes life easier to take.
The larger, more well established, more powerful religious systems become, the better worked out are their concepts of reward and punishment.
It served as a strong incentive in this world.
Bear in mind, divine justice awaits you only after your death.
The result is that you can only enter into the religious utopia, that just and joyous world, only after you have died.
But please pay attention here no one has ever referred to Paradise, to the Heavenly Kingdom, as a "Utopia." We reserve the word "Utopia" for such as Campanella's City of the Sun,
Plato's Atlantis, or Vera Pavlovna's Third Dream.If one considers that, as a rule, Utopias are created by dissidents, opponents of the existing order, the church and worldly authorities frequently punish them severely. Chernishevsky wrote his utopia imprisoned in a fortress; Thomas Moore's head was struck off....
They had touched on something that was out of bounds! They had tried to say that somewhere, on this Earth, during one's lifetime, you could search out and discover justice and joy.
They had sinned; for if they had been right, then all the religious systems of reward and punishment would vanish for utter uselessness.
The classical Utopia was, at the same time, an Anti-Utopia, and in its turn it bequeathed to us the Anti-Utopia's of contemporary type, which also had their roots in world literature, but for a long time no one connected the two or called it for what it was.
Koshchej's Kingdom was Anti-Utopia. The City of Fools ['Gotham' in English parlance] was an anti-utopia. Even Swift's Gulliveran states were anti-utopias.
If the creators of utopia's attempted to distance their creations from their real worlds as much as they could, the creators of Anti-Utopia's tried to hide none of the connections of their terrors with reality. He simply made the SF or Fantasy writer's step of placing it beyond the bounds of reality, and in place of your face in the mirror you observed a disfigured mask..
But we recognize them anyway.
As a result the creators of Anti-Utopias are also not encouraged. But if the Utopian writers were destroyed by the church, the Anti-Utopians were pursued by entirely worldly powers.
The Anti-Utopia, as a worldwide phenomenon, was formulated toward the beginning of the twentieth century, when the world was united into a single whole and the recognition of want and threats had also become universal.
The Utopia was derived from the principle: somewhere, somehow, this wold be a great place to live.
The Anti-Utopia warned: if this goes on, we'll fall into the Abyss!
In Western Europe, where literature has remained the personal affair of the writer, the writers of Anti-Utopias remained at large.
Among us, and among the similar governments, the best the Anti-Utopians could hope for was just not to be published. The first great Anti-Utopia of the 20th Century, Zamyatin's We came out in the Russian language in our own country only seventy years after it was written! That Zamyatin was able to die a natural death is a miracle. Even during a period when the body guard of socialist ideology was almost liberal they did their best to rip the Strugatskies' books to pieces with their fangs.
The terms Utopias and Anti-Utopias are generally well known and here I will merely point out certain details.
But there is one other current in this area this is socialist Utopia.
So.
In the Religious Utopia the ideal world exists 'not of this world.'
In the classical Utopia the idealized system can be built 'somewhere and somewhen.'
The Anti-Utopia warns us of what will happen "if this goes on."
The Socialist Utopia proclaims: "The Present Generation of Soviet people will live under Communism!"
This is a lie neither the generations in question, nor the authors of the slogan, believed it at all.
But it did imply that we, although we had certainly not built Communism yet, were already living in the most contented, just, and even joyful society in the history of the human race. And if we expressed the slightest doubt, they would just liquidate us.
Communism was to be the Heavenly Paradise on Earth, even though no one, in not a single Marxist tome, had been able to say just what our Communist Paradise would consist of.
By the way, there was really no need for them, as the signs and portents of what was to come had already been created and were there for all to see.
Many years passed before the Communist ideology lost its monopoly on the direction of thought and the feelings of the country's population, and then it was evident to all that what was to have been the Communist (or socialist) Utopia (Paradise on Earth) had in fact been an Anti-Utopia, the greatest and most extensive Lie with the most catastrophic of results in the history of mankind.
I was born at the height of the construction of the Socialist Anti-Utopia; I've lived my whole life in this system of values.
I'm both a product, and a victim, of this system.
I want to write a book about this person, a person in many ways typical of his generation and those that came before and after.
I find that my becoming a writer of Fantasy and Science Fiction is an entirely natural course of events; what is odd is that the majority of the inhabitants of our country have not.
At the same time something does differentiate me from my contemporaries. We are all somewhat different from each other, otherwise it would be possible to write a single memoir for all.
Many of our leading writers and eminences of culture have left behind memoirs. We read them and are delighted at the possibilities to gossip about the author's doings..
