Berner Anna Voldemarovna

Berner Anna Voldemarovna

Genus. in 1912 in St. Petersburg, in the family of a railway engineer. She graduated from the Leningrad Hydrotechnical School in 1934 and went to work at the Hydroproject Institute. My father worked in the Urals. He was soon arrested under the “Yezhov order” and later died in custody. A.V. Berner was the eldest of three children in the family; she entered the Leningrad Civil Engineering Institute, from which she graduated in 1941.
Brother Sergei went to the front and soon died, the youngest, Alexey, and mother, Evgenia Dmitrievna (ur. Vasilyeva), remained with Anna Voldemarovna in blockaded Leningrad. She joined a sewing artel that worked for the needs of the army. Her work card helped the family survive the first terrible winter. In 1942, the Berners were evacuated to Yaroslavl, A.V. went to work at the hospital. After the end of the war, she returned to Leningrad and participated in the restoration of the city. Later she was engaged in industrial design, holding positions from engineer to chief project engineer at the Lengiproshakht, Refractories and 1st Design Institutes. Among the projects in which she took part are a titanium white plant in Sumy, a plant in Isfahan (Iran), and the administrative building of the Russian Diesel plant in Leningrad. In 1967, she retired and began to spend a significant part of her time in the village of Ovinets, Pskov region. There she developed an interest in genealogy, and not in her own pedigree, but in the pedigrees of local peasants. Over time, she collected significant material. In the early 1980s. Anna Voldemarovna became interested in the family circle of A.N. Benois and soon met the historian of the Benois family, Fyodor Frantsevich Benois, and other representatives of the family clan. In those same years, seeking the rehabilitation of her father, A.V. Berner came to the Memorial Research Center, to V.V. Iofa. She took an active part in the work of the center, in particular, she processed the archive of L. I. Polovinkina, about whom she published an article in the Memorial Bulletin in 1995. She also dealt with the fate of the repressed members of the Benoit family and related families. The collected material was used in the preparation of reports made by her at the International Genealogical Conference in St. Petersburg in 1992 and at seminars of the Russian Geographical Society, as well as a conference dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the Benoit family in Russia. A.V. Berner participated in preparations for the opening of the Benois Family Museum in Peterhof. Since 1991, A.V. Berner has been a member of the Russian Geographical Society. She has repeatedly spoken at seminars and published two articles in Izvestia of the Russian Geographical Society (issues 1 and 5). Her article was also published in the collection “200 Years of the Benois Family in Russia” (1994). She died in St. Petersburg on May 29, 2002.