Just as Russians who went to live abroad blessed the countries that had accepted them with their artistic, scientific and technical achievements, so Europeans found in Russia endless opportunities to put their talents and abilities into practice
By Kirill Privalov
Nowadays you can find Russians in any part of the world. For centuries the population of Europe, and then America, had grown ever more mixed owing to a variety of circumstances: wars, revolutions, epidemics and climate change that caused famine and poverty… Such chaotic mixing, though it was difficult for foreigners to survive in an unfamiliar environment, acquainted the peoples with each other and mutually enriched them. Just as Russians who went to live abroad blessed the countries that had accepted them with their artistic, scientific and technical achievements (take Nabokov and Sikorsky, Berdyaev and Zvorykin, Mechnikov and Rachmaninoff, to name just a few), so Europeans found in Russia endless opportunities to put their talents and abilities into practice.
However, there were notorious exceptions. Travellers, primarily French, set the pace here. Did they understand Russia? It is enough to recall the memoirs of Marquis de Custine, who visited Russia in the nineteenth century. This spiteful cynic wrote the book, Russia in 1839, which still justly retains the title of the “bible of Russophobes”. In it Russia is portrayed as a wild and dictatorial country where people almost wear bearskins. Hence the phrase that became an aphorism: “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar”, which is often automatically attributed to everyone from Pushkin and Dostoevsky to de Maistre and Napoleon. Curiously enough, I asked my French friends many times to comment on it, but they all viewed it as a derogatory, almost insulting assessment for Russians. For me, despite my absolute dislike for the Marquis’ false narrative with his tall tales, I have never seen anything blameworthy in comparing a Russian with a Tatar. On the contrary, the statement of the Parisian master of dubious historical anecdotes contained a homespun truth. There is such a mix of blood in every Russian that in such a multi-ethnic country as Russia it is not easy to determine which people you belong to. And why should we do it now?
In Soviet schools children were taught at geography and social studies lessons that over 150 different peoples and ethnic groups lived in the country. This was probably true, given the censuses that were conducted regularly at that time. I remember that the most difficult question of our geography teacher was: “Name the peoples of Dagestan!” And I, who always had an excellent mark in geography, memorized (just as my grandfather had once memorized “Our Father”) all of them: the Avars, the Laks, the Dargins, the Kumyks, the Nogays, the Lezgins… Even now if you wake me up in the middle of the night, I will surely give you this long list, including the Tsakhur people and the Udin people (smaller groups in the Caucasus Mountains).
Apparently, such a “geographical inoculation” in my school years played a certain role in my professional life. I came to love trips as an editor to faraway regions and wrote a lot about the way of life of a wide variety of peoples – both in Russia and abroad. Paradoxically, it turned out that the ethnic exotic can be found not so far away from us. More than that, sometimes it does not have an exotic character at all, but quite a European one. I mean it! For below I am not going to talk about inhabitants of Altai, Kamchatka or the Far North, but about one hundred percent ethnic Europeans – Germans and Frenchmen, with the sole difference that today they are exclusively Russian people.
Was ist here?…
“The architects Schechtel, Thon and Klein, the sculptor Klodt and the two great Roerichs, the theatrical families of Goedicke, Helzer, Neuhaus… Plus many wonderful Russian military leaders and politicians, musicians and inventors, physicians and scientists…” Heinrich Martens is ready to continue this German list of Russian glory nonstop. This is understandable, since he is the Chairman of the Commission for the Preservation and Development of Cultural and Linguistic Diversity of the Peoples of Russia of the Presidential Council for Interethnic Relations, the President of the Federal National Cultural Autonomy of Russian Germans (FNCA RG).
“I joined the Council as a representative of the Autonomy of Germans,” Heinrich Martens goes on. “When it comes to ethnic Germans, there are 430,000 of us in the Russian Federation today. It’s only official information, according to the census. In fact, there are far more Russians with German roots, taking into account their grandparents. Exponentially!…
Figuratively speaking, if you ‘scratch’ any Russian, you find that he is either a German or a Tatar.”
