The following was written in June 2013 by Katja Post-Zyhlarz, the daughter of Nadezhda Innokentyevna Gorokhova who was Michael Innokentevich Gorohoff’s older sister

My great-grandfather Baron Ivan von Wahl (pronounced “fonn vaal”) came from a Baltic German noble family and was owner of a large estate near Yakutsk. His wife Mariya had gipsy roots. Only 3 of their 20 (!) children survived: my grandmother Yekaterina Ivanovna and two of her brothers. The first brother was a district attorney by profession, not married, and lived in Irkutsk. The second brother (named Nikolay or Nikita) was a merchant and lived also in Irkutsk. He was married, and his daughter studied piano at the Irkutsk Conservatory. During or after the civil war (1918-1922) she married a Chinese pianist, and they both escaped to Peking, China.

Once in a year Baron von Wahl travelled to St. Petersburg for visiting relatives of the von Wahl family, and for selling furs, gold and diamonds from the Yakutsk district.

When my grandmother Yekaterina Ivanovna married my grandfather Innokenty Mikhailovich Gorokhov, her father was shocked and very angry (“What a misalliance!”), and he disinherited her.

Innokenty Gorokhov came from Verkhoyansk, Northern Siberia. His father Mikhail Gorokhov was a jewish Russian/Ukrainian merchant, his mother was descended from an Evenk family. Evenks (also known as Tungus) are one of the indigenous peoples of the Russian North. Innokenty Gorokhov had two professions – he worked as schoolteacher and as ethnologist. And he collected folk-tales of peoples of Yakutia.

After her marriage, Yekaterina Ivanovna began to study medicine at the University of Tomsk, Western Siberia. She was the first female student of medicine and the first female doctor working in Siberia.

In 1891 a British nurse, Kate Marsden, was traveling through Yakutia. She was a leprosy specialist and was deeply impressed by the miserable living conditions of lepers under the Yakut people. In the same year she founded a leprosarium near the town Vilyuysk which is located about 370 miles from Yakutsk on the river Vilyuy. She described her journey in her book “On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers” (Cassell Publishing, New York, 1892).

My grandmother Yekaterina Ivanovna finished her studies in Tomsk and worked first for several years in the Vilyuysk leprosarium. She was living there together with her husband Mikhail and their children Musa, Boris, Gleb, Mikhail (Misha), and Nadezhda. Some years later they moved to Yakutsk where Yekaterina Ivanovna established a doctor’s office. When Innokenty Gorokhov deceased suddenly and unexpected in 1908, my grandmother said, “I was a spoiled princess. My husband turned me into a real human being.”

In 1915 or 1916 Musa Gorokhova married William Nathanson, a German army officer, and both went to Berlin, Germany. He was a prisoner of war and had stayed together with other German POWs in Yakutsk. For me it is a mystery how it was possible to get a marriage license and a travel license from Russia to Germany during the war …

In 1917 my grandmother Yekaterina Ivanovna moved together with my mother Nadezhda to Irkutsk because she had the opportunity to work in a hospital. In winter 1917 in several villages near Irkutsk epidemic typhus broke out. Yekaterina Ivanovna went there to help the sick people. Two weeks later she got infected and died on January 7th, 1918 at the age of only 43 years.

The fourteen years old Nadezhda lived for two years with her unmarried uncle (district attorney von Wahl) and had to work hard as his housekeeper. Afterwards the other uncle von Wahl took care of her.

WW1 ended and the civil war began. Boris Gorokhov served in the Tsarist army. In 1918 (or 1919) he was appointed as town major of Yakutsk. A short time later members of the Bolshevik Red Army killed him.

Gleb Gorokhov was a young student of theology. One day he tried to protect a group of farmers against an attack by members of the Tsarist White Army. He was shot.

In 1925 my mother Nadezhda received an exit visa for visiting her sister Musa in Berlin, Germany. She never again returned to Russia.