his care for the journey and my grandmother and Aunt Liza met me when I reached Manchuria. I loved visiting my grandmother and these trips always gave me much joy.
For the Feasts of Christmas or Easter, Mama, Papa, the Lupov family, my mother’s older sister Alexandra Feodorovna (Aunty Shura), her husband Alexander Vasilievich and their daughter Vera came to Manchuria. My grandmother was very proud to have her family congregate around her. She loved her sons-in-law and would buy them their favourite cigarettes and drinks. She catered for each individual taste. Papa smoked Dubler and Uncle Alexander smoked Antik. She bought Antipas vodka for one and Zhemchug for the other. This is how it was with everything.
Antonov family portrait, taken after immigrating from Russia to China
China was welcoming to the Russian refugees. The Chinese accepted a defeated, exhausted but heroic, White Army with its accompanying civil citizens. Being adaptable, hard working and good business people, the Chinese were ready to establish a common ground with the Russians. By the time the refugees arrived, there was an established infrastructure in place.
On the 16th of August 1897, the Russian Spiritual Mission was established with an official opening ceremony to mark the official start of work on the building of the Chinese Eastern Railway. In keeping with the agreement between the two countries, Russia provided security for future service personnel as well as churches, hospitals, schools and houses for railway workers.
Family home in Hailar, China
My father writes:
The day when we needed to cross the Chinese border was upon us. About six to seven kilometres before reaching the town of Manchuria, there was no more cannon fire. The rifles became quiet. Somewhere there may have been an occasional shot fired but the constant whistle of bullets stopped. Logically, this quietness should have brought with it some relief at the thought that one is still alive, but in fact the opposite happened. It is difficult to explain but there was feeling of wanting to cry or shout. We were not ready at this time to say, ‘Forgive me!’. It is difficult to explain what we felt at that time to someone who had not shared a similar experience. To leave one’s own land and go into a foreign land, into which we were not invited, was not easy. All the riches of Russia, all that was accumulated by our predecessors, was left to our conquerors. Will we ever see you Russia, in the way you were? We do not know. Each one of us, filled with heavy thoughts, tried to surreptitiously steal a glance into the eyes of the other to gauge his level of suffering.
Many years later, I had the opportunity of meeting the renowned Russian author, V.G. Rasputin in Moscow. He said that he liked my father’s book and that some parts had real artistic merit.
Galina and writer V.G. Rasputin
From what I remember, he especially liked my father’s description of the actual Ice March. It was a tribute to the poignant retelling of what occurred by a person who was not a professional writer from one who was established in his field.
I answered, ‘Am I actually hearing this from you of all people?’
My mother was brought to Manchuria as a young girl. Her family included her father, mother, three brothers and four sisters. They had lived in the Ural town of Miass.
My grandfather, Feodor Maximovish Antonov, was an entrepreneur businessman/merchant. He traded cattle and grain. He built roads between surrounding villages and towns and was well-off, rich even. He had a marvellous two-storey house in the town square. His plans to send all his children to university came to nothing, with only his eldest child managing to finish high school.
The bloody revolution turned the wheel of history for the whole country and for individuals. The family lost land, property and money through leaving Miass. Having reached the station of Lebiaz, they took a freight train to China. The family managed to reach Manchuria, in spite of suffering from typhus during their journey. After all their wealth, their horses, carriages, stock and property, they began life in China in absolute poverty.
I visited Miass during a trip to Russia with my husband in 2000. Everything that my mother, grandmother and godmother told me about life in Miass became for me so clear and understandable. I visited their house and walked along the streets which my mother and her family had walked many years prior. I totally immersed myself into their previous life. I imagined myself as my mother, playing with dolls in the attic of their large merchant mansion. I imagined how they would have pulled me on a sleigh to school in winter after a filling breakfast of buns and aladii (pancakes). I imagined how I would have gone into the forest to gather berries and mushrooms. I saw all this as on the palm of my hand.
This visit to Miass opened to me a new world, a world which I had heard so much about from my mother. This previously imaginary world became for me a bright reality. In Hailar and later in Australia, my mother kept all the traditions that she inherited from Miass, her homeland.
The family brought with them two fur coats to Manchuria. One was made of ferret fur and the other of fox. From the sale of these, my grandfather bought several carcasses of beef from an abattoir and dairy products from a peasant’s farm. While one of my mother’s brothers, Kolia, worked for the railways, her older sister, Shura, my mother and her younger sister, Marussia, sold the meat and milk products, not in a shop, but at a market stall. They did this through summer and winter.
The youngest sister, Liza, went to school. The oldest brother, Diodor, bought cattle for slaughter. Kostia, the youngest brother, who had a talent for languages, travelled to various regions and negotiated with the Mongol and Chinese traders. This is the kind of childhood that was the fate of my family and my dear mother, who in the freezing cold spent days on end standing by her stall, occasionally warming herself at a stall owned by a kind Chinese man. All nine family members lived in one room.
In time, the Antonovs opened a butcher shop. They moved into more comfortable lodgings and the children were able to resume their schooling. They acquired land on which animals could be kept – not just for slaughter but also for farm work. They bought camels and arranged transport. Life became happier. For a long time the dream of eventually returning to their homeland did not leave them but the thought of returning to the Soviet hell was not an option. They settled in Manchuria.
My father’s fate was tragic. Unfortunately, I do not know much about his early life. Being a child, and later a young woman, the stories told by my father found their way into my consciousness, whereas war and politics did not interest me - how very sad.
Now, I would have listened and absorbed all the details of his stories. I do, however, remember my father speaking of a forest. I assumed that his parents were foresters. In fact, he came from a very rich family. This was obvious as both he and his sister studied in St. Petersburg and for a peasant to be able to send his children to the capital, he needed to be rich.
In 2000, during my travels throughout Russia, I searched through government archives and found that he was indeed of peasant stock from Perm. He completed technical school and became an ensign in the army. As an officer he was listed as a member of the non-hereditary nobility. He had been wounded.
The Russian Revolution occurred in 1917 and by 1918 the army disbanded. In his writings, ‘Memoirs of the Ice March’, we find that having reached Siberia; he formed a brigade at the request of the peasantry and heroically fought the Bolsheviks. At the end of the conflict, having been defeated, he found himself
