An Escape From Russia

Robyn 0:00

But the German soldiers pulled from above and the Red Army soldiers pushed from below, and finally we made it up to safety, to the stunned amazement of those left behind on the platform in the refugee camp. And if anyone claims that there are no more miracles these days, they are mistaken. We experienced two real miracles in a row on our departure. And there are still angels these days. You just have to recognize them. Even if they may appear in the form of a communist commissar in a leather jacket, or a gray field uniform of a German lieutenant.

Thad 0:54

And the story that we were going to present is from the diary of a girl who lived through it, and then her family escaped from Russia, went to Germany, and we found her diary uh last month when we were in the diary archive in Mindingen, Germany. And so that's what we're gonna bring to you today. In order to understand uh the background of the revolution, it's important to go back and look up a little bit of history to get some context for what's there. Uh a couple of episodes back, we had the story of the Romanovs, who were the last czar family of Russia. And from their perspective, the revolutionaries just seem like these malcontents that kind of came out of nowhere. And they've been around, they'd been around during uh Nicholas II's father's time and his father's time. And if you look at it from the perspective of the ruling class from Nicholas and his ministers, it seems like people have always been discontent, and that's just the way life is, and that's part of part of being a czar, is dealing with people that that want stuff. And so Nicholas, you know, saw his role as very much just a guy who's trying to maintain the legacy that he's been given and continue that for his son.

Robyn 2:14

So I was looking uh up things to read about the peasants and what was going on in rural Russia because Anna, the girl that we're um using this diary of, well, she lived in St. Petersburg and she doesn't really give uh an overview of what was happening in all of Russia, partially because I mean she just didn't know because she just knew what was going on in the city. And so I started to look into what it was like in Russia. So I found a book written by Vera Brodeo, who lived in Russia in the early 20th century. And so she experienced all of this. I got the book from the haunted bookshop uh last year. I've actually gotten several books from them. They're great because they have books that, you know, honestly you wouldn't really find anywhere else. It would be hard to find this book, Apostles into Terrorists, Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II. Um, and so in the book, she says, quote, Russian Tsars saw themselves as benevolent patriarchs, but in reality, they were paternalistic and tyrannical, aiming at owning their subjects, body and soul. They tolerated no independence of deed or thought. They deprived the church of its power, reducing it to abject subservience, and appropriated to themselves the spiritual as well as the temporal leadership of the people. They gave and took away lands and honors, rights and privileges in the most arbitrary manner, with the result that no class or group could develop into a stable social body, and they governed the country with the help of a vast bureaucracy, corrupt and inefficient, the kind of a huge quicksand that engulfs all good intentions, including those of the more enlightened Tsars themselves. The most damaging aspect of the Russian monarchy was its arbitrariness. Since the Tsars did not abide by any set of laws, the law itself fell into disrepute. The concepts of civic rights, civic duties, equality before the law, and even citizenship in the modern sense of the word had no chance to develop. And as everybody, from provincial governors to village policemen, Aphthazar was an arbitrary autocrat in his sphere. There was no redress from injustice or oppression. By far, the worst evil in 19th century Russia was serfdom. Over three-quarters of the population consisted of peasant serfs, owned either by nobles or by the crown or by the church. These peasants were no better than slaves. They were often mercilessly exploited and sold, or given away like cattle. But Russian peasants had never accepted serfdom as a permanent institution. They knew it had originated in an agreement entered upon by their ancestors in times long past, by which peasants served the crown in exchange for protection from invaders and marauders, or else served the nobles when the nobles had to serve the Tsar. But time had passed, and with it the danger from invaders and marauders while nobles were released from state service in the second half of the 18th century. Serfdom should have come to an end then, but it lingered for almost