Petro Ivanovych Rulin (1892-1940) is a cult figure in the milieu of Ukrainian theatergoers, although he is not much known to the man in the street. Father of the Ukrainian drama study, a prominent theatrical critic, a literature researcher, founder of the Ukrainian Theatrical Museum at the Kyiv Caves Monastery (now the Museum of Ukrainian Theatrical, Musical, and Cinematic Art), a professor at the Kyiv Theatrical Institute, he managed to go through all the circles of hell in his self-denying, albeit short, lifetime: “showpiece” dismissal from teaching in 1934, arrest and accusation of “national fascism” in 1936, deportation to Siberia in 1937, and death from physical exhaustion caused by tree felling in December 1940.
Thanks to the fearless persistence of his wife Lydia and letters from artists’ and actors’ leagues to the USSR Prosecutor General’s Office, Rulin was posthumously rehabilitated in 1958. The year 1972 saw the publication of a collection of his articles, prepared by the prominent scholar’s wife as well as the well-known theater experts Petro Perepelytsia and Rostyslav Pylypchuk. On Pylypchuk’s initiative, Kyiv hosted in 1992 an international conference to mark the 100th anniversary of Rulin’s birth (unfortunately, its proceedings were never published).
In the same year, the SBU allowed his only daughter Iryna to see his father’s 300-page criminal file and Pylypchuk to copy it “from A to Z.” It is also clear why Pylypchuk has not yet dared to make these materials public – the only living witness for the prosecution at the 1937 closed-door trial was Ivan Voloshyn, his theatrical institute mentor, which presents an ethical problem.
The criminal case file, now kept at the SBU archive, and Rulin’s large personal collection at the Central State Archive-cum-Museum of Ukrainian Literature and Art (TsDAMLM), which comprises his numerous manuscripts, essays, personal and business correspondence and biographical documents, are invaluable documentary sources now. Last September TsDAMLM hosted an exhibit to mark Rulin’s 120th birth anniversary on the basis of these materials and photographs from the collections of the Museum of Ukrainian Theatrical, Musical, and Cinematic Art. Last February the same exhibit was held for a month at the National Les Kurbas Center. And recently the abovementioned museum and its branch – the Maria Zankovetska Museum – hosted an international workshop, “Ukrainian Theatrical Museum: 90 Years for Scholarship and Culture,” where several reports were dedicated to the figure of Petro Rulin.
There is a hope that the scholar’s creative legacy and correspondence will be published in the near future. But even this will hardly substitute for the living reminiscences that his relatives can share. For documents can not only reveal the truth but also lead the researcher up a blind alley, and working with documents can bring about a situation when the answer to one question will raise a dozen new ones. Unfortunately, there is practically nobody among the living who could personally know Rulin. His wife Lydia and daughter Iryna have departed this life. A small part of the family archive is now under care of his granddaughter Lada DIACHOK. She keeps at home some old family photos and documents in a box and a marvelous coffee cup, which Maria Zankovetska gifted to Rulin’s wife, in the sideboard. But of the greatest value are family reminiscences from grandmother, which Diachok is sharing for the first time with The Day’s readers.
Ms. Diachok, there are lots of documents in Petro Rulin’s archive, which confirm his Swedish citizenship. What made your ancestors move to Kyiv?
“Grandmother told us that two brothers, Ivan [Petro Rulin’s father. – Author] and Viktor, had come to the Russian Empire to work. Viktor dealt with bread supplies from Russia to Sweden and usually visited Petersburg, while Ivan was a Nobel company representative in Russia (he was apparently a chemist by trade). Their parents Per Erik Rulin and Maria Brigitta were ordinary Swedish farmers, which you can clearly see on the photos. I don’t know how they managed to give their children a good education.
“There was a factory in Riga which produced and supplied to Sweden sulfuric acid for making dynamite. My great-grandfather Ivan, a shareholder of this factory, dealt with supplies. I also know that Boris, their third brother, born in 1896, must have been doing his military service in Sweden in 1924-26.”
What brought your great-grandfather Ivan to Kyiv?
“Probably, he came to Kyiv on business and met his future wife there. Judging by what we were told, Klavdia was very beautiful and my great-grandfather fell in love with her. Klavdia’s family belonged to the ‘middle stratum.’ She had graduated from a gymnasium, which was a good level at the time, for it envisioned at least the knowledge of languages. As their daughter Olha (Petro Rulin’s elder sister) was born to them in 1891, they may have been married in 1890. Klavdia’s sister Hanna was married to Feofil Yanovsky [prominent Ukrainian therapist, founder of clinical phthisiology, the doctor of Lesia Ukrainka, Maria Zankovetska, and Ivan Karpenko-Kary. – Author].
