Living 100 Russian Years

This article is an excerpt from RESILIENCE: Life Stories of Centenarians Born in the Year of Revolution, published by Russian Life Books in March 2018 (with a companion movie released in November 2018). The book compiles 22 biographies (and over 150 photos), to recount the remarkable lives of individuals born in the year 1917.

As much as possible, the project sought to have the subjects tell their stories directly, in their own words. Galina Grebneva’s words are shown in italics.

GALINA VALERYANOVNA GREBNEVA

Moscow ~ 19 August 1917

Galina Grebneva (born Kortova) is a diminutive woman with straight hair cut just below her chin line. Completely blind and with slightly diminished hearing, she is a profoundly tender soul. She smiles and laughs when complimented on how nice she looks in a special yellow dress. It is the same one she wore 60 years ago to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

When guided, she moves around her apartment with relative ease, scarcely admitting to being tired, even though she must rest halfway between the living room and kitchen. When asked how she is doing, she replies with a sing-song, legato-cadenced “kha-ra-sho” (“fine”). When asked what is her favorite meal, she replies without hesitation, “Caviar on buterbrody” (an open-faced sandwich). She has a sweet tooth and repeatedly asks for just a bit more sugar in her tea.

Galina lives with her daughter Irina in a cozy two-room apartment, one room of which is a museum to Galina’s life, filled with displays of photographs, awards, and timelines arranged for the groups of students that regularly stop by to visit and hear her 70- and 80-year-old stories. A handwritten family tree stretches across the table. Compiled a decade ago, it is kept up to date with penciled inscriptions – the newest members struggle to remain on the page.

Irina is a whirling dervish of energy. She imposes a strict daily routine on her mother’s life, keeping her active and lovingly peppering her with suggestions: “Mama, stand up straight... Deep breaths... Lift your legs higher as you walk...”

“She is a child,” Irina confides later. “What do you expect? I sleep with her... She can no longer dress herself or get up on her own.” And just two weeks before she almost lost her life. She rode in an ambulance for the first time ever, in order to be treated for a severe, life-threatening case of bronchitis. It took a great measure of pushiness and work for Irina to get the doctors at the hospital to care about her 100-year-old mother, to put her on antibiotics and treat her raging fever. Even protestations that Galina was a war veteran and blockade survivor fell on deaf ears.

For all that, Galina is imperturbable (and her cough is largely gone). Her blindness causes her to aim her gaze higher than normal, and she occasionally flicks back her hair and twitches her head as she talks, as if self-conscious of the camera she cannot see. Her voice is clear and musical, occasionally jumping half an octave on softer vowels. At times her replies to questions seem a bit rehearsed, as if she is delivering them to a class of Young Pioneers. Yet she is always very precise and concise.

Her life began in Samara, on August 19, 1917.

About my parents... My father, Valerian Ivanovich, had a wonderful voice. He sang in the Mariinsky Theater. A superb tenor. And Mama, she was a kindergarten teacher.

But it turned out for me that my parents separated early and left me with my grandmother, in Samara. So I swam in the Volga, bathed there... I have very fond memories of my childhood.

When it came time to start school, Galina and her mother and grandmother moved to Leningrad.

It was very difficult for me. I was in kindergarten and had to walk alone to school through Mars Field... along Nevsky Prospekt.

Indeed, repeated queries about Galina’s childhood brings up only this memory of her earliest days in the city.

After high school, she entered the Institute of Railway Transport, training to be an electrical engineer.

In 1937, while still a student, Galina met her future husband, Sergei.

He was three years older than me. I was in the first year, he was already in the third. He led our classes. As he would say, he saw me when he first walked into the classroom and immediately fell in love. I sort of gradually fell in love with him. For him, it was at first glance.

After classes, he would accompany me home. Sergei and I sang in a choir together; the choir brought us together.

Sergei did so well at the institute that he was selected to study at the Higher Party School, which Stalin had set up in 1939 to train the best and brightest cadres. The couple would not marry until 1945, carrying out a tender correspondence during the war that has been preserved and bound in the family archive.

I got excellent marks all five years. I finished up during the blockade,* but classes were being held during the bombardment, the ceaseless bombardment. Every day I walked to classes. A rocket never fell on me.

Of course, we went hungry, because they only gave us, I forget, I think it was 125 grams of bread.

Despite being a natural leader and a strong student, Galina was not initially allowed into the Komsomol, because of her family’s “noble status” – her mother’s grandfather, Kapiton Ivanov, was a peasant who had gained noble status for his service in the Crimean War (1853-56).