a century. The fact that there was widespread unrest among the peasants due to natural impatience to get their freedom played into the hands of the Kryptonaki. They were able to frighten the Tsar with their specter of peasant revolts. He was never at his best when things went wrong, and this time too, he blundered. Early in 1861, the Tsar ordered troops to be placed in all rural parts of the country, with instructions to shoot to kill, to disperse crowds with bayonets, and to raise villages to the ground, where necessary. The request of the Minister of Justice, the Holy Sinod, instructed the rural clergy to preach gratitude and obedience to the God-anointed Tsar, without giving away the fact of having received official instructions. In the capitals, army patrols were stationed everywhere, even inside the Winter Palace. Secret police spies swarmed all over the towns. People were instructed to inform the police if anyone had more than three visitors at a time. They were also told not to talk of the liberation of peasants and to report anybody who did. This directive prompted an unfortunate person to confide in his cronies that freedom must be coming, for which the lapse, the poor fool was given 230 lashes. After several postponements, the peasant reform became law on February 19th, 1861. It was solemnly proclaimed in all the churches on the eve of Great Lent, but it fell flat. It satisfied nobody. The serfs were set free without land. They were allocated portions of land, but these were not large enough to feed a peasant family and its cattle. And for this land, the peasants were expected to pay an exorbitant price. The owners of the land were to be paid a lump sum by the state at once, but the peasants were to pay by annual installments plus interest over a period of forty-nine years. Only then would they receive a clear title to their holdings. It had become apparent later that these annual payments and the high taxes and dues payable to the state pauperized the peasants and made the introduction of modern farming impossible. Many small landowners, too, were ruined since they were left with little land and too little money to support themselves. The peasants received the reform with complete disbelief. They even suspected the authenticity of the imperial manifesto. They could not believe that the father Tsar had been given unjust terms of reform. Clearly, the greedy nobles and the corrupt officials had once again deceived the Tsar, perhaps even forced his hand. Soon spokesmen for the peasants trudged by the hundreds along the interminable Russian roads to see the Tsar and tell him of the injustice and hardship suffered by his people. Most of them were picked up by police before they even got near the Tsar, and were soon trudging even longer roads to Siberia. But their fate, if news ever reached their native villages, only confirmed the belief that truth was held from the Tsar. The land reform was slow to take effect. The terms were sufficiently vague and confused to foster the belief that this was not, in fact, a true freedom, but some preliminary freedom. And the peasants confidently waited for it to be true. With land and plenty of it, they expected it to be announced soon. But the profits of a violent and bloody revolt were proved entirely wrong. There was now less unrest than before the liberation. The country was but becalmed in a dispirited, stunned kind of silence, when gradually the passive resistance to the reform began to express itself in refusals to go through formalities. These sporadic and unarmed protests were suppressed with the whole force of the Imperial Army, which did indeed shoot to kill, and thousands of peasants were nearly flogged to death or sent to Siberia. The Tsar reacted to the hostile reception of the peasant reform with great bitterness. He'd expected gratitude, not criticism, and he felt misunderstood and unloved. If he'd studied Talcoville, he would have known that the most dangerous moment for a bad regime is usually when it begins to reform. The abuses that are removed seem to reveal those that remain, and to make them more galling. The evil has lessened, it is true, but the people feel it more keenly. The liberation of Alexander II did not stand the test of time. The very word progress was so hateful to him that he forbade it in official documents. The censorship was tightened again, and the secret police to hunt radicals, real or suspected. An ever-growing mass of citizens was classed as politically untrustworthy and faced a constant threat of arrest or exile without charge or trial. Scores of plays were banned, the publication of many journals was stopped, and secular Sunday schools for the children of workers and peasants were closed. Also, the Liberal Chess Club in St. Petersburg end quote.

