The Reluctant Conductor is the first in a series of four novels tentatively called Baranovsky Family, Exodus from Russia, an epic about a Jewish family, in four generations, living through the era of The Soviet Union and then immigrating to America.

The family lived in a no-man’s land known as Bessarabia, later Moldova, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova and now The Republic of Moldova. In England, throughout Europe and in many references on-line, it is sometimes also called Moldavia. Kishinev (pronounced Key-shih-NEV), now called Chisinau, is the capital.

Second to Armenia, Moldova was the smallest of the former Soviet Socialist Republics and is sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. Kishinev is where the Baranovsky family – and a large population of Jews — ended up through one of the most tumultuous times in history.

It’s a harrowing epic in which the relatively fortunate people in this story, like millions of others, had their humanity eroded, or they were dragged away from their morals of following the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments.

There were millions of less fortunate people who died. By some estimates Stalin was responsible for as many as 60 million deaths. In human history, only Mao Ze-Dong – who killed some 78 million in China from 1951 to 1969 — exceeded Stalin. Hitler came in third.

In the course of human history, there have been countless other bloody regimes. The numbers are mind numbing and staggering. Many books have been written about most of them, but compared to what happened in Germany in World War II, relatively little is known about what happened in Russia.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize for literature when he was the first to write about the Soviet gulag system, claimed the true number of Stalin’s victims might have been as high as 60 million people. If a lower estimate of 20 million people is the true number that still translates into 1,830 deaths every single day of Stalin’s rule. Each one of those people had parents, wives, children and loved ones. The historian Medvedev’s father was one of those people, as were countless relatives and friends of the people in this story.

These books attempt to depict what it was like to live through that era. It’s a vast and complex story that nobody who didn’t live it can fully grasp. Even the people who were there mostly didn’t have the perspective, education or media to know what was happening to them, much less anyone beyond their immediate realm.

This was all enabled by the fact that Russia was and is so enormous. The Ural Mountain Range, which is considered the border between Europe and Asia, runs north and south in what is considered the “western” part of Russia, though it is about 1,000 miles east of Moscow. It is considered “western” because there are still 5,000 more miles of Siberia east of the Urals. Russia is about 6,500 miles wide at its widest point, more than twice as wide as North America.

It’s also worth mentioning here that most Russian cities are situated far north in comparison to population centers in the rest of the world, which means they all have long, cold winters and short summers. Parallels are measured from the Equator, which is 0 degrees. The North Pole is 90 degrees north. There are no sizable cities on earth above the 60th parallel where it is mostly tundra and ice cap. To provide global perspective, the following is a list of cities and the parallel north of the Equator on which they sit: Anchorage, 61; Helsinki, 60; St. Petersburg, 59; Moscow, 56; London, 51; Prague, 50; Paris, 48; Kishinev, 47; Seattle, 47; Toronto, 43; New York, 40; Kattakurgan, Uzbekistan, 39.

Until it became accessible by airplanes, the internet and other global communication, Russia was so vast and so isolated that Russian leaders could do anything they wanted, and nobody knew about it, and if they did, they couldn’t do anything about it, and the victims were powerless and unable to leave.

Unfortunately, there has never been justice in the world, and history keeps repeating itself. Stalin sent people of all races and religions to the gulag but that doesn’t mean the Soviet Union wasn’t sexist, homophobic, racist and especially anti-Semitic.

Stalin wanted to send all Jews to Siberia. In fact, he set up a Jewish state that still exists, called “Birobidzhan” in the far reaches of Siberia on the northern border of China. This is just one example of how anti-Semitism is ingrained in the culture that goes back at least 2,000 years in a land that through a long, complicated series of historical coincidences became a place where, by default, there was a large population of Jews.

Jews in what later became Romanian territory, Bessarabia, Moldova, etc., have been attested to as early as the 2nd century AD, when the area was ruled by the Romans. During the next two millennia, Jews were treated with varying degrees of welcome. In the 14th Century, the area became a refuge for Jews expelled from Hungary and Poland. Around the same time the Spanish Inquisition occurred during which Spanish royalty ordered all Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism, leave the Iberian Peninsula, or be killed. The Jews that left had nowhere to flee but east. When they finally got out of all Catholic-controlled countries, Bessarabia is where they ended up. Beyond was Ukraine and then the vast reaches of Siberia.

In the 1500s, the area came under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. During that time, many more Jews settled in the region, though they were deprived of rights and suffered indignities under the Ottoman rule.

In 1791, Catherine the Great of Russia created what was called “The Pale of Settlement,” which was a region of Imperial Russia where Jews were allowed to live. The area encompassed Poland, Lithuania, Crimea, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and parts of Western Russia. The boundaries were reconfigured many times up until it was abolished in 1917.

