Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [222]
In the cramped, pitiful little room where the driver of the terrible truck had lived and died I wrote down from Alexei’s words his father’s biography:
“My father, Sergei Ivanovich Lyukhanov, was born in 1875, in Chelyabinsk District, in a peasant family. A fourth-grade education. Beginning in 1894 worked in the Stepanov brothers’ mill. In 1900 moved to Chelyabinsk, where he worked until 1916 for the Pokrovsky Brothers Company running an electric telephone station. He worked too as the Pokrovskys’ personal driver and would go to Petersburg with them. In 1899 he married Avgusta Dmitrievna Avdeyeva (she was four years younger than he, had finished grammar school, and worked as a teacher).
“In 1900 their oldest son Valentin was born, who served with his father in the Ipatiev house guard. Then came Vladimir, myself (in 1910), and a daughter Antonina. In 1907 he joined the Bolshevik Party. In the summer of 1916 he got a job in the Zlokazov brothers’ factory as a machinist. Later Avgusta’s brother, Alexander Avdeyev, the future commandant of the Ipatiev house, came there from Chelyabinsk. Lyukhanov set him up at the factory as machinist’s assistant and did all his work, since Avdeyev didn’t know how to do anything.
“My father never reminisced or talked about the Ekaterinburg period of his life.
“After the surrender of Ekaterinburg in 1918, the Lyukhanovs went to Osa in Perm District, where my father got a job at a lumber mill.
“Soon after that he and my mother separated over something. In 1921 she returned to Ekaterinburg with all the children and worked there as the director of children’s homes. On March 23, 1924, she died of typhus. Dying, she asked Serzh (as she called father) to be told that she had been wrong. Her oldest son did not carry out her request and only shortly before his death did my father learn from me about my mother’s last words. What I said greatly agitated him, and he was very upset not to find about it until the end of his life.
“Avgusta Dmitrievna is buried in Sverdlovsk in the Mikhailov Cemetery. After her death I was given up to a children’s home, and my uncle—Avdeyev—took my sister Antonina to Moscow. From 1918 to 1926 my father worked in Osa, where he was in charge of an electric station. In 1923 he married a second time to a German, a German language teacher, Galina Karlovna (who died in 1928). Between 1926 and 1939 my father moved many times—he had jobs in various towns in the Urals—but wherever he worked he was a mechanic. Finally, in 1939, he reached Perm. After the war and up until 1952 he worked as a lathe operator in an infectious hospital there. He worked hard and long and was always fixing all sorts of household utensils for the hospital workers. (He never took more than a ruble for his work.) He worked until he was eighty, and he never suspected he was entitled to a pension. He was very taciturn, he spoke rarely. Beginning in 1944 he lived with me and my second wife in our room at 30 Twenty-fifth of October Street. He died in 1954 and is buried in an old cemetery in Perm.”
All this was nearly a word-for-word repetition of what my guest had already told me. When I asked about my guest, Lyukhanov’s son replied vaguely: “I think someone did come and meet with Father.… I think he was here again after my father died, too.” That was all eighty-year-old Alexei could tell me. In parting, Alexei Lyukhanov gave me all his father’s remaining documents. Among them was a “Certificate” issued to Sergei Lyukhanov by the Pokrovsky Brothers Company in 1899, decorated with a tsarist medal and a profile of the man whose body he drove in his truck. And a photograph. One of the last. In which the former truck driver is a pathetic little old man.
I never saw my guest again, but I often think of him. And about what he told me. It was all too entertaining. As a rule, the truth is very boring.
Although … although at times I think my guest knew a lot more than he told me. And