Russian chapter in Anzac saga
Published in The Australian, April 25, 2005
IT'S the
1960s in Minsk, the capital city of what is now known as Belarus. Elena Govor,
similar to millions of Soviet schoolchildren, is being force-fed the
militaristic propaganda of the communist empire.
She finds escape in an unlikely place – a collection of stories by Australian
writers – and the future social anthropologist falls under the spell of the
outback, its people and the "Aussie spirit".
Four decades later Govor, who moved to Australia with her ethnographer husband Vladimir Kabo in 1990, has written her own "war book".
After completing her doctorate and a novel, in early 2000 Govor happened upon the service records of World War I soldiers stored at the National Archives in Canberra. It was the start of a new project, in which she interwove the stories of immigrants from Slavic and Baltic states to create a new chapter of the Anzac story.
Launched last week at the National Archives at an event attended by children and grandchildren of Russian immigrant World War I servicemen, Russian Anzacs in Australian History tells the stories of soldiers who struggled with English and were shunned as "bolshies".
Of the 1000 Australian-Russians who served in World War I, constituting what Govor calls a "forgotten battalion", about 150 fought at Gallipoli.
The book owes much to editor Roderic Campbell, who helped Govor put Russian thoughts into English prose, and to the archives, which waived the usual $16 fee per record. But Govor's journey began at the Canberra War Memorial in her first months in Australia.
"I was fascinated with how Australians remembered their military past," Govor says. "I grew up in a military-style education system . . . all our propaganda in school, in museums, in the streets, was war, war, war . . . World War II, the Great Patriotic War ... That turned me into a strong anti-militarist. I just hated it. It was something horrendous.
"When I came to the [Australian] War Memorial, I was touched that it was not a glorious military past, it was just very humane . . . the story of ordinary people."
Ordinary people such as Louis Brodsky, a soldier who had struggled to enlist. When Govor found his son Alexander, she learned why.
"He struggled because he had bad teeth," she says. "It is a story that did not fit the Anzac image. He enlisted in the army and disappeared when he got to Egypt. He deserted. My approach was to have all of the 1000. Each life is interesting. I don't want to judge them. [Brodsky] surfaced in Australia a few years later. He had tried to get to Russia but he was arrested."
In her meticulously researched genealogy, Govor uncovered the tragic story of military medal recipient Peter Chirvin. Honoured for his courage as a stretcher-bearer at St Quentin, Chirvin was wounded twice during four years in the Australian Imperial Force serving from Gallipoli to France.
According to Lieutenant-Colonel J.S. Denton, the Russian soldier's conduct was exemplary. But he was persecuted by his fellow soldiers and on April 16, 1919, Chirvin was found hanged aboard the troopship Anchises, a suicide.
"I am raising questions for modern Australia on what is assimilation; when can I say that I'm Australian," Govor says. "Is it when you lose the accent and you don't look different that you are assimilated?"
Sitting in a small room in her Canberra cottage, Govor shivers at the memory of school trips designed to promulgate patriotic propaganda. But the sun is shining through the eucalypts at her window and she brightens as she remembers taking refuge in her book of Australian short stories.
She recalls a Henry Lawson classic, "of a woman staying awake all night because there is a snake under the house", she says.
"She puts her children to sleep on the table and sits on guard all night. It was not so much agricultural stereotypes but more this freedom of people . . . that it all depends on yourself, that you can determine your destiny. In Australia it all depended on you. That was the whole world for me; it's a spirit of making [a] home, of relying on yourself, not on the state, not on the system or whatever, just in your own nature, whatever you could find."
Govor met Kabo at Moscow University. He shared her fascination with Australia. A Jew and World War II veteran, he spent four years in a Stalinist prison camp in the early 1950s for "unpatriotic crimes". In the gulag he studied Australian anthropologist A.P. Elkin's writings on the Dreamtime. On his release, Kabo was banned from travel outside the Soviet Union and he became a long-distance expert on the subject.
It is perhaps their talent for straddling parallel universes that led Govor and Kabo to become experts on the links between Russian and Australian society.
An invitation from the Institute of Aboriginal Studies – and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika reforms in the Soviet Union during the late 1980s – at last brought the pair to Australia.
Govor's doctoral thesis, Australia in the Russian Mirror: Perceptions 1770-1919 was published by the Australian National University. Her novel, My Dark Brother, is based on the life of a Russian immigrant and his Aboriginal wife.
Govor lives quietly with Kabo and her 12-year-old son Rafail Mikhaylovich Kabo, nicknamed Ralphie. Skinny and bright, Ralphie strides into the room with a brisk "hello". He hugs Govor and, in a perfect Australian accent, politely answers questions about his school.
Discussion turns to Chirvin's mother, a widowed peasant woman in Vladivostok who spent the '20s asking Australian authorities for information about her son's death.
Govor writes: "I have a special place at the Canberra War Memorial: the Roll of Honour of the 49th Battalion, where the name of Peter Chirvin is placed between the names of a [Briton] and a Dane. Chirvin is the first to whom I bring a poppy. I have chosen his name not just in memory of this man driven by his former comrades-in-arms to suicide; it is to remind us all about our past. Lest we forget."
Russian Anzacs in Australian History, UNSW Press and the National Archives of Australia.