Reviving the Russian family tree

MOSCOW — As a child, Sergei Telyatnikov listened to family tales about his departed great-grandfather, a wealthy nobleman. But in the repressive decades of the Soviet Union, Mr. Telyatnikov’s family tree remained obscure and was discussed only in hushed tones behind closed doors.

Many Russians in the Soviet era knew little of their lineage predating the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and those who did often went to great lengths to hide it.

But with the economy now booming in post-Soviet Russia, tracing roots is a fad sweeping the middle and upper classes. Russians such as Mr. Telyatnikov are searching their family trees to get a better sense of identity in a country with a tumultuous and violent history.

Mr. Telyatnikov, now 47, hired a newly sprouted Russian genealogy search company and submitted the names of relatives in the stories that his paternal grandmother had told him.

Eighteen months and $2,000 later, Mr. Telyatnikov learned that his family indeed had a wealthy great-grandfather, and was related to other famous figures in Russia’s imperial past: Dmitry Mendeleyev, creator of the periodic table of chemical elements; Alexander Blok, the poet; and Joseph Billings, a British seafarer hired by Catherine the Great to discover a passage through Russia’s North Pacific coast.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of information the Communist Party would have welcomed.

Orphans of the revolution

In the Communist era, many Russians were denied party membership and prestigious positions in Soviet organizations because of suspected aristocratic bloodlines. The years of upheaval during the revolution and under V.I. Lenin and then Josef Stalin caused massive dislocation, and many first-generation Soviets grew up orphans with no knowledge of their past.

“Some of my friends who know about my family tree joke with me and ask if they need to stand up now when I enter the room,” said Mr. Telyatnikov, owner of a Moscow-based Spanish tile import business he set up in 1993.

Professional searches can take a year or more and cost from $1,000 to $5,000, plus transportation costs for sending researchers to dig around in remote, regional archives.

Many more Russians are discovering their family lines through Russia-based genealogy Web sites and computer programs, some of which were based on family-tree software popular in the United States a decade ago.

But many Russians get disappointing results. Specialists say few are lucky enough to find aristocratic roots such as Mr. Telyatnikov’s.

In Russia, 90 percent of the population were peasants before the revolution, so most Russians are finding out their ancestors were landless villagers.

Research is costly

“Those who want to find a famous person in their family history usually think they will be able to improve their status, but more often, they pay a lot of money and find out [their ancestors] were nothing,” said Mikhail Gershzon, a genealogist from the International Genealogy Research Institute.

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