Alexander Ustinovich Zelenko
While perusing the newly-added San Francisco Bulletin’s archives at newspapers.com I came across a rare photo of Russian architect-educator Alexander Ustinovich Zelenko (1871-1953), an important figure in George Hodel’s boyhood. The above photograph is from the paper’s December 4, 1922 edition. The caption mentions that Zelenko is “late of Moscow and now of L.A.” We know from a Los Angeles Times article of October 15, 1922 that Zelenko was a lifelong friend of George Hodel’s parents, that they had him build a custom house next to their own Pasadena home as a fifteenth birthday gift for George — their pampered, boy-genius only child — and that Zelenko’s stated intent at that time was to settle in Pasadena near the Hodels.1
We glean from press reports that Zelenko set up offices within San Francisco’s Liebes Building (owned by a famous fur importer and retailer, H. Liebes) in early 1919. This was to serve as a bridgehead for a venture which would gather business intelligence and build economic ties between post-revolutionary Russia and the United States. He set up an east coast HQ in New York around the same time.
Interestingly, the Liebes Building lies only blocks from William Hightower’s haunts around the time of the Father Heslin murder. That raises the possibility that George Hodel was visiting Zelenko, e.g., to intern at his offices, during the summer of 1921, and came into contact with Hightower and/or his storied consort, Doris Shirley.
I find it interesting that George Hodel’s third major career in adulthood, following stints as a physician and as a psychiatrist, was as a sort of globetrotting collector of business intelligence. That is pretty reminiscent of Zelenko’s stock-in-trade in the period the two were acquainted. So, perhaps there is an indication there that George got some inside exposure to Zelenko’s operation during his boy-genius days.
I’ve seen nothing to suggest there was anything sinister about Alexander Zelenko, but he is a multifaceted and slightly mysterious figure. The biographies I’ve seen online do not even mention his All-Russian Co-op project or his period of residence in the United States (ca. 1919-1923) and generally focus on his achievements as an architect and educator in Russia, where he was born and died.
An article in the May, 1920, issue of The Harvard Magazine describes Zelenko as “the most important Russian in this country today” — the man holding the keys to the establishment of economic relations between the United States and the new Russia.2 It mentions that Zelenko was reluctant to supply his own photograph and had a policy of “keep[ing] himself as much as possible in the background.”
There was controversy over whether Zelenko was a front for Lenin’s government. One of Zelenko’s American aides, Helen Valeska Bary, recalls in a UC Berkeley oral history that the Soviets pushed this idea via local propaganda mouthpieces because they resented the independence of the cooperatives whose interests he represented. On the other hand, I notice that an outfit which sounds very similar to Zelenko’s focused on establishing post-revolutionary trade with the United Kingdom apparently was linked to Soviet espionage activity.3
You can find many small news articles on Zelenko’s comings and goings in the US in the Co-op days. He criss-crossed the country giving lectures and meeting business people. Within three weeks of the Father Heslin murder we find him meeting with farmers in Petaluma, the “egg capital of the world,” 40 miles north of San Francisco.
After relocating to Pasadena in 1922 we find Zelenko and wife teaching UC extension classes and engaging in various slightly offbeat cultural interests. Rather weirdly, the wire photo I found in the SF Bulletin shows Zelenko holding model monkeys. His wife, Anna, was dubbed the “Puppet Queen” and the Los Angeles papers feature reports on traditional Petrushka puppet performances the couple staged at the Hodels’ residence.
A Hodel family photograph shows famed Russian composer and concert pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff seated between Anna and Alexander Zelenko. George Hodel was of course something of a prodigy on the piano, so one imagines this was a big occasion for the Hodels. The date of the photo is unknown.
An article in The Highland Park Herald of November 2, 1923, mentions that Alexander Zelenko, formerly of Moscow’s City University, has been appointed to a newly-created “Los Angeles Academy of the Theater” to give instruction on “pageantry and festival.” U.S. newspaper references to the Zelenkos seem to dry up after this. Based on other biographical summaries I have found, I would guess that he returned to Moscow not long afterwards and spent the balance of his life there. It seems Zelenko did have at least some notable architectural commissions following his return, so he probably was not at odds with the Soviet regime. It would be nice to know the rest of the story.
[ADDED 29-APR-2024]
The arrival record below, which I found on Ancestry.com, documents Zelenko’s arrival in the United States in February, 1919, which is consistent with the SF Chronicle’s report of March 6, 1919, about his opening an office in the Liebes Building. Zelenko sailed on the RMS Empress of Japan and entered the US in Seattle, with an intended final destination of San Francisco. Interestingly, the record states that Zelenko had been in the US before — in Los Angeles, CA, from 1904-09. This might connect to the statement in the Los Angeles Times’ “Boy’s Homes Is Planned By Russian” article that Zelenko was a “life-long friend of M. and Madame G. Hodel.” George Hodel’s parents immigrated to the U.S. in 1901 and moved to Los Angeles from New York several years later (see Steve Hodel’s The Early Years — Part I, p. 18) . In any case, it looks as if Zelenko was in LA around the time of George’s birth in 1907. I have seen no other mention of this early Los Angeles connection. It does not correspond to the 1913 fact-finding trip in the West on behalf of the czar’s government mentioned in the LAT story. The LAT story also omits to mention Zelenko’s then-recent All-Russia Union activities — but at least there we have an idea why it might be “sensitive.”
It took quite a bit of detective work to confirm that the Alexander J. Zelenko of the Co-op was one and the same person as the well-known educator/architect Alexander U. Zelenko, but the evidence for that seems pretty conclusive. See the discussion in the comments at https://stevehodel.com/2019/02/26/musical-prodigy-george-hodel-raching-out-with-world-renowned-composer-sergie-rachmaninoff-family-photo-circa-1917-1923/.
A Russian commentator on the same thread referenced in footnote 1 reports that Zelenko was close to Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was a powerful figure in the Soviet educational system hierarchy. That seems to undercut Helen Valeska Bary’s claim that the “Soviet front” accusation was a canard promulgated by the Soviets themselves.