Irina Patrikovna Breslina: Irina Patrikovna Breslina was a distinguished Russian ecologist and environmentalist in a land where environmental and ecological problems are immense.
Her contributions to numerous academic journals, collections of essays and conference proceedings and writings on flora and ornithology were highly regarded.
Born in 1934 in Moscow to Yekaterina Kreitser, a linguist specialising in Japanese, and her Irish husband, translator and poet Patrick Breslin, her childhood was blighted by the terror which raged through the USSR.
Her mother was arrested in 1939 and her father in 1940. The trauma of witnessing her mother's arrest cast a long shadow over Irina's life; in the delirium of her final days she believed that the KGB was pursuing her and any unexpected telephone call caused her great distress and anxiety.
With their parents under arrest, Irina and her brother Genrikh were sent to a children's home in the Urals, where they spent some years before being reunited with their mother upon her release. Asked about her experiences there, she answered with typical stoicism, "We were better off than the children who were not sent there," referring to those who died of hunger and cold during the blockade of Leningrad. She spoke in private, however, of picking nettles for her little brother to eat, so that his fingers would not be stung.
The fate of her father, Patrick Breslin, remained unclear until many years later, when it was learned that he had been accused of espionage, found guilty of "anti-social behaviour" and sentenced to eight years' hard labour. He died in July 1942 in Kazan in transit from prison to a labour camp.
Irina studied agriculture at the Moscow Agricultural Academy, later specialising in botany and ornithology with specific interest in the Tundra. In 1987 she published a unique study entitled Plants and Sea-birds in the Islands of the Sub-Arctic Regions under the auspices of the Polar-Alpine Botanical Gardens Institute of the Academy of Science of the USSR. This study was the result of many years spent in spartan conditions living on the remote islands of the Barents Sea and the White Sea. She also worked for many years in the Botanic Gardens in Kirovsk, near the White Sea town of Kandalaksha, according to herself, the most northerly botanic gardens in the world.
She spent her retirement in the small village of Mezhozyorny between St Petersburg and Pskov, not far from the Estonian border. Her early hardships had developed her sense of resourcefulness and the produce of her vegetable and flower garden augmented her modest pension. In summer she rowed across the lake to sell vegetables and fruit to visitors at a holiday village; in the autumn she sold bouquets of gladioli to parents for their children to present to their teachers.
She had a part-time post as a natural history teacher in the local school and gave regular talks at the naturalists' centre in the nearby town of Luga, organising excursions to the forests and lakes.
From an early age Irina was aware of her Irish heritage, and was already familiar with the natural history of Ireland before a combination of good fortune and intensive research led to her being united with her Irish sister, Maireád Breslin Kelly, and her extended family. She frequently said that the idea of coming to Ireland had previously seemed as remote to her as a journey to the "cosmos" or outer space. In the course of her many visits to Ireland, which she referred to as being a "Skazka", or a fairy-tale experience, she delighted in discovering its beauty at first hand, visiting islands, bird sanctuaries, gardens, exploring the seashore and riverbanks. As Irina had no children, she derived immense pleasure from meeting her Irish nieces and their children in Dublin, Edinburgh and London.
When cancer struck in 1999, she responded with characteristic heroism, continuing to enjoy life as much as possible after surgery and between courses of radium and chemotherapy. Although initially the care she received appeared to be adequate, she later expressed a deep sense of betrayal by the state which she had served so well. Her monthly pension barely sufficed to pay for the medication she needed. When, in August 2002, symptoms of the disease reappeared, she went to the Oncological Institute where she had previously been under the care of an eminent consultant. It was closed, due apparently to a financial crisis.
Irina died at her home, surrounded by friends and neighbours and in the loving care of the local nurse, Valentina Fyodorovna. Plants from Ireland grow on the grave of her late husband, Renald Yevgenevich Sukhov, beside whom she now lies and where she has requested that Irish soil be placed.
Irina Patrikovna Breslina: born 1934; died January 25th, 2004.