During the Russo-Turkish War, 1768-1774, Jews in the area endured massacres and pillages that were perpetuated in nearly every town and village in the country. During the Russo-Turkish war of 1806-1812, the Russian invasion was again accompanied by massacres of the Jews.

Despite an extremely tumultuous back and forth in rule by various entities, the Jewish population in Bessarabia – being within the Pale — was on the rise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This growth was in part attributable to the “Treaty of Berlin” signed in 1878. This broad-sweeping treaty is what concluded the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, which was a decisive victory for Russia.

The Treaty of Berlin was the final act of the Congress of Berlin in July of 1878, stipulating the terms of when Russia finally defeated the “Tartars.” This marked the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Treaty of Berlin decided the fate of Bulgaria and divvied up the formerly Ottoman-occupied lands between Turkey and Western Europe. It was negotiated by the United Kingdom, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Abdul Hamid II.

As a result, Ottoman holdings in Europe declined sharply; Bulgaria was established as an independent principality inside the Ottoman Empire and Romania achieved full independence. Serbia and Montenegro finally gained complete independence, but with smaller territories.
Romania declared its independence but was forced to give back southern Bessarabia to the Russian Empire. They chopped what is now Moldova in half from west to east and Russia got the southern part, which included the capital city of Kishinev. Russia wanted this territory because it was heavy producer of grains, tobacco, grapes, cattle and horses and they built railroads in the province with Kishinev as a hub. From there, the products were carried north to Kiev, west to Romania, or southeast to the port of Odessa on the Black Sea.

The “Treaty of Berlin” also happened to stipulate that non-Christians in Romania and Bessarabia, including Jews and Muslims, should receive full citizenship. The rights that citizenship established were steadily eroded in ensuing years, but nonetheless, the Jewish population in the area steadily increased.
In 1889, there were 180,918 Jews of a total population of 1.6 million in Bessarabia, or 11.11 percent. By 1897, the Jewish population had grown to 225,637 of a total of 1.9 million or 11.65 percent. In 1903, Kishinev had a Jewish population of 50,000 or 46 percent of a total of about 110,000 people. Jewish life flourished with 16 Jewish schools and more than 2,000 pupils in Kishinev alone, and some 60 Synagogues.

Jews in Kishinev, overall, were better off than their coreligionists elsewhere in Russia because the city was the rich center of one of the most fertile districts in Russia. It was a big, sophisticated capital city with a cathedral and a train station with regular trains to Odessa, Kiev, Minsk, Warsaw, Moscow and many other cities in Russia. There was a Russian Orthodox Christian cathedral. In the arts, there were an opera house, a national theater and a music conservatory, all of which were heavily supported by the Jews.
Jews formed an almost indispensable factor of economic existence. The peasants in the region were neither advanced nor capable and diligent enough to sell the products of their labor independently. In short, the peasants needed the Jews, and this was a big part of why a tolerable relation grew up between the two classes. But there was also much tension.

Tsar Alexander II began his reign over Russia in 1855, ushering in a period of political and social reform, notably the emancipation of serfs in 1861 and the lifting of censorship. That was when Britain, France and Piedmont defeated Russia in the Crimean War. Tsar Alexander II attributed Russia’s defeat to its backward economic and social system – most of the labor force consisted of uneducated, superstitious serfs.

Wrestling with his conflicting motivations to preserve the autocracy, he sought to modernize. In doing this, one of his reforms gave partial ownership of land to the people, but never enough so that they could pay their taxes and make money. This, along with the industrial revolution changing the character of labor, as well as a host of other social and political problems was causing unrest in the entire region during the succeeding 50 years.

Amid all of this turmoil, there was a phenomenon rooted in the Russian Orthodox Christian Church called “pogroms.” A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. The first pogrom was as early as 1389 in Prague. The most recent pogrom against Jews was in Kielce, Poland in 1947. From 1881 to 1919, some 60,000 to 200,000 civilian Jews were killed in pogroms, mostly in Ukraine.

The Cossacks, who were Orthodox Christians, played an important role in Russia’s wars of the 18th-20th centuries. They served as border guards and protectors of towns, forts, settlements and trading posts, performed policing functions on the frontiers and came to represent an integral part of the Russian army. They were also used to instigate pogroms.

The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 stood out as particularly sanguinary. At least 49 Jews were killed, 92 severely wounded, 500 slightly wounded and more than 700 houses and all 60 synagogues were destroyed. Despite global outrage, almost nobody was prosecuted for the atrocities. For those reasons, it marked an historical turning point that became the motivation for the mass exodus of Jews from Russia throughout the 20th Century.

