8 December 2025
No need to school us Nikitinskys in patriotism
by Leonid Nikitinsky
Source: Novaya gazeta
On 30 October, a conference was held in the house of culture in the village of Kostino, Ryazan Oblast, on N. Ya. Nikitinsky’s Kostino economic activity. Nothing remarkable about that for Novaya Gazeta had Nikolai Yakovlevich Nikitinsky (the correct stress is on the second syllable) not been my great-grandfather.
Nikolai Nikitinsky was born exactly 100 years before me, in 1853, got his engineering education, and held state posts. For his service he was awarded several orders, including the Order of St. Prince Vladimir 4th Degree, which bestowed upon his family hereditary nobility.
Nikolai Yakovlevich’s marriage to Olga Ivanovna, the daughter of 1st Guild merchant and Moscow mayor Ivan Artemievich Lyamin, allowed the family in 1897 to acquire the estate of the Meshchersky princes in Kostino on the high bank of the Oka.
My great-grandfather took up potatoes rather by accident. His brother’s wife, Maria Efimovna Nikitinskaya, née Gracheva, turned out to be the owner of a collection of seed potatos assembled by her father, Efim Andreevich Grachev.
After her father’s death, Maria Efimovna gave the collection to her brother, who had somewhere to plant potatoes. In the 1910s, the newspapers of the day wrote about Nikolai Nikitinsky as ‘Russia’s potato king’—and people came to Kostino in wagons from all the central provinces for tubers to plant.
For him this was an economic calculation rather than a hobby or a whim.
In the early twentieth century, potatoes were not yet widespread in Russia, primarily due to the capriciousness of the varieties brought from Holland and Germany. Not that long before, there had been famous peasant potato revolts, and Princess Avdotya Golitsyna had said that the potato was ‘a trespass on the Russian nationality, potatoes spoil both stomachs and the pious morals of our bread and kasha eaters blessed from time immemorial’.
Nikolai Yakovlevich increased his collection to 511 varieties, which were sent to him from all corners of the world, and was involved in their selection—breeding seeds for harvest in the temperate zone. At least four such new varieties were bred, including the famous ‘Lorkh’, known to Kostino’s inhabitants then as the ‘Nikitinskaya-12’. My great-grandfather also developed methods for preserving potatoes for up to 3-5 years, for which he had special storehouses equipped on his farm.
Nikolai Yakovlevich died young, in 1911, but in 1918 his estate avoided destruction: the peasants had respect for the Nikitinsky family. Nevertheless, Olga Ivanovna was forced to leave, but the collection was partially rescued by Aleksandr Lorkh, who took it to the Institute of Potato Production in Moscow.
After the revolution, a kolkhoz and technical produce school were created in Kostino, though the unique techniques of selection and preservation were lost.
The manor house burned mysteriously in 1998, after renovation, when the first governor of Ryazan Oblast decided to build his own residence there. The school for peasant children that my great-grandfather built at the turn of the century was dismantled for firewood in a very Russian way: it turned out that larch, which it was built from, virtually doesn’t burn.
Nikolai Yakovlevich had two sons and two daughters, including my grandfather, Ivan Nikolaevich. In 1934, he was repressed along with 140 teachers and scholars in the ‘case on the fascisation of the Russian-German dictionary’ and later rehabilitated. For the most part, he was lucky: after five years of Vorkuta he spent the rest of his life (he died in 1953) going from exile to exile, whereas the directors of the editorial office were executed.
My father, Vasily Ivanovich Nikitinsky, born 1923, went through the war and in 1950 was expelled from graduate studies at Moscow State University’s Law School ‘for concealing autobiographical facts’, but he subsequently defended his candidate and doctoral dissertations, ending his life in 1992 as a professor of jurisprudence.
…Participants in the Kostino conference placed a memorial marker where the school had been, a school the local authorities hope to restore. The hard part is getting started. Maybe one day they will restore the manor house, in the design of which Fedor Shekhtel took part, and also the park and fountain, which used to gush from the earth all by itself thanks to an engineering idea of Nikolai Yakovlevich’s.
What is my point? In order to have the right to take pride in your ancestors you have to make something of yourself. ‘We are Russians, God is with us’ is a foolish boast, like a fish being proud that it is not a bird. We attend to our own ‘blessed ways’.
Our ancestors had ancestors, too, and ‘our ancestors’ is only in the Constitution that was mutilated in 2020. There is no need to school us Nikitinskys in patriotism.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