Thad 10:38

Things were bad in the countryside. In the cities, things weren't much better. So by the end of the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution to a limited degree had arrived in Russia. And so people were moving out of the countryside and into the cities to find work. And the factories that were there were the same type of factory situation that you'd had in the Industrial Revolution in Europe, Britain, the United States, in that conditions weren't great. You could find work and you could get paid, but you were the work was dangerous, the hours were long. People were getting injured constantly. It was not a great situation. And so the people in the countryside were feeling somewhat disenfranchised, like kind of like they were, you know, they had they quote owned the land and were getting paid, but they were still feeling like they were kind of like slaves. Likewise, people in the city felt like they were slaves to factories. And so if we we go back in time a little bit, these issues weren't new to Russia, although they were they were kind of new at this point in time, but the issues of factories in the Industrial Revolution were problems in America and Britain and the rest of Europe in the early 1800s. And so a couple of guys who who were from Germany, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, got together and said, you know what, this is the time to make some big big changes to the world. The future of humanity is going to be cooperative. And so their theory, which they they based on, you know, look, they looked at history, they looked at science, and they said, this is going to be a scientific theory. And we're going to say that the future of humanity is going to be one where where we eliminate personal property and everyone shares everything. And so they they said that, you know, in the in the past, when you had everybody making stuff on their own, you know, you had the farmer would grow crops, and the craftsman would build things out of his own home and sell them to people. This was no longer the situation. You couldn't do that anymore because you had these factories, and these factories could create stuff faster and cheaper than individual craftsmen. So before, where you had a woman and she could essentially sew clothes and sell them out of her home, she was now displaced by the loom, which had, you know, a factory and a whole bunch of people working it. The loom and these factories could turn out clothes so much faster than just a woman and her needle could. And so where you had a group of self-employed people before, these people were now no longer able to compete against factories. And so they went to they went and got factory jobs, these factory jobs that were not particularly great. And the problem, you know, according to Marx and Engels, is that you have these people that have the capital and people that don't, the capitalists. And they the capitalists were the bourgeoisie, is what they called them, and the workers were the proletariat. So when you hear the term proletariat, just think regular worker people, and the bourgeoisie, that's the capitalists. Those are the people that own everything. So their theory, Marx and Engels, their theory was that throughout history, you had these classes of people, the haves and the have-nots. And the people that have, in this case, the means of production, or the the people that had the capital and own the factories, they are oppressing the people doing the work. They're basically exploiting them, right? So they people would go to the factories and they work long hours and you know they have these terrible conditions, and they're basically being taken advantage of by the people that have the capital to do that. So they developed, along with a number of other people, a writing, which what they called the Communist Manifesto. And their vision of the future was that in the future, everyone would share everything. You would eliminate personal property, you would eliminate classes. So the people that had this property would share it with the other people that were doing the work. And so everyone would work, everyone would share property, everyone would share basically everything, and people would be they would have universal education, everyone would be educated, and then everyone would co-govern. The idea being that eventually you eliminate the state. Everyone has, and nobody has not, and everybody's equal, and under the eyes of God and the law, and and everything else. Some of their more radical ideas were a public education, so universal education for everyone, the abolition of private property, and their idea being that you would also abolish religion. There would be no more religions anymore, because they felt that was uh an archaic artifact of the past. And the future would be based in science and technology and utopia, except not utopianism as you know practiced back in the day. Their side, their utopia was going to be scientific and it was going to work this time. It was good stuff. And so, as these things are going on in Russia, uh, the Communist Manifesto arrives in Russia and is pretty well received.

Robyn 16:16

Yes, it actually arrived in the 1860s. Uh Orlando Fijis, who is one of the most preeminent historians on Russia, um, he said in his book A People's Tragedy, The Russian Revolution, 1891 to 1924, that, quote, the special attraction of Marxism stemmed from the importance it gave to the role of the working class and to the idea of progress. The popular Marxist pamphlets of the late 1890s, which for the first time attracted numbers of workers to the cause, drove home the lessons of the famine crisis in 1891, that peasants were doomed to die out as a result of economic progress, that they were a relic of Russia's backward past who would be swept away by industry, and that the beliefs in a commune society was no longer tenable. Only Marxism could explain to workers why their peasant parents had become so poor and why they'd been forced into cities. End quote. Society's changing, but they don't know how to move along with it. And in this context, Nikolai Chernikevski wrote a book. Um, he wrote it in prison. He was a revolutionary, and it is called What is to be done. So this book was a novel to not very intellectual scientific stuff. It was it was easy for the masses to read. Um, and it tells the story of a young girl who breaks free from an arranged marriage and tries to follow her dream of starting up a workshop and basically breaking free of the mold that had been there. So I read this book and I found it to be very much like a mid-1800s uh Twilight or The Hunger Games or something where a young girl finds herself in coming-of-age. It's a coming of age book. And the importance of this book is that it added an emotional element to the revolution. Marx and Ingalls were a bunch of intellectual guys who did couldn't really communicate to, well, females, but the masses, as well as this novel could. And it was one of the most influential books at the time. And like there was even a newspaper article that said that it was more influential than Marx because it was able to get people's emotions riled up and get them excited. Um, one of the people who was most influenced by Trinikevsky's book was Vladimir Lenin, who would later become the leader of the party that overthrew the government in October of 1917. He took so much from this book that he like one of his first pamphlets is he called What Is to Be Done after the name of the book. And so even today, if you look it up and you're trying to find Chernikewski's book, the first thing that pops up everywhere is Lenin's work that he based on it. And so this was a book that a lot of people were influenced by that you know didn't didn't really connect with Marx. And also the um Communist Manifesto and works by socialists and stuff were really hard to get out in the countryside of Russia. It's like there weren't really printing presses there. Uh the Tsar didn't approve of a lot of it, so uh it was banned. Uh people went through a lot of different things in order to just get one copy, and then like a whole surrounding community would have that one copy to read, whereas what is to be done was more um prevalent and people were more able to read it and connect with it.

