My family's Russia: few countries have seen more changes in the last century than Russia. Anastasia Stepanova traces its history through the lives of three generations - Lead Story

If you were to ask most Russians about their origins they would immediately refer to Mother Russia. But our nation is not as homogeneous as it may seem. In fact, the majority are descendants from many nations, as I am.

I am only a quarter Russian, and a hotchpotch of Ukrainian, Polish and even Albanian blood flows through my veins. I wouldn't be surprised if there were even some Tartar drops as well--the legacy of 300 years of the Mongol-Tartar yoke in medieval Russia.

I am sure my family story is not unique in Russia. But it gives a picture of what it was like to live behind the `Iron Curtain' and why we are the way we are now--sceptical of our government, suspicious of any changes.

My great-grandparents were originally from the Ukraine. They had a big family of two sons and seven daughters--of whom my grandmother, Zoya, was the youngest--and a little piece of land, which provided them with everything they needed.

In the early 1930s a great famine hit the Ukraine, known as `the bread-basket of Russia'. A plague of locusts ate the harvest. Some people went mad and even started to turn to cannibalism. There were cases where women killed their husbands to feed their children. My grandmother was very little then but she still remembers the horror. `Wherever you went there were orphans, swollen with hunger, sitting in the streets begging for money.'

Even worse than the natural disaster was the inhumanity of the authorities. The Soviets confiscated people's last stocks of food--to make everyone equal--and sent fathers to labour camps and their kids and wives to Siberia.

EXILE

The same fate was waiting for my great-grandfather. The Soviets took away his little allotment (its original size had been determined by the number of males in the family) and all his belongings. He was sent into exile at the labour camp on the Solovki Islands in the Barents Sea. He was accused of being a kulak--rich peasant--because he owned a few pieces of farming machinery to feed his big family.

`I was three years old when they tried to take our favourite cow, which didn't want to go with them,' remembers my grandmother. `To comfort my mother I reminded her of a whole jar of milk we had in the basement.' From the camp her father was sent to build the Belomor-Baltic Canal and then to build a new city, Murmansk, up north on the Kolskiy Peninsula, Where his family joined him later to escape the famine.

My great-grandparents were religious people. However they brought up their children, including my grandmother, as atheists, because they were afraid of the consequences. The practice and expression of religious beliefs were banned. Those who dared to disobey were prosecuted, sent into exile or to labour camps.

My grandmother has always been a believer, but not a religious churchgoer. She used to believe in the `bright Communist future', which for her--and many other Soviet people--took the place of religion. True faith in God came to her much later, during the perestroyka times in the 1980s, when the atrocities and lies of the past decades became known. People were horrified by the cynicism that the Soviet leaders, starting with Stalin, had displayed towards their own people. It was the first time people had the opportunity to return to God.

STRANDED BY WAR

In 1941, on their way back to the Ukraine from Murmansk, the family decided to visit one of my grandmother's sisters, who had married and settled in Gorki, now Nizhny Novgorod. On the day they arrived in Gorki, World War II broke out and they had to stay. They lost contact with their father, who at that time was trying to reestablish the family home in the Ukraine, which was now occupied by the Fascists. Only some years later, when the Ukraine was liberated, did they succeed in finding him and he rejoined the family in Gorki. Till the last day of their lives my great-grandparents spoke only Ukrainian.

In 1953 Stalin died, and the whole country mourned. People were incredibly patriotic and devoted to him. It was impossible to get a train ticket as millions were flooding into Moscow to bid farewell to their leader. `The capital was seething with people. There was no transport except the overcrowded tube,' recalls my grandmother, who went to Moscow, but never got to Red Square, as our Moscow relatives foresaw the danger of overcrowding. People fell into the sewers under the square through badly closed manhole covers. Many were injured and many died in the stampede.

While studying history at the Pedagogical Institute of Gorki, my grandmother met the love of her life, Muftar Muco, a medical student from Albania. He was taking part in the international students' reunion, which she was helping to organize. At that time there were many foreigners from the Peoples' Democracy countries, such as Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania, China and Bulgaria, studying in Gorki's universities. But as the Cold War intensified, it was becoming more difficult for foreigners to visit the city, because Gorki was a large centre for the military industry.