Kira Robinson; witnessed birth, death of USSR

Kira Volkoff Robinson was born in Riga, which is now the capital of independent Latvia. She grew up during the Bolshevik Revolution. (Janet Knott/Globe Staff/file 1999)

Kira Volkoff Robinson witnessed both the birth and collapse of the former Soviet Union. Born into Russian nobility, the daughter of an imperial prosecutor fled the country at the outbreak of the 1917 revolution, started by the Mensheviks and joined by the Bolsheviks. She, her mother, and grandmother - her father stayed behind - arrived in America when she was 12.

In memoirs she later wrote for her children, she recalled the monthlong trip aboard "The Massilion Bridge," a tramp steamer that brought her family to New York in 1921. The trip took so long, she wrote, because it stopped in Bizerta, Tunisia.

There, she wrote, they saw "probably in mothballs the former czarist yacht, the Almaz, once of the Russian fleet that had been destroyed in the battle of Tsushima in 1905."

"I loved the trip," she wrote, "as the crew thought it fun to have a little girl on board and they taught me to recognize the various stars and constellations, let me watch how the ship was run, showed me how to use the compass and the sextant."

She was reading in volumes by then, according to the notepad on which she recorded every book among many she read from the age of 12 to the time she died of congestive heart failure on Nov. 7 at her home in the Annisquam section of Gloucester. She was 99.

"Kira was reading right up to the end," said Sharron Cohen of Gloucester, former librarian of the town's bookmobile who visited Mrs. Robinson weekly with books of all types, preferably nonfiction. "Kira had a lively interest in many things, and she was opinionated about a lot of things. Though she was not vain about looks, she was vain about her mind. She did not want to lose it. She lived for intellectual arguments. Her particular favorite was her argument about the existence of God, and she was not on God's side."

From 1957 to 1974, while her husband, Howard A., taught physics at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., Mrs. Robinson taught Russian there for a number of years.

Prior to Adelphi, her husband had been a Foreign Service officer with duty in France and Sweden. During their years in Paris, from 1952 to 1956, they befriended Alice B. Toklas, the life partner of the late writer Gertrude Stein.

"The more I saw of her [Toklas]," Mrs. Robinson wrote in her memoirs, "the more I felt that she was as brilliant on her own as Gertrude Stein - that she had made it possible for Gertrude to live a very pampered life as she took care of all the mundane things of just living - shopping, cooking, entertaining, typing Gertrude's manuscripts, running her errands while Gertrude held court."

Mrs. Robinson took some kidding about knowing Toklas and Toklas's recipe for brownies laced with marijuana, which became a folk story in the 1960s.

When questioned, Cohen said, "Kira just smiled."

Mrs. Robinson also kept her mind sharp with the board game Scrabble, which she often won, said her son, Holbrook of Cambridge. She was playing it and beating people until two weeks before dying, he said.

She was born in Riga, then part of Russia, now capital of independent Latvia. She was 5 when the family, supporters of the czar Nicholas II, moved to St. Petersburg.

Her mother, Natalia Volkoff, brought her own mother and Kira "through the attendant political chaos to the Black Sea, where she persuaded the commander of a small French naval vessel to take her small family to Constantinople," said Mrs. Robinson's son.

After two years there, the three women settled in Schenectady, N.Y., where Kira met her future husband.

After graduating from Cornell University in Ithaca in 1930 with a degree in French literature, Mrs. Robinson enrolled in graduate studies at McGill University in Montreal but left to marry in 1935.

In 1948 and 1949, the couple lived in Sweden when he was in the Foreign Service. They returned to the United States while Mrs. Robinson's husband worked as a physicist in Lancaster, Pa., before taking another Foreign Service assignment in France.

From 1952 to 1956, they lived in Paris, where they met Toklas and many of the bright and cultured young artists and writers who were drawn to the country in those days. Mrs. Robinson was fluent in Russian and French and knew Swedish.

"As a teacher, Kira was inspiring and inculcated in me a love of the Russian language and literature. She had a wonderful mind," said Mark Thall, a Boston psychiatrist who was her student at Adelphi.

A grandson, Frank Huyler, a physician in Albuquerque, described her as "a life force," noting he had once phoned her to interpret for a Russian patient.

The Robinsons retired from Adelphi in 1974 and moved to Annisquam.

The death of her husband in 1998 was a blow from which Mrs. Robinson fought to recover. "I think in the end she missed Howard. He was the love of her life," Cohen said. She rose above her sadness, friends said, with her intellectual pursuits and her friends.

While she cultivated friends of all ages, Cohen said, Mrs. Robinson sought those who were younger than she for activities such as the French group she held at her home at 11 a.m. Fridays for more than six years until April. "It was really a social group," said Jaye Whittier, of Gloucester, a member.

"Kira was a remarkable woman and a born teacher," Whittier said. "She could help you to correct your French, without making you feel like an idiot."

She inspired many, Cohen said, "a model of getting older without being insipid."

Besides her son and grandson, Mrs. Robinson leaves a daughter, Marina Huyler of Revelstoke, British Columbia; and another son, Peter of Minneapolis; seven other grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

At her request, there will be no funeral service.