Remembering Nina Sudeykina by Dn. Igor Panuytin
My mother, Nina Sudeykina, was born in 1932 in a village some 100 miles south of Moscow. She was the youngest of 5 children in the family. This was a year of a great famine in Soviet Union because of Stalin’s collectivization. To survive, her father decided to move his family to the nearby city of Serpukhov, the city from where St. Herman of Alaska came. During the WWII the Germans, advancing to Moscow, tried to capture Serpukhov. The city was indiscriminately bombarded; I saw the holes from the unexploded shells under the roof of my grandmother’s house when I was small. My mother, 10 years old at the time, used to go to a military hospital to read and write letters for wounded soldiers who could not do this themselves because of injuries. For this, she received a commemorative medal 70 years later that she proudly wore on the 9th of May, the Victory day in WWII in Russia.
In the difficult years after the war she finished high school; then, while working at a machine-building plant, technical school and college. She defended her master’s in engineering while pregnant with me. To advance her career she joined the communist party. In 1964 we moved to the newly built city of Puschino, a center of biomedical research where she was promoted to the position of chief safety officer at a scientific equipment manufacturing plant. Nina was forced to retire after the economic collapse in Russia in the 1990s. All the family savings were gone due to inflation and market manipulations by the new Russian oligarchs.
After my father’s death in 2006 we brought my mother to the US to live with us. Even though she was baptized as a child she never attended church as an adult in Russia. She could not even attend my baptism in 1963 because a visit to church might end her career. From 2007 onward, she attended St. Nicholas Cathedral. You may remember her standing or sitting at the chair under the column to the right of the altar. In her last years my mother embraced our Christian Faith with all her heart. Her favorite reading became the Holy Bible and the Lives of the Saints. I always remember her praying, morning and evening prayers; her prayer book was falling apart due to heavy use. At first she helped my wife Irina with Sunday lunches and with preparing food for bazaars. However, after she turned 80, her health deteriorated; she developed dementia. Nina passed away in October 2018 and was buried at Rock Creek Cemetery. May her memory be eternal!
