RUSSIA: War, revolution - and an academic search

It is an epic adventure of high seas piracy, empire building, political intrigue, Russian royalty, war and revolution, exile, Hollywood fame... and academic endeavour. Now, 80 years after his father fled Bolshevik terror, Hollywood legend Yul Brynner's son Rock - a history and politics professor at Connecticut State University - is a regular visitor to the Russian city of Vladivostok, birthplace of his actor father famed the world over for his title role in The King and I.

Rock Brynner, who was raised on stories of his great grandfather Jules' business role in Vladivostok, first returned to the city five years ago to lecture at universities founded by his ancestors. The experience led to the publication last year of Empire and Odyssey - the Brynners in Far East Russia and Beyond (Steerforth Press, New Hampshire), which sparked a lively debate among academics in Vladivostok where the Brynners' role in the development of the city has long been keenly studied.

The book charts the lives of four generations of Brynner men from 1865, when 16-year-old, Swiss-born Jules ran away from home to become a galley boy on an ocean-going privateer. Jules, the business brains of the family, went on to become an oligarch of his time - what Brynner calls the "Rockefeller of the Far East".

The Far East Shipping Company that Jules founded still exists, its distinctive FESCO logo visible on the hulls of dozens of ships in Vladivostok port.

In Soviet times, Brynner's grandfather Boris ran a Siberian lead, zinc and silver mine under a concession granted by Cheka secret police founder "Iron" Felix Dzerzhinsky. Later, Boris escaped from Stalin's terror with his family.

Also recounted in the book is Yul's path to Hollywood stardom via Paris, where he played gypsy songs and sold smuggled cocaine to survive. His son's own no less fascinating life included stints as a bodyguard to boxing legend Muhammed Ali and road manager for 'The Band', a rock group founded by Bob Dylan, before he eventually went into academe.

Rock Brynner was so warmly received during his initial US State Department trips to Vladivostok, where he gave lectures at the Far East State University (founded by Jules) and at the Far East State Technical University (founded by Boris), that he became a regular visitor. University students in Vladivostok have been treated to an eclectic mix of lectures, their subjects ranging from tolerance and terrorism to the social impact of rock and roll.

Back home in America, Brynner teaches a slightly more staid course in the history of Communist and post-Communist governments. From September, he will teach the 20th century history of the Pacific Rim, a region that includes Vladivostok.

His book reveals the intriguing - and historically contentious - role the Brynners played in events leading up the Russian-Japanese war of 1904. That in turn led to revolution, civil war and the founding of the Soviet Union.

But Brynner's research failed to resolve a more personal part of the history - what happened to the bodies of Jules and others interred at Sidemy, near Vladivostok, when Trotsky's revolutionaries finally arrived in the area at the end of the civil war in 1922?

The Bolsheviks often desecrated the homes and sometimes even the graves of those they deemed "enemies of the people" and the Brynner ancestors were unceremoniously removed from the family's granite mausoleum at their Amur Bay estate.

A breakthrough came last year when a relative, 96-year-old Valery Yankovsky, wrote to say that a group of Korean family retainers had hidden the lead coffins, dragged from the tomb after armed Bolsheviks had sailed across from Vladivostok to seize the estate.

The Brynners and their Polish aristocrat relatives the Yankovskys, who also owned land at Sidemy, had earlier raised a private army of Koreans to protect against marauding Chinese pirates and the Siberian tigers and leopards that roamed the estate. The loyal Koreans hid the coffins to prevent further desecration by the Reds.

Yankvosky, 11 years old at the time and today the only surviving witness to the hurried family evacuation by boat from Sidemy's small harbour, said the coffins were too heavy to have been carried far and suggested that use of metal detectors might find them.

"At 96, my Uncle Valery is the only person alive who knew all four generations of the Brynners," said Brynner. "He wrote to me, encouraging me to visit with a metal detector expert. I did not let him down."

Although Brynner's first search around the mausoleum last September revealed nothing, local enthusiasts hope to continue the work. Sidemy holds close associations for Brynner: the rare Amur big cats Yul knew as a child are still found at Russia's oldest national park, Kedrovaya Pad, founded in1916.

"When my father was a child, he spent all his summers here, swimming from the beach at Sidemy below the cottage where my grandfather spent his honeymoon in 1916," he said.

"I can imagine how wrenching it must have been for the family to leave their old life. Not because of their wealth or because it was taken away by the Communists but because it is so beautiful, both in the spirit of the people and the location. It was a long way from here to Hollywood for my father Yul."

Brynner plans to continue filming the wider story of his intriguing forebears with Korean-American filmmaker Ku-Ling Siegel in locations that include Moscow and Switzerland. Rose Hye Jung Han, the film's Seoul-based Korean producer, said the feature-length documentary Odyssey should be in cinemas by late 2008.
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