Christened with Crosses - by Eduard Kochergin (Paperback)

About the Book

The memoirs of an old man who, as a boy, learnt to find his way between extortionate state control and marauding banditry, the two poles that characterize Russia to this day. A story about the awakening of artistic talent.

Book Synopsis

While the mothers in Siberia wait for their soldier sons to return from the war in the west in 1945, the eight year old Eduard secretly jumps on board the trains heading in the opposite direction, heading west, towards Leningrad. Placed in a Siberian orphanage as a child because his parents were arrested as public enemies, there is only one thing he wants: to go back home to Leningrad and to find his mother again. It is not only his desperate courage and his youthful agility that ensure his survival, it is also his artistic talent. With his agile fingers the boy is able to bend wire in the shape of profiles of Lenin and Stalin, as if in silhouette. He uses them to cheer up the invalid war veterans on the train stations returning from the front, who then give him a piece of bread, a bowl of soup and who, in a spirit of comradeship, warn him of the railway police and the secret service henchmen wanting to send the runaway back to the orphanage.

Eduard spends more than six years on the run, experiencing close encounters with post-war Russia where life and fate have become synonyms. He encounters other stowaways, professional beggars, soldiers returning from the war and wartime profiteers, the mothers of soldiers and war invalids, Chinese from the Ural, Cossacks dealing in hashish, Bashkir Estonians, Russian penal colony escapees and, time and again, orphanage directors. In order to survive the winter he often registered himself voluntarily in the next orphanage, each one always a little closer to the West, running away again before the servants of the Stalinist state are able to send him back to Siberia.

The memoirs of an old man who, as a boy, learnt to find his way between extortionate state control and marauding banditry, the two poles that characterize Russia to this day. A story about the awakening of artistic talent under highly unusual Russian circumstances.

Review Quotes

"As in Solzhenitsyn's famous accounts of Gulag life, "The Gulag Archipelago," there is a matter-of-fact acceptance of brutal conditions, leavened by moments of humor and compassion. Despite the horrors he sees, Kochergin retains his humanity in a world which tyranny and war have rendered almost uninhabitable." RUSSIA BEYOUND THE HEADLINES

"A powerful memoir of one man's journey to adulthood in a Soviet world that could have stepped out of a Dickens novel but 100 years on." Stuart Allen, Winstonsdad's Blog

"Academician Eduard Kochergin, a titled master, who has created legendary performances together with theatrical producers on the stages of the leading Russian and foreign theatres, has an equally good command of the word and of the brush. A veteran of modern culture and art, who was the artistic director of the Bolshoi Drama Theatre in St. Petersburg for a long time, has written memoirs of his difficult childhood. It is a very powerful document from a historical standpoint. It is the absolute truth written by a talented and wise man who has lived a long life." ANDREY GELASIMOV, famous Russian writer for Voice of Russia Radio

"These days quite frequent are attempts to rehabilitate Generalissimo Stalin and his Soviet state internal politics. That, while many victims of his repressions have not yet been cleared of bogus accusations. Articles in Stalin's favor are being disseminated on the Internet and through traditional publishers. On their backdrop a devoid of theatrics story of a young boy, a victim of Stalin's political machine, is nothing less than an act of civil courage. This courage and truth are the two aces that made Eduard Kochergin's literary presence possible." ELENA SAFRONOVA, ZNAMYA MAGAZINE