Well, let’s try to “scratch”, say, the Moscow region without travelling too far! And then we will find that, according to statistics, about 4,000 Russian Germans live in the Moscow region. It may not sound impressive… But we can’t help but envy the intense activity of these enthusiasts exploring the past of our country.
“There has never been a region of compact German residence in the Moscow region, like, say, near St Petersburg, on the Volga or in Transcaucasia,” says Natalia Dempke, Chairperson of the Council for the Regional German National and Cultural Autonomy of the Moscow Region. “However, there are towns in our region that convincingly show how significant the contribution of Russian Germans to the country’s economy is. First of all, this is Kolomna.”
In 1863 two Germans came to this ancient town – the brothers Amand and Gustav Struve. Amand was only twenty-eight, but he had already constructed a railway bridge over the Moskva River. Pavel von Dervis, a well-known Russian concessionaire, commissioned Struve to build a railway bridge across the Oka River. At that time von Dervis and Karl von Meck (his wife Nadezhda was the main sponsor of Pyotr Tchaikovsky) – both of German origin – were the major sponsors of Russian railways. And so Amand Struve, a young engineer, establishes a small workshop at the confluence of the Moskva River and the Oka. The contract was taken in September 1863, and in February 1865 the first train ran over the bridge. Under the guidance of engineers from among Russian Germans a huge project was implemented in just a year and a half: from the first nut to the final product! This had never been seen in the Moscow region before.
The fact is that, striving to be independent of the situation of European industry, Struve set the task for the workmen from near Moscow to master the entire production line, starting from the smallest part. The bridge over the Oka in the place of Bobrovo became the first in the country built exclusively from Russia’s own metal products. And that was just the beginning…
In a matter of years Amand Struve developed a modest workshop into the country’s largest manufacturer of railway products. In 1867, about four years after the start of production, the Struve brothers’ plant became the second in the European part of Russia in terms of capitalization and number of employees after the legendary Putilov Plant in St Petersburg. By 1894 about 3,500 Russian-made steam locomotives were operating on all Russian railways, of which 42.5 percent had the brand of the Kolomna Plant. It built bridges and produced not only steam locomotives, but also carriages, trams, steamers, icebreakers, locomobiles, agricultural machines and motor ships equipped with diesel engines of its own production. For the first time since the Nobel Plant the production of diesel internal combustion engines was organised at the Kolomna Machine-Building Plant.
“My great grandfather came to Russia when he, an orphan, was only ten,” Natalia Dempke recalls her family’s history. “In 1868 my great-grandfather was employed by the Kolomna Machine-Building Plant. Why do I know the exact dates? Because on Struve’s orders lists were drawn up, which have been preserved. They recorded who came and from where they came to the plant, who worked there and where they lived. It was written about my ancestor that he was a ‘Prussian subject’, because then Germany as a state still did not exist. In 1895, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his work at the plant – he was a blacksmith – my great-grandfather was presented with a silver–plated samovar and a tray with the inscription: ‘To Gustav Dempke from the craftsmen of the blacksmith shop.’ We still keep these artifacts. How did we manage to do it? It’s hard to give all the details… During the famine the family silver was exchanged for bread and cereals, but the gifts once presented to my great-grandfather were preserved. He worked for Struve for forty years and retired at the age of sixty. He earned well – up to 190 roubles a month, a lot of money at that time! And then he had a decent pension.”
Struve’s German capitalists had no idea about the vaunted “responsibility of business”, which is so much talked about today, but they developed social services in Kolomna. Seven years after the foundation of the plant a school and a hospital (attached to it) were opened as if by miracle, later followed by a consumer cooperative and an entertainment theatre… Workers could buy goods at cheaper prices at their plant, and not always for money. If there was not enough money, then food was sold at the expense of the share savings of a particular member of the cooperative. These savings consisted of an initial share payment, the amount of goods purchased and the total profit of the consumer cooperative.