Thad 20:05

Right. So, you know, it's one of those examples where we see that you can have all kinds of great scientific theory and you can have all kinds of great policy, but really it's it's the stories that we tell each other. And in this situation, you could look at the Russian Revolution, which turned into the communist revolution, which then was implemented in some of the largest, most populated places in the world. And you can trace back the inspiration of this back to uh a guy who was a novelist who was writing a fiction novel. So that's it's just something where you look at that and you say, these stories, even things that are written as entertainment, they they shape our thinking, they inspire us, they're important.

Robyn 20:51

And and so it was around this time where there was an excitement, strikes were beginning to happen. The workers would be a large chunk of what would form the party that would take over a Russia in 1917 led by Lenin. They were a huge part of it, not all of it, but it was this group who wanted reforms, who wanted change, who like were able to read and act. And so it was in this context that uh after Alexander released the like freed the serfs, and um, and they were in the countryside and there was still oppression everywhere, there was the a revolt in January of 1905 that was called Bloody Sunday. What's important to think about is that a lot of the peasants believed that the Tsar was on their side and that he would never do anything to make their lives horrible and make things worse for them. They very much believed that it was just the nobles, the bureaucracy, all these people that were lying to the Tsar about what was going on and getting him to say things and that. If only they could reach him, and if only they could talk to him, he would totally understand what was going on with their lives. So this revolution that turned out to be Bloody Sunday, long before the Irish one, was uh because a bunch of peasants went and they were trying to express their grievances to Nicholas II at the time.

Thad 22:22

And Nicholas's response to all of this, um, Fiji says, he quotes it just a bit just a little bit before Bloody Sunday, the ministers come to the Tsar and they present him with uh these reforms. Uh, the other thing is that there are a whole spectrum of reforms that people are trying to get done, not just for the people in the in the countryside, but for the people in the factories. And so some of the the more radical reforms of the day are hey, you know what, maybe people could have a representative assembly where laws could be passed and we could start, you know, making things a little bit better. And so, Nicholas, you know, as as we've as we've talked about, you know, in in the past episode, he's a guy who is trying to bridge this gap. He's not particularly interested in government. He seems to be a guy who's kind of trapped by history. He's the descendant of these czars that have ruled this country, sometimes with an iron fist, sometimes with reform. He's trying to fulfill what he sees as his duty, which is to be the steward of this dynasty and this house and this country, and then pass it on to his son.

Robyn 23:36

And and it's really hard to read Nicholas's account before this and his diaries and things, and not just feel empathy for him and sympathy for him, because he really didn't want to be caught up in this. He spent more time worrying about his family than worrying about what was going to happen in Russia. And so when you think about Nicholas, it's not like he was this commanding figure who was really rule ruling with an iron fist, as Thad said, he was just trying to keep things together.

Thad 24:07

Right. So when this draft is brought to him, he reads over it, and his response is this quote, I will never agree to the representative form of government, Nicholas proclaimed, because I consider it harmful to the people whom God has entrusted to me. The decree was finally passed on the 12th of December, promised to strengthen the rule of law, to ease restrictions on the press, and to expand the rights of the Zemstos, those were progressives. But it said nothing at all about the important subject of the parliamentary body on which concessions were essential if a revolution was to be averted. Hearing of its constance, Mirsky at once fell into despair. Everything has failed, he said despondently to one of his colleagues. Let us build jails.

Robyn 24:51

And it's interesting that, yes, that said, they did come up with this idea of an assembly, and they did try to make it work, but within a year or two it it had dissolved. Yeah, the Duma had pretty much dissolved.

Thad 25:04

So as a point of uh reference, the Duma that they're trying to get started here, it comes back, and that they uh it actually exists in various forms. Um and it is existing um from that point forward. And in fact, the Russian Duma exists today. It's their parliament. So when you hear the term Duma, that's what it's referring to, is is the parliament. So its initial, it's initial trying to get started, Nicholas was like, no, no, no, that's that's just not something that should be, because in Nicholas's perspective, he was, as you said, it this is a duty entrusted to him by God, and he's you know, he has to he has to enact it. And it would be inappropriate to have a representative form of government because it would be taking, it would be going against God's will.

Robyn 25:46

And so when we look at all of this going on late 1800s, early 1900s, you see the peasants are unhappy, um, don't like the position they're in, see what's their um their background, their ancestors, and that there's really no path forward with them. You see the factory workers who are super upset with their conditions because they moved to the city thinking things would be better.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

Better life.

