Richmond’s White Russians want to forget

It’s no secret that one of the most intriguing ethnic enclaves in New England has existed for almost 50 years in the little Kennebec River town of Richmond.

In the last decade, though, the stories about the White Russian expatriates who came to live among the Yankees has changed. Now, the occasional newspaper or magazine article speaks only of the decline of the once-thriving colony: how the generation that fled Mother Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution has been dying off steadily, and how many of the children who were born Russian in Richmond have since left the quiet, backwoods town for life in bigger places.

Yet the story, whether of cultural prosperity or disintegration, remains a colorful, exotic footnote in Maine’s history. What other Maine town of fewer than 3,000 people has two Russian churches and one Ukrainian, or its own chapter of White Russian Corps Combatants? Where else in Maine could you have bought a pair of handmade Russian boots, or found a restaurant where the customers discussed the glorious days of Tsar Nicholas II and the horrors of Stalin’s gulags while eating pirozhki and borscht?

I discovered the Russian colony in the pages of “The Girl Who Would be Russian,” Willis Johnson’s wonderful collection of short stories based on the people he befriended in Richmond. Once I had read of the aging Russian ballerina passionately dancing “The Dying Swan” to an unappreciative audience of locals down at the Methodist church, I wanted to see the place for myself. Did the ballerina exist? What of the other actors, musicians, poets, painters and royal relations who made this town their home?

Mostly, I wanted to talk to the surviving original immigrants, now well into their 80s, to find out what they thought after witnessing the birth and death of Soviet communism in their own lifetimes.

The town manager gave me a few Russian names and wished me Continued on next page luck. Of the 500 people who formed the thriving colony of the late 1950s, she said, only 100 or so remained. Many of them were old now, and didn’t talk to outsiders about their lives. I got the same message from the pastor of one of the Russian churches.

“The story is too convoluted,” he said. “Their perspective is different.”

I called Galina Panko, an 84-year-old Russian woman who served four terms on the board of selectmen. She came here from Leningrad with her second husband in 1970, and now lives alone in a house near the river.

“What is inside of me is the Russia I left, not the Russia of today,” she said in a thick accent. “Only the people who were deeply involved in the revolution and the Stalin disaster could understand. My husband was arrested and disappeared. I want to forget that time.”

I understood. Some of them had lost whole families to the brutal changes that swept their homeland. They had been stripped of their traditions, their farms, their religion, their dignity. They had endured refugee camps and Siberian prisons and the pain of relocation. And now their names were being carved on tombstones in a small-town cemetery on the other side of the world.

What they had to say could not be squeezed into a few quotes in a newspaper.

Before leaving Richmond, I stopped at the Railroad Cafe and Lounge on Main Street. Helena Schumejko was behind the bar, preparing for the late afternoon rush. She is 41, with large, dark eyes and a bright smile. She was born in Munich in 1950, and came to Richmond three years later with her Ukrainian father and Polish mother. As a child in the Russian colony, she spoke only Russian at home, attended St. Alexander Nevsky Church, dressed in traditional costume, and sometimes felt the sting of growing up different.

Helena left in 1967, raised a family in Massachusetts, and returned to Richmond two years ago to care for her elderly mother.

“I have come home,” she said.

Baron Vladimir von Poushenthal had bought lots of property here after World War II, and lured his emigre countrymen to settle on it with promises of a Russian landscape of snowy winters, tall spruce trees, and a river filled with sturgeon. After seeing an ad in a New York newspaper, Helena’s father bought a farm and 26 acres for $8,000.

He got into the egg business and eventually went broke at the hands of a crooked grain dealer. The family struggled, Helena said, but hard times in America was better than living under the dreaded Communists in a place called the Soviet Union.

“My father hated communism,” she said. “It destroyed his life. He fought in the Tsar’s army, and spent eight years in Siberia. He never saw his children again. We never had anything red in the house until I was older. My father hated the color.”

When Helena returned to Richmond in 1989, the strong Russian culture she grew up in was nearly gone. Cunningham’s market had very little Russian food on the shelves anymore, the Slavic restaurant was gone, and there were usually no more than 20 people in St. Alexander’s on Sunday.

But she fondly remembers people such as Mrs. Rodamanov, the concert pianist who gave her lessons for three years as a girl. She remembers the visiting Russian theater groups who put on festive shows at the church, the smell of Russian foods from her mother’s kitchen, and the chatter of Russian women as they walked down Richmond’s Main Street bundled up in dark wool.

And, yes, she remembers the ballerina dancing “The Dying Swan.”

“It was at the Oddfellows Hall,” she said. “She still lives here.”

Helena has never visited the Soviet Union that her father despised. With the collapse of communism, she probably never will. She is an American who was reared in the culture of an older place, a Russia that survived for 80 years in the hearts of her parents and the other members of the community. As they die, so do the memories.

“My father always said, `Lena, I will not live to see it, but one day the people will take their country back.’ They did, and I wish my father was here today,” Helena said.