EC 517

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

26 Unrequited Children

A long time ago, I read in a magazine that mothers of young ducklings have problems raising their young, because during the duck hunting season so many moms get shot that few are left with any parenting experience.

My mother (b. 1908) was a handsome young woman, half Russian, half Latvijan, who came from Russia to Latvija in 1922 at the age of fourteen.

Having survived the horrors of the Soviet Revolution, which involved, for a couple of years, separation from her mother, and having survived extreme cold and sheltering in a disintegrating shack at the foot of a mountain at the top of which the Reds nightly shot any number of Whites, she did not return to Latvia to be healed of the psychic wounds of war, but to the disciplinary terrors brought to the family by her father, the Latvian ambassador to the Soviet Union.

With the Revolution having brought her Russian mother’s status among nobility to naught, and her father’s status as a nerd of a bureaucracy on the rise, the family was at the mercy of a hardnosed career man. As part of his home-made program of social ladder climbing, his children were forbidden to associate with the children of people he deemed to come from the lower classes. Mother’s wish to study nursing was ignored, because the profession was deemed unworthy of Kārlis’ pretentions to stature. To be crude about it, in a technical sense Karlis did not ‘fuck’ his daughter, but arranged that she be fucked by the father of her children to be.

When Manya was twenty-four years old, her father summoned his daughter to wed my father.* It was a more or less ‘secret’ wedding, well out of sight of the yellow press, which had taken a keen interest in the trial that had taken place months before. Kārlis, and my paternal grandfather, and everyone else in the family kept their mouths shut about the upcoming marriage.\

*Many decades later, after the death of Stalin  and Manya’s mother’s return from the Gulags, grandmother wrote mother (who was by then in America) that she had cried greatly when mother was married off. Still, she was unable to do anything to prevent the marriage. Needless to say, when I read the letter, I realized that grandmother cared little for the feelings** of her grandchildren.

**When grandmother’s own son Sašha was still an infant, and when she was visiting her mother-in-law in the Latvijan countryside, she had left her infant son in the yard alone and crying. When her Latvijan mother-in-law protested that one ought not leave a child so crying, she replied that she was “hardening his character”. At a later time, I read that such ‘hardening of character’ was a custom among Russian nobility.

The clear beneficiary of the arrangement was Kārlis—he had a large countryside estate that was losing him money (the low salaried farm workers were burning down his barns.) Maybe he would now have access to the money needed to keep the estate afloat.

The long term results of the shotgun wedding were that Karlis’ oldest daughter never married, but remained single, and preferred to earn her keep as a piano teacher. Kārlis’ fingerless son (he lost all his fingers but thumbs due to frostbite when the children were wintering in Krasnoyarsk at a railroad switchman’s home) married an ordinary telephone switchboard operator simply because she was impressed by his father’s status and realized that her offer of sex would be appreciated (for the taking advantage of which uncle Sasha was briefly kicked out of the family circle).

Thus, mother, who did not receive an education beyond a girls finishing school, remained forever narcissistically focused on herself. Until another catastrophe (WW2) struck, she let her children be raised by nannies; she never called anyone, but waited to be called; it was as if she was going through life as a vegetable or, if you will, suffering of vegetative dystonia.* Her children, proper little animals all, starving attention, sometimes drove her to hysterics. I used to be one such small demon.

*More about this illness later and in the course of this story.

Three years after father was shot in Astrahan (in April of 1942—no one knew this until 1955, after Stalin had been murdered; and grandmother, the knazina’s daughter, returned from Siberia to Latvija) mother had an affair with a young German officer serving in the post office corps of the German Wehrmacht. I remember the young officer’s name as Fritz. The affair may or may not have saved our lives, because Fritz was able to commandeer the Wehrmacht post office outfit to bring us with it when it fled, after the Soviets broke through established front lines with a tank column that was stopped by a counter attack just a few kilometers from my aunt’s farm. The love affair (if that is what it was) did not last more than a month or two.

Though mother used to insist that she and father loved each other, I was never sure that it was more than a defensive statement, because there was considerable amount of evidence to the contrary. The emotional instability brought by war and the Russian Revolution in her childhood years, followed up by compelled love brought to her by her father and not resisted by her mother, combined with a return of war (WW2) that caught her in the bloom of her years… initiated a long series of events that not only destroyed her expectations of life, but destabilized the lives of her children.

