The graves of Jane and Jenny Wheeler. Photo: Vyacheslav Sergeevich Slusarev.
Friends and Shushary
Clare B Dimyon reflects on her visits to Shushary in Russia
In 1983, aged seventeen, I went on a Quaker pilgrimage to ‘1652 Country’ in the North West of England and heard a woman called Anne Wynn-Wilson speak about a Quaker tapestry that was just a gleam in her eye!
I recently completed another Quaker pilgrimage to ‘1832 Country’, to the Quaker burial ground in Shushary in Russia. This is where the remains of Jane and Jenny Wheeler, partner and daughter of Daniel Wheeler, lie. Daniel Wheeler was a Friend who responded to the request of tsar Alexander I for assistance in draining the marshes around St Petersburg.
The first draft of this account was written in a leather bound calendar-type book, one of a number of gifts from the administrator of Shushary, who welcomed me and my assistant Vyacheslav.
Earlier, we went to Veelerovski Pereulok – literally ‘Wheeler Lane’ – which was named in 2014, three years after my first visit to St Petersburg in 2011. Little did I realise that Shushary was adjacent to the airfield of the international airport at Pulkovo, where I had first arrived on my initial visit. This time I came by ferry to arrive for 15 July 2017 – 200 years to the day after Daniel Wheeler first arrived here on his preparatory visit in 1817.
When I told a Russian official that I was going to look for the burial ground in Shushary he apologised for disappointing me, but explained that Shushary was on and beyond the front line during the appalling siege of Leningrad 1941-44. So, he said, it could not possibly have survived. I wrestled with feeling so foolish for making such an obvious mistake, but another voice kept asserting: ‘I’m sure there have been visits since the war.’
Who knows what kind force in the universe led me to open Sleigh Ride to Russia, Griselda Fox Mason’s account of Joseph Sturge’s ‘deputation to the tsar’ in 1854. He went to Russia in the hope of averting the Crimean war. Yet there the reference was not only to Richenda Scott’s visit in 1961, prior to publishing Quakers in Russia, but also the account of another visit in 1983. I apologised for contradicting the Russian official and sent him a copy of the page! All the same, I, least of all, should not have missed the association of Shushary with the siege of Leningrad.
The Friend has carried accounts of visits to Shushary every few decades. There was one in 1892 and another in 1930 that reported the visit of Gilbert MacMaster, which resulted in a ‘Certificate of Protection’ for the site from the Soviet Institute of Agriculture. There was another account in 1983, with a nice line drawing of the two graves and the surrounding iron railings with red Finnish granite, but also another white stone plaque attached later to the iron railings. Ruslan Vladimirovitch Tihimirov, the chief administrator for Shushary, who had shown us the way through the undergrowth, pointed to the gash in the upright red Finnish granite stone. He explained: ‘This is certainly war damage.’
So, Friends, while the memory of both Daniel Wheeler and his family and the name Shushary have been precious to many of us, I have never seen any mention of the astonishing statistical implausibility that a cemetery, even a Quaker burial ground, could have survived not only 200 years but also being on the front line of the appalling hostilities of the siege of Leningrad. In other religious traditions it might be called a ‘miracle’. I just stood there in awe of this miracle. Ruslan Vladimirovitch explained that he would like to achieve some restoration of the burial ground and a clear path to it. I replied that I was sure Friends in Britain would want to know about this and might apply the workings of the Spirit to this end.