The school was free. Besides, boys working at the plant were required to study, and if a school student skipped school without a valid reason, a fine of fifteen kopecks was imposed on him each time. And such a system worked. When the Struves first organised the school, most of its students were Russian children. A Lutheran class was formed for offspring of Germans. Teaching was in German. But if you look at the school registration books of that time (they still exist!), you will see that along with migrants from various German lands Russians were taught in the “special class” as well. It was more practical: at that time all technical literature in Russia was in German. I know about it for sure from my grandfather, who graduated from a technical school and married a lady who was half German and half Russian in the town of Skopin in what is now the Ryazan region.
“The Russian Germans were not migrants in the modern sense of the word: they did not send money earned in Russia to Germany,” Natalia Dempke continues. “No, they came here to become Russians and invested their earnings and savings in Russia. ‘The Connecting Thread of Time. In the Service of the Fatherland’ is the title of a book that we published, which contains the stories of the most outstanding Russian Germans… You ask what became of the Struves’ descendants? There are a lot of them. Gustav, who married Baroness von Osten-Driesen from the glorious family of the Russian Germans von Driesen (General Fyodor von Driesen was a hero of the Battle of Borodino, where he lost his leg), had as many as eight children. Nikolai, for example, pursued a musical career. Together with Sergei Rachmaninoff and Serge Koussevitzky he established his Éditions Russes de Musique (the Russian music publishing house), which he ran. “My faithful and only friend,” this is how Rachmaninoff called Nikolai Gustavovich. And Gustav’s other son, Sergei, was an officer and at the same time a man of high society: he played the guitar well, sang Romani romances and danced beautifully. Sergei was an aide-de-camp to Emperor Nicholas II and died in February 1915 fighting for Russia.
As a native of Kolomna, I am particularly interested in the German history of my native town and the Moscow region in general. In 1871 the Struve brothers’ plant became a joint stock company and its third owner was Anton Lessing, a former Bavarian citizen who already had a factory in the Nizhny Novgorod province – in Vyksa. When in the late nineteenth century an economic crisis broke out, Lessing sold his estate to support his plants and save workers.”
There was no Lutheran church in the Moscow region – even in Kolomna where most Germans lived. But Amand Struve paid 1,000 roubles annually to support the Moscow Evangelical Lutheran Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul, and a pastor travelled from there to the plant regularly. Other German settlements in the Moscow region were given spiritual guidance as well. Interestingly, the Germans did not build any Lutheran church in Kolomna, but they always donated money for an Orthodox one. As one clever book says: “We are not able to understand the future without touching the ruins of the past.”
According to the chronicles, the first German colonists reached Russia through the port of Kronstadt. Catherine II personally came to the pier to meet the fellow Germans. She pranced on horseback in front of the migrants exhausted by a long journey and shouted in German: “My children! Newfound sons and daughters of Russia! We cordially welcome you under our reliable wing and promise you protection and parental patronage! In return, we expect obedience and zeal, unparalleled diligence and undaunted service to the new fatherland! And whoever does not agree, let him go back now! The Russian State does not need rotten hearts and weak hands!…”
“I can only live and work in Russia…”
Vsevolod Egorov-Fedosov was a Russian citizen, but deep down he continued to identify himself as a Frenchman (unfortunately, this amazing man passed away during the COVID epidemic). He headed the Association of Descendants of French Families in Moscow.
“My ancestors were Frenchmen from two famous families – Armand and de Moncy, who became Demonsi in Russia,” Vsevolod Egorov-Fedosov, an Honoured inventor of Russia, a design engineer, told me. “According to my findings, they came to live and work in Russia in 1791. While in France the Revolution was in full swing and the guillotine was working mercilessly, the Russian Empire seemed to be an island of stability in Europe. The Frenchmen in Russia, where high society spoke French fluently, managed to put their talents into practice in a short span of time. Some set up factories and workshops, others opened boutiques, others ran theatres and publishing houses, taught…”
But the Napoleonic Wars began, and the situation changed radically. Vsevolod Markovich made a dramatic pause – and a “plot” began in the style of a burlesque film where only Depardieu or Belmondo was missing.
