It's hard to say exatly 'what' my family believed because their beliefs changed so much over the years. My parents both considered themselves to be Christians though they were at times very secularised and seemed to have ever evolving ideas of what the Bible meant. My father, Alexandr Merezhkovsky, was always a very non-conformist anti-state sort of person (almost an anarchist) and whilst he paid lip-service to communism had very little belief in it. My upbringing was a sort of 'Christianity' though I have never really ever been able to define it - 'Christian Existentialism' would probably be the best term. It was only when I met Stanisław and his family did I really start getting a good Bible foundation.
The Kaliningrad area was originally Protestant before the Germans were expelled in 1944-47. The Russian immigrants were a mixture of Russian Orthodox, Moslems (from the Central Asian Republics), and communists. I suppose my parents were a sort of 'unorthodox Russian Orthodox' though they rarely agreed with each other. In spite of not agreeing they nevertheless seemed to get on well together as people, though they often quarrelled on how to best raise the kids. We lived in a large run-down apartment (which survived the war) owing to the many kids in the family.
Father was away from home a lot as his jobs changed, beginning his career as a farmer and then ending up as a mechanic maintaining and repairing vehicles. In the end he tired of that and became a driver for the Kaliningrad City Council dealing with waste disposal. It was about that time, or a little before, that he met a second woman called Olga and polygamy started in our family.
There was nothing particularly religious or spiritual about the arrangement. Olga wasn't a Christian but they seemed to get on well together. There was never any quarrelling or jealosy over the matter. Mother was always big-hearted and figured that if it made father happy she was happy about it. She became very enthusiastic about polygamy and was probably the one who actually pushed him into the arrangement. Olga was not quite so big-hearted and secretly wished father to drop mother, but when father made it clear that he would never desert mother, the matter was dropped. Olga was quite well-off financially and that, of course, helped the whole family to some degree. Whether you would call the arrangement true 'polygamy' or not is a matter of opinion but it was nothing like the kind of Christian/Messianic polygamy that I live today with Stanisław and his other wives. But the one good thing that came out of my mother's pro-polygamy beliefs was that it prepared me for polyagmy which as a result came quite naturally to me. Mother always spoke positively about it and so I had none of the prejudices that most from the monogamy-only culture have.
I come from a very large family with many brothers and sisters so large families and I have always gotten on well together. I'm not the solitary type at all and get quite miserable when there's nobody around. I suppose that's another reason I like polygamy because there are always dear sister-wives to talk to and share with.
I've always loved nature and so whenever we got away on holiday to the northern costal resorts I was in paradise. We used to go to one of three resorts run by the Communist Party at Svetlogorsk (Rauschen), Pionersk (Neukuhren), and Zelenogradsk (Cranz). That all ended when communism fell and Kaliningrad became separated from the Motherland. My youngest sister and I used to go riding along the endless beaches and across the sandunes up the Kurshskaya Kosa (Kurishe Nehrung). Olga only ever came with us once and whilst the relationship between her and mother was OK there was never remotely anything like the kind of love that exists between myself and my own sister-wives. Whilst mother was definitely a polygamist at heart Olga was not. I'm not sure if really my father was either - the three of them seemed to be thrown together more by circumstances than by anything else. And what is even odder, from my point-of-view, is that by the time father met Olga he was in what I call one of his 'atheist swings'. Whatever held the relationship together (it has since fallen apart and father is back with mother full-time) it wasn't religion for sure, since Olga had no belief of any kind that I know of.
Virtually the whole of our family and all our relatives live in the Kaliningrad Oblast today, including my grandparents (now deceased), uncles, aunts, cousins, etc., and so I visit them when I can, though that's less frequent now that I have family committments of my own. My parents, brothers and sisters visit me sometimes at my home in Lublin. Every now and then I get the urge to travel north back home but now, as I get older, I find less and less attachment there. My home is my polygamous family.
Postscript (2016) - Her parents are now divorced and Kasia herself, since deserting our family several years ago, is now single (SBSK).
Author: KMK