“Petro Rulin’s father died too early, in 1904, leaving Klavdia with four children on her hands. Hanna Yanovska helped her sister’s family very much. I don’t know if I have the right to say this, but my grandmother considered it possible that Ivan had handed over his shares to Hanna well before the revolution. Having to care for a family and a selfless husband (Feofil Yanovsky not only treated a lot of people free of charge but would also lend money to poor patients), she was a more practical woman.
“Grandfather wrote in his biography that the uncle, Professor Yanovsky, supported their family after father had died. When Petro was a 15-year-old ‘real school’ pupil, he tutored (sisters did not work, naturally). I know that he had tuberculosis and Feofil treated him.
“I don’t know how Petro met Lydia, but they got married in 1916 and my mum was born in 1917. Grandmother attended the Women’s Higher Courses at St. Vladimir University, was awarded a degree at Grenoble University in France, and taught the German and French languages – first from time to time, then in a school, and later at Kyiv University.”
Like your grandfather, Lydia failed to escape repressions…
“In 1937 grandfather was sentenced to six years of internal exile and deported to Kolyma. The rest of our family (mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother) were arrested in July of the same year and sent to the village of Chasha, Tyumen oblast, for an indefinite period. Grandfather taught German in school. Mother had studied at the Institute of Architecture before the exile and, not to discontinue her studies, she entered the Mathematics Faculty of Sverdlovsk University.
“Grandmother had a list of Politburo members, and she would send every day an approximately the following letter: ‘Yes, I am guilty, I failed to see an enemy in my husband and duly report on him. But Comrade Stalin said that children should not be held responsible for their parents. So what does it have to do with my daughter and, moreover, my mother-in-law?’ Asked what she was doing, grandma would say: ‘We are already in Siberia and we’ve got nothing to lose!’ We are perhaps the only family that came back to Kyiv!
“As our apartment on Dionisivsky Lane had been requisitioned, with all of our belongings, during the arrest, we were given a room in a shared apartment on 72 or 74 Lenin Street (now Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street).
“Incidentally, when the Nazis were going to blow Kyiv up, they ordered all residents to pack up and move for some time. When they came back, they found that the manuscript of grandma’s dissertation – the German-Ukrainian dictionary of law, which she had prepared before the war, – had disappeared. A common thief could hardly have taken interest in a ‘piece of writing.’ Some of our acquaintances must have done this.
“I know that Lydia helped Yulia, my father’s mother, who could no longer work due to old age and was in dire straits during the war. We still keep grandma’s letters to dad, in which she mentions this.”
Will you tell me the amazing story of the Orant’s salvation at St. Sophia’s Cathedral?
“Grandma failed to evacuate with the university and stayed behind in Kyiv together with the sick great-grandmother. On September 1 classes began in schools and at the university. There were slogans galore: ‘We will not surrender Kyiv!’ And on the 19th the Germans came in… The situation was difficult, and grandma did not like recalling this. At first she scraped a living by selling everything that was in the apartment. Then she went to work at the Transitional Era Museum-cum-Archive organized in 1942.
“When I was a child, grandma used to take me to St. Sophia’s Cathedral and tell me that there were some special Orant schemes that make it possible to ‘dismantle’ the mosaics. She remembered that in 1943 the Germans decided to take the Orant away, and, to thwart this plan, grandma and the cathedral’s watchman had hidden the documents.”
What was the destiny of your relatives after the war?
“Before the 1937 exile, mum and dad had been same-year students at the Architecture Institute, and when mum came back to Kyiv, she was reinstated. When the war broke out, she was in Kamianka, from where she went to serve in the army as combat engineer. They were building defense fortifications, leaving them to the Germans, and were following the retreating army. Then she was sent to build a chemical plant in Kemerovo, the Kuznetsk coal basin. I was born in Kemerovo in 1943. After the war, Stalin secretly ordered that enterprises should not be returned to the original places. Many remained behind there or returned either illegally or under some official occasion. The Makiivka Construction Trust gathered its employees and came back to Ukraine – to rebuild the Donbas. Incidentally, my father, Kostiantyn Spivak, is in fact my godfather, while my biological father, Yosyp Raikhlin, was mum’s fellow student (he and mum died in the same year in the US and Kyiv, respectively). Grandma hid his sister Maria behind the wardrobe, while all the other [Jews] went to Babyn Yar… Maria was married to a Russian. Grandma managed to furnish her with the documents that listed her husband’s surname. She thus got an opportunity to leave the occupied Kyiv.
