In large megacities, it is quite common for representatives of one ethnic group to monopolize any urban specialization. In Moscow, for example, Karaites are known as tobacco masters: before the revolution, the owners of the main Moscow tobacco factories (Dukat and the future Java) were Karaites, and until the early 1960s, representatives of this people were directors of a number of tobacco shops in the capital. Tatars in Moscow in the post-war decades were known as janitors. Until now, they also work as porters at some Moscow railway stations. Representatives of the Mordovians, who began to settle actively in the city in the 1920s, were initially coal miners and cab drivers. This article examines one of these Moscow monopolies that still exists today, namely shoe cleaning, which has long been practiced in Moscow by representatives of the Assyrian diaspora. The author used field materials collected during the research of the Moscow Assyrian diaspora in 1992-2000.

More than one generation of Muscovites is familiar with the small "Shoe Shine" tents scattered throughout the city, especially in the streets and squares in its central part. Since the early 1920s, this specialization was monopolized by the Assyrians who settled in the city during this period-refugees from 1914-1918 from Turkey, and traces of it continue to be preserved to this day. For many decades, Assyrian cleaners were an integral part of the flavor of old Soviet Moscow. Some Muscovites, primarily residents of the areas where Assyrians lived (Zamoskvorechye, Tishinka, Samoteka, the city center, etc.), were well acquainted with representatives of this ethnic group. Residents of areas of the city where there were no Assyrian colonies often identified Assyrians as Armenians. For example, residents of Devyatinsky Pereulok (between Presnya and Sadoviy Koltso) used to say with a touch of disdain when they were going to clean their shoes before a date or other important event:"I'll go to the Armenians' place to clean my shoes." There were two reasons for this. First, the external similarity, from the point of view of Muscovites, Armenians and Assyrians, and secondly, the fact that in the first period of residence in the capital, Assyrians, being previously independent mountaineers, were shy about their new job and pretended to be representatives of other peoples, primarily Armenians. By the way, many native Muscovites still believe that it is Armenians who work in the boot tents.

Since the 1920s, shoes in Moscow are cleaned exclusively by Assyrians. Of course, this work was done in the city even before the representatives of this ethnic group settled here. However, the new diaspora that arrived in the city completely replaced all those who were engaged in this trade before it. The main reason for the occupation of the Assyrians-refugees in this particular craft was their almost complete ignorance of the language of the country (especially at the beginning), their lack of any professional skills necessary for

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life outside the mountains of southeastern Turkey. Shoe shine also provided a quick return on investment, which is important for feeding numerous refugee families. "Previously, in Moscow, shoes were cleaned by Russians and Tatars. But they were literate, they knew the language, they knew how to sign their names. They quickly became popular. And our parents came from the mountains. Refugees. They didn't know the language. They didn't know how to sign their names. So they stayed in the cleaners" (Viktor Babaev, born in 1946, Assyrian-diznaya). According to Nina Barutovna Zavzu, a Moscow Assyrian kunai, 1931. For example, the Assyrians learned to clean shoes from a Jew who worked on one of the Moscow boulevards. Unfortunately, she was unable to explain whether this was the beginning of the history of specialization for her group alone or for the entire Assyrian diaspora. One way or another, but by the beginning of the 1920s, in almost all the newly formed Assyrian colonies in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, shoe cleaning was the main source of daily bread. By the way, recently I had to hear another version of why the Assyrians were engaged in shoe cleaning in Russia. An old Moscow Assyrian woman claimed that her tribesmen began to clean the shoes of Russians as a sign of gratitude for saving them from the hands of Turkish thugs in 1914-1918. However, this is more like a romantic fairy tale than anything else.

I have also heard from some representatives of the modern Assyrian intelligentsia that this specialization was imposed on their people by the Soviet government through the "Union of Assyrians" in the mid-1920s. However, this version does not stand up to criticism, since the "Union of Assyrians" ("Khoyad-Atur", later "Khoyadta") it was organized only in 1924, and representatives of the Assyrian ethnic group were engaged in shoe cleaning everywhere by the beginning of 1920.

As I was able to find out from informants, before taking to the streets of Moscow with boxes and brushes, the Assyrians tried to earn their bread by various seasonal jobs. So, men of the Kunai group at one time paved the streets with paving stones and laid tram tracks. In the first half of the 1920s, many Moscow Assyrians were engaged in small-scale speculation in a number of capital markets, in particular in the famous Sukharevsky market.