Just before the entry of Bonaparte’s Grande Armee into Moscow Armand and Demonsi were among the forty foreigners – most of them were already Russian citizens – who, by order of Count Fyodor Rostopchin, the Governor-General of Moscow, were arrested and exiled. (An anti-French purge was carried out in St Petersburg as well).
They were banished as enemy agents and free-thinking Jacobins dangerous to Russian society. Rostopchin, a demagogue and nationalist who sought to curry favour with Emperor Alexander I at any cost, planned to expel even more Frenchmen from Moscow, but did not have time to do it because the surrender of Moscow to the enemy was swift.
Those who were arrested were put on a barge to the hooting of the crowd and sent down the Moskva River. Curiously enough, only the heads of families were taken hostages, while their kin remained in burned down Moscow. They sailed for about two months: first along the Moskva River, and then along the Oka to Nizhny Novgorod.
All this was described in the diary of one of the exiles – the director of the French Theatre in Moscow Armand Domergue. He was a well-known personality in Moscow, and his name was “first in the first category” in the proscription lists. However, Domergue lived in the house of the Swedish consul. And this, in his view, should have ensured his safety: “If I came to Russia under the protection of the Government, it is impossible to violate international law without obvious injustice.” The author of the reminiscences adds, “But I knew the suspicious Russian police too well to have any hope for this: every day we saw Frenchmen passing through, exiled from St Petersburg to Siberia.” Finally, on 22nd August, arrested among others, Domergue was sent into exile along the Moskva River.
An address was read out to the arrested on the barge, the text of which Domergue gives with the addition: “I vouch for its authenticity.” Here is this declaration: “Frenchmen! Russia has given you refuge, but you don’t stop plotting against it. In order to avoid bloodshed, not to tarnish the pages of our history and not to imitate the satanic atrocities of your revolutionaries, the Government has to banish you from here. You will live on the banks of the Volga River, alongside a peaceful and faithful people who despise you too much to do you any harm. You will leave Europe for a while and go to Asia. Stop being scoundrels and become good people, turn into good Russian citizens from the French ones you have been up to now; be calm and submissive or expect even greater punishment. Get on the barge, calm down and don’t turn it into Charon’s barge. Goodbye, bon voyage!”
“This menacing announcement horrified us,” Domergue confessed. The very mention of Charon, the ferryman who carried the souls of the departed to the realm of Hades in ancient Greek mythology, was spooky! The barge, scraping its bottom on sand and stones, sailed slowly “along the winding and shallow Moskva River” (by the third day they had covered only forty versts). The exiles were transported to Nizhny Novgorod as late as in winter. After two weeks spent under arrest in the city the embarking began again – the Frenchmen were sent on a sleigh down the Volga River to the area of St Macarius Monastery, where the largest St Macarius’ Fair in Russia was traditionally held. There the exiles were housed in a building that was a hospital or the monastery infirmary behind a high fence, under the guard of five demobilised veterans (“invalids”, as they said then).
The imprisonment lasted two years. The Frenchmen were allowed to go outside once or twice a week to buy some food for themselves at their own expense! Though some money from the Treasury was allotted to support the “hostages”, it did not reach the Frenchmen. Their relatives who remained in Moscow would send them some money for food… Gradually the Russian Frenchmen began to gain the Nizhny Novgorod authorities’ confidence. Local nobles began to welcome these unwilling wanderers. The animosity that the internees had initially felt towards themselves from the population abated and disappeared.
It happened that the Government eventually forgot about the exiled Frenchmen, the “hostages of fear”. The Russian army had gone far into Europe and was fighting with Napoleon on the battlefields of Germany and France. “It was not until late 1814 that my ancestors Armand and Demonsi returned to Moscow, to their families,” Vsevolod Egorov-Fedosov concluded. “And they remained in Russia, which had subjected them to such a harsh trial, forever. Over 150 of their offspring, Russian Frenchmen living in Moscow today, are descended from these two exiles alone.”
