Conor O’Clery - The Shoemaker and his Daughter

Conor OClery is a legend among foreign correspondents His new book will be welcomed by everyone who cares about good writing and about the human stories that enable us to understand the great movements of world history.

Richard Lloyd Parry, bestselling author of Ghosts of the Tsunami

By tracking the hardships endured by one indomitable family, Conor OClery takes us into the hidden heart of Soviet Russia a Russia bristling with vodka and nuclear warheads, food lines and empty shops, full employment and broken dreams The Shoemaker and His Daughter is an illuminating combination of history, politics, geography and humanity thats personal and close

Keggie Carew, author of Dadland

An absolutely terrific book moving, informative, an extraordinary story beautifully written.

Martin Fletcher, former foreign editor of The Times

A tour de force a sweeping account of the turbulent decades of the Soviet Union and the new Russia, told through the prism of a RussianArmenian family. The story features love, politics, murder, wars, and the fracturing of ties, personal and ethnic, brought about by Stalin and his Kremlin successors. OClery is a gifted writer.

Luke Harding, New York Times bestselling author of Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House

Brilliant! Conor OClery shows more about how people really live in the former Soviet Union than any foreign writer before him. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know about todays Russia.

Fred Coleman, author of The Decline and Fall of the Empire

www.penguin.co.uk

The Soviet Union, 1962. Shoemaker Stanislav Suvorov is imprisoned for five years. His crime? Selling his car for profit, contravening the Kremlins strict laws of speculation laws his daughter Zhanna will help to dismantle thirty years later. On his release, social shame drives the shoemaker and his family to voluntary exile in Siberia: for some, the capital of the Gulag, for others, the chance to start again.

Buffeted by historical events from World War II to Gorbachevs perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union, the chaos of capitalism, ethnic wars and rising crime, the Suvorovs enjoy the best of times and endure the worst of times as the communist system crumbles around them.

The Shoemaker and His Daughter takes in eighty years of Soviet and Russian history, from Stalin to Putin, through the prism of a family Conor OClery knows well he is married to Zhanna. Both intimate and sweeping in scale, this is a story of ordinary lives shaped by extraordinary times, and the triumph of the human spirit.

Also by Conor OClery

Melting Snow: An Irishman in Moscow

America: A Place Called Hope?

The Greening of the White House

Ireland in Quotes

Panic at the Bank

The Billionaire Who Wasnt

May You Live in Interesting Times

Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union

The Star Man

To Marietta

MY WIFE ZHANNAS parents, Stanislav and Marietta Suvorov, and Zhanna herself, are the central characters of this book, so I am hardly a neutral chronicler. Nevertheless, I have done my best to tell their extraordinary story as honestly and accurately as possible, and explain how their personal destiny was affected to a remarkable degree by the epochal events that shaped the Soviet Union and modern Russia, from Stalins time to the Putin era. I am overwhelmingly grateful to Marietta for her patience in recalling past, and sometimes painful, events, with great clarity, and naturally also to Zhanna herself. Thanks also to Larisa Airieva, Zhannas sister, and Larisas son Valera and daughter Zoya, who helped locate documents and photographs. Michael OFarrell, John Murray, Valera Airiev and Julia Halliday (OClery) made valuable comments on early versions of the text. Julia too had to revisit some painful memories. Michael OClery drew the maps, and Paul Campbell helped explain to me the craft of shoemaking. I am very grateful to the Irish embassy in Bucharest for hospitality and guidance. In particular I would like to express my appreciation to Eoin McHugh and Brian Langan, formerly of Transworld, who commissioned the book and helped me develop the concept. Thanks also to Andrea Henry, editorial director at Transworld Publishers, whose suggestions enabled me to draw out the emotions that marked the high and low points of the family odyssey, and to Fiona Murphy of Transworld Ireland.

A note on names and spelling. Russian names contain a first name, a patronymic and a surname. To avoid confusion I have tended to omit the patronymic and use the diminutive of first names, for example Sonia rather than Siranush. For the spelling of Russian names and words I have, where appropriate, used the more readable system of transliteration, using y rather than i, ii, or iy, thus Yury rather than Yuri.

Stanislav died before work on the book began. It was my great privilege to know him. He was a hero of the Soviet Union, in the best sense, and I am proud to own two pairs of shoes that he made for me.

How merry we are with our glasses of wine!

God willing, God willing, not for the last time!

God willing, God willing, that were drinking not for the last time!

Georgy Stroganov, Caucasian Drinking Song

ON 11 JANUARY 2017 a diminutive white-haired Armenian woman arrives in Bucharest, and takes a taxi from the airport to the Grand Hotel Continental in Victory Street. The heaviest snowfall in five years has almost paralysed the Romanian capital and she has to pick her way through high snow banks to the foyer entrance after the driver drops her across the street. She is used to severe winter conditions. Marietta Suvorova has travelled from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, six thousand kilometres to the east, where she has lived most of her seventy-seven years and where the winters are long and bitter.

She is joined by me and her elder daughter Zhanna, to whom I have been married for twenty-seven years. We arrive from Dublin the same day. Our purpose in coming to Romania is to find the World War II grave of a Soviet army officer, Lieutenant Nerses Gukasyan, who was Mariettas father and Zhannas grandfather. He died fighting in central Europe in 1944 when Marietta was five years old and is buried somewhere in Transylvania.

The Russian government estimates the number of Soviet military deaths in the war at 8.7 million, with another 2.4 million missing in action. In the chaos of armed conflict, records were often destroyed, leaving families to grieve without knowing where their loved one was killed, let alone buried. This was the case with Lieutenant Gukasyan. In October 1944 the Soviet army notified his family in the Armenian town of Martakert in the southern Caucasus that he had given his life for the Motherland. That was it. The letter contained no details of how he died or where he was buried.