It is even more interesting of the author has guessed correctly about his future and has maintained a comprehensive diary since early childhood.
From the notations of the diary we can see how from an early age the author met with his older colleagues, and they poured the child tea while pouring their wisdom into his eager ears.
What does the unsuccessful athlete who has flubbed his chances say? He says he was not ready to win the two and a half meters jump, but he was walking past the stadium and sort of tripped over it.
Or what the lover says to his inamorata: "My wife doesn't understand me, and she doesn't interest me at all either."
So, from the point of view of the above two postulates, I shall ask you to examine my writing career.
In the first place, I had not planned on becoming a writer and now I really don't want to be one. I was just passing the stadium and tripped over it. From the first I had in fact wanted to become an artist, and then a paleontologist.
I didn't even get the education I wanted. I wanted to major in Geology, but matriculated as a translator. As it was, my school leaving certificate had only two Threes, in trigonometry and in English.
Consequently, I was never well known to my older colleagues, not a single well known writer ever poured tea for the frisky little brat and no one ever passed on to me his lyre; I am in fact fairly well known to a number of other writers now.
The very first review that talked about me and what was then my second or third published piece declared that I had once shown promise, but that I was now written out, and anyway that everything I had created I had stolen from far finer writers; even the little girl Alice had been snagged from the esteemed Lewis Carroll
I cannot write a real memoir, in as much as I have no idea of what to put in it. Nothing has really happened in my life everything has just sped past to one side, puffing steam like a train engine.
In a sense my work, as it were, may be considered pseudomemorial. You can forget about encountering the hero of the day, but I will try to recount the Anti-Utopia that came into the world and which grew someone who set about writing fantastic literature.
What is the cause of this? Can it be found in nature, or in Nurture? What led to the creation of the social phenomenon known as Kir Bulychev?
Quite apart from his objective worth as a writer he is certainly the product of odd and diverse forces which merged and came to fruition in the arena of Soviet History. To what extent are these forces fantastic in and of themselves? Are are they merely 'fantastic' in aggregate?
Well, only by posing the question in such a way that one might justify the appearance of the present memoirs.
I have lived a totally ordinary life beneath a government I found totally ordinary. Even having become a writer of fantastic literature I never guessed that this was not a state, but an odd species of Anti-Utopia, which ended up constructed in one country, as Comrade Lenin taught.
I have been like a sparrow who has spent his whole life in a trash pit, and when a passer-by asked: "Why are you confined to that pit; step out into the real world?" he answered: "I'm not confined. I live here."
I am a representative of a specific category of Soviet mass literature; I'm not even from the Generation of the Sixties, but from the Seventies (a phenomenon, unlike the Generation of the Sixties, unhailed and unstudied.) Even more, my activities as a screen writer fell in the Seventies and Eighties. Although so few remember it today, I contributed the scenarios to a dozen or so full length films and a vast number of shorter films. Even more I was able to occupy the ecological niche in children's science fiction for ages greater than those who were confined to Eduard Uspenskij.
The Nineties were the years of my gradual shuffling off the stage. I have not quite fallen out of sight, but conditions around here are dark enough I would recommend a good telescope for finding me.
I decided to write a book on "How to become an SF author," because of my subjective desire to make sense of the epoch as the sum of influences which gave birth to someone as inconspicuous as myself.
I ask only that you do not take my words as the whole truth, nor even as an attempt to tell the whole truth.. You will certainly never find the whole truth on the pages of anyone's memoirs. On the pages of a Lie-Memoir from one of the Land of the Soviets' SF writers the truth should be changed to unverifiable rumor and various forms of apocrypha.
For the same reason we shall make use of historical prose, that most mendacious of literary forms. I make no pretense that my creation is a work of fiction. I am not going to dream up anything here. All the facts which may be checked are really and truly facts. The names are real. The events took place.
Everything else is a lie.
The author, known also as Igor Vsevolodovich Mojeiko, was born in Moscow at Bankovskij Pereulok near Chistie prudy on 18 October, 1934 in a family of proletarians the carpenter Vsevolod Nikolaevich Mojeiko and Maria Mikhailovna Bulycheva, a worker at the Armand Hammer factory.
This I set forth on the road to the realm of fantastic literature at my very birth, for it is difficult to think of a more deceptive and deceitful set of lies, tem bolee chto prihodilos sobirat them po krokham.
I belong to that broad category of Russian subjects/podannyx, whose families were created by the revolution, and whose genealogies were destroyed.
Under the normal course of events my parents would never have even met, on the otehr hand I would have known the biographies of my grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles.