However, no one knows the exact number of descendants of the Frenchmen in Russia. After Napoleon’s invasion of Russia alone, according to conservative estimates, there were over 50,000 natives of France (I’m not speaking about captured Germans, Poles and Austrians – there were about 200,000 captured Europeans in total, enormous figures! I’m only speaking about Frenchmen). From the wounded and frostbitten Napoleon’s soldiers and officers sheltered by compassionate peasants are descended the current Sentebovs and Denotkins, Kapralovs and Matisovs, Frantsuzovs and Medlevs, Ridikultsevs and Ofitserovs… Genealogical Sketches in a Family Grove – this is how Armand-Demonsi, aka Vsevolod Egorov–Fedosov, entitled his book.
The “Family Grove” is a huge schema showing the connections between French families in Russia. The family tree is crowned by thirty tablets with pedigree lines and surviving documents that made up the exhibition, “Moscow-Paris. From the History of French-Russian Families in Moscow Over 250 Years.”
“We have already organised our exposition about fifteen times,” Vsevolod Markovich went on. “First of all in the Moscow region: in Elektrostal, Voskresensk, Fryanovo, etc. The previous time it was in Pushkino near Moscow – in the Armand family’s patrimony.”
And then another story unfolds, worthy of a film adaptation… After the Northern (now Yaroslavl) Railway that connected Moscow and Yaroslavl had been opened in the mid-nineteenth century, Pushkino became a prominent regional centre. The village began to grow rapidly. The Armands obtained a house in Pushkino near Moscow where in 1853 they also bought a mill to weave wool from a Frenchman named Favard, who moved to France.
The first Pushkino manufacturer in the family was Eugene Armand, who named it E. Armand & Sons. Things went so fine for him (there was also an excellent dyeing department) that six years later Armand built a second weaving mill half a kilometre away from the first one, on the bank of Serebryansky Pond. In the Soviet era it was renamed Sickle and Hammer, which became a major industrial enterprise in the Moscow region. Today there is no trace of the hammer and the sickle though, but the factory still exists.
The Armands’ house in their Pushkino estate was quite modest – there were no halls with columns, just new wings were added on top of those already built. The home was huge: Eugene Eugenievich and Varvara Carlovna had twelve children of their own and adopted more children. The children would sing the humorous ditty that they had invented about themselves: “If you see a giant nose, it means Armand’s grandchild!” The offspring of the Armands played football (which was then beginning to become fashionable) together with workers’ children. As local old-timers recalled, the workers, encouraging the Armand team, instead of “Armand! Armand!” would shout: “Karman! Karman [meaning “pocket” in Russian]!”
However, the Armands were not stingy. They opened a club, or a community centre with a theatre for employees of the factory (there were about 2,500 of them). They built a school, a hospital, and an almshouse for retired workers. The founder of the legendary Armand factories, Eugene Ivanovich (Eugene Louis), is buried right beneath their windows. His grave is at the back of the St Nicholas Church, to which the family of Russian Frenchmen had so generously donated.
Not only the Armands had estates in the Moscow region. On the outskirts of Pushkino, in Nikolskoye-Kudrino (now the Kudrinka area), on the opposite side of the River Ucha from the Armands’ factory on a high bank stands the cloth spinning mill of the Dupuy & K Cloth Manufactory Association. Cloth that was produced here in the late nineteenth century was called “Dupuy” and was considered to be among the best in Russia in terms of quality.