These pogroms — in accordance with worker strikes, peasant unrest and military mutinies — culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1905. Basically, the people were sick of being slaves to the Tsar. There was a mass wave of social unrest –fueled not in a small way by Jews — that spread through the vast areas of the Russian Empire. The revolution led to the establishment of limited constitutional monarchy, the State Duma of the Russian Empire, the multi-party system, and the Russian Constitution of 1906.

With the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria on June 28, 1914, a global set of age-old diplomatic conflicts exacerbated by entangled international alliances sparked conflict that quickly spread around the world. The war drew in all the world’s economic powers, which assembled into two opposing alliances. One was the Allies, which included the United Kingdom, France and Russia. The other was the “Central Powers” of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

The Eastern Front of World War I, at its greatest extent, encompassed the frontier between Russia and Romania on one side and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, Turkey and Germany on the other. It stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, opening fronts in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and the Sinai. The United States joined the Allies in 1917.

Russia had a huge army but a poor economy and had trouble arming and supplying itself. It’s success in World War I battles were mixed and all the upheaval ultimately resulted in the collapse of the Russian government, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. At the threat of further advances of German and Austrian forces, Russia was forced to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918. This treaty ended Russia’s participation in World War I.

In 1917, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, all of Bessarabia declared itself an autonomous republic – including the southern part that had been part of Russia since the Treaty of Berlin — and soon after with intervention by the Romanian Army, all of Bessarabia became part of the Kingdom of Romania. The Soviet Union disputed the legality of these acts and regarded the area as a territory occupied by Romania.

In the Soviet Union as whole, the Bolshevik Revolution ushered in an era of totalitarian rule that oppressed everyone, including and especially, Jews. In 1917, the Soviet authorities repealed the Tsarist legal system and abolished Western legal concepts including the rule of law, civil liberties, the protection of law and guarantees of property. Crime was determined not as the infraction of law, but as any action which could threaten the Soviet state. For example, profiteering could be interpreted as a counter-revolutionary activity punishable by death.

It wasn’t until June of 1940, under the power of Joseph Stalin, that the Soviet Red Army “liberated” Bessarabia from Romanian occupation and made it The Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova. Stalin had planned to accomplish the annexation with a full-scale invasion, but the Romanian government agreed to withdraw from the territories to avoid a military conflict. This action incidentally occurred before the United States became allies with the Soviet Union against Germany. When the Soviets took over, they instituted a series of campaigns of political persecution, including arrests, deportations to labor camps, and executions.

In 1941 the Germans, with Romania as an ally, attacked Russia in what was code-named “Operation Barbarossa.” Adolph Hitler launched what was and still is the largest military operation in world history in both manpower and casualties. Over the course of the operation, about four million soldiers of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along an 1,800-mile front. In addition to troops, Barbarossa initially used 600,000 motor vehicles and 625,000 horses.

A major wave of this invasion was out of Romania, being one of the Axis powers, with the heavily Jewish population of Kishinev in the crosshairs. In its wake, millions of civilians – Jews and everyone in Moldova – fled the bombing to as far as Uzbekistan and became refugees, camping in deplorable conditions. Hundreds of thousands of those people, along with countless souls imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, died of Typhus, which is spread by lice.
The population of Kishinev before World War II was about 120,000. By some estimates, 53,000 out of 65,000 Jewish inhabitants of the city perished. After the war, the overall population was 40,000.

For the sake of this story, it is helpful to spell out a few things about Judaism. First, Jews commemorate that God, after creating all that exists in six days, took the seventh day to rest. Judaism views the start and end of days with each sunset. Therefore, Shabbat, which is on Saturday, begins at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on the next day. The command that sanctifies the Sabbath is in Exodus 20:8, which states, “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it Holy.”

Judaism is largely about the preservation and perpetuation of family. The Yiddish word for family is mishpaha.
Jews believe in bashert, a Yiddish word that means, “meant to be,” but the concept of bashert has many intricate meanings. It can refer to any kind of fortuitous, good match, such as finding the perfect job or perfect house, but it usually refers to one’s soul mate. Jews looking to marry “look for their bashert.” Meeting a soul mate, running into an old friend at the grocery store, rescuing an animal or not getting a certain job can all be called “bashert moments.” Even further, bashert, can refer to the decisions people make that affect the destinies of themselves and their families as influenced by God.

Jews also believe in a concept that in Yiddish is called Gedanken. It comes from the same word in German, gedanken, which means “thoughts.” In Yiddish, the meaning is deeper, as it refers to free will, or the thoughts and decisions people make — apart from God — about their lives that may affect their posterity for generations to come.
This is story about the Baranovsky Family’s bashert and gedanken.