The Assyrians, who came from various tribes that lived in the south - east of modern Turkey, including the independent (Ashir) mountaineers, took up shoe cleaning. Some exceptions were the Moscow representatives of the Shapatnaya tribe, who settled on Mytnaya Street. According to an old Moscow Assyrian, Yakov Yukhannovich Vartanov, they were engaged in the manufacture and sale of sweets, ice cream and other similar products in the 1920s. In the late 1920s, with the exception of one family, they left for Iran. Shapatnaya, who lived in other cities of Russia, including in the city of Yegoryevsk, Moscow region, like other Turkish Assyrians, were engaged in shoe cleaning.

Assyrians-natives of the Urmia region of northwestern Iran (Urmizhnaya), practically did not clean shoes in Moscow, as well as in other cities. They were engaged in small-scale trade, some of them having come to Russia even before the events of 1914-1918. and having managed to get used to it, they worked in many other structures, including the civil service. The leadership of the "Union of Assyrians" created in 1924 also consisted mainly of Urmizhni. This group of Assyrians, due to its historical development and position, which distinguished it from the fate of its Turkish tribesmen, was considered the most developed and cultured. The Western Catholic and Protestant missionaries who settled in Urmia in the 19th century, who were successful with the local Assyrians, instilled in the latter that they had the most correct Assyrian language, that they were much more cultured than the "louts" living to the west of them, in the Turkish Hyakkari mountains, etc.shapatnaya " - according to the tribe closest geographically to Urmia, without distinguishing them from the total mass of other groups. In the USSR, beginning in the 1920s, the Urmian intelligentsia actively promoted the idea

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that Urmizhnaya is the most literate of the Assyrians, that their language is the real literary Assyrian language, although in reality the Urmian dialect is the most polluted with foreign impurities. Based on the Urmian dialect in the USSR, a grammar was compiled, which was taught in Soviet Assyrian schools, the newspaper "Kohva d-Madnha" ("Star of the East") was published in Tbilisi, and books were published.

As far as I was able to find out, the relations between the Turkish Assyrians and their Iranian tribesmen-Urmizhnaya in the 1920s in Moscow were far from the best. According to one of the Assyrians now living in Moscow-Urmizhnaya, a native of Tbilisi, before his group was almost half of the Assyrian population of the capital. Unlike the mountaineers, who settled exclusively on tribal and single-family grounds, the Urmizhnaya families were scattered throughout the city. The attitude of the Turkish mountaineers towards their Iranian tribesmen reached the point of hostility, sometimes developing almost into outright pogroms. According to him, most of the Urmizhnas left Moscow for Tbilisi during this period, and then moved through Iran to the West. He also cited as an example the case of his own uncle, who during one of the conflicts killed a mountain cleaner and, fearing blood feud, fled to Tbilisi. Information about such relationships between Iranian and Turkish Assyrians was not confirmed by informants-children of immigrants from mountain groups. But, as far as their stories go, before the war, Turkish Assyrians of various groups constantly communicated with each other, and they rarely came into contact with Urmizhnaya, exclusively in the Assyrian club. This confirms the information about their estrangement. Active migration of the Urmizhna from Moscow to Transcaucasia in the 1920s did take place.

Initially, in the first half of the 1920s, when there was still no centralized allocation of parking spaces for cleaners, clashes between representatives of various Assyrian tribes who settled in Moscow over the most profitable streets and squares were common. One of these massacres, which took place in 1923 on Tverskaya Street, is mentioned in his article by V. V. Savchenko. Skorobogatov [Skorobogatov, 1931, p. 68]. He writes that this was the last clash of this kind between Assyrian tribes, but according to my informants, similar incidents, and quite large ones, such as the conflict between the Kunaya and the Ashirite Assyrians in 1925, occurred regularly and later. The most recent relapse of this peculiar "war for places" occurred already in the second half of the 1940s. At that time, many Assyrians who returned from the front from Khanlar (Azerbaijan) came to the city. Having looked for "bread" parking lots in the city center, where Moscow kunai were sitting, they tried to take them over through the leadership of the Moscow Cleaner artel. But the Assyrians of other Moscow groups came out on the side of Kunai and helped the latter defend their camps. In general, representatives of Assyrian tribes and individual families held fast to their "points" in the crowded streets and squares of the city, trying not to concede them to anyone. Such places were passed down in families by inheritance. For example, until now, on the square of Three railway Stations, the few remaining "parking lots" belong only to the Assyrians of Diznaya, and now the grandchildren of those who sat on these places in the 1920s are already working on them.

