Hi everyone

I hope that blogging will work as well this time in keeping you up to date with my travels as it did last time.  There’s a lot about blogging I have forgotten, so I will need to get up to speed quickly again.

The Lost History

1 September 2018: Before my sabbatical: reflections

As a child in my family home, I became familiar with some interesting information about my father’s heritage.  My father was half-Russian.  His mother, Mirra Ivanovna Benge had come to New Zealand in 1919 after marrying a New Zealand soldier, Onslow Benge, in France at the end of the First World War.  Mirra’s father, Ivan Mikhailovich Tarbeyev - formerly a Major-General in the Russian Imperial Army - and her mother, Maria Federovna Tarbeyeva, joined their daughter in New Zealand in 1920.  They both died before I was born, and my Russian grandmother died not long after I was born.

From left: my father Michael, his mother Mirra, his sister Lola, his father Onslow, and in front, his grandmother Maria Federovna Tarbeyeva or "babushka", the General's wife.

In our family home we had some mementos of my father’s Russian heritage – including the General’s cavalry sabre and medals, and a couple of icons.  We also had some family stories - notably about the family estate near Vitebsk in Belarus, which was confiscated from the family at the time of the Russian revolution.  Apart from these taonga, my father’s Russian heritage seemed to his sons to be most noticeable in aspects of his temperament, interests and behaviour.  He loved opera and singing (the General had been a fine tenor) and we had several records of the Don Cossack choir, Russian bass singers singing folk songs etc.  My father was also a capable linguist and had learned Russian both at university and from his mother.  His emotions were notably close to the surface and he would often weep at stories or songs that moved him.  He would hug his sons, and we all appreciated that warm expression of his affection.  He also had a real openness to employing in his real estate business people who had come to New Zealand as migrants from Eastern Europe and the Levant, perhaps as a result of his understanding of the difficulties that migrants could face in becoming incorporated in a new land.

Some of the treasures at our family home: two icons, the General's Serbian order of the White Eagle, and his sabre with the George Cross and ribbon (awarded for valour)

My father and mother also had a few close friends who were migrants from Russia - notably the Marx/McDonnell/Fyodorov family and the Artemiev family.  We would often catch up with them on special occasions, particularly at Easter time, when the menu would feature not only piroshki but also kulich and paskha and other delicious Russian food.

Towards the end of my father’s life, he began to research his Russian heritage through a family researcher in Saint Petersburg.  The researcher, Elena Tsvetkova, discovered that the Tarbeyev family had its origins in Russia in 1340 when a man named Merdulat bei Murza Tarbei came from the mongol Golden Horde (probably bringing soldiers with him) into the service of the then Prince of Moscow, Semyon Ivanovich Gordyi (The Proud).  At his baptism this ancestor took the name Semyon Tarbeyev.  For his service to the Prince, he was made a member of the hereditary Russian nobility.  Documents traced the first seven generations from Semyon Tarbeyev, but after that the family line could no longer be followed.  There were Tarbeyevs who held notable ranks or offices in the service of the state, and Tarbeyev families were numbered among the nobility in the Russian provinces of Vitebsk, Vologda, Kazan, Orenburg, Penza and Tambov.  My father’s immediate Tarbeyev ancestors came from Vitebsk province in White Russia (Belarus), which was formerly a part of the Russian Empire, but is now a separate country.

The Tarbeyev family crest from a nineteenth century book documenting the history of the Russian noble families.

My father was highly interested by the discoveries the researcher was making, but he died in 2004, when the research was only partly completed.  In 2017 I formed a plan to visit Russia to connect with my Russian family heritage.  So I got in touch again with the person who had done the earlier family research, and she continued to do family research into the Benges’ Tarbeyev roots.  In 2017 she came to the end of her research, having identified four generations of Tarbeyevs who had lived in the province of Vitebsk before my great grandfather Ivan Mikhailovich Tarbeyev.  The earliest ancestor found was simply mentioned as Matvey, the father of Pyotr Matveyevich Tarbeyev who was the Governor of Vitebsk province from 1800 to 1802.  The connection with the ancient Tarbeyev family was clear, but the intervening links had been lost.  Because of some uncertainties about staffing in the parish I decided not to go to Russia in 2017, but planned to undertake my visit in 2018.