Fortunately, there lives in Kaluga my dear cousin Svetlana, whom you are fated to meet later in these pages, and it is because of her that I know of some rather unbelievable events in my family history. Svetlana is a jurist by profession and an historian by calling. She has chosen for herself the lot of "preserver and protector of the Russian Lands." Such crumbs of information about the Mojeiko clan as still exist she has obtained and preserved; she's even carried out explorations in search of relatives and found them.
I remember how, many years ago, a woman from Leningrad phoned me; she had read my book mon the wonders of the world and wanted to know if I might not be related to Vsevolod Mojeiko. I admitted that he was my father, and she said that would have to make her my aunt, or more precisely, a cousin of my father.
I gave her my father's phone number and gratefully forgot about the conversation, but it was Svetlana who, after my father's death, set off for Leningrad and searched out our aunt, Nina Lvovna.
It was from her that I got the details about other members of the extended Mojeiko family, as well as that of her own father, Novikov.
I can sum up the fates of these people in only a few sentences.
My paternal grandfather Nikolai had two brothers, Lev and Mikhail, as well as two sisters, Masha and Natasha.
It was a large, close knit, well-to-do family.
All of the brothers graduated from the University in Peterburg. Lev was married to a Polish woman, Valeria Bonifatievna; he was a mathematician and liberal, which led him to teach in a Sunday school, where he taught workers together with Naden'ka Krupskaya, with whom he was friendly, and through whom he met her husband Ulyanov. But he never became a social- democrat; as a professor of mathematics he received a personal dvoryanstvo [I take this to be the equivalent of a British knighthood-JHC), and during the war he founded a company for supplying the army with spirits. After the revolution he taught mathematics in a Leningrad school, he maintained good relations with Nadezhna Konstantinovna, and quite possibly this saved him from arrest, if not from a painful death. He died of starvation during the winter of 1942, and Valeria Bonifatievna and their daugther Agnia were evacuated to Vologda, where the two of them soon died from dystrophy. Of all the family there remained only the elder daughter Nina, whose first husband, Arkahgelsky, was a liturgical composer, had been shot in 1937 as a SDE (Socially Dangerous Element.) All that remained of her family was their daughter Lyudmila, who was sixteen at the beginning of the war. Nina Lvovna's second husband died at the front, and she and her daughter worked as medics for the duration of the Blockade. After the war Lyudmila enrolled in an Institute and was accepted into the Party, but in 1949 they arrested Nina Lvovna as the wife of a liturgical composer who had been shot twelve years earlier, and sent her to Potma. Lyudmila was expelled from the Party and her lover split from her publically. Lyudmila went home and turned on the gas. The following day her mother returned home. For some sort of unaccountable reason they had released her. This was the woman who had searched me out, and through me my father. She lived quite alone and died some twenty years ago. She loved painting, music, and in Svetlana's words, was quite proud of he membership in the Mojeiko clan.
Mikhail Mojeiko, the oldest of the brothers, was born in 1865, served as an tax accountant in Mitavo, then in Peterburg. At the end of the Civil War he moved in with his brother Nikolai in Taganrog, then moved to Smolensk. He worked as an accountant in a kindergarten; the entire family lived in one room of a communal apartment. A neighbor wanted the room, and he wrote a denunciation of Mikhail Mojeiko. He was arrested in February, 1938. His daughter later remembered how he stood between two Chekists, without his pince-nez, holding up his pants with his hands, and whispered, "Good by, my children." He died in prison after several days; his heart simply could not withstand the constant beatings during the interrogation he was, after all seventy years old at the time. In the report on his death they wrote: "Shot in Prison." An uncommon diagnosis. They didn't like to write that.
His son, Evgeny, was a geologist; at the time he was away on an expedition. By the start of the war they had already arrested him, and he was released from prison in 1947.
Evgeny's sister, Nina Mikhailovna, worked as a machinist, but was fired in 1938 as the daughter of an enemy of the people; then she survived the occupation of Smolensk by the Germans, after which she worked as a librarian, but she was fired for the crime of living through the occupation. In her old age she told Svetlana: "I hate them both, Hitler and Stalin. But I hate Stalin more."
