Lev Lurye: [...] He became a chief advisor, bosom friend, guru and beacon of unattainable standards for an immense number of people. He worked around the clock, but with a lightness of touch and a cheery attitude. He brought to mind someone from Pushkin’s coterie […] * * *  Senya had arrived in Leningrad from Moscow in search of a lawyer for his close friend Gabriel Superfin, who had been arrested for editing the “Chronicle of Current Events”. By that time I myself had graduated from the School of Economics, albeit with a few hiccups (I was kicked out for a pamphlet I had drafted in protest at the misrepresentation of Lenin’s teachings), but I was busying myself with Russian history, in particular the members of the People’s Will movement (Narodnaya Volya). Roginsky was building on the work of his teacher, Yury Lotman, by studying the Decembrists, in particular the lesser-known characters – Novikov and Gabbe, for example. He immediately began to ask me about the People’s Will movement (and this was pure Roginsky – focusing on the interests of whomever he was talking to). One of the things we talked about was the possibility that an extremely interesting document was gathering dust in some archive or other. In 1882, Yakov Stefanovich, a member of the Executive Committee of People’s Will who was under investigation in the Peter and Paul Fortress, had managed to send a letter to his émigré friend Lev Deutsch. This letter was intercepted by other members of the People’s Will movement and caused a tremendous scandal, with Stefanovich’s fellow party members accusing him of betrayal. Roginsky considered the matter for a while and, after taking a drag on his cigarette, proposed finding the lost letter. Not a week went by before he did just that, at “Dom Plekhanova,” a branch of the Public Library’s manuscript department. The document was a palimpsest – secret messages were written in milk between lines of writing in normal ink. We started to decipher and annotate the text, and in the course of this work we became friends. Although Senya was only four years older than me, he became my teacher, and it is no exaggeration to say that he determined the course of my life and was the single most important person in it. He frequently visited our home on Petrogradskaya and became close friends with my father, the historian Yakov Lurye. I often found myself in the six-metre kitchen of the Roginskys’ apartment at the corner of Frunze street and Yury Gagarin avenue. A huge range of people gravitated towards the apartment where he lived with his family, and there were so many of them – poets, dissidents, professors, American trainees, well-educated elderly women – it would be easier to list the people I didn’t meet there. After a while our families rented a dacha in Ust’-Narve, where Senya was arrested in August 1981 and taken to Leningrad. We just managed to smoke a final cigarette together by the Volga car in which the members of the secret police had arrived. After Boris Roginsky, Senya’s father, was rehabilitated in 1955, the family was given a flat in the Moskovsky district. Boris Roginsky, one of the chief designers of Elektrosila, had been arrested for the first time in 1938, finished his sentence in 1943 and carried on working as an engineer at the Northern Dvina Camp. His wife Elena Roginskaya, who taught Russian language and literature, took their two children and went to live with her husband, and Arseny was born there in 1946. After being transferred to Lodeynoye Pole to work on the construction of an electric power station on the Svir River, Senya’s father was arrested again in 1951 and sentenced to lifelong exile. He never left the Bolshoi Dom prison, however, because he died shortly after the investigation had ended. The terrible fate of the father, and a desire to understand how such a thing could happen, were major factors that determined the fate of the son. “The ashes of Claes beat upon my heart,” he once came out and said to me. The corner of Frunze street and Yury Gagarin avenue is adjacent to the Moskovsky Victory Park, which was where yobs liked to hang out. While Arseny was still at school he began getting into trouble with the police, and his mother sent him to Lodeynoye Pole to complete his secondary education out of harm’s way. After studying at the University of Tartu, he then returned to Leningrad. His turbulent teenage years left him with an incredible ability to make friends in many different places; those who sought out his company included Sergei Kovalev, Yury Lotman, the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Adam Michnik, an FSB general from the Lubyanka archives and his fellow inmates, including the shish kebab seller called Givi, a thief who went by the nickname of “Moscow”, and a Chechen whose name I don’t know, but who served time for cattle stealing. In 1975, when Stefanovich’s letter to Deutsch had been published in Tartu, Roginsky asked me to work on the samizdat anthology Pamyat, but after having discussed the matter with my father I refused on the grounds that they would arrest me straight away. Arseny did not insist, merely noting that it would be a huge mistake to see the world as a place swarming with informants, and that a great deal can be achieved while working underground. Roginsky differed from his fellow human rights activists on this point – the names of editors were not published in Pamyat, unlike in the Chronicle of Current Events. Perhaps that is why Roginsky was the only one to serve time for Pamyat, and why none of his associates were sentenced. Roginsky was an organiser par excellence, and everyone who found themselves within his orbit fell in love with him. His most important gift was the ability to find the strengths that lie hidden in everyone, to bring out their best and to put it to use for the common good. He became a chief adviser, closest friend, guru and beacon of unattainable standards for an immense number of people. He worked around the clock, but with a lightness of touch and a cheery attitude. He brought to mind someone from Pushkin’s coterie. The NGO Memorial, which he helped found and then led for many years, is a powerful institution and a monument not only to the victims of the regime, but also to its creators, in particular Arseny Roginsky. Goodbye, dear friend. Translated by Joanne Reynolds |
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