When the Assyrians ' Union was formed in Moscow in 1924, one of its earliest measures was the orderly distribution of shoe-cleaning places among Moscow's Assyrians. This was supposed to put an end to the endless "showdowns" due to parking on the city streets and other outrages in this area. The Union of Assyrians signed a contract with the Moscow Municipal Service for the rental of 745 shoe-cleaning places as of May 1925, which were already distributed to organized groups.

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in this way, which excluded the possibility of previous conflicts, although all possible violations still remained [TSMAM, l. 13-21].

Initially, the Assyrians arranged parking lots on crowded streets and squares of Moscow near the places of residence of their group in the city, next to their fellow tribesmen and fellow villagers. So it was more convenient to get to the place of work every day, and also in case of encroachment on the place of strangers to give the latter an organized rebuff. When the organized distribution of places began, this order began to be violated, as it became possible to get a good place through the "Union of Assyrians", and later - through the artel" Moscow Cleaner " in any corner of the city. But still, in general, the geographical location of the sites of Assyrians of different groups continued to remain within the boundaries that were laid down in the first half of the 1920s.

So, the Kunai owned parking lots on a large territory in the western half of the central part of the city, bounded by the Garden Ring, Arbat and Neglinnaya Street. Their parking lots were located on Gorky Street (Tverskaya), Teatralnaya Square and other prominent places of the city, including almost all famous Moscow theaters. Those who lived in the Presnya and Tishinka areas of Jilvaya cleaned their shoes both in the area of their residence, and on Belorussky Railway Station Square, Mayakovsky Square, adjacent to the last part of the Garden Ring, Novoslobodskaya Street and along Leningradsky Prospekt. Assyrians who lived on Taganka (Gyavarnaya and nudyznaya) worked on Taganskaya Square, at the Kursky Railway station, on Solyanka, on the squares of Krestyanskaya and Abelmanovskaya outposts. Assyrians of Zamoskvorechye and the adjacent Zatsepy and Mytnaya Streets, mostly Gyavarnaya, as well as some Shapatnaya and Dzhilvaya, cleaned their shoes in their area, including at Paveletsky railway station, on Serpukhovskaya Square and further to Danilovsky Market. Gavarnaya from Oktyabrskaya Street sat in parking lots along Sushchevsky Val Street from Rizhsky Railway Station and Krestovsky (now Rizhsky) Market, inclusive, to Savelovsky Railway station. Their outlets were also located near the Butyrsky market, "Durov's corner" and on Mira Avenue. Diznaya with Gravity has long been chosen by the area of Three railway stations. Their parking lots were also located on Mira Avenue, on the Garden Ring and in other places. On Smolenskaya Square and the surrounding streets, albaknai people who lived nearby were cleaning their shoes. The locations of parking lots often changed due to new construction in one or another part of the city, the will of the architect, and for other reasons. But, despite this, in the city you can find points that have been in their place since the first half of the 1920s. So, the parking lot on Nikitsky Vorota Square has been continuously operating since 1924. The parking lot, located at the beginning of the Kuznetsky Bridge, near the corner with Pushkinskaya Street (now Bolshaya Dmitrovka), began its history in 1921.

Quite an interesting place was the square in front of the Kursk railway station. Here, since 1920, a large number of parking lots of cleaners who lived in the Taganka area appeared, which were located in an arc around the perimeter of the square. Since the second half of the 1940s, Moscow Assyrians jokingly called this place "Kursk Bulge". There was even a joke:

"Where were you during the war?"

- I spent all four years on the Kursk Bulge, cleaning my shoes.

Many tents existed on this square until the early 1990s, when almost all of them were removed.

