21/07/07
Helen Mirren reveals the joy of meeting her Russian relatives
by WILL STEWART
Dame Helen Mirren was thrilled when The Mail on Sunday traced her Russian relatives last year. Now we've taken her on the extraordinary emotional journey back to the country estate that was the family home until the Bolsheviks drove them out. It was, she says, more exciting than her Oscar night...
A pile of boulders stands on the edge of a thick Russian wood.
They are remnants of foundations upon which an elegant wooden mansion, once owned by the illustrious ancestors of Dame Helen Mirren, was built.
The actress has returned to a tiny hamlet near the city of Smolensk to rediscover her roots and meet the relatives she never knew existed. She and her elder sister Kate dig into the rich soil and plant three roses in memory of their great-grandmother, Lydia Mironova. It is a moving moment.
"I never thought we would ever be able to come here and do this," says Helen.
"I'm so pleased. I'm going to cry. It is not the last time on this emotional trip that the sisters are moved to tears."
Helen's planned journey to western Russia began a long time ago, perhaps even as far back as her childhood in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, when she perched on her grandfather's knee. Dashing Pyotr Mironov, an eloquent tsarist army officer, would recount romantic tales of his noble past.
Pyotr was working in London to supply arms to his country during the First World War when, in 1917, the Bolsheviks usurped the old order. His six sisters and Lydia, his elderly aristocratic mother, were thrown off their country seat, Kuryanovo, with its proud 'English garden', and forced to live in near penury in dingy Moscow flats.
Had Pyotr returned, it would have been to certain execution by Lenin's troops, so he remained in London, becoming a taxi-driver. For years he wrote to his sisters but lost contact with his family during the Stalin era.
Even so, he never gave up the hope, even up to his death in 1957, that one day things might change and that the Mironovs could be reunited in Russia.
"I was always the one as a child who listened to my grandpa's stories," says Helen, who was born Ilyena Mironov.
"I was captivated by his descriptions of this faraway life on the estate he loved, explaining to me where the stables were and his mother's roses. He was reliving his lost past by telling it to me, his seven-or eight-year-old granddaughter. That seeded my fascination and my desire to find out more.
"I tried so hard to find it � looking on maps and the internet. But the name of the local town was changed by the Soviets. I feared we would never see it."
The actress, whose name was later anglicised by her father Vasily, last year starred in a BBC radio play based on the letters her great-aunts had sent her exiled grandfather and on his unpublished memoirs, which she found in his wooden trunk.
But the last letter was sent in 1932, or so she believed, and Helen feared that her family had been killed in Stalin's purges. She travelled to Moscow in her search for surviving relatives, but without success.
"We just assumed they had been wiped out in the gulags," she says.
However, last October, after two years of research, The Mail on Sunday was able to track down Valentina Zimina, 83, the widow of noted Soviet historian Alexander Zimin. Alexander was the grandson of Helen's great-aunt Olga. We discovered that three of the great-aunts - Olga, Lydia, and Valentina - had married and had children and, through Mrs Zimina, we were able to trace their surviving relatives.
When The Mail on Sunday article about Helen's family appeared, the actress called immediately from America to say she was 'astounded and thrilled' by our discovery. She invited me to her London home to see old family photographs she had inherited, which matched some of the pictures her relatives held in Moscow.
She told me how much she would love to see Kuryanovo and gave me her grandfather's memoirs plus his hand-drawn maps and letters, kept inside his magnificent wooden trunk that had been made on his old estate.
We set about trying to locate the site of the old house, but the destruction of the Soviet years, the ravages of war,the lack of reliable maps and the long Russian winter, when the ground is covered in snow for five months, made the task extremely difficult.
Despite her busy filming schedule, Helen kept in close touch with our progress.
Days after winning her Best Actress Oscar for The Queen in February, she emailed saying: "I had a great night in Hollywood, but it won't be as exciting as seeing Kuryanovo!"
By June, we had located nine relatives and found the site of the house. Helen and Kate, a retired teacher, invited me to accompany them on their trip to see the estate snatched from their ancestors and, most remarkably, to meet their blood relatives.
She might be one of the world's most celebrated and successful actresses, feted wherever she goes, but Helen Mirren is utterly without pretension or grandeur. She appears just as at ease in a simple Russian cafe as she does at a lavish Beverly Hills party.
She arrives in Moscow with her sister - no entourage, no retinue. This is a deeply personal odyssey for them both.
We drive to Kuryanovo, two hours from Moscow but two centuries back in time.
"Oh my God, I just didn't think any of this would be here any more," Helen says, exploring the simple sand track that runs through the village where the serfs of her family's estate once lived, and where local peasants still pull water from the well.
"I'm simply amazed," she adds. "I thought this would have been destroyed in Soviet times, ruined by the building of ugly factories. But it is exactly as I imagined it in my dreams.
"It's so beautiful - small, brightly painted wooden houses with their vegetable gardens. It's very Russian, but looking like an English village might have done in Jane Austen's time.
"To say I feel as if I've come home is not strictly true. I would find it difficult to live like this. But I do find it incredibly beautiful, perhaps because it's in my DNA. I feel very happy here. I know my father and grandfather would be utterly astounded if they could see us here, that we had managed to find it."
Zinaida Laptkenova, 83, the eldest resident of Kuryanovo, has been expecting the star.
"It's lovely to see you here. We thought you might come," says the smiling babushka. Like other locals, she's been preparing for their famous visitor by watching counterfeit DVDs of The Queen.
"It's where our father was born before going to England, and our grandfather," Helen tells her through a Russian translator.
Zinaida has been crucial in helping to piece together the Mironov past. She has lived in the same simple house all her life - a remarkable feat in a region ravaged in the past 90 years by wars, a bloody revolution and Stalin's terror campaign.
She helped us with clues to locate the exact spot where the Mironovs' mansion - destroyed early in Soviet times - once stood, a place that Helen and Kate are about to enter for the first time.
Helen and her sister meet Igor Kobyakov, 39, the current owner of the land on which her ancestors' estate stood. He has privatised it from the state and now has ambitious plans to build "eco-friendly" dachas for the new moneyed elite.
Igor, whose bodyguards carry daggers in their belts, is vague about how he has made his fortune, but he is a warm host. We learn that he slaughtered a lamb that morning and, as Helen and Kate drive on to the site, it is being roasted over hot coals.
A table laden with locally grown salads and traditional brown bread has been laid in the shade of the woods, and the best Russian "champanski" is served to commemorate the momentous return of the Mironovs to their former lands.
Igor makes a speech. "I am really happy, Helen and Kate, to see you here," he says. "I own this land now but I am really happy to find out what a rich history this place had before the revolution. Now I hope we can make this story go on.
"Believe me, I will put all my efforts into it. I promise to try to rebuild this area with private homes and that farming will return to the land that was once your family's."
Helen replies: "For us it's rather wonderful that someone is going to bring a new energy and life back to this part of the world."
She speaks movingly of how her great-grandmother and her children had been removed from Kuryanovo by the revolutionaries and how one of her great-aunts had returned a decade or so after being thrown off their land to find the house gone.
"But my great-grandmother Lydia's pink roses, which she so adored, were still there," Helen says. "It was a part of the world my grandfather's family loved deeply."
continues ...
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Sunday, July 22nd, 2007
Actress Helen Mirren reveals the joy of meeting her Russian relatives
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