Robyn 26:11

Yes, a better life. They were promised um a a better life. And um in the book I read, Apostles and Terrorists, um, the author compares it to America. People in Europe that, you know, moved to America thought it would be a better life was very similar to people in the countryside moving to cities in Russia and expecting a better life. And in both cases, often people were disillusioned. So we have this tinder box of Russia that's you know ready to explode and is all there in the background, millions of people. And then we have Anna, this girl who was a teenager at the time, young girl, when she escaped, she was 19. This is a memoir, but she's recalling her experiences in Russia at the time. Um, she did live through the Russian Revolution. As we said, it was in St. Petersburg. So you get the city um view of it, what it was like in the city. Her family was more of a middle-class family. Her dad was a manager of a factory, so you see what things were like from that perspective. And it's really interesting just to see the look the view that one person had of this in a city compared to all the chaos that was going around in Russia at the time.

Thad 27:32

So, one of the things to to point out of note is that there are actually two revolutions during this time period. And that's reflected by the fact that there are essentially two schools of thought on how to reform Russia. So, all of these people that are that are dissatisfied, they want change. So, you have two schools of thought. One of those is the Social Democrats, and their idea is that look, we what we can do is we can implement reforms. We can have a representative form of government, we can put in some safety concerns, uh, maybe we could put in some laws where you can't hire five-year-olds and put them to work in dangerous places, things like that, right? They included um women's rights. Women's rights. And there was a there was a lot of progressive rights that were thought of in the social democrats. And then you had the communists. That's the when you hear the they went by the name Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks, their idea was, hey, when we have the revolution, we need to we need to implement this decide communism idea. So they took the works of Marx and Engels, and Lenin went in and built on top of that a whole lot of Leninism, Marxism. And their ideas were basically like, yes, we're going to take it. We can move the full world forward, and not only should we just make things better, but we should go ahead and make things the best.

Robyn 28:56

And if you want to think about this in in other terms, it's you had the social democrats, the the group that wanted reforms was excited, where for a while Russia was actually like the most reformed country in in the world. Like they had more rights than anyone else. You'll hear Anna talk about it. But you had those reformers, and then they wanted to work through government and follow all the ways that people had traditionally gotten power and that way. The communists, the Bolsheviks, um, led by Lenin, were just like, yeah, nah, guys. We're we're just gonna scrap this and uh and we're just gonna start over. Uh forget this whole going through government, we're gonna create our own.

Thad 29:42

Right. So the two revolutions that happen are one, an unexpected revolution, and we're going to talk about that from the pr from the perspective of Alexander Kerensky, who was a guy working in the Duma and finds himself kind of thrust into the middle of things when revolution just kind of spontaneously breaks out. When this happens, called the February Revolution, Lenin and his compatriots are actually in Switzerland. They're not they're not present. They're they've been exiled because you know the Tsar didn't want all these troublemakers at home. So these guys have been flung far and wide. So Lenin is off in Switzerland, and word gets to him that a revolution has happened in Russia. Something that he that nobody really expected, just kind of out of the blue. No one expects the Russian revolution and Lenin realizes that if he's going to have a communist revolution in his lifetime, this is his opportunity. So through a series of intrigue, he eventually gets passage through Germany during wartime in a sealed train car back to Russia, where he then gets out, meets up with Leon Trotsky, and they create over the a series of a few months the Bolshevik Revolution.

Robyn 31:08

And it's important to remember, Thad mentioned in wartime that the war, this is World War I. Um, Germany and Russia were fighting each other. So Switzerland was sending him through enemy territory to Russia. And Anna's gonna talk a lot more about Germans and how they retreated in Russia, but this this was like a thing. It's a big deal. It's a big deal.

Thad 31:33

Right. And in fact, we we will hopefully talk about that at some more at some point.

Robyn 31:37

We will.

Thad 31:37

Alright. But now let's get to Anna's story.

