A copy of the photo of Olga Aderman, née Belyavskaya, is on display at the Tula Historical and Architectural Museum. The original image is housed in The State Archive of the Tula region.
Olga Belyavskaya is one of the daughters of the founder and first owner of the ‘Old Tula Pharmacy’ Ferdinand Belyavsky and his wife Jeanette Siebert. She was born on May 30, 1869, in Tula. As a child, Belyavskaya often helped her mother with the housework: she planted flowers and took care of pets. In her memoirs, she writes that she was her father’s ‘sunshine’. At the age of 10, Olga Belyavskaya enrolled in the first grade of the women’s gymnasium in Tula, and later studied at the women’s gymnasium in Moscow for two years, the founders and managers of which were Alexandra Evenius and Maria Poussel. The best teachers of Moscow taught there. They taught Russian, French, and German, gave music lessons. Olga Belyavskaya passed the last exam on her 17th birthday on May 30, 1886.
A year later, in 1887, Friedrich Aderman started to work at the pharmacy of Ferdinand Belyavsky as a pharmacist, shortly after his graduation from the University of Dorpat. On December 4, 1888, Aderman and Olga Belyavskaya got engaged, and two years later they got married. From 1891 to 1896, four sons were born in the family: Erich, Felix, Voldemar Richard, and Georg Ferdinand. The two eldest sons died in childhood, and Georg lived only to be 22: in 1918, he died of the ‘Spanish flu’, the epidemic which then swept the whole world. The marriage of Belyavskaya and Aderman lasted 24 years, in 1914 Friedrich Aderman died. The third son of the Adermans, Voldemar, was admitted to the Mikhailovsky Artillery School in December 1914, and eight months later he was sent to the front. After the revolution of 1917, Olga Aderman knew nothing about her son’s fate for almost three years.
In January 1918, the new government took possession of the pharmacy and then confiscated the house. Now Aderman had to pay rent for the premises. After her husband’s death, she occupied only one room — the former dining room. I couldn’t pay more, because there was no income after the confiscation. When they began introducing bread and ration cards, Olga Aderman did not receive them: the cards were issued only to those who had a profession. In hard times, the food supplies the family had once stocked up on, and barter trade, an exchange of goods for food, helped her to survive. Thus, Olga Aderman managed to live in Bolshevik Russia for five years.
In the spring of 1921, she received news from her only surviving son, Voldemar. He was in Berlin. In 1923, Aderman requested permission from the authorities to travel to Germany because of ill health. On October 1, 1923, she arrived in Berlin and spent the rest of her life in Germany with her family and friends. Olga Aderman died in 1939.
