Genrikh Patrikeyevich Kreitser, who died on June 21st aged 65, was born at a dark time in 1937. It was the year when the Stalin terror overwhelmed Russia. As he lay in his crib, thousands of doors were beaten down in the dead of night. Tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands were sent to certain death in the labour camps of Siberia and the far north. Soon afterwards the terror reached his immediate family.
Genrikh Kreitser died in Pushchino, an hour's drive south of Moscow. Pushchino is a hothouse of scientific endeavour which concentrated its resources on biological matters and produced a successful artificial skin that assisted the recovery of severe burns victims. Pushchino, in its heyday, was one of the most highly-educated places on Earth. In its population of 22,000 more than 1,000 held doctorates. The town housed a university reserved totally for post-graduate students. There were eight institutes manned by 1,500 scientists.
It was in the institute that concentrated on "the mathematical problems of biology" that Genrikh Kreitser held sway. He was a genial, hard-working scientist and mathematician in his 60s, popular with his colleagues, overwhelmingly hospitable in his modest apartment to visiting academics from western Europe and the United States, humorous and good-natured to a fault.
He had, moreover, something that singled him out from his fellow academics. Genrikh Kreitser was Irish. His story and that of his family was a remarkable testimony to the terror that Stalin imposed upon the land and to the freedom of information which developed under President Gorbachev's programme of glasnost.
The key to Genrikh Kreitser's origins lies in his patronymic "Patrikeyevich". Russians take as their middle name a derivative of their father's first name. Genrikh Patrikeyevich's father was, therefore, called Patrick.
The story of Genrikh Kreitser's provenance has been told in the striking RTÉ television documentary Amongst Wolves - Stalin's Irish Victim, which was broadcast twice last year. Genrikh Kreitser's father was Padraic Breslin, a London-born Irishman who moved to Moscow in the mid-1920s and died in 1942 in a Gulag near the Volga city of Kazan, wrongly accused of "anti-Soviet agitation".
Genrikh Kreitser, who was born on April 6th, 1937, and his sister Irina were left as orphans and sent to an institution in the Urals to be raised. More than 50 years after his father's death a lifetime's search by his Irish half-sister Mairéad Breslin Kelly led to a joyful Irish-Russian family reunion in Moscow.
Irish citizenship, to which he was entitled by birth, fell naturally on Genrikh Kreitser, who had been given his mother's surname rather than his father's. St Patrick's Day became a special occasion at the Irish Embassy in Moscow when Genrikh Kreitser ritually brought his father home. The reception was always one of merriment and good humour, but a solemn moment became part of the tradition as Genrikh Kreitser placed his father's photograph on the piano in the reception room.
It was no ordinary picture. Research had unearthed the official photographic evidence of Padraic Breslin's imprisonment taken by his captors in the Lubyanka headquarters of Stalin's secret police.
Genrikh Kreitser's Irishness, and his Irish family, were of absolute importance to him. There was an Irish spirit of rebelliousness in him which, from time to time, emerged from under the layers of Russian passivity. At a time when payments to Russian pensioners were running more than six months behind schedule and few complaints were made, a telegram was sent from Pushchino to Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin in Moscow. The stark text read: "Where is my pension? - G. Kreitser." Payment was received forthwith.
Towards the end of Amongst Wolves Genrikh Kreitser was seen reciting an old Irish toast. It called for health and long life, for abundant progeny, for land without rent and finally for "bás in Éirinn" that he may die in Ireland. It was a wish he frequently expressed and was not to be. But the moist soil near the vast Oka River at Pushchino where Genrikh Kreitser now lies will forever be an Irish place in the very heart of Russia.
Genrikh Patrikeyevich Kreitser (Breslin): born 1937; died, June 2002