The first sites of Assyrian cleaners were quite simple. Their main "equipment" was a box where the client put his foot, a jar of shoe polish and brushes. All this the cleaner brought with him. In the 1930s, the Moscow Cleaner artel was organized, bringing together all the Assyrians involved in this trade in Moscow. By 1936, she installed stationary "cabinets" on the streets, from which two seats were pulled out, for the client and the cleaner, and after the end of the working day

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the box, brushes and accessories were removed there. In the late 1940s, the cabinets were replaced by tents. They were made of wood and were very warm and comfortable. In 1954, the artel was transformed first into a trade union, and then into a system of factories as part of the Moscow household service. Those who worked in parking lots now have the opportunity to receive a pension when they reach the appropriate age. In 1957, for the first Moscow festival, metal tents were put up instead of wooden tents, which can still be found on some streets of the capital. To celebrate the 850th anniversary of Moscow, most of the remaining ones were replaced with new booths. Assyrians do not like them very much, because in the heat it is impossible to breathe in them, and in the cold it is difficult to warm them.

The factories that were part of the household services system lasted until the early 1990s, when they were partially converted into an LLP, and for the most part ceased to exist, as most of the Assyrians still employed in the field bought out their outlets. In total, there were nine factories, eight of which united points scattered around the districts, and one, located at 9 Kulakov Pereulok, was the main enterprise.

The cost of shoe cleaning, according to David Ishoevich Mirza, who worked for a long time as a factory supervisor, did not change until the early 1990s: 10 kopecks for shoes and 20 kopecks for boots in the prices of 1936: of course, taking into account price fluctuations in subsequent years. Since the early 1990s, while the tents were still cleaning shoes, the price became negotiable. The cleaners, like all employees of the household service, had a day off on Monday.

If initially there were 745 parking lots in Moscow, where Assyrian cleaners worked [TSMAM, l. 21], then in subsequent times their number gradually decreased, although very slowly. According to the same D. I. Mirza, there were at least 600 "Assyrian" tents in the city in the early 1970s. Then they were quickly removed. By the time of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, parking spaces at the entrance to the platforms of all Moscow railway stations were eliminated. Back in the 1970s, there were at least two dozen parking lots in the area of the Three Railway Stations Square. Many other crowded places in Moscow also kept up with her in their number. So, along Gorky Street, tents were standing almost at every step, on Serpukhovskaya Square there were ten of them, on Nikitsky Vorota Square there were originally seven points.

In the initial period of specialization in shoe cleaning, when there was still no centralized distribution of shoe polish and accessories, the Assyrians extracted or made everything they needed themselves. A few years ago, in one of the tents, I was shown old homemade horsehair brushes made in the 1920s. Unlike modern ones, they were reliable in use, easily washed in hot water from stuck shoe polish and served for a very long time. After the appearance of the Moscow Cleaner artel, everything necessary was distributed through it. However, the artful shoe polish and fittings were not of very good quality, and the cleaners still had to look for other ways to purchase them. According to the stories of many old-timers of Assyria, until the early 1950s, gutalin was purchased from Romanovsky Jews living in the Samoteka area. Members of this family lived in 1st Volkonsky Lane and on Troitskaya Street, both places being adjacent to Assyrians. In Volkonsky Lane they had a small wooden shed, where they were engaged in cooking gutalin under a patent. Cooked exclusively to order. Their clients were Assyrian cleaners from all over Moscow. According to Nina Zavzu, who as a child often went to them on behalf of her parents to buy shoe polish, these were two brothers, who by the 1940s were already at the age of Lev and Abram.

According to the stories of Assyrians, whose parents worked on Kursky Railway Station Square before the war, until 1937, at the corner of the Garden Ring and Verkhnyaya Syromyatnicheskaya Street, on the site of a modern house with a store "Lyudmila", there was a small laboratory, as well as

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it was owned by Jewish private traders, where local cleaners bought good-quality shoe polish, carefully packaged in tin cans. In 1937, the owners of this warehouse were repressed. Zamoskvoretsky Assyrians remember how their parents bought gutalin from an old Jew who brewed it, who worked at the Pyatnitsky market. No one has ever been able to tell me his name. Gutalin for Assyrians was brewed by representatives of Jewish nationality not only in Moscow. I was able to hear similar information in 1994 from the Assyrians in Vladimir.