Robyn 31:41

St. Petersburg, nicknamed Venice of the North, had been the capital of the Russian Empire since Peter the Great. It was the seat of government, a residence of the imperial family, a thriving trading metropolis, and an important industrial center. Thus, on the city streets, one encountered not only Russians, but also representatives of all European states, as well as Caucasians, Armenians, Siberians, and Chinese. The largest foreign ethnic group living in St. Petersburg was, without a doubt, the Germans. At the beginning of the 20th century, St. Petersburg had over two million inhabitants, of whom 75,000 were Germans. First, there were the Germans of the Reich, subjects of the German Empire. They kept to themselves, had their own clubs, their own holidays, interacted almost exclusively among themselves, and maintained contact with the Russian population only as much as necessary. Then there was also a larger Austrian community and a small Swiss community, but the vast majority of St. Petersburg Germans came from the Baltic states. And for a good reason. After Peter the Great victoriously ended the Great Northern War against Sweden at the beginning of the 18th century, the provinces belonged to the Russian Empire, and were divided into governates of Livonia, Estonia, and Courland. At that time families were large. Eight to ten children were not uncommon, and the small Baltic homeland could not offer everyone a promising future. Thus, Russia became the land of unlimited opportunities for the Balts, just like America was for Western Europeans. Even the large estates in the Baltic region, belonging to Baltic nobles, were mostly entailed estates, meaning the eldest son inherited it and the younger sons largely entered Russian service, either as officers in the Russian army or as civil servants in administration, in the ministries or even Russian court. But many Baltic academics, merchants, and craftsmen also went to Russia because they found much better opportunities for advancement. Many of them occupied leading positions, others founded their own companies. In Russia at that time, Germans were welcomed with open arms. While Russians often mocked the meticulous, fastidious German, they also valued his efficiency, reliability, organizational talent, and know-how. There was a Russian saying at the time, the German is clever, he even invented the monkey, demonstrating Russians' high regard for Germans. Generally speaking, relations between Germans and Russians before the First World War were excellent, as the two nations complemented each other almost perfectly. Germans were readily willing to take on responsibility and perform good, efficient work if they were paid fairly, while many Russians were happy to delegate responsibility and daily drudgery to a reliable employee and were happy to pay them generously. My father came to St. Petersburg from the Baltic at the end of the last century because there was a favorable opportunity for career advancement. He'd grown up in a large family in the countryside of Corlin. My grandparents had four sons and four daughters. All four sons were able to attend a gymnasium, grammar school, and graduate, but that was the end of it. University studies were out of the question, and at that time there was no student loan program, the cost of university studies had to be borne entirely by the parents, which was just too expensive for my grandparents. My father would have loved to study, but since that wasn't possible, he went to Riga and became a merchant. He spent almost his entire life in the service of Riga Paper Mills Joint Stock Company, a large paper mill that supplied the Russian hinterland with fine writing paper, art printing paper, cigarette paper for Russian papyrus, and in later years also paper for Russian banknotes. The latter was, of course, a particularly important and lucrative. St. Petersburg hosted wonderful concerts by local and foreign orchestras and soloists, and it posted several permanent theater, most notably the two imperial theaters and Mars Linsky and the Alexander. The Marlinsky Theater offered operas and ballet performances of the highest caliber. It was the favorite theater of the court and the upper crest, a place where everyone who was anyone gathered. Even the exterior was impressive. It was a sumptuous theater, entirely upholstered in dark blue velvet and gold, with enormous chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, cascading their light upon distinguished society that assembled there. Civilians in tailcoats, officers and diplomats in gleaming dress uniforms adorned with sashes and medals, and ladies in elegant evening gowns covered in glittering jewels, their precious fur stalls casually draped over their soldiers, matching oversized muffs in their laps, and then fashionable white hair and feathers in their elaborately styled hair. It was the favorite theater of the upper crest, and the ticket prices were correspondingly high. Adding to the problems was the unsavory practice of middlemen buying up large numbers of tickets and reselling them under the table at a considerable markup, which drove the prices even further. As a result, we rarely visited that theater. Fortunately, my father was a passionate theater goer and occasionally treated us to a box. Thus, even as children, we saw several wonderful ballet performances, such as Chukowski's Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, Ardubis, Capella. Later, when we were older, he also took us to opera performances. I particularly remember an unforgettable performance of Mazorsky's opera Boris Godinov with the famous bass Chapbalin, probably because I had the opportunity to absorb the imperial family from our box. I saw Nicholas II, the last Tsar of the Romanov dynasty, his wife Alexandra Firnova, and their two eldest daughters, Grand Duchess Olga and Tatiana. At the end of the performance, everyone present stood and sang the Russian national anthem, God Save the Emperor. Who could have guessed that the family would one