Page 169 - Revelation

Svetlana de Rohan-Levashova. Revelation

loved me selflessly and sincerely. In the most difficult years of my life my father was
my "island of peace", where I could return any time, knowing that I would be always
welcome there.

He had lived a very difficult and stormy life and wanted to be absolutely sure that
I would be able to stand up for myself in any situation, no matter how unfavorable, and
that any misfortune could not break me down.
I can say from the bottom of my heart that I vas very lucky to have parents such
as mine. If they had been a little bit different, who knows where I would have been
now and whether I would have existed at all...

I also think that fate brought them together for a reason, because it seems that they
did not have any possibility to meet each other.
My father was born in Siberia, in a very far away city of Kurgan, which was not
the place where his family initially dwelt. It was chosen for them by the then "just"
Soviet government and was not a subject for a discussion...
So, one wonderful morning my real grandparents were rudely shown the door
from their beloved and very beautiful enormous family manor, torn from their usual
way of life and thrown into a terrible, dirty and cold carriage which went in the
intimidating direction of – Siberia…

Everything about which I shall tell further I gathered using nuggets of information
here and there – from memoirs and letters of my relatives who live in France and
England and also in Russia and Lithuania. To my huge regret I could do this only many
years after my dad’s death.
My grandfather’s sister Alexandra (later – Alexis) Obolensky was exiled with
them and the Seriogins – Vasiliy and Anna – voluntarily followed him, because Vasiliy
Nikandrovitch was not only my grandfather’s charge d'affaires for many years, but
also his closest friend. Probably one has to be a true FRIEND to have the courage to
make a similar choice and go of one’s own free will where they went, because they
perfectly knew that they went to meet their own death which regrettably was called
Siberia.

I always felt very sorry for our beautiful Siberia – a proud but pitilessly trampled
by bolshevist boots, land! Black forces converted it into an intimidating "earthly hell"
cursed by people, just like many other things and places. No words would be enough
to describe how much suffering, pain, lives and tears this proud but exceedingly
exhausted land has absorbed ... Could it be that the "far-sighted revolutionaries"
decided to slander and ruin it, choosing exactly this glorious land for their devilish
aims, because once it was the heart of our pra-Motherland? In fact Siberia has
remained the "cursed" land, where somebody's father, brother, son or even the whole
family died, for very many people ever since.

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