The accessories needed for sale through shoe outlets also had to be made on the side. By the beginning of the 1930s, the Assyrians-diznaya, who lived on their own, rented a small shed in the courtyard of one of the houses on the 4th passage of Maryina Roscha, where they set up the production of laces, insoles, "podpyatochnikov", etc.Residents of the surrounding houses were engaged in the production of products, for whom this was a good opportunity to earn extra money. Similarly, in Oktyabrsky Proezd, near the Museum of the Soviet Army, almost the entire local population was engaged in custom-made fittings for Assyrian cleaners. The main consumers of their products were Assyrians who lived nearby, at the beginning of Oktyabrskaya Street, behind the Soviet Army Theater. This fishery lasted here almost until 1960. It is possible that similar "productions" existed in other places of the capital.

Non-Assyrians working in the shoe yards were quite rare. As a rule, they were mostly women who were married to Assyrians and helped their spouses. After the war, at the beginning of Maroseyka Street, a Russian woman worked in the parking lot - the widow of an Assyrian who died at the front. I was able to find information about one rather unique case where Karaim worked as a shoe shiner. His name was Semyon (Solomon) Katyk. According to the stories of old-timers who knew him personally, in the early 1940s. he was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, nominated from the military unit in which he fought. At the front, he was seriously wounded and left disabled. The Karaite tribesmen then jokingly began to call Katyk "a member of the Council From the Other World." The former position of deputy helped him find a job in a structure monopolized exclusively by Assyrians, and get a good point on the Riga Railway Station square. Semyon Katyk worked here from the second half of the 1940s to the beginning of the 1960s, when he was killed in a traffic accident on the square.

Currently, some" Assyrian " tents that specialize in shoe repair are run by Armenians. An Azerbaijani man works in one of the two repair points located near the Baumanskaya metro station. There are cases when Assyrians - owners of outlets, working in other, more qualified and paid jobs, in order not to lose their places, hire people from outside to work in them.

Soon after mastering the specialty of cleaners, Assyrians began to provide their clients with services related to minor shoe repairs, such as pouring galoshes, lining heels, horseshoes, etc.Soon many points switched to minor shoe repairs. Among those engaged in the latter, people from Khanlar (Azerbaijan) who actively settled in Moscow in the post-war decades are particularly distinguished. They are considered the best masters, and they have the best points in the city. Khanlar Assyrians are descendants of the inhabitants of the southern coast of Lake Van, mainly Nudiznaya, as well as Catholic Assyrians from Botan. Fleeing from the massacre in 1915, they passed through Azerbaijan and came across the German colony of Elenindorf (until 1938 it was called Khanlar). Seeing the German church and the Christian population, the Assyrians decided to settle here, taking on the colonists as laborers. During their time living side by side with the Germans, the Assyrians adopted their accuracy and serious attitude to work, which later began to distinguish the Khanlars.

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Already in the 1920s, Assyrians-refugees in Moscow, in addition to shoe cleaning, began to master other specialties. This was also facilitated by the educational activities of the "Union of Assyrians". This company organized an electromechanical workshop, which produced parts of machines for textile production, rheostats, etc., and also carried out repair work. The workshop was an educational and production combine, where Assyrians received the necessary qualifications, after which they were sent to industrial enterprises. The Util-rubin artel was also established, employing over 250 Assyrians, 50 of whom were women (Badreev and Rabinkov, 1933, pp. 64-65). According to the old-timers of Assyria, before the war, the old people encouraged young people to learn new urban specialties. Sincerely hoping to return to their native lands, they said:: "You are learning. When we return to our homeland, we will need builders, doctors, and engineers to develop our land... all specialties will be useful...". However, these dreams of the old people were not destined to come true. The assimilation of other professions by the Assyrians did not lead to the abandonment of shoe cleaning. Many of them, as a rule, went to work in parking lots after retirement. This continues to this day.