day meet such a tragic end? We visited the second imperial theater, the Alexander Theater, much more often, where only dramas and comedies by Russian authors were performed. Here too, excellent actors performed, and the stage design and costumes were in no way inferior to those of the Merlinsky Theater. Here, too, there was a magnificent theater hall decorated in red velvet and gold. However, it wasn't the favorite theater of the Uppercrest. There were no middlemen, and therefore prices were normal. Here we saw the classic Russian dramas and comedies that we'd previously read and, as students so nicely put it, discussed in our Russian lessons at school, taking on different roles. Fortunately for those with less money, and especially for school and university students, St. Petersburg had a second opera house, the musical drama. It wasn't housed in a grand building, but rather a large concert hall with a balcony, and its interior was much more modest. However, ticket prices were affordable. And the stage design and costumes weren't as elaborate as the other theaters, but this was more than compensated for by the wonderful voices and dedication of the young singers who performed there after graduating from the conservatory, earning their first accolades and captivating the mostly youthful audience with thunderous applause. I was here often since our clique, a group of my classmates and fellow students, had formed a kind of theater club when I was in my final year of high school. We used to go to the drama once or twice a month, occupying a whole row in the stalls and enjoying the wonderful performances. And those opera evenings and the romantic sleigh rides across the snow covered streets, either in snowstorm or under a clear sky with moonlight and starlight, those are among my fondest childhood memories. As you will probably have gathered from everything I've told you so far, life in St. Petersburg during the Tsarist era was quite pleasant, provided you had the necessary cash. But this shining side of the coin had a very ugly, dark reverse, namely the poverty and absolute lack of rights of the lower classes. Wages were extremely low, there was neither health nor pension insurance, no notice periods, no entitlement to vacation, and no compulsory compulsory schooling for children. So the vast majority of the population was illiterate. When a worker, his wife, and the children fell seriously ill, it was a catastrophe for his family. The wife had to figure out how to support herself and the children while also caring for her sick husband as best she could, because there was no health insurance and she had no money to pay a doctor. If the illness lasted a long time, many a family, through no fault of their own, fell into dire straits, and there was a lot of begging and drinking in St. Petersburg. There were no pubs, like in other countries. The state-run Monopoly stores sold liquor in quarter liter bottles, and it was considered good if customers took their bottles of vodka home and drank it there. But many used to drink the whole bottle of liquor in one go right there in the street. They staggered around the streets, senselessly drunk, until they finally collapsed and fell asleep. If they were lucky, they were discovered and taken to the station to sober up, as they were at risk of freezing to death in the harsh winter. These were, of course, extreme cases, but even in everyday life, one encountered everywhere the stark social contrasts and the absolute indifference of the authorities and the rich and property towards the fate and living conditions of the lower classes. These were, of course, extreme cases. But in everyday life, one encountered everywhere the stark social contrast and the absolute indifference of the authorities, rich and property, towards the fate and living conditions of the lower classes. I only need to think of the conditions in the house where I was born and where we lived as tenants until our departure from St. Petersburg in June 1918. It was one of the houses built in the first half of the 19th century for the well-to-do middle class, the so-called intelligentsia. It stood on the banks on the fontains, a wide canal that flowed into the Neve and was crossed by several bridges. Our house stood on one such bridge. The former Kimisov Bridge, now the Lomonisov Bridge, with its four stone towers, connected the hanging iron chains. It was a five-story building with rounded corners, its front facing the Fantanka. It was built in a square on a large wood paved courtyard, in the center of which a garden with tresses, bushes, benches, and a fountain where the tenants' children could play, under the supervision of nannies or their nanny. The covered main entrance, or parade entrance, as it was called, was guarded by a uniformed doorman whose job it was to ensure that no unwanted visitors, such as merchants or even beggars, entered the building. The contrast between the luxurious lifestyle of the upper 10,000, often degenerating into senseless waste, and the poverty and absolute lack of rights for the lower classes, was so stark that it was foreseeable that a revolution would come sooner or later. Although many Russian writers, such as Tornyev, Kontrakov, Chekhov, and especially Dostoevsky, described and announced these intolerable conditions in their works, nothing changed. When Russia's entry into the First World War brought further Severe suffering, hunger, and deprivation to the population, the cuff overflowed. The popular uprising of February 1917 led to the abdication of the emperor and ultimately to the murder of the Tsars family. With that, the era of the Tsars ended and the era of the USSR had begun. When Russia entered World War I, there were lots of changes. The capital is now called Petrograd instead of St. Petersburg, because that sounded too German. Far more painful to us as Germans living in Russia was the abrupt end of the traditionally good German-Russian relations that had existed for decades. Suddenly, we were the cursed Germans, viewed with