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~ Vladimir Yakovlev (son of the popular editor of Moscow Novosti Egor Yakovlev), 2021
This man’s story illustrates perfectly the necessity for EVERY SINGLE PERSON to clear the energetic ties between themselves and their family’s past.
“I am baptized after my grandfather.
My grandfather Vladimir Yakovlev was a murderer, a bloody executioner, a checkist. Among his many victims are his own parents.
He shot his father for speculation. When she found out that, his mother, my great-grandmother, hung herself.
My happiest childhood memories are related to an old spacious apartment on Novokuznetskaya Street, which our family was very proud of. As I found out later, this apartment was not bought or built, but acquired – that is, taken by force – by a rich Moscow business family.
I remember the old threaded cabinet that I would climb in to look for food. And the big comfortable sofa on which my grandmother read me stories in the evening. Both huge leather armchairs, which, by a family tradition, were only used for particularly important conversations.
As I later learned, my grandmother, whom I loved dearly, worked successfully as a provocateur for most of her life. She took advantage of her noble ancestry to get closer to different people and provoke her acquaintances to confront her. Then she described these conversations in official reports.
The couch I was told stories on, chairs, buffet and all the other furniture were not bought by my grandparents. They simply chose them from a special warehouse, where they supplied property from the homes of shot Muscovites.
From this warehouse, the checkists furnished their homes for free.
Beneath the thin veil of ignorance, my childhood memories are imbued with the spirit of plunder, murder, violence and betrayal. They are soaked in blood.
And me, who am I myself?
All of us, who grew up in Moscow, are the grandchildren of victims and executioners. All of them, absolutely all of them. Without exception.
There were no victims in your family? So there has been burners.
There were no shooters? So there have been casualties.
There were no victims or executioners? So there are secrets there. Don’t even doubt it!
It seems to me that we greatly underestimate the impact of the tragedies of the Russian past on the psyche of today’s generations. Mine and your psyche.
When evaluating the scale of the tragedy connected to the Russian past, we usually count the dead. But to truly appreciate the scale of the impact of these tragedies on the psyche of future generations, it is not the dead, but the survivors that count.
The dead are all gone. But the survivors are our parents and the parents of our parents.
Survivors- it’s the widows, the orphans, the lost loved ones, the exiled, the ones who became murderers to save themselves, in the name of idea or victory, the betrayers and traitors they, the broke, sold their consciences, turned into executioners, the tortured and their torturers, the raped, the crippled, the robbed, the forced to write reports, wasted by uneducated grief, guilt or lost faith, the humiliated, starved to death, captivity, occupation, camps.
Tens of millions of people have died.
The survivors – in the hundreds of millions.
Hundreds of millions are people who have passed on their fear, their pain, the feeling of being under a constant threat emanating from the outside world – they have passed it on to their children, who in turn, adding to this pain their own suffering, have been betrayed put your fear on us.
Statistically, there is not a single family in Russia today that in one way or another has not borne upon themselves the horrific consequences of unprecedented atrocities that have lasted in the country for a century.
Have you ever wondered how much the life experience of three consecutive generations of your ancestors affects your personal world perception today? If you haven’t – think about it.
It took me years to understand my family history. But that’s why now I know better where this constant, unreasonable fear came from. Or the excessive cover up. Or the absolute inability to share and build close relationships. Or the constant feeling of guilt that has haunted me since childhood—actually as long as I can remember.
At school we were told about the atrocities of the German fascists. At the university – about the crimes of Chinese Hunweibins and Cambodian Red Khmer.
They just forgot to tell us that the place where the most horrible, unprecedented in its scale and duration, genocide occurred was not Germany, nor Cambodia, nor China – but our own country. And this horror of the most terrible genocide in human history was experienced not by the Chinese or the Koreans, but by three generations of their own family.
We still think it’s better not to know.
It’s actually worse than that. Way worse than that.
What we don’t know continues to affect us through children’s sleep, through our relationships with parents. It is simply when we don’t know, we are unaware of its impact and we are powerless to counter it.
The most terrible consequence of inherited trauma is the inability to be aware of it. And as a direct consequence of this, an inability to realize the extent of this trauma and the extent of our perception of reality today.
And it’s not that important who exactly personifies this fear for any of us, whom we perceive as a threat – America, the Kremlin, the Ukraine, the homosexuals, the Turks, the “deplorable” Europe, the fifth column, or just the chief of work or the entrance policeman and the subway.
What is more important is whether we realize to what extent our personal fears today and our own sense of external threat are actually just the ghost of that past that we are so afraid to look in the eye. ”
~ Vladimir Yakovlev (son of the popular editor of Moscow Novosti Egor Yakovlev), 2021
Translation by Manol Peykov
via Marina Sotnikova