The last of the Molokans: Russians' heritage kept alive in Mexico
He began sticking little labels on half the possessions in his house. He went back to the dilapidated church that his parents helped build, restoring it. He even went to the cemetery, pulling weeds from the forgotten headstones, lettered in Cyrillic.
Living among ghosts gives Kachirisky a strange peace.
The only thing that haunts the 70-year-old is a question that does not have an answer: "When I die, who is going to take care of all this?"
A century ago, hundreds of Kachirisky's forebears — members of an obscure Russian Christian sect called the Molokans — fled from the outer reaches of the czar's empire to the lush Guadalupe Valley 50 miles south of Tijuana. They built a bustling village under the hot Ensenada sun.
Wearing the garb of the old country, they grew alfalfa and grapes, cooked borscht and blintzes, and sweated together in saunas behind their houses every Saturday night. On Sundays, they sang psalms and drank tea brewed in samovars brought from Russia.
But years ago, squatters came and took their land. Now, villagers say, fewer than 20 remain who claim "pure Russian blood."
Kachirisky and a handful of others have taken it upon themselves to keep alive memories of that way of life.
The Molokans have gone into the heritage business. They greet the tourist buses that come over the bumpy road from Ensenada. They nurture and scrupulously maintain two museums. And they operate many mom-and-pop enterprises, including one run by Kachirisky.
But it's small solace, given the loss of the idyllic community of their memories. And the museums have sometimes inflamed local debate over who owns the past and who has a right to claim it and make money off it.
So Kachirisky pursues his historical restorations in this small town and continues to lecture visitors and tourists, not talking much to his fellow Russian septuagenarians — even though they are likely the only ones who can really understand.
"The pain of what happened affected us, all of us," he said. "It makes us so sad."
Kachirisky's wife of 47 years, Martha Lidia, is Mexican. She remembers how her mother-in-law taught her to make blintzes and borscht, which the Molokans make without beets. Today, the results of those unions are everywhere. More than 300 locals claim some Russian heritage.
The farms prospered as well. Neat rows of alfalfa and grapevines marched up and down the lushly rolling valley.
Many families built saunas behind their houses, where men would gather to purify themselves each Saturday night before Sunday's visit to church.
The idyll ended in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hundreds of landless Mexican settlers streamed into town. They stormed up to the farms and announced they were taking over, saying the Molokans weren't real Mexicans.
"They put on hats like Pancho Villa and carried signs that said, 'Death to the Russians,' " said Augustin Lopez, who is part Russian.
The Molokans pleaded with them. They showed a signed proclamation from Mexican President Porfirio Diaz, granting their rights to the land.
"They said, 'Why do you have so much and we have so little?' " said George Mohoff, who was born and raised in the Guadalupe Valley but now lives in Los Angeles County.
The Molokans were pacifists, unwilling to use guns and fists to hold on to their land. The settlers kept coming and the Molokans "were left with broken hearts," Mohoff said.
By the early 1960s, the minister — and formal Sunday church services — had disappeared.
Kachirisky was born here in the Guadalupe Valley. But he and his wife became part of the exodus, moving in the early 1960s to Pico Rivera in the Los Angeles suburbs. He stayed there 27 years.
The little English he learned in America still comes out in a gruff voice heavily accented with Russian. But his Spanish has no accent at all, and Kachirisky and his wife transformed themselves into Angelenos, like any other immigrants from Mexico.
He and his wife joined a Pentecostal church, put their kids in school and went to baseball games. They went back only for visits.
But by the late 1980s, a change in management had left Kachirisky unhappy at the mattress factory where he worked. He returned to the Guadalupe Valley about the same time a burgeoning eco-tourist trade was bringing visitors and museum money to the area.
For a while, it looked like this would bring the community back together — although many had stopped practicing the religion.
The Russians collaborated to put together the first museum in 1991. They rummaged in closets and storage spaces and came up with a vast collection of dresses, photographs and samovars. They helped reconstruct a town map, showing where everyone had lived. Children even began learning Russian.
But in 1998, a dispute over how the museum was being run led its director — a Mexican married into a Russian family — to quit and establish a competing museum directly across the road from the first.
Although their exhibits are substantially the same — photos, maps, bright Russian dresses and samovars — many townspeople insist there are serious differences. But those tend to have more to do with who put the museums together and how they profit.
Michael Wilken, an anthropologist who leads tours through the valley, said he believes the dispute stems from differing perceptions of who has a right to claim the treasured past.
"Whenever I hear the argument, it seems to be that 'So and so is making all kinds of money off this,' and 'They're not really into it for the right reasons,' " he said.
"People can have conflicts," said Julie Bendimez, director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Baja California. Her institution helped found the first museum and continues to fund it.
"I don't want to continue the war between them," she said, "but that's how it has evolved." She said she thinks the two museums "complement each other."
With the museums came busloads of tourists and students — up to 10,000 a year.
Soon, individual townspeople began catering to the tourist trade. Maria Samaduroff got a tourist certificate and, with her daughter, serves schoolchildren cheese and lectures in her back yard.
And then there is Kachirisky, who has turned himself into the town's one-man curator. It started with displaying his possessions and serving tourists blintzes.
Then, he turned his attention to the church, built in 1950. The roof had collapsed, and rainwater had poured down the walls and floors.
Kachirisky spent thousands of dollars and hours of labor, painstakingly putting the church back the way it was.
Dozens of teapots and hundreds of teacups sit on a musty shelf, unused since 1960. Alongside, sugar cubes rest patiently in their pink box, as they have for four decades.
"Before, when you went on Sunday, it was so happy," he said. "So much life — the boys and girls singing. Now when I come here, I just want to cry."