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Rockets and People
to the famed Soldatenkovskaya (today
Botkinskaya) hospital. The factory
committee and the governing body of
the Nizhnekhodynskaya textile factory,
where my parents lived and worked,
provided horses during the most difficult
and hungry years to bring joy to the
children of the workers.
On New Year’s Eve in 1919, these
horses brought us, dozens of children,
in sleighs to the first New Year’s party
in Russian history in the Hall of
Columns of the Noblemen’s Club.This
was my first visit to the Hall of Columns
of the future House of Unions. I have
since been in that most popular old
Muscovite hall innumerable times.
Many visits to the Hall of Columns have
been completely erased from my
memory. But some of the events associated
with it have been stamped in my
memory forever.
I remember the New Year’s celebra-
tion of 1919 in the Hall of Columns clearly after eighty years. Pieces of real white
bread with jam have stuck in my memory just as clearly as the enormous fir tree
that stunned my childhood imagination with its vast assortment of ornaments, the
radiance of the electric chandeliers, and the music. Indeed, at home, the primary
source of light was kerosene lamps. The factory, located ten kilometers from the
center of the capital, did not have transmission lines from the Moscow electric grid
until 1922.
For people of the younger generation, it is difficult to imagine that in today’s
prestigious region of Serebryanyy Bor, in Khoroshevo-Mnevniki, and along the
entire Khoroshevskoye Highway people lived and worked without enjoying such
basic achievements of civilization as gas, electricity, telephones, refrigerators,
running water, and so on.At the factory, all of the machines were driven by a single
diesel engine with a complex system of multi-stage belt transmissions.
This same diesel engine also provided the factory village with light for a couple of
hours in the evening.
The factory workers and their children, with whom I quickly became friends,
determined the social microclimate.The Civil War was still going on, and we, of
course, played “Reds and Whites,” rather than “Cowboys and Indians”. Nobody
wanted to be White. Frequently, when visiting the workers’ dormitories, which
were called “bedrooms,” I heard conversations about the imminent victory of
32
From the author’s archives.
The author, now a young Muscovite,
photographed in 1918 at the age of six.