At this point some unusual things happened.  I heard that a Russian man had featured my great grandfather in a museum he had created.  My father had been pretty down to earth about his heritage, willing to point out that the family were only minor nobility and that there were many generals in the Russian army in the First World War.  So I was not sure why someone would want to focus on my great grandfather’s life in particular.  What I learned was that the Russian man, Pyotr Gabrielyan, was a friend of my cousin Tony.  Pyotr and Tony had met in Malaysia, where Tony had been running a holiday resort.

It turned out that Pyotr had been interested by Tony’s story that he had Russian heritage, and so Pyotr had done some research into the General’s life and had featured him in a museum he had created when he built a school and a church in his local town of Otradnaya, in Krasnodar Province in the south of Russia.

Major-General Ivan Mikhailovich Tarbeyev

I further learned that Pyotr was coming to New Zealand to visit Tony, who was now living here, and that they would visit Wellington together in March 2017.  I arranged to take Tony and Pyotr to visit the grave of the General, who had died in Wellington in 1925 and was buried in the Karori Cemetery.  My two brothers, Christopher and Matthew, their wives, Diane and Francie, my mother, and Helen and I all met with Pyotr and Tony that same afternoon.  One thing I was very keen to ask was why he was so interested in General Tarbeyev in particular.  Was it simply an expression of his friendship for Tony, or was there some additional reason as well?

Tony with Pyotr at the General's grave.

Part of the family at the meeting with Pyotr.  From left: my brother Matthew, Pyotr, my brother Christopher, me, my cousin Tony, and in front, my mother Wendy.

In order to ensure that we had a worthwhile conversation when we did not speak Russian and Pyotr did not speak much English, I asked a local interpreter, Olga Suvorova, to come and translate for us, which she did.  Through her, Pyotr explained that the Armenian people, who suffered so greatly from the Armenian genocide by the Turks in 1915-16 during the First World War, have long committed themselves to keeping alive the names of those who helped to protect or support them during this ordeal.  Pyotr’s reasoning was that the General, as a senior officer in the Russian army of the day, was part of the attempts to defeat the Turks and to support the Armenians.  So he had taken it as a moral duty to preserve the memory of General Ivan Tarbeyev.  But actually, it went further than that too.  Pyotr’s friendship with Tony was deep, and he was passionate about the connection he felt with the General and his descendants.  This was personal for him.  (Later, in 2018, a grandchild born in his family was called Ivan in memory of the General.)  Pyotr warmly welcomed anyone in the family who would like to come to Russia to do so, as his guest. 

A strange coincidence (if you can call it that) about this meeting was that Olga Suvorova explained to us that her husband, Stuart Prior (formerly New Zealand Ambassador to the Soviet Union) was now the Honorary Consul to Belarus, and that he would be most interested to hear about this Belarusian connection.  With Olga, Stuart was indeed amazingly supportive of our interest in our family connections in Russia and Belarus, and my efforts to find out more about them.  Later that year I visited them in their home.  I was fascinated by their very considerable knowledge about the early twentieth century in Russia and the Russian revolution.  From a photo of my grandmother as a teenager Stuart could identify the school she went to in Saint Petersburg.  They also spoke knowledgeably about aspects of the challenges of the revolutionary period in Russia, of which I was unaware.

My grandmother in her school uniform, pictured with a friend.  My grandmother is on the right.

Stuart offered to see if he could find a researcher in Belarus who might look further into the archives there to see whether any other information about the Tarbeyev family could be found.  However, a response from Belarus took a long time to come.  In March 2018 I was booking flights for my sabbatical in September and October 2018 and a researcher had still not been found.  So I arranged to visit Belarus for the permissible five days without a visa, in the hope that a researcher might be found and I could end up visiting the area where the former family estate was, and maybe even connect with some distant relations.

As we waited for progress in Belarus, another surprise discovery was made at home.  In my father’s personal papers four letters in Russian were found, which had been kept by the General.  Two were letters that we thought at first were written to him during the war by his mother - but may have been from his sister, Manya (Maria).  One letter was written by his brother Georgii, and another was from an unknown person.  It was amazing to hear these voices from the past expressing their own personal concerns on often quite day to day matters, and their love for the man they knew.

A letter to Ivan from his brother Georgii, dated 20 September 1917, just before the Russian Revolution.

