Eudokia_Dimitry_Girev_travelSometime a simple map can tell a lot! There is an extract from new article by V.Prydatko-Dolin about polar explorer D.Girev, who was member of R.Scott’s Antarctic Expedition in 1910-1913. The map shows unthinkable way of Girev’s mother Eudokia to the Sakhalin’s Katorga (Russian Empire), which she endured in 1885 (violet), and the Girev’s way to GULAG points (former USSR), which he endured during 1930-1933 (yellow).

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Prydatko-Dolin, V.I. 2021. Demetrius is the son of Evdokia, the grandson of Simeon. NASC “Expedition XXI” (website), Kyiv, 1-19, fig. 4. (Ukr.) The first detailed Ukrainian-language essay on the polar dog-handler D. Girev (1889-1933) from Sakhalin (Russian Empire, USSR), a member of the Captain Commander Robert Scott Polar Expedition. The author found out a rare archival record related to his mother, Evdokia, and argued that the family came from Baranchynsky in Verkhoturye (Perm Krai, Siberia), and also clarified the old church names of all those were involved in the record of the birth of the polar explorer: not Semyon, but Simeon, not Fedor, but Feodor, not Ivan, and Joachim etc. After all, the polar explorer name was recorded in the church metrics as Demetrius [Dimitriy]. (What if his ‘girev’ family name might had Turkic roots?) In addition, a strange story was revealed: if tsarism once sentenced Dimitri’s mother to 8 years of hard labor and sent her from Siberia to Sakhalin, then Stalinism ‘thanked’ the polar explorer for participation in the Antarctic expedition and sentenced him to 5 years, and sent… in the opposite direction, Siberia. The total mileage is almost like to Antarctica! Not everyone will withstand such abuse. Therefore, Dimitri’s life was shortened not by an abstract heart attack, but by an NKVD attack… on his heart. How much do we not know yet? It turns out that after the polar explorer’s death, his widow returned home not to the Far East, but to Poltava-Sumy region in Ukraine. About this and other things read in the author’s new investigation.

Key words: Girev, Geroff, Omelchenko, Scott, Sakhalin, Baranchisky, Perm, Antarctic, Siberia, Ukraine.