Dimitri Jouralov- Blue-blooded Russian?

During our trip to Russia, Akhila asked our guide if any descendants of the Czar families still exist. The guide replied no, they were all killed. Some claimed to be relations but without any proof: remember Anastasia!

That’s when I remembered Dimitri Jouralov, the Russian in NDA about whom I have written elsewhere. So here is a refresher.

When I joined NDA as a cadet in July 1955, I noticed a frail, short, oldish foreigner, perhaps the only one, among the staff. In due course, I learnt that he was Dimitri Jouralov, a Russian employed as an instructor to teach that language. I did not opt for Russian as a foreign language and so for the first four terms, I had nothing to do with him. In the 5^th and 6^th terms, I opted for Golf and Western Classical Music respectively as my hobbies both of which were supervised by Mr. Jouralov. As cadets in NDA tend to view most things as compulsions thrust on them, I did not take much interest in either although later, they were to become my lifelong pleasures. Consequently, Mr. Jouralov remained a distant figure during my training days in the NDA.

Five and a half years later, I was back in NDA as a Divisional Officer and ran into Mr. Jouralov again. By then, he was considered too old to teach but was retained as officer-in-charge Golf. He was a bachelor and was given a small hutment by way of accommodation on the way to Peacock Bay. I was a bachelor myself staying in the Officers’ Mess which Mr. Jouralov frequented every evening.  Running into him was therefore inevitable. Those were days of prohibition and being a civilian, Dimmy could not buy liquor. So he devised a unique way of getting it. He would come to the Mess in the evening and catch us bachelors with his favourite ruse, “Water is the best drink but I cant afford the best, so give me the second best- a glass of rum!” Because of his loving, humble personality, it was impossible not to fall for that line.

So when my friends, Subodh ‘Guppy’ Gupta and Lalit ‘Tiger’ Talwar insisted on my taking up golf which I had dismissed till then as an old man’s game, I came in closer contact with Dimmy. We played a lot of golf together and though he was pretty weak and aged by then, he would regularly drive 150 yards straight down the centre of the fairway and his game was as precise as a Swiss clock. One day I said to Dimmy that I had developed a pain in the neck during a round. He strongly chided me and said, “Nonsense! You can never get a crick in the neck if you really play golf’!”

Dimmy had a fascinating story to tell. He said he was from a blue-blooded Czar family and ran away from Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. He had a natural talent for music and had learnt how to play a few instruments. He travelled across Central Asia scrounging a living playing in various bands and thus found his way to India where he became the drummer and later the leader of  Maharaja of Patiala’s band. Eventually, he moved to Dehradun and took up the job of teaching Russian at the Joint Services Wing. When the JSW shifted to Kharakvasla as the National Defence Academy, Dimmy moved along with it.

Transferred out of NDA in 1965, I lost touch with Dimmy. It was sad when I learnt sometime later that loneliness caught up with Dimmy and one morning he was found hanging from the ceiling in his modest abode.