Penza merchant Pavel Fyodorovich Nikolaev was born on January 11, 1867. His parents’ names were Fyodor Sergeyevich (1844-9.02.1900) and Matrona Dmitrievna. His father, a merchant of the 2nd guild, most likely came from Spassky district of Tambov province.
In 1869, he was trading timber in the neighboring town of Kerensk, and in 1871 he moved his family from Spassk to Penza. In the city which stood on the Sura River Fyodor Sergeyevich settled in the place called Peski where apparently he bought a house. By 1874, he already appeared on the list of Penza merchants and in 1895, he was in the 2nd merchant guild, trading different goods. In the last years of his life he was selling fish and mushrooms and running a shop. The estimated value of his real property was 47 thousand rubles. There is an entry number 14 in the list of merchants, having same-trade merchant certificate, for the year of 1913 which says: “A widow of merchant Fedor Sergeevich Nikolaev – Matrena Dmitrievna, 69 years old.” A burial service was read over Fedor Nikolayev in the Nativity Church on Troitskaya Street before he was buried at the Myrrhophores Cemetry.
Nikolaev’s fish trading business was kept up by his son Pavel Fyodorovich, who was assigned from the townspeople to the 2nd merchant guild. The trade was arranged on a grand scale, since in 1899 the Penza City Duma let Pavel Nikolaev, together with a merchant N.M. Tikhonov, a place for the construction of trade shops on the Bazarnaya Square on hire for 24 years. This location was really convenient for fish trading: right there, in the depths of the earth, there was flowing a small river Shelahovka whose waters were used in fish tanks and for refrigerators. A few years later this building at Moskovskaya Street 73 was expanded and given the name of a Fish Market or Fish Arcade. Till the year of 1917, Pavel Fyodorovich ran a fish trading business there. The building has been preserved up to the present day although adding a storey has somewhat changed its original appearance. Now there is a shopping center and some public catering places.
On June 2, 1889, Pavel Fedorovich married a petty bourgeois from Penza Evdokia Ivanovna Tersnovskaya. They got married in the Kazan church on Peski. They gave birth to four sons – Anatoly (1893), Evgeny (1898), Vladimir (1903), Vyacheslav (1905) and four daughters – Faina (1891), Antonina (1896), Zoya (1899), Sofia (1901).
In the early 1900s Pavel Fedorovich bought a house on Rozhdestvenskaya Street, 18 (now Gorkogo Street). Here the children spent their childhood. It was a one-story wooden house with several rooms. Since the fish trading was the main family business, fish scales were painted on the casing by Nikolaev’s request. In 1918, the house of the Nikolaevs was municipalized and estimated at 7470 rubles, and more recently in 2011, it was demolished, depriving the descendants of the chance to see the places of an old Penza associated with the life of interesting townspeople.
After 1917, Pavel Fedorovich worked as a gardener at the Penza Housing Bureau. In the summer of 1919, he was arrested on charge of providing financial support to the counterrevolutionary organization of Lieutenant Volosov, who allegedly aimed at the armed overthrow of Soviet power. On July 17, 1919, P.F. Nikolaev was sentenced by the Cheka (Soviet secret police) to the death penalty and on July 18, in Penza he was shot by a firing squad. Apparently the sentence was carried out in the Penza province prison; his burial place is unknown, though.
According to historical documents, Pavel Fyodorovich Nikolayev was a modest man living moderate and calm life. Hence the question arises, in whose way a 52-year-old family man working as a gardener could get? And, after all, who is Volosov?
Vladimir Dmitrievich Volosov was born on May 8, 1888, in Penza in the family of a merchant of the 2nd guild Dmitry Afanasievich Volosov and his wife Maria Pankratyevna. He graduated from the Penza non-classical school and then the Moscow Commercial Institute. Since 1908, he was on military service in the rank of lieutenant. He was awarded the Order of St. Stanislaus, the Order of St. Anna of the 3d class, the Order of St. Vladimir of the 4th class, the Order of St. Anna of the 4th class and other high awards. From the first days of Soviet power he fought against the Reds as a member of the Orenburg Cossack Corps, which was deployed and conducted military operations in Samara province. In 1919, in Syzran region, Volosov repeatedly gained the rear of the Reds and successfully conducted various diversions, for which he was thanked by the command with the formulation: “For skillful intelligence and dashing raids in the rear of the enemy.” According to some sources Lieutenant Volosov fled to Denikin’s army and there was no further information left about him. But whereas Cheka’s officers lost traces of his future, traces of the past led them to Penza, where a proceeding was instigated, after which according to historian S.V. Volkov 32 people were shot and 20 people were sent to a local concentration camp. Pavel Fyodorovich Nikolayev was among those who were shot; he possibly was related to Volosovs.
Such a sudden, cruel and meaningless death was an awful shock for the wife Evdokia Ivanovna and their eight children. Until recently, they led a completely different, peaceful and familiar life, and suddenly everything got broken. Orphans wanted to believe that this was only a dream, but it was a terrible and inevitable reality. Apparently, the family was in great poverty, and then the children went to different cities.
One of Nikolaev’s daughters was Antonina Pavlovna. She was a graduate of the Penza Women’s Gymnasium (1915) and an exceedingly beautiful girl. In 1913, when in Penza as well as throughout Russia they were celebrating the 300th anniversary of the reign of the Romanov dynasty, she took part in the festivities and was dressed up in embroidered traditional Russian clothes, sarafan and kokoshnik. After the revolution, she had to work as a clerk in vegetable sub-division at the Food Committee of the Province. On July 24, 1919 she applied to the authorities with an application: “I hereby inform you that due to the death of my father and my mother’s illness I can not attend classes. Please give me a leave for two weeks to sort out family matters. A clerk of vegetable sub-division A. Nikolaev ». Then there came frequent applications with requests to give a sick leave, and in October 1920 she asked for a month’s leave because of the upcoming marriage and apartment arrangement. Her husband was the son of a Penza merchant Andrei Mikhailovich Chikhirev; four children were born from this marriage.
On March 1921, Antonina, having a position of a clerk of oil and egg department, requested a leave, enclosing the certificate of the Higher Medical Commission, which claimed the necessity of operation. Another certificate said that she was obsessed and released from all official and family responsibilities. The life of the family in the years of Soviet power is vague. According to relatives, for some time the Nikolaev-Chikhirev family lived in the Narym region, and then returned to Penza, where in 1931 Antonina Nikolaevna died of typhus and was buried at the Myrrhophores Cemetry.
Sources: GAPO, f. 109, op. 1, d. 1081, p. 11 vol., 12; d. 1236, l. 10 vol. – eleven; f. 182, op. 6, d. 406, l. 317; 368, l. 158 vol. – 159; f. 9, op. 2, d. 1399; Shchukin .SI. Gubernskiy city of Penza at the turn of the XIX – XX centuries. – Penza, 2001. P. 147; Reference GAPO of 11.11.92, No. 56-T; Reference UBB RF for the Penza region. from 05.05.93, No. R-6; Information of Denisova Natalia Alexandrovna; http://napoleonic.ru.
