It was the light hands of the local historians that saved the things in these museums by hiding them in the first years of Soviet power, when treasure had a different meaning, and things of beauty and value had been revalued and placed in danger. Much of the porcelain, textiles and fine furniture in the Alexander I Memorial Museum went missing in that frenzy against tsarism and the Church, and icons were publicly burned. (Its collections had been prized also for their improving effect on the taste of the local magnates in interior furnishings, which tended to the vulgar.) At the end of the 1920s, however, there was saving work done on the necropolis of Beglitskaya Kosa outside Taganrog, which was threatened by the erosion of the shoreline.
One of the most treasured collections in the Taganrog regional museum is the archive of Pavel Filevsky, a local historian and teacher of history and geography who had studied at the gymnasium at the same time as Chekhov. Filevsky wrote a memoir of all the teachers they shared: the Russian teacher and the Latin teacher, the masters of divinity and literature and the ‘pathologically irritable’ Edmund Dzerzhinsky, who taught mathematics (and whose son Felix became the first head of the Cheka and worked himself to death for the Soviet security state, his statue standing outside the Lubyanka for decades until it was pulled down in front of a revelling crowd in August 1991). Filevsky was ardently Orthodox, and sympathised with the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds. From a Kharkov gentry family, he loved Taganrog, writing poetry in praise of the town and a learned article on Pushkin’s one very brief visit. In Chekhov’s lifetime Filevsky published a historical novel called The Fall of Byzantium and, as the First World War broke out, a universal chronology and conspectus of the history of humanity, its doings, its thoughts and its creative work from 5508 BC to AD 1910. He planned to write a full history of the region, beginning with a volume on the Scythians, taking in all aspects of its development – historical, biological, geographical and economic – just the kind of masterwork of positivist historical fact-accumulation that Nietzsche thought had exhausted European culture and made it senile. A portrait of Filevsky in old age shows him as the very image of the blood-drained intellectual, almost an ascetic in the style of El Greco. He had survived the Revolution, giving lessons in factories and technical colleges in the early 1920s. In 1927 he became a member of the North Caucasus Regional Society of Archaeology, History and Ethnography, and three years later a curator and archivist of old Taganrog. Through local history, he managed to weave his own work into the new system. There are letters in his archive from friends and colleagues who fared less well, museum workers, librarians and schoolteachers arrested and sent into exile in Kazakhstan and Siberia for imagined crimes against Stalin’s state. ‘I do not regard myself as guilty, but the inexorable Article 58 had stuck to me like smallpox,’ the local teacher Vinnikov wrote with his sense of irony unbroken from ‘not such a distant place, as we Russians like to say’. A letter from another teacher, trembling on the edge of despair, said that ‘sometimes things are so hard, grief and mourning so profound that only deep faith sustains our weak strength and holds us back from taking a foolhardy step’. The librarian Edward Yurgens left his letter unsealed, knowing, he said, that his correspondence was ‘of interest to other individuals’. In his Central Asian exile, the only thing that alleviated his sorrow was the knowledge that he had loved ‘everything beautiful in mankind, in art, and in nature, and remained sure of the source of all beauty’.
In 1925, Felix Dzerzhinsky was on the verge of nervous collapse, after successfully laying the foundations of the Soviet police state. In that year, he had captured the political chameleon Boris Savinkov, ex-terrorist and collaborator of Sidney Reilly, and spent many hours in ‘conversation’ with him in a cell made comfortable in the Lubyanka. In May 1925, Savinkov, who had written letters to friends from the prison extolling the glories of the new Soviet state, died after a mysterious fall from a window. Reilly was regarded as the key to the British spy networks that still troubled Dzerzhinsky, and he conceived an elaborate ‘sting’, known as ‘Operation Trust’, to lure ‘the ace of spies’ himself back to Russia. Reilly was arrested in a Moscow apartment in September 1925, and taken to the Lubyanka for interrogation, labelled Prisoner No. 73. On 5 November, he was executed with a shot to the back of the head, allegedly on direct orders from Stalin.
The Party insisted that Dzerzhinsky take a rest, so he came with a small escort to Taganrog, where his father had once lived in a small house opposite the gymnasium. Dzerzhinsky requisitioned a suite for himself in the palace in which Tsar Alexander I had liked to rest his tired spirit. Insomniac, Dzerzhinsky prowled through its rooms and galleries by night. Rumours about some secret purpose for his visit spread through Taganrog, and parents kept their children indoors, made the sign of the cross when he drove past in his armoured car with the curtains open, and refused to open their doors to visitors. Living in his father’s town did little to alleviate Dzerzhinsky’s depression and he soon left for Moscow on a special train. He died an exhausted man the following July, in the middle of a rambling speech to his comrades, ‘punctuated by hysterical outbursts’. Molotov carried his coffin.
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In the town’s main church, the icons were draped in black lace: a Greek practice that I had not observed in any other Russian place of worship. Chekhov visited the cemetery when he came back to Taganrog, remarking that it was beautiful but looked as though it had been ransacked, with one of its memorials barbarously scratched. He walked among the tombs with a female friend called Monya Khodakovskaya, a freethinker who laughed at the dead and their epitaphs, as well as the living priests and deacons in the church. Chekhov was sensitive to the vulnerability of the dead to our slander and abuse. He witnessed a funeral in Taganrog, and wrote that ‘it is not pleasant to see an open coffin, in which a dead man’s head is shaking’.
We wandered through the cemetery. Demakos, Verazzi, Kleopatro … Russian family names on the tombs were scarce. There were many Marias. The usual fake flowers, in crazy colours gone dusty, decorated oversized metallic graves, some of which had broken apart and yawned a little like open coffins. A great many had crosses improvised out of scaffolding, set in place in the Soviet period, when tombs were adorned with red stars, signs of loyalty to the Revolution even in death. I wondered how archaeologists might interpret these scaffolding-crosses thousands of years from now, when the seventy-five years of Soviet communism were just a fleck in the great panorama of human time. Would they wonder and theorise about them just as archaeologists now wonder about the signs of ritual and belief in the stone catacombs of the barbarian burial mounds on the steppe? Why, archaeologists wonder, are the long bones from the left legs of horses always laid out from north-west to south-west in the inner chambers of Scythian tombs, sealed with shields and mats made of pebbles, where the dead always lie with their heads towards the entrance?