Being an integral part of the city's color for many decades, Assyrian cleaners let many representatives of the capital's creative elite of the past years pass through their parking lots. Especially lucky were the Kunai, who lived in the city center and kept parking lots in such prominent places as Gorky Street, near theaters, central restaurants, etc. Working until the second half of the 1940s at the service entrance of the Bolshoi Theater, Gevargiz Veniaminov regularly helped S. Ya. Lemeshev get away from annoying female fans. Many other theater celebrities also "passed" through it. I. S. Kozlovsky, M. D. Mikhailov, M. O. Reisen, O. B. Lepeshinskaya, G. S. Ulanova, and young Maya Plisetskaya regularly cleaned his shoes. The Assyrians who cleaned their shoes on Gorky Street knew well Mikhail Zharov, Lyudmila Tselikovskaya, and many other celebrities who lived there. The latter knew the cleaners personally and always greeted them. We went to their parking lots not only to clean our shoes, but also just to talk. As a rule, the cleaner who worked near a particular theater was always aware of all the events taking place in it, both creative and behind-the-scenes. Back in the 1970s, in the lobby of the Moscow hotel, there was a point of cleaning, which everyone knew as "Uncle Misha". He also "passed" through all the famous guests, many of whom he knew personally, in particular M. Sholokhov. Celebrities and ordinary Muscovites liked to go to a shoemaker they knew, talk about life, and sometimes, hiding from prying eyes with the curtains of a shoemaker's stall, take a hot drink. Some particularly colorful Assyrians often became the heroes of newspaper reports of the capital's publications.

Sometimes Moscow cleaners-Assyrians even found themselves on the pages of masterpieces of Russian literature. Thus, in Ilf and Petrov's "Twelve Chairs", a cleaner who worked at the corner of Tverskaya (Gorky) and Kamergersky Lane is mentioned: "...And for all that, he remained unknown, although in his art he was the same master as Chaliapin-in singing, Gorky in literature, Melnikov in ice skating, and the most nosy, brownest Assyrian, who occupies the best place on the corner of Tverskaya and Kamergersky, is cleaning his boots with yellow cream. Chaliapin sang, Gorky wrote a great novel. Capablanca was preparing for the match with Alekhine. Melnikov broke records. The Assyrian brought the shoes of citizens to a sunny shine" [Ilf, Petrov, 1974, p. 167]. As I was able to find out, in the late 1930s, Tawer Zumaev, an Assyrian kunaya, worked at this place. He died in 1953 at the age of 54. It is possible that either he, or one of his older relatives who had previously worked at this place, inspired the writing of these lines wandering through the streets of Moscow in search of syuzhe-

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tov for a future book by two writers. According to people who remember Zumayev, he was a very good conversationalist.

The famous theologian Pavel Florensky, who in the 1920s was related to the Moscow Power Engineering Institute by virtue of his lay specialty, according to legends that go back to the employees who remembered him, spoke to shoe cleaners on the streets of Moscow in a language that they understood.1 Florensky knew many ancient languages, including Aramaic, a natural extension of which is the language of modern Assyrians.

I was able to find information about the negative attitude of Muscovites to Assyrians-cleaners. In the 1950s, residents of the old part of Leninsky Prospekt (up to present-day Gagarin Square) forbade their children to associate with shoe cleaners and junk dealers. What caused this ban, no one could explain to me.

In 1946, on the basis of the branch Council of Spartak in Moscow, many amateur football teams were created, including the team of the Assyrian artel "Moscow Cleaner". It was played exclusively by Assyrian children-children of artel workers. The core of the team were residents of Samoteka (Diznaya), but there were also Assyrians from Presnya (jilvaya), the city center (kunaya) and Zamoskvorechye (gavarnaya). The team was a thunderstorm of similar amateur teams of the capital, losing only to the team of "Vserasoyuz". One of the important advantages of the Moscow Cleaner, in addition to the good preparation of its players, was the language factor: during the game, the players talked on the field in their native language, which was incomprehensible to the opponents and did not allow them to predict the actions of the players. Many former players of the "Moscow cleaner" later got into the big sport. In 1954, during the reorganization of the artel, the team broke up. After that, there were eight small shoe factory teams, but it wasn't just the Assyrians who played in them. These teams lasted until the very end of the 1960s. In addition to football, other sports were cultivated in the artel. The second most popular game among the Assyrians, like the Eastern people, was chess. Here, the Assyrians were also ahead, losing only to the team of the Moscow Watchmaker artel, which was mainly Jewish in composition.

