Secret in the Old Mansion by Stephen Mooser

But Uncle Vladimir, the brother of Belim’s father, was a passionate admirer of Putin and believed the family “must be grateful to the Soviet Union for all the opportunities it gave us” he dismissed Belim as a pathetic democrat who’d been “brainwashed” by the US. Valentina, for her part, felt no nostalgia for the old regime. But while Nikodim remained a blank, Belim was learning about the persistence of Soviet ideology even in the house there were portraits of Lenin that hadn’t been thrown away. Valentina continued to be obstructive, resenting her granddaughter’s escapes to local towns (“We have potatoes to plant”) and ticking her off for weeding the strawberries too slowly. Part memoir, part detective story, the book records her stuttering progress. It was the same with family research – Belim must be patient and take it step by step. The secret of embroidering, she was told, was to do it “stitch by stitch”. Dismayed, she consoled herself by making friends with a woman called Pani Olga, whose archive was textural rather than textual: a collection of beautifully embroidered cloths. But she’d had a dread of it since childhood and its criminal files were closed to the public. But the regional archives in nearby Poltava hadn’t survived the various upheavals of the 20th century: “It was as if they never existed.” She might have gone to the Rooster House, a mansion originally built to house a bank, later a home for the various incarnations of the Soviet secret police: the Cheka, NKVD and KGB.

Her one preoccupation was her garden, in particular her cherry orchard, and she harassed Belim to help out.īetween gardening stints, Belim began inquiries about Nikodim. But whenever she was asked about the past, she shrugged it off: “Now we must think about the future.” She avoided mention of the current war, too, except to complain that it had pushed up food prices. Valentina lived in a village in central Ukraine, where Belim had spent happy years as a child, and was delighted to have her granddaughter back. And now she had a reason to go back: not just to visit her grandmother Valentina but to discover the truth about Nikodim.

Having left the country at the age of 15, first for the US, then to settle in Brussels, Belim desperately missed it. And why had he vanished? The mystery was made more urgent by Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the renewed fight for a free Ukraine. I n 2014, Victoria Belim came across a strange entry in her great-grandfather Sergiy’s notebook: “Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.” Who was Nikodim? She had never heard the family talk of him.

Secret in the Old Mansion by Stephen Mooser