My paternal grandmother, Lidiya Nikolaevna Dergacheva, was born in 1879 in Libavo. in the family of a military officer. Her father had been transferred to Smolensk, but there he fell from his horse and died. His sons were enrolled in the cadet corpus on the Government funds, following which they also served in the army as officers. Victor was wounded at the front, and while his solders were carting him to a hospital on a stretcher they were hit by a shell burst. Leonid, after the Revolution, served in the Red Army, was the head of machine gun training courses, served together with Voroshilov, but at the end of the Civil War was demobilized, settled in Taganrog, married a Greek woman, and was arrested in 1937. Before he was sent off into the camps he received a visit from his wife; he managed to whisper to her: "Look at my hands!" His fingers no longer had nails. My grandmother wrote to everyone, begging them to free Leonid. Finally, in 1939, she received a telegram from Voroshilov: "Your brother has been freed." On the next day she received yet one more telegram: "Your brother died unexpectedly." My grandmother was able to whisper to herself that her brother had died of joy when Voroshilov had helped him, but on the form dealing with his rehabilitation many years later it was written that he had died in a camp a year before then.
Lidochka Dergacheva made her acquaintance with Kolya Mozheiko when she was still in high school, when he had come to Smolensk on business. Her parents forbade her to go out with a low class bourgeois. Lidia quit school, and refused to eat and drink. Her parents surrendered. Lidiya sent Nikolai a telegram to meet her on the hill beneath the clock with the three faces. Kolya was climbing the hill, saw her from afar, fell on his knees and crawled the rest of the way to her, saying over and over again that he would love her all his life.
The young couple settled in St Peterburg. In 1902 they had a son they named Vsevolod. At the age of two he had to be operated on for appendicitis, but they gave him too much chloroform and he never woke up. My grandmother fell into such a state of depression that they feared for her life. My grandfather took her to the holy man Ioann of Kronstadt.
The holy man sat beside my grandmother for a long time and stroked her head; finally, he began to command her:
"Cry now, cry. I ask you to cry!"
Then, for the first time since the death of her son, my grandmother burst into tears.
And, as Ioann predicted, my father was born shortly thereafter. My insistent grandmother gave him the same name as her first son. He was spoiled rotten, his handsomness and talents were praised, and a great future was predicted.
Some time ago while engaged in collecting awards and decorations issued to civilians for meritorious service there came into my hands a pile of award citations. Among theirr number was a document certifying the awarding of the order of St. Anna First Class to the Archpriest Sergeyev. I knew that this was the worldly name of the holy Ioann of Kronstadt. Since then I have had in my home a document which the holy father must have held in his hands often, for certainly he was not without human weaknesses, and I remember his portrait where his chest was covered with not a few decorations.
In 1920 Nikolai Mozheiko decided to evacuate his hungry family to the south.
He took with him his own children, the children of his brother Mikhail as well as his very beautiful mistress, whose presence never once prevented him from loving his wife to the end of his days.
On their arrival in Taganrog he bought a house for the entire Mozheiko clan, a somewhat smaller separate house for his beloved, and they began to live quite comfortably, all the more so as grandfather Nikolai had managed to bring along the family jewels.
They lived lavishly, not paying attention to what the year was and how the world was changing beyond their door. My uncle Mikhail's wife, who had been born the baroness Taube, was a professional pianist, and on her birthday in 1921 Nikolai dropped by to visit with a horde of movers they had brought her a Bekkerov piano.
In the end of course Soviet power was established in Taganrog and arrested my grandfather, because they took him to be the Emperor Nikolai, escaped from his just punishments. For a while my grandfather sat in jail, and when it was at last known that the real Nikolai had already been shot, they changed the charges on the form and inserted the crime of serving in the white army, and this was of course utterly true as my grandfather served as an accountant during all the regimes.
My father, devout Party man that he was, was terrified of meeting with grandfather. The old people still lived in Taganrog and on my grandfather's occasional arrivals in Moscow it was my mother who met him. My grandfather died in the middle of the thirties, after which my grandmother moved back to Moscow, and I even remember her vaguely. She lived at least until the Second World War.
So let us stop a moment and imagine a large, normal family. All the Mozheikos were tall, blue eyed blonds inclined to obesity, to ardent passions which hardly stopped them from loving their wives and children dearly. Before the Revolution my grandfather and his brothers were, if not very rich, at least people of substance, which allowed them to live well and even enjoy themselves.
After the Revolution the Bolsheviks destroyed the Mozheikos by hook or by crook. As to the fates of many of them, I haven't a clue, but almost none of them escaped arrest and death, some in camps, some from dystrophy, some being left with no option but suicide.
The clan was exterminated, although they were not famous, nor even aristocratic.
Therefor you may understand why I was never able to bring myself to join the Party, or even its Union of Writers.
But you say: but among your relatives were remarkable successes, not just victims, but those who adapted to the world of Soviet Power..
Well, that was their life, their road, and I can't judge any of them I am writing about the time period, and its rules.
Further sections from Kir Bulychev's "How To Become An SF Writer" will appear in WORKS IN PROGRESS in February and throughout 2003.