Rediscovering the Ties That Bind

For genealogist Nikolai Mozharov, reconstructing family trees is a way of rebuilding Russian society.


"I think studying genealogy is necessary in our immoral time," said Mozharov, a board member of the Historical Genealogical Society, which opened in 1990 in Moscow, "It evokes in a person love of his ancestors, and he won't be desecrating graves."


Russian family ties were broken during the displacements of the civil war following the 1917 revolution and the repressions of Stalinism. In many cases, family trees even became liabilities -- a source of shame or potential peril if ancestors were from noble families or relatives had been repressed for some other political reason.


In light of the new freedoms since perestroika, Russians have begun tracing their lineage, and Mozharov, 66, has made it his mission to help them.


Mozharov, who has traced his own family tree back to the 15th century, started his research in 1988 after retiring from his job as an international transport consultant.


Four years later, as a member of the society, he began helping others search for their past in free weekly consultations. Since 1992, he said about 300 people have come to him for advice on finding documents pertaining to their families.


"At first there were lines, and people were making appointments for a consultation one or two months ahead," Mozharov said. The numbers have waned since then because present-day economic worries have impinged on interest in the past. The society also needs to make itself more visible, he said. It still does not have a permanent office or phone number.


Alexei Gudkov, 43, a retired military officer and a new member of the society, said he became interested in his family tree when perestroika began and archival information became more accessible. In six years of combing through archives and querying relatives, he has traced his family back to 1685.


"Now I am the expert on our family's relationships," Gudkov said. "At the moment, I am corresponding with my grandmother's cousin. She lives abroad, but we were told she died as a child."


"Most people who come have a human interest in their kin," Mozharov said. "Most of them are middle-aged and they are trying to draw conclusions about what they did in life and what their family did."


Others search the family tree for material gain -- property that belonged to ancestors, for example. "Others look for relatives abroad to get away," Mozharov said.


While Mozharov helps trace any lineage, whether aristocratic or peasant, the other main organization in Moscow dealing with genealogy is interested only in nobility. The Pushkin Museum's genealogy section, founded in 1991 and headed by Olga Rykova, has assembled its own archives -- 200 files of documents, as well as portraits illustrating the history of Russia's noble families.


"It is bizarre, but, because of the repressions, genealogical documents were not destroyed," Rykova said, adding that the state wanted to be able to trace its people's ancestry.


"Many descendants of Russian noble families who now live abroad come to us for information," Rykova said. "From England, Golitsyns and, more recently, Orlov-Davydovs visited us and asked for a copy of documents that we have." Others have come from France, Germany and Luxembourg.


Ironically, Rykova, 44, who did her dissertation on genealogy, is not sure of her own family tree. "My case is difficult," she said. "My grandfather was a love child of a man from a noble family, and my father has always been afraid to talk about it."