Following the affair with Fritz, and after we had fled to Germany and had arrived in Weimar, Germany, mother began an affair with the son of the German household, where we were given a room in the attic. Heinz was an officer in the German Luftwaffe stationed in Munich. The affair was seen as a threat to the stability of her family by Heinz’s wife, whose letter to my mother, begging her to cease the affair, I discovered and read.

An unfortunate after effect of the brief affair with Fritz was that it was witnessed by my aunt Emma, the youngest sister of my paternal grandmother, the same who grandfather had abandoned at the end of the 19^th century. It was aunt Emma, who by taking us into her family circle saved us (as we were on the list) from being deported to the Soviet gulags.

After the war mother never reestablished contact with Emma, thus loosing for her children important information from their paternal grandmother’s side of the family. That the connection with this grandmother had been emotionally strong among her daughters was attested to by my cousin Aija who, following her mother’s emotional commitment, following her death had her ashes buried at the site of grandmother’s grave.

Several other love affairs by mother followed in America (which is not surprising, because when she arrived there. she was only forty-one years old). By then her children were on the cusp of turning into young adults and were doing their best to find a place in the hat of America’s white rabbit the labyrinthine ways virtual history had brought them to.

The Russian composer  and writer Vladimir Martynov in his book “Auto Archeology” (Item 35, as per the Latvian magazine ‘Rīgas Laiks’, October, 2014) tells of his concept of a world made of ‘two optics’: that of the optic of daytime and of the optic of nighttime. Writes Martynov: “The configurations of the awakened state form according to the rules of grammar, but the configurations of dreams are not subject to these rules, there are no linear or causal dictates, wherefore beginnings and ends may chance and change places freely… As a result, one and the same scene may appear very differently in dreams and reality. What is offered in a dream at once and as a whole, in reality is offered in small parts, which is why it loses the intensity of dreams.” (Transl. by LK)

As a result of the polarization of the optics of day and night, and because I assign them equal value, I have seen Daisy (the poet Dante would have called her Beatrice) come visit me in numerous dreams. For the reason, we may live in an optically polarized universe, Daisy appears in my dreams as a black or dark skinned woman. She always embraces and kisses me, and though on occasion I awaken from the dream with an erection, we never have a sexual meeting that may be called as being sex proper.

EC 516

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

25 Of Sinking Ships, Cabbages, 

and Knyazs

The age of trubadours began in what is now the French province of Languedoc after the Catholic Church exterminated what it called heretics, the Cathars. Today it is commonly thought—as a consequence of that extermination and the propaganda of justification that followed the Albigensian Crusade—that the Cathars were late arrivals, a kind of infection that pounced out of nowhere on the Christian faith. But what if the Cathars (artisans, specifically makers of chairs) had been in Ocetan (later Languedoc) long before the arrival of the Catholics?

If we accept that Christianity has little to do with Catholicism (and that Catholicism is an infection the Christian faith suffers from), we may come to see how the replacement of Christian egalitarianism (a source of peace on Earth) with coercive taxation designed to impose on humankind a secular government* has resulted in the mess wrought upon  us and times by governments.

*I submit that by a long process of wars, a government that initially consisted of a war lord, has evolved through a series of steps into a two tier social system: government and a full-employment bureaucracy VS the rest of humankind, consisting of outcasts, exploited by the first for whatever is left on Earth to exploit.

One of the results of the murder of the Cathars was the rise (some say ‘rebirth’) of sexuality. The troubadours were among the agents of that rise. However, before the phenomenon burst into its present bloom of red algae, it was (as per the above Wikipedia link) associated with

“… Mariology that most strongly influenced the development of the troubadour genre. Specifically, the emphasis on religious and spiritual love, disinterestedness, mysticism, and devotion to Mary would explain "courtly love". The emphasis of the reforming Robert of Arbrissel on "matronage" to achieve his ends can explain the troubadour attitude towards women.”

One may argue that ‘mariology’ is a resistasance movement that arose of the ashes of incinerated Cathars. Of course, the victor, the Pope, soon claimed the movement for his own. Thereafter the movement ‘progressed’ as a result of a combination of factors, re: i) gloss of propaganda (to cover up earlier crimes); ii) diversion of attention from crimes by replacing noble songs with bawdy stuff that celebrated cannibalistic sexuality; and iii) was wily compromise by allowing the losers to keep up a sense of hope that some small element of their ‘beaten up’ beliefs may survive.

