A brief story of my Russian family. Grandparents #2

For Grandparents #1, read here.

They are #2 for a reason. I was much closer to my Dad’s parents. I had a good relationship with Dedushka Lenya, my grandfather on my Mom’s side, but I never had the same connection with him as I had with my Dad’s parents.

Dedushkay Lenya, born in 1935, was from Vinnytsia in Ukraine. His younger sister and her family still live there, and we keep in touch. In 2022 Vinnytsia was bombed by Russia.

Ukraine war: 23 killed in Russian rocket attack on Vinnytsia

Mom says it’s fortunate that Dedushka didn’t live to see the tragedy of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

My grandfather served in the Soviet Navy in his younger years and then worked up to a position at the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), the Russian equivalent of the CIA. He met his future wife, my grandmother (babushka Ira), in Leningrad.

Dedushka was a spy, though not in the front ranks of his organization, so the word “spy” sounds a little more sensational than in some other situtations.

Thanks to Granddad Lenya’s career, Mom’s family reached one of the top tiers of the Soviet social hierarchy, and she had the opportunity to see other parts of the world. In an era when the West was hidden from the Soviet…