Hello dear editors!
I read with interest an article about Commissar Zadorozhny in the October issue. I myself am a museum worker, once I worked in the Gatchina State Museum Reserve, now in the Peterhof State Museum Reserve, so the topic of the late Romanovs is not alien to me.
There must have been quite a few people like Zadorozhny at different times, but they remained unknown, and even in the archives we probably will not find anything about them. Just random memories. Here is an example from my family history. In one of my 2010 notebooks, I found the following entry: “Grandma told me that her father saved Kerensky in 1917 – he helped him escape from Gatchina. She found out about this from her mother and was very afraid that sooner or It would be revealed sooner.”
No more details. It is not even clear under what circumstances such a memory visited the grandmother.
Mikhail Alekseev. 1914-1917 years. The location of the shot is unknown.
Her father, that is, my great-grandfather Alekseev Mikhail Dmitrievich (1893-1926), was from Gatchina, but he died before the birth of his daughter, so I hardly knew anything about him. She just said that she was in the military, she had a bike and she was trying too hard when she lifted the bar. Her family, it seems, owned a two-story brick house on Sobornaya Street, almost next to the Cathedral of the Apostle Paul, because her sisters and her mother lived there before the war. About the last grandmother she remembered that she was a majestic woman in black, very “outstanding” even in old age.
Sometimes it seems to me that the widow of Mikhail Dmitrievich Anna Andreevna deliberately withheld information about him from the children.
Searching for documents in archives is familiar to me, but you can hardly find information about a person about whom you know almost nothing. Where did she come from, who did she serve, where? Meanwhile, there are many pictures of him, and I always want to know more about him. So far I could only find a record of the birth of his eldest son in 1921, and there he says “employee” about his father’s occupation.
He (in Budenovka) with his family in Trotsk. Winter 1925-1926.
Kerensky, in his notorious notes, does not name the people who helped him escape from the Gatchina Palace. In 1922, he wrote the following: “I still do not consider myself entitled to tell in detail about my departure from the Gatchina Palace. The Bolsheviks are still in power, the people are still alive … I left the palace 10 minutes before the traitors they broke into my rooms… I was still walking through the streets of Gatchina when the persecution began. I was walking together with those who saved me, but whom I had never met before and saw for the first time in my life. In those moments when who showed resilience, courage and unforgettable selflessness”.
There is a hook, but there is nothing to hold on to. And there is no one to ask for more details. The family tradition continues.
I will also add that the widow Anna Andreevna was not a prominent person, if this is understood in the generally accepted sense. Descendant of peasant women from faraway places
Gatchina (v. Lugi), lived in Gatchina since 1896, at first he served with a general’s wife, after 1926 he worked as a dishwasher, raised three children, lived 70 years and died in 1951. It is thanks to her that it has become preserved our family photographic archive. Throughout the war, he kept photographs and documents with her.
Sincerely, Andrey Spaschansky. Gatchina