Yet she persisted. During the war, Irina recalls, Sergei wrote to Galina, saying, “Galochka, I would like for you to join the party. Do you need my recommendation?” During the difficult first year of the blockade, she was finally allowed into the Komsomol, and then, when she graduated, into the Party.

Soon thereafter, in 1942, when a chance came to be evacuated from Leningrad, Galina was told that only one person could accompany her.

We had to leave grandma behind. She died because she could not even go out to get bread. But I took Mama with me.

Papa was living in Kirov at that time. I arrived in Kirov and my father’s new wife took care of me for two weeks. I could not even raise my arms, I was so weak.

I was taken by a neighbor to a banya there. And of course I had not undressed for several months, and when I did, the women there all began to cry. They looked at me, Lord, you could see my ribs, and instead of a stomach there was a pit, and sticks for legs with circles for knees. I was a skeleton. The women cried.

During the war, Galina worked on the railroad in Omsk, and Sergei fought “on four fronts.” After the war was over, in September 1945, Galina and Sergei were married and Sergei entered the diplomatic service.

The couple’s first diplomatic posting was to South Africa (1947-49), followed by England (1952-54),^* Ceylon (1957-59), Batumi (1964-68), and finally Spitsbergen (1972-76).

While in England, Galina taught kindergarten, set up a children’s choir, and attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

The American children’s choir had been in first place. But after we arrived, we took first place...

I worked in the kindergarten, and there was a park next to the embassy. After lunch we would go to the park to practice our singing and dancing... all the dances, all the songs were taught outdoors...

She [Elizabeth] was, of course, a fine person... Each embassy had its designated place in the park, and she walked by and gave everyone [commemorative] medals from her coronation. She was such a lively person.

In 1967, while in Moscow between postings, Irina recalls, the family was given a samizdat copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel, The First Circle. They were only allowed to keep it for two days. Galina and Sergei read it simultaneously, “one passing a finished page to the next. They did not sleep for two nights,” Irina says.

“Papa said that it could not be true, that he did not believe it [that there were forced labor groups in factories]... But Mama said that it actually might be true. She had seen, she had experienced how people could disappear. How these trucks drove around with ‘Bread’ or ‘Produce’ written on the sides. There was not so much produce in Moscow, and therefore they had to be hauling people around in them.”

Irina underscores, however, that “we are a completely non-political family. For each, the most important thing is to work, to help, for those who can, to help.” And her parents did not bring their work home, Irina says, for “everywhere there hung those slogans, ‘the enemy is always listening,’ The enemy. That’s how it was. There was always some sort of enemy...”

After her father died, Irina says, she asked her mother if he had been involved with the KGB, as that was very common for long-serving diplomats. “She said that they tried to recruit him,” Irina recalls, “even brought him in, but that he refused. He did not agree... In general, he wanted to be a teacher. He was very intelligent, Papa was. He was like our encyclopedia. He could answer any question. Absolutely anything.”

He was a very good man. Very smart. We lived together as best friends. We sang in the choir together. Second, we both were skiers. Then we took up table tennis. So we had common interests.

The family was always close, always active in sports and outdoor activities together, and every Saturday they all cleaned the apartment together. They were never rich, and Irina notes how humbly they lived.

“When people came to visit, they could not believe that this was the apartment of a diplomat’s family,” Irina says. “Everything was very modest. We didn’t spend money on anything... but we always went to the theater... we, the whole family together, went to the Moscow swimming pool, which is now the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Different things were valuable to us, you see?”

Galina never raised her voice to her children, Irina says. In fact, when she was angry, she would go completely silent. “Maybe she just didn’t know how to get angry, that her character was just like that. Better to be silent... Then we children would all be in a hurry to apologize.” Their father, the diplomat, was the one with a temper, Irina says. “He could explode. But it would quickly pass.”

Even today, two of Galina’s children call her every night to check up on her. Once a month, on special days, a cousin comes and takes Galina and Irina to a church three minutes away – Peter and Fevronia Church. Galina and Sergei embraced the Church in the 1990s, after the Soviet system fell. And in 1999, a few years before Sergei died, the couple had an official church wedding.

When asked how one lives to be 100, Galina is characteristically terse:

Do sports. Do something interesting. Make life good in your family.

What is the secret to long life? You must help people.

Galina is sitting at the table in the kitchen and asks for a bit more to eat.

“And what can I give your highness?” Irina asks in a love-laced reference to the family’s distant, noble past.

“Well, perhaps some caviar buterbrody?”