By the way, throughout the twentieth century descendants of Gustave Dupuy intermarried with both the Armands and the Gauthiers. The Academician Yuri Gauthier, a wonderful Soviet historian and archaeologist, and his grandson, the Academician Sergei Gauthier, an outstanding Russian transplant surgeon, belong to the latter…
And in the Savyolovo railway line there is a place called Katuar, in the woods near which my grandfather used to go mushrooming. It was named after a French family whose representatives came to Russia in the early nineteenth century. In 1821 an emigrant aristocrat’s son, Jean-Baptiste Catoire de Bioncourt, became a Russian citizen and a merchant of the first guild Ivan Katuar. His offspring regained their nobility and became major Russian landowners, like Alexander Catoire de Bioncourt, A.A. Demonsi’s grandson. The Katuars’ trading house had considerable property in Moscow and other cities. At the turn of the twentieth century the Katuars became the owners of brick and ceramic factories in what is now the village of Nekrasovsky in the Dmitrov district. The railway station was named Katuar in gratitude to the Katuars for their participation in the opening of the Savyolovo line.
“In 1791 the first Catholic church in Moscow in honour of St Louis IX, King of France, was opened in Milyutinsky Lane, along with a French lyceum, which now bears the name of Alexandre Dumas Pere,” Vsevolod Markovich related. “Ironically, I studied within the walls of this school without knowing where I was and not even suspecting that my ancestors were French. Our family didn’t reveal it to the children, and under Stalin it was too dangerous to belong to the ‘dirty cosmopolitans’. It was no less risky (as I realised much later) to be related to Inessa Armand, whom Stalin viewed very ambiguously. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but ‘Comrade Inessa’ – this is how Lenin called his mistress – carried our surname throughout the Soviet era.”
Paradoxically, she was not an Armand by birth. A daughter of the French opera tenor Theodore Stephane and the Anglo-French operetta actress Nathalie Wild, Inessa, who was orphaned at the age of five, came to Russia with her aunt, a governess. The latter found a place for her niece as a teacher in the Armand family of wealthy textile industrialists. The rest was a matter of female ways.
The following entry has survived at St Nicholas Church of Pushkino: “On 3rd October 1893 the wedding was of Alexander Eugenievich Armand, a hereditary honorary citizen, a son of a merchant of the first guild in Moscow, of the Orthodox faith, and his first wife – the maiden Inessa-Elisabeth Theodore Stephane, a French citizen, of the Anglican faith.”
Inessa was nineteen, and Alexander was twenty–three. Immediately after the wedding the newlyweds went to Eldigino, one of the Armands’ estates near Moscow. The palace ensemble still exists there; however, the young couple did not stay in it, but in a two-storey log house, which later became the Inessa Armand Museum. A local street bears her name, and there is even a whole district called Armand. Multi-storeyed buildings, interspersed with still surviving dachas… Of course, the name is a vestige of the Bolshevik era. But there is one thing for which “Comrade Inessa” should be honoured for sure – her many children. Over less than ten years in marriage with Alexander Armand the passionate Frenchwoman gave birth to four children. After that she left him for his younger eighteen-year-old brother Vladimir, with whom she had another child… It is some kind of family fate! Renee, Inessa’s younger sister, too, married one of the Armand brothers, Nikolai. This is yet another of Pushkino’s love stories.
By the way, a few versts away from Pushkino there was the estate of Henri Brocard, who became Genrikh Afanasievich Brocar in Russia. In the mid-nineteenth century he came to Russia where on 15th May 1864 – this date can be regarded as the beginning of modern Russian perfumery– he opened the production of fragrances. A genius, a revolutionary of scent! The Novaya Zarya (“New Dawn”) Soviet factory appeared on the site of Brocard’s factory, which was nationalised in 1917. “Fragrant Henri”, as Brocard was nicknamed in Russia, did not live to see that terrible day: he passed away in 1900. Shortly before his death his wife Charlotte asked the perfumer if he would like to return to Paris after achieving worldwide recognition and becoming a millionaire. “I will return to France to die, but I can only live and work in Russia,” Brocard replied.
He could not have imagined that his iconic perfume, on which he worked for so many years to present it to the Tsarina under the name The Empress’ Favourite Bouquet (Brocard’s offspring succeeded in finishing this masterpiece for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov Dynasty) would become the flagship of the USSR light industry under the brand name Red Moscow.