In April 2018 Alexey Adashkin, a friend of Stuart Prior’s in Belarus, gave me contact details for a researcher who could look further into my family history and attempt to identify the exact location of the Tarbeyev family estate and the three villages that had been mentioned as being located on the estate - Puzanovo, Mishki, and Poddybie.

I found many points of connection with the researcher, Alexey Vaytkun.  He was a committed Christian who had also travelled to Jerusalem and to Mt Athos, and he had a very active interest in the history of imperial Russia.  We formed a friendship as he worked to help me make connections with my ancestry in Belarus.  One early and significant discovery he made was of a 52-page largely handwritten inventory of the family estate, named Ekaterinhof after the Tsar’s estate in Saint Petersburg.  This inventory was completed in 1846.

The document, which was found in the Belarusian National Archive, was written in an older form of Russian, and needed to be translated into contemporary Russian before it could be translated into English.  Alexey arranged the translation into contemporary Russian in Belarus, and then Olga Suvorova translated the document into English.  The document gave a full description of the estate, the people and livestock living there, its buildings, crops, the quality of the land etc.  It also gave some idea of the regulations for working the land.  At this time the estate was 436 hectares (just over 1,000 acres).

One of the pages of the inventory of the Ekaterinhof estate, found in the Belarusian National Archive.

Alexey also found a document from 1906 that stated that the Ekaterinhof estate was owned by Colonel Mikhail Pavolovich Tarbeyev, my great grandfather’s father.  At that time, following the liberation of the serfs in 1861 and a further 45 years of history, the estate had been reduced to 170 hectares.

Further to these documents, Alexey tried to find out whether there was any documentary evidence of the estate being confiscated from the family's ownership.  He managed to find in the archives in Vitebsk a document dated 1918, the year after the revolution, which lists the name of former owners of confiscated estates in the relevant district.  However, this mysteriously failed to mention the Tarbeyev family and the Ekaterinhof estate.  It seemed that something had occurred between the revolution and the time that this document was composed, to alienate the property from the family without a written record.  I was disappointed with this news as I had wanted to be able to corroborate a family story that had been with us in New Zealand for 100 years.  But the record of how the land was alienated had been lost.

Alexey made connections with a local museum in that district and he was able to identify the precise location of the family estate.  It appeared that the buildings on the farm, including the main house, were no longer there (but later I heard that there might be a building or buildings in the villages that dated from the time of the original estate).  The museum staff were very helpful to Alexey, who found that my great grandfather’s brother Georgii had been a teacher in the district for a short period after the revolution and had lived for a few years with a number of other family members on a farmlet on the former estate.  That farmlet had still been called Ekaterinhof.

Meanwhile Stuart Prior’s friend Alexey Adashkin had made contact with the manager of tourism and mass media in the local Shumilino District Council, Mrs Valentina Novitskaya.  She generously arranged to host me and Pyotr, my travelling companion, for a visit to the district.  We would visit the Shumilino district where the former estate had been on Saturday 8 September, and she would provide an interpreter who was a local teacher of English.  Then on the Sunday she would take Pyotr and me to Polotsk, a city where my great grandfather had been born, to visit a famous monastery and the cathedral, which had been built in the twelfth century, before dropping us back to Vitebsk to catch our train back to Minsk.

Once Alexey had completed the research he could undertake in Minsk and Vitebsk, he sent a full report to me.  He also sent to the local newspaper in Shumilino District a draft article that was later published.  It mentioned my interest in the Tarbeyev family who had lived in the Ekaterinhof estate in the district over 100 years ago, and invited anyone who was connected with that family to contact Alexey.  To date no one has responded.

In just four days’ time I will be flying off to Minsk, to meet Pyotr, Tony’s friend, who will travel with me in Belarus.  Alexey Vaytkun the researcher, and Stuart Prior’s friend Alexey Adashkin (who contacted Alexey the researcher and Valentina Novitskaya in Shumilino District) will join us for dinner that night to talk and reflect on what has already been a remarkable journey of discovery.  None of this would have been possible without the kindness and support of strangers, friends and family.

The plan for my time away is:

·         6-10 September: Belarus

·         11-20 September: Armenia and Georgia

·         21 September - 15 October: Russia

·         15-22 October: United Arab Emirates

·         23 October: Arrive home

Thanks for joining me on my journey, visiting family history.

Peter