“Mum was eventually allowed to come back to Kyiv from Makiivka and be reinstated as student, Grandma began to teach the German language at the university, but she was arrested on April 13, 1945. We knew nothing about the destiny of grandfather. Mum had to take care of me, great-grandmother, and grandmother whom she had to accompany to courts every now and then.
“Lydia served a term on the Rybalsky Island and in Syrets (after the Nazis’ retreat, the German concentration camp was turned into a Soviet penal facility). She worked at the prison’s medical department. She had done a nurse-training course during World War I and was afraid of no work. I always say that grandma was the last intellectual in our family, for being an intellectual is a condition of soul rather than an education. Everybody respected her. She was a lady highly conscious of her own dignity, and she was never a flatterer or an informer. She did an eight-year term under Article 58.
“When grandma was arrested in 1945, mum, great-grandmother, and I moved to Dnipropetrovsk. It is in fact the great-grandmother who raised me because my parents had to work. And they filed for a divorce in 1947.
“In November 1947 father [Kostiantyn Spivak. – Author] brought us to Kyiv. One of his brothers, Yevhen Spivak, was a well-known pianist, a professor at the Kyiv Conservatoire; another brother, Kyrylo, worked at an archive. I owe very much to my ‘double’ father and always remember this. He fought as infantryman throughout the war – from Kyiv to Stalingrad – and lost his leg after receiving several wounds.”
Did grandma often tell you about granddad? Was she aware of the epochal role that her husband played in the history of Ukrainian theater and theater studies?
“All that my granddad was doing was considered a commonplace thing. When the Ukrainian Theatrical Museum was being organized in 1926, it was given an old building on the territory of the Kyiv Caves Monastery. Granddad would buy firewood, and grandma would stoke the stove to prevent the exhibits from spoiling. Grandma helped very much to sort out and systemize the exhibits.
“Petro Rulin was a very busy person. He worked a lot, and his time was scheduled down to a minute. It is not mere words: grandma recalled the following episode. She once said to her husband: ‘Petro, we need to have a talk.’ In reply, Petro took out a memo book, looked at his schedule and said: ‘OK, on Thursday at such and such hour.’
“Grandpa made a list of books for his daughter (my mother), which every cultured person must read – the list ranged from Ancient Greek to modern authors.”
What languages did Petro Rulin know?
“He knew a lot of languages – not only French and German. Grandpa was very unhappy that Russian was spoken at home, and he always tried to make everybody speak Ukrainian.”
When did your family come to know about grandfather’s tragic death?
“When I was in my second year at the university, a new student, Nina Dubinina, came to us. We got acquainted and made friends. I was well received at her home. Her stepfather Ivan Moiseiev had done a term in a Kolyma camp. Apparently, he was doing time for ‘the first sugar case’ (those involved in the first and second ‘sugar cases’ were imprisoned and executed, respectively). When I asked about Petro Rulin, he said: ‘I know him.’ This was a shock. We know from letters that grandpa first worked as accountant in exile. Moiseiev told me that Rulin had refused to doctor some statistics contrary to the camp bosses’ wishes, so he was forced to fell trees without even having a cotton-wadded vest. The winter of 1940 was very severe, but he only wore a jacket. Rulin starved to death because it was impossible to survive in such conditions. Moiseiev said he would say everything to Rulin’s wife alone, but grandma spurned the offer. She said she was unable to bury her husband for a second time. It is Moiseiev who told me the legal address to which I sent a query, and we received the first official confirmation of Petro’s death: ‘died of cardiac insufficiency on December 23, 1940.’”
Did you attend the conference on occasion of Petro Rulin’s centenary, conducted by Rostyslav Pylypchuk?
“Yes, I sat and listened. I can remember one of grandfather’s former pupils from Canada to whom Petro Rulin said before the arrest: ‘You’d better leave. There will be no good.’ Pylypchuk was closely in touch with grandma. Thanks to her and Liudmyla Prykhodko, a theater expert and archivist, very much was done to restore the memory of my grandfather.”
