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Tardent crest 1643 Tardent ChaletTete dÁi
The Tardent Family  from Ormont-Dessous, Vaud, Switzerland.

Cecile Tardent was the great granddaughter of Louis Vincent, the Chabag colony founder. Her parents Victorine and David were cousins, children of Charles and Samuel, Louis Vincents sons, both practising viticulturalists in and around Chabag, today part of Ukraine.  Charles published several interesting works on viticulture, Samuel developed a successful estate with vines, and orchards.

Today, offspring of the Russian branch of the Tardents live in Moscow.  As well as descendants of Cecile, the progeny of Antoinette Virginie Tardent, granddaughter of Louis Vincent who married Leon Schanzer. Leon was a Viennese chemical engineer who became a winemaker of Odessa.

This is a photo of  Cecile Tardent (1871-1964) (14.144 Inventaire Genealogique Des Tardent). She married Konstantin Nikolaevich Alexandrovich, College Assessor, the clerk's office of the Sevastopol port.

 

Rita Portnyagina's photo.

Cecile

Konstantin Nikolaevich

  

After nearly one hundred years after the Swiss vignerons founded the colony in Chabag near Odessa on the Black Sea in what was once part of the Russian empire, today Ukraine, in l918, Bessarabia was occupied by the Romanian armies after the turmoils of the Russian revolution. In 1940, Hitler made a present of the province to the Russians,   on June 28, 1940 and shortly after the soldiers arrived at Chabag, hot on the heels of the last colonists to make a rushed departure with only a suitcase. This annexation was the death of the Swiss colony, and though some of the colonists managed to find their way back to Switzerland, others fell into the clutches of the Russian army, and their fate is unknown. The Swiss colony, its fields, vines  and its buildings were mostly destroyed.

The war, and the Russian revolution also put paid to new colonies founded in 1892 by the Swiss, on the banks of the Dnieper, Kherson, called 'Osnova' and another in 1909, called  'New
Chabag'.

However some of the descendants of the colonists had already integrated into Russian society, and their descendants prosper.

Their son, Virgil Tardent Schanzer was an eminent figure in the transition of Russia from an autocracy to a socialist state, one of the idealists who dared to dream of a better life for the people, who by the end of the 19th century had suffered privations to an extent and on a scale that was truly terrible.

In 1899 he graduated from the Faculty of Law of Tartu University.

He worked as an assistant attorney.

At a meeting in May 1907 in London, the V Congress of the RSDLP was elected to the covert "Bolshevik center" created by the Bolshevik faction.

From 1901 , he engaged in underground work in Moscow under the party pseudonym Marat.   Several times he was caught and exiled to Eastern Siberia.

After returning to Russia, he was arrested and deported under police surveillance in Siberia, where he continued his underground revolutionary activities. In 1908 he was transferred to the Turukhansk region. He escaped from exile, and went abroad.

He returned to Moscow in 1910 where he died in 1911 of a serious illness.

 

Cecile's children

George                                                                                  Olga

        

Young Konstantin and Olga (below)
   
Nikolai