Unlike Moscow, in the small Assyrian colonies in the cities of Central Russia, shoe-cleaning specialization died out by the 1970s and 1980s, along with the last members of the generation who arrived from Turkey. Only minor shoe repairs have been preserved. The largest of the Assyrian communities near Moscow was located in the city of Yegoryevsk. Before the war, up to twenty families lived here. In 1994, there were only five left. Yegoryevsky Assyrians (Shapatnaya) also cleaned their shoes in their city, where, according to the memories of old-timers, there were many parking lots on the central streets. The residents of Yegoryevsk were sure that Armenians were working for them: "We used to have small tents on the streets in Yegoryevsk. The Armenians were sitting. Shoes were cleaned. They sold shoe polish and shoelaces. Gutalin was good. They cooked it themselves somewhere. There was no such thing in stores." For some reason, only a few Yegoryevites knew the real nationality of the cleaners, as a rule, those who lived nearby or often communicated with them. As you can see, in Yegoryevsk, the Assyrians also used gutalin, purchased on the side. According to Yegoryevsky local historian Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov, even after the war in the city, on the main street, called Sovetskaya, there were five points. In them, in addition to shoe accessories, you could get anything you wanted. Smirnov told me about a booth boy he knew, who was called "Uncle Senya" in Russian and whom he visited regularly.-

1 This information was given to me by the current head of the Moscow Old Believers ' community of Pomorsky Concord, A.V. Khvalkovsky, formerly one of the employees of the MPEI, who once found teachers there who remembered P. Florensky.

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it was used when it was necessary to get either a bicycle chain or some other small thing. If Uncle Senya didn't have something at the moment, he would get it out for the client until the end of the next day at most. Where he got it from was a mystery to the rest of us. By the way, during my trips to the Assyrians of the Krasnodar Region in 1995, I was "revealed" the secret of such a long existence of cleaning tents in Moscow, while in most other places cleaning went along with the first generation: through many points there was a purchase of stolen goods. It is possible that in Yegoryevsk and other cities this could also take place. Currently, there are no Assyrian cleaners in Yegoryevsk.

Unfortunately, the Assyrian shoe monopoly in Moscow is gradually disappearing. There are still "Assyrian" tents on the streets of the capital, Assyrians still work in many other shoe repair shops, but this will soon be a thing of the past. The demand for cleaning services is now almost nonexistent. The new shoe care products that have appeared in large numbers, which easily fit in your pocket, have finally replaced the representatives of the shoe cleaner profession. There are hardly six dozen tents on the city streets themselves. Many of them only do minor shoe repairs. In the rest, shoes are no longer cleaned, but are engaged in the sale of accessories. In August 2000, shoes could only be cleaned in one of the Moscow tents located near the Nikitsky Gate, and even then two elderly Assyrians working in it took on this task solely because of the low profitability of the point. It cost them twenty rubles a pair to clean their shoes.

Probably in ten years the last "Assyrian" booths will disappear from the streets of Moscow. Another detail of the old Moscow flavor will disappear. The old Muscovites, both the Assyrians themselves and the citizens who knew and loved them, are gradually passing away. The last carriers and keepers of the Moscow city original culture are leaving. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, due to the resettlement of Muscovites from the center of the capital to "sleeping" areas, small Assyrian "colonies" disappeared, in which the original culture of the Moscow diaspora of this people was formed, with traditional holidays, weddings, and its own special world. The young generations of residents of the capital who are replacing the old people are representatives of a completely different world, largely "Westernized", where completely different values already reign. Many children and grandchildren of Assyrian cleaners are embarrassed by the former specialization of their people and believe that it should be forgotten as soon as possible as it humiliates their people. For the numerous Transcaucasian Assyrians who have arrived in Moscow over the past decade, mainly from Georgia and Armenia, this is generally something alien and incomprehensible.

For many Soviet decades, beginning in the 1920s, the Moscow Assyrians, as a small diaspora in a city of millions, were an integral part of the old Moscow culture, now almost completely disappeared.

list of literature

Badreev and Rabinkov. Trudyaschie assyriytsy v strane Sovetov [Working Assyrians in the Land of Soviets].

Ilf I., Petrov E. Twelve Chairs, Moscow, 1974.

Skorobogatov V. Aysory v SSSR [Aysors in the USSR] / / Prosveshchenie natsionalnostei, Moscow, 1931, No. 1.

Central Municipal Archive of Moscow (TSMAM). f. 1215. Op. 1. D. 230.

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