.

That the crimes of the Catholic Church have not been forgotten is testified to by the so-called miracle at Fatima (1916) and the miracle of Lourdes (1858). While Fatima is located in Portugal, and Lourdes in Occitania, France, the latter event clearly is influenced by the first.

The ‘miracle’ of Fatima—the appearance of Virgin Mary to three small children—consists of a series of prophecies told by Virgin Mary to the children. The first two prophecies referred to immediate times and were immediately revealed, while the third prophecy, passed on to the Vatican, was to be revealed in 1960. However, came 1960, the Vatican refused to reveal it. This makes any future release of the ‘prophecy’ subject to suspicions of being a lie, and the crime—abandonment by Catholic Christianity of humankind to the dictates of secular government—not only a foregone conclusion, but confirmation that some such is what the content of the message of Third miracle is about.

The march of events from the time of the sacking (1209) of the Cathars at Carcassonne (and Jersika) have predictably led to an orgy of violence and pornography in our time (2016). Arguably the hymn of the orgiasts is a song of our times, re: “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones.

To stop the licentious behavior of his son (the way he attracted to himself women to sleep with and the consequences he then tried to evade) grandfather warned father that his job as editor was at stake. At the same time he offered his bastard granddaughter’s grandmother a settlement. It was to be a house on the coast of the Riga Gulf.

Grandfather then compelled his son to also find himself a wife. His youngest daughter’s marriage to the son of the President of Latvija was to play a role in her discovery.

Not all stories have money at the end of their rainbows. Being a young and poor country, Latvija had few wealthy and educated people of breadth and experience. Thus, the problem:--where is a wealthy man to find his children suitable partners in marriage on a social level equal to his ambitions and does not return his progeny to the rough of the Commons? Male children were generally left to their devices. Girl children, raised in an atmosphere of virtual reality that was overtly repressive, offered challenges and exercised a wealthy man’s ingenuity.

Grandfather had wittingly or unwittingly lucked out when his youngest daughter found herself the son of the President as a partner. It is said that my father introduced them to each other. For his other daughter, grandfather found a military man who served as military advisor to the second Latvijan President (Kviesis). To find a marriage partner for his renegade son, he turned his attention to the diplomatic world. At this point, it was my father’s sister’s turn to come to his aid.

Familiar with the private lives of the Latvian political elite, my aunt Marta was aware that the family of the Latvian ambassador to Russia had among its members a daughter of marriageable age. Manya—a Russian language endearment for Maria—was a handsome young woman and sixteen years younger than my father. Because beauty was a valuable ‘thing’ in itself, Manya had neglected her studies. While her sister had finished music school and was earning her living as a piano teacher, Manya was waiting for the world to come to her.

Manya’s father, the ambassador, was more than pleased to bring the world to his daughter. An ambitious man and son of an ambitious farming family*, Karlis Ozols was more than pleased to hear that one of the richest men in Latvija was seeking for his son a partner in marriage.

*The family came from a patriotic and self-assertive region of Latvija (where the Herrnhuters had once been very active). Kārlis brother, had become a lawyer, while he, the younger, worked as a surveyor. As such, Kārlis found a job surveying land in Russia near the southern tier of the Ural Mountains, where Russia was to build the Trans Siberian Railroad.

With the natural environment in a state of break-down the world over and the virtual reality of the city (St. Augustine had christened the city ‘holy’) on the rise, Kārlis was on the look-out for favorable circumstances to transition from the Latvijan ‘real’ to the ‘virtual real’ championed by America.

When in Ufa, Russia, Kārlis met the daughter of the local knyaz (in the language of Kievan Rus the name is synonymous with the British title of Prince or Lord), who upon graduating from finishing school for young women in Petrograd/ St. Petersburg, had returned home and was working on her uncle’s estate as bookkeeper and manager.

Of Tartar descent [her maternal grandfather had captured the region of Bashkiria (Bashkortostan) for the Russian Tsar], the young woman, not unlike other young people, was enamored by new ideas and new ways of doing things. This led to her falling in love with the young surveyor from Latvija*. Not surprisingly, this was not acceptable to Russian elites, especially not to her strong willed and uppity mother, who forbade the relationship. This forced grandmother to exercise her own will in the matter.

