She was eight years old, studying at a grammar school named for Tsar Alexander II, when the first rumblings of revolution began. Labor strikes flared in the faraway capital of St. Petersburg, and on January 22, 1905, Imperial Guards opened fire on an unarmed crowd of protestors, killing and wounding hundreds. News of the “Bloody Sunday” massacre spread quickly, provoking violent protests across Russia. “I remember sitting on the roof of my house in Feodosiya and watching fires burn across the city,” she recalled of that time, which Leon Trotsky later dubbed the “dress rehearsal for the revolution.”
In 1913, the family moved to the Crimean city of Kerch. Maria Mikhailovna was now a pretty, dark-haired young woman of 16, and suitors soon came calling. In 1914, a soldier in the Tsar’s army named Naum Ilyich Schneider proposed with the words, “Let’s get married or not get married, but I’m tired of just coming over for tea.” The couple wed, but their marital bliss was short-lived; Russia had entered World War I, and Naum Ilyich was almost immediately sent to the front to fight.
As Maria Mikhailovna recalled:
We knew he had to go fight, but we thought we’d have a little bit of time together first. He left two days after we married, and I didn’t see him again for almost three years.
He was wounded very badly in the war, hit in the leg with an exploding bullet. One doctor wanted to amputate, but another said it wasn’t necessary. He suffered terribly. But in the end, they didn’t amputate. I remember when I saw him for the first time after he came back. He had recovered in a hospital in Odessa, but was still in very bad shape.
I was only sixteen when we married, just a girl. But when he came back, I was a young woman. When they told me he was coming, I put on a special dress for the occasion, and a new hat, and then rushed over to see him.
I could not believe what I saw. He was so thin and ragged-looking, and he’d lost some of his teeth. He was ten years older than I, and he looked to me at that moment like an old man. I thought, Is this really my husband?
For any soldier, returning home from a bloody battle must come as a relief—but the country to which Naum Ilyich returned was in chaos. In February 1917, armed revolutionaries overthrew the Russian government, and a month later, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated his throne; the Russian empire was collapsing. In October of that same year, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized control and declared Russia the first “Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.” But not all Russians supported the Reds, as they were called, and anti-Bolshevik factions known as the Whites rose up to battle them. Now, in addition to the fighting in Europe, Russia was plunged into a violent civil war—another conflict that nearly took Naum Ilyich’s life:
We were living in Kerch. The Whites had taken the city, and the Reds had retreated to hide in catacombs in the mountains nearby. The Whites stormed through the city, looking for young men to take away with them.
They came into our building, grabbed my husband in the stairwell and started to drag him away. I came running out with our newborn daughter in one arm, and grabbed him with the other. I refused to let him go. I knew that most of the men who were taken away would never return.
They were furious that I wouldn’t let him go, and burst into our apartment to look for weapons. They started throwing things out of the bookshelves and closets. Suddenly, my husband’s Order of St. George medal that he had won in the war fell out. When they saw that, they let him go. That medal saved his life.
The Russian Civil War raged for five years. When it ended in 1922, the Bolsheviks were in power, and Vladimir Lenin established himself as leader of the new Soviet Union. Although the USSR was envisioned as a Communist state, Lenin launched reforms known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP, under which certain people—called NEPmen—were allowed to engage in small-scale private enterprise to help reinvigorate the shattered economy.
Naum Ilyich became a NEPman. He ran a private mill in the early 1920s, which enabled the young family—now with three children—to enjoy a comfortable life. But comfort was fleeting: after Lenin’s death in 1924, new Soviet leader Joseph Stalin abolished NEP and launched a violent backlash against NEPmen, who were branded as dirty capitalists. The children of NEPmen were denied entrance to kindergartens, so Lia, the couple’s youngest child, was forced to take her mother’s maiden name of Gurevich. To her father’s shame and distress, Lia never took back his name.
Stalin launched the first of his Five-Year Plans in 1928, rushing to industrialize the country at a terrible cost, eventually plunging large swaths of the Soviet Union into famine. Naum Ilyich, whose private mill had been seized, found work in a quarry, where he was forced to labor 16-hour days for meager pay. Maria Mikhailovna did her best to feed the children, but the family had very little; when Lia fell ill with typhus, her father fed her noodles brought home from his quarry rations.
These were terrible times, and they got worse in 1930 when Naum Ilyich hurt his shoulder in an accident. No longer able to work at the quarry, and with no other employment prospects, he took the dramatic step of leaving his wife and children in Kerch and heading north to Leningrad, in hopes of finding work there.
By now, the young family had already endured war, famine, and devastating economic privation. Then, the Terror began.
Throughout the 1930s, Stalin stoked fear and paranoia across Russia, ordering the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of millions of people, often for no reason at all. In 1932, Maria Mikhailovna’s father became one of those arrested when, after noticing a shortage of whistles at the factory where he worked, he’d melted down five-kopek pieces to get enough copper to make new ones. He was charged with the crime of defacing the Soviet seal—the hammer and sickle on the melted coins—and thrown into prison. Yet he was one of the lucky ones, serving just three months for his “crime.”
That same year, Naum Ilyich finally scraped together enough money to bring Maria Mikhailovna to Leningrad. She brought their eldest daughter and left the other two children, including Lia, in Kerch with their grandparents. Two years would pass before she could afford to return for the younger two children.
When she did come back, “she brought a suitcase filled with treats for us,” recalled Lia, who was a robust, plainspoken woman of 72 when she told me this story. “White bread and buns. I hadn’t seen white bread in ages. It was the best thing I had ever tasted.”
The late 1930s were a terrifying time for many Russians, but a happy time for Lia. Her family was together at last, living just outside Leningrad in the village of Levashovo. She was a bright young student with hopes of studying at Leningrad State University, a goal she achieved in 1940, enrolling in the university’s history department.
Yet once again, comfort was fleeting. During her first year at the university, her father was arrested at their home in Levashovo. When I asked why, she responded dryly, “You don’t ask that question in Russia. Nobody was arrested for anything sensible; people were just arrested. They didn’t have to have a reason.” Naum Ilyich was thrown into a Leningrad prison.
Lia forged ahead with her studies, even as she began hearing alarming reports of Nazi advances throughout Europe. Stalin and Hitler had signed a nonaggression pact in 1939, and the Soviet Union continued to go about its business in the vain belief that Hitler would honor the pact. But on June 22, 1941, the Germans invaded Russia.
“I will never forget that day,” Lia told me.