*At the time, Rīga, had a reputation of being a progressive city, on par with Stockholm, Sweden.

When the young couple decided to marry, they could find no Russian priest who would perform the ceremony for fear of being ostracized from the Russian Orthodox Church* and upper class society. Therefore, the young couple had little choice but elope to Rīga, where they found a retired Orthodox priest, who for a remuneration and contribution to his meager pension married them.

*To close the ‘great East-West Schism’, the Eastern Christians (the losers of a military conflict) were compelled to accept the Scriptures as created and doctored by the West. This is, of course, a great problem for Russia. What to do? How to return to the social concepts that ruled before it was forced to turn its Eschaton oriented religious theology for the Capitalist ideology of the West? Surely the social order of the world would be radically different today had Eastern Christianity been able to prevent the rise of the predatory capitalism of the Vikings cum West.

Following the marriage, the young surveyor, with the help of his Russian wife and her small inheritance, which she had received from her uncle (tēvocis), now had the means to enter and  graduate as an engineer from Riga University. Following graduation, he took a job at then well-known Putova factory in St. Petersburg. When WW1 broke out, he was sent by the authorities of the factory and government as a quality control engineer of railroad cars to Canada.

Kārlis wife, my maternal grandmother, burdened with three children, was left behind in St. Petersburg, where she had to fend for herself. An enterprising woman, she organized horse drawn food relief wagons from Latvija to Russian nobility of Petrograd, and proved herself an organizer and budding merchant. When the Revolution came, she fled with her three children to Ufa, Bashkortostan, the area in which her forebears’ estates were located.

Unfortunately, fortune did not follow her. The Whites were soon entrapped by the Reds. The train in which her mother, a knyazina, was fleeing along with General Kolhak  to the east, was trapped by the Red Army, and the knyazina was killed by a blow from a rifle butt near the city of Omsk.

To make a long story short, mother, being a good looking young socialite and thing with no particular interests or skills, was as if a God sent offering-in-marriage to grandfather’s sexually addicted son. Father, who had made a mess of his personal life [apparently with a materialist orientation, he had little or no sympathies for the Herrnhuter orientation toward the Eschaton (end of the World as a solution of the word’s problems), even as he was not sufficiently sophisticated to realize that materialism was dependent on lies about reality], was not helping build the reputation of the newspaper.

As for Karlis, after his return to Latvija from America (where as a founder of the Latvian Refugee Relief Organization, he had a chance to meet with President Hoover), he became (through extra ordinary luck that connected him through one of his wife’s forebears, a former knaz who supported the Reds, and his wife’s best friend who had married Tsurupa, who was to become the Soviet Union’s finance minister) Latvija’s ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Whatever Kārlis ambitions and early successes, his plans came nowhere near realization.

His mentor, my virtual Godfather, the Presidents of Latvija, died in 1927, and the Latvian Foreign Ministry (having got wind of Tsurupa’s and his wife’s visit to Latvia to meet with Kārlis and his wife) used the meeting as reason to fire him from his job at the ministry. Roughly a decade later the Soviet occupiers had Kārlis arrested, and he was transferred to the Llubyanka prison in Moscow, where in June, 1941, he was executed. Stalin himself may have approved his execution. Back in the 1920s, Stalin had accused the Latvian ambassador of transporting the valuables of desperate Russian nobles via diplomatic pouch to Latvia. It is rumored that the pouch held several Faberge eggs.*

*When the Soviets invaded Latvija in the summer of 1940 (likely as a preliminary step to invading the rest of Europe), Kārlis is said to have given two suitcases full of ‘valuables’ to the Swedish ambassador to Latvija to take with him to Sweden. No inventory of the contents of the suitcases was made or discovered. After WW2 the suitcases were allegedly shipped to Kārlis son, an agronomer, who was then working as a researcher in a laboratory at Cornel University. The ship carrying the suitcases of valuables to America is alleged to have foundered in a storm. If the story about the Faberge eggs is true, sinking the ship to ‘lose’ the eggs may have been more than worthwhile.

In the long term, the marriage of Manya and my father was to exact a heavy toll (material and psychological) from mother as well as her children. The marriage did not cure father’s sexual behavior (conceivably acquired while pimping for General Kolchak). Having escaped death on a ship (possibly at anchor in Odessa), father was shot for his sins and indiscretions on April 13, 1942 in Astrahan, and his bones lie buried among the sand dunes somewhere on the Volga delta.

EC 515

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

24 Priapus Unleashed

By every story there hangs another, especially when it comes to our own story. We can clearly see this in the story of Daisy, which begins even before her birth and runs as if independently of her: her father’s suicide leads to a stepfather who rapes her, to lovers who sexually canibalize her, to children she loves, but does not know what to do with, and whose stories will likely have little to do with her—in spite of her love of them.

Stories outside of ourselves are the result of the arrival of the virtual era, which is an era of ‘history’ that has no reality. History as it is written today is a story within a story within a story written by historians of the “big picture”, which betrays reality as it really is or ever was. In short, virtual reality only seems. It is as real as it is impermanent.

A story interests us because it explains how a series of events create a given situation or consequences and then resolves the misunderstandings or misperceptions. 

The story that I tell about my Godfather being the First President of Latvija is true, but only if my family’s subjective history is taken into account. It is of no relevance to the virtual or ‘big picture’*, which is a lie, a kind of movie or video by being its audience. We may compare ‘my story’ to the story of the Twin Towers in New York, which allegedly blew up because allegedly terrorist planes flew into them. The media overlooks the story that the buildings blew because of nuclear devices going off deep below their foundations.

*Indeed, I see myself as an actor in the 'big picture', then after the cuts have been made, watching the movie, the story from an auditorium.

Sometimes real stories that have become lost are rediscovered, but more often not, which is why the real may seem unreal. This is because the virtual has come to seem real.

The death of my paternal grandmother, the first wife of my grandfather, has been heretofore interpreted as a consequence of her being—unbeknownst by anyone else—bound by a profound love to grandfather. It is said that she loved him greatly (and who am I to deny it?), but if this is so, was she not a nuclear device (begin watch at 42 min.) that could ‘blow’ the twin towers of virtual reality, these towers being represented by ‘the other life’ that grandfather and Emiliya constructed for themselves. The real life, the one outside of virtual reality, continues with me, one who thusly has lived two lives.

Recently a farcical story called “Emiliya” was published as a book. The name of the book referred to my grandfather’s second wife. When I suggested to a critic that the book receive prepublication reviews and criticism, he suggested that I was trying to sabotage its predestined success. When the author of the book called me and wanted to arrange a meeting, and I refused to meet, one of  my own family members thought that I was trying to sabotage the reappearance of the family name in the Latvijan media. I let drop the matter when said individual refused my advice, and did meet with the author of the trash. There was little that I could do, but maintain silence as a public feud among family members would surely have been counterproductive and supported virtual reality.

Anyway, the possible murder of grandmother, and the absence heretofore of any note of such a possibility, went unnoted by the author who presumed a great enough familiarity with Emiliya to write a book about her. But had the possibility of murder been noticed, it would have been ‘a nuclear device’* that spoiled the worship of money.

*The nuclear device had escaped my attention as well, until in an obvious synchronous—or was it pareidolic?—event [I picked up a magazine that had been lying on the floor beside my bed for over a year and read a story (translated from a 2009 story in Harper’s Magazine) of the possible murder of the great Russian writer Llew/ Leo Tolstoy author of “War and Peace”, possibly by tea made of henbane. As soon as I had read the story, my grandmother’s unexpected death came to mind. Incidentally, the name of henbane in Latvian is ‘driģene’. If we remember that G may trnsliterate into J(Y), at some time it was also pronounced dri+yane, bal-driyahns, being a well known plant the roots of which are used to make a sleep inducing tea to this day.

At the beginning of WW1, my father was twenty-four years old and a student at St. Petersburg University. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, he joined General Kolchak’s Army known as the ‘Whites’. The end of the war found him with other officers of the White Army taking refuge on a ship in the Black Sea. The ship was to be surrendered to the Red Army. Suffering death by execution must have been much on father’s mind. But fortune smiled. In 1920, a Peace Treaty was signed between the Latvijan government (established in 1918) and Russia, which allowed him to return to Latvija (in 1921) unharmed.

After father returned to Latvija, he began to work at the newspaper his father and paramour had started in 1911. Because grandfather was expecting great things of his son (by then twenty-nine years of age), father started work in the printing room. The job was given him by design, so that he would learn the newspaper business from the bottom up. Needless to say, he was quickly promoted, and in a short time joined the editorial office, and became the foreign news editor. Eventually father replaced grandfather as editor-in-chief of the newspaper.

But there was one awkward problem, a rock and a hard place hid beneath the surfce of the water, which had the potental of sinking the Titanic so recently launched.

It was my father’s addiction to sex.

How and why the addiction came about, I do not know. But at the time when grandfather abandoned his family and went to Riga (1904), father was only twelve years old. It is conceivable that he interpreted the break-up of the family as an event provoked by his father’s liaison with Emiliya, which he may have interpreted as a green light for sexual licensef. His brother, a few years his senior (also a student at St. Petersburg) is said to have died of syphilis. Incidentallyt, he may have originated the idea for the newspaper —from Russian precedents, which, in turn, had imported the idea from London. In short, the idea of a penny newspaper surviving off advertisements was then taken up by his father and Emiliya.

The transition from life of a student in Petrograd to the life of a military officer facilitated turning of sexual partners into exploitable things. When this happened, love was destined to last until its victim had been cannibalized or the cannibal killed on the battlefield, after which time another damsel ready to become a ‘thing’ was found.

After discharge from the military, father’s addiction to sexual love was encouraged by the fact that he was the son of by then one of Latvija’s wealthiest men, that he was a handsome man, and there was no shortage of young women on the make and willing to risk being turned into ‘things’ (and turn their male partners into things in turn) to kick up their heels in a bedroom among piles of money. This is not to say that there is scientific proof for what I am writing. It is a simple enough conjecture. Still, there is some corroborating evidence for taking such conjecture seriously. The following begins to  explain:

My virtual Godfather, the President of Latvija, was not present at my baptism. His absence from the ceremony had a better excuse than his absence from the ceremony that founded the Latvijan state. That is to say, by the time that I was born, the First President of Latvija was already six years dead. But his oldest surviving son, a lawyer sitting on the Latvijan Supreme Court at the time, married to my father’s youngest sister, was willing to take the role of a bridge between the dead and the newly arrived boy child. A Lutheran archbishop oficiated at my christening as if to replace any memory of the Herrnhuters*.

*While I believe that grandfather continued to be conflicted by his Herrnhuter past due to the upbringing he had received from his father and mother, and many of the editors of the newspaper were of Herrnhuter roots, there was no outward projection of that past either within the family circle or public life.

In 1922, the son of the First President of Latvija returned from the war, and was discharged from the military (‘’Imanta’ division) that same year. Like a sensible young man, the following year he married my aunt, who was my grandfather’s youngest daughter as well as my father’s youngest sister.

One heard talk (behind the scenes) of how expedient it was for the daughter of one of Latvija’s wealthiest men, a media mogul, to bond with Latvija’s most prominent political family. The same chatter suggested how expedient it would be if father, too, were to marry, because then he and his sister’s issues could benefit from the prominence of their grandfathers.

If such a timely birth came true for my aunt’s children—my cousins, born 1923 and 1925—it passed me by. Instead, I have two half-sisters. Tamara born in middle 1920s, and Yolanta born in 1928, a year after the death of the President. My half-sisters had only a socially unacknowledged rumor to go by if they wished to learn who their true father was.

It took a scandal to bring my father to the altar.

The scandal was caused by the grandmother on behalf of Yolanta, my haf-sister born in 1928.

Yolanta’s grandmother spoke on behalf of Lutheran propriety and in censure of General Priapus’ denchik*, who having promised to marry her daughter, did not do so when the young actress** delivered of a daughter. When the news became public, the Latvijan yellow press waved my father’s reputation in the face of the public as a dirty rag. To stop the blood of the family’s reputation running down the gutter took interference by grandfather and his money belt.

*Denchik, a military commander’s aide in the Tsar’ army. I do not have any factual evidence whether my father was in fact General Kolchak’s denchik or whether  the accusation was only in jest, but this is what a Cheka official accused him of having been.
**The same actress became at a later date the mistsress of the first Soviet Latvian Prime Minister.

In one of his last letters to mother, which father wrote before being deported to the Gulag from his prison cell in Rīga, he called her Solvega (Sun’s Way), a character in Norvegian playwright Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt. By making such an address, father admitted himself to be like Peer, a more or less lost son and soul.