suspicion and suspected of all manner of evil. Shops owned by Petersburg Germans, where we had happily shopped for years, were not only boycotted, but sometimes looted and vandalized. And the police stood idly by, even though the owners' families had lived in Russia for generations and were Russian citizens. It was enough that they had German-sounding names. German could not be spoken in public under penalty of severe punishment. We could only speak German with each other within our homes, and censorship prevented us from communicating in German with people like our family outside of Russia. And as for the German language church schools, a rigorous recation was carried out, through which the government tried to get rid of foreign influence in the school system. From August 1914 onwards, instruction in German was only permitted in two subjects, German and religion. Now this wasn't hard for our teachers and the students born and raised in Russia, since we mastered Russian as well as our own mother tongue. The rectification was harder for our leaders who had grown up in the Baltic states and studied at the State University of Dorput, where lectures had been held in German. Meanwhile, the First World War continued and brought, like everywhere else, immense suffering to everyone. Countless families mourned fallen sons, grandsons, fathers, or spouses. Vast swaths of land were devastated, destroyed, or occupied by enemy troops. And now, to top it off, there was a total collapse of the food supply. It was truly grotesque. In agrarian Russia, the breadbasket of Europe, which for decades had supplied all European countries with grain, bread was almost impossible to find. Other basic foodstuffs were also becoming scarce, and we had long since stopped receiving meat with our ration cards, only fish, varieties we had never heard or seen before. These fish were delivered by the wagon load from Ziberia, salted. There were only two kinds of varieties, ket and the bobla. If we were supplied with ket, we were already happy. If you soaked this cod-like fish for 24 hours, the flesh yielded enough to prepare a filling meal. You could boil it, fry it, or grind it. In any case, you would be full. This was especially bad for the hardworking population. As the Russian troops were pushed further back, the defeat seemed inevitable. Discontent began to fester among the population, leading to strikes and riots. I'm gonna pause her diary right here and read part of the propaganda that communists were putting out at this time to try to get the public sympathetic towards overthrowing the Tsar. So this is by Alexandra Kalante, who was a communist and uh wrote material pamphlets and gave speeches against um World War One. And she believed that communism was a worldwide thing, so she opposed World War I on all aspects. But this is what she targeted specifically for Russians. Um, and she wrote this in 1915. It's called Who Needs the War? And this part of it is called Heroes. The war has not yet ended. Indeed, its end was still not in sight, but the number of cripples was multiplying. The armless, the legless, the blind, the deaf, the mutilated, they had set off for the bloody world slaughterhouse, young, strong, and healthy. Their life still lay ahead of them. Only a few months, weeks, even days later, they were brought back to the infirmaries, half dead, crippled. Heroes, say those who started a European war, who said one people out against another, the worker from one country out against his fellow worker from another. At least now they've won an award, they will be able to walk around wearing their medals. People will respect them. However, in real life, things are different. The hero comes home to his native village or town, and when he arrives, he cannot believe his eyes. In place of respect and joy, he finds waiting for him fresh sufferings and disillusionment. His village has been reduced to poverty and starvation. The men folk were dragged off to war, the livestock requisitioned, taxes must be paid, and there is no one to do the work. The women have been run off their feet, they are haggard and starved, worn out with weeping. Cripple heroes wander around the village, some with one medal, some with two, and the only respect the hero gets is to hear his own family reproach him as a parasite who eats the bread of others. And that bread is rationed. The hero, who returns to the town, fares no better. He is met with respect by his mother, who weeps from both grief and joy. Her darling son is alive. Her aging mother's eyes have beheld him once again. His wife smiles. For a day or two, they will fuss around him. And then, since when do working people have the time, the leisure to look after an invalid? Each has its own affairs, his own worries. Moreover, the times are difficult. Not a day passes, but the cost of living rises. War. The children are wailing. War is always accompanied by epidemics, infection. The wife is trying to do a thousand things at once. She must work for herself and for the breadwinner. And the Tsar's pension? How much is that? It would hardly pay for one boot for the one leg they have remaining. Officers, wounded generals will, of course, receive their pensions according to rank. But who is interested in the ordinary private, the former workers, peasant, or artisan? Who cares about his fate? Power in the state is not in the hands of the people, but in the hands of the landowners and industrialists, the lords and masters. The state finances controlled not by those hero soldiers who die in the hundreds of thousands and millions in the war, but by those same lords, the landowners, industrialists, state officials, the servants of the Tsar. At first, while the memory is still fresh and the canon are still sounding at the front, the hero soldiers will be remembered. Various societies, charitable organizations, and the Red Cross will come to their aid with miserly handouts. First one year passes, then another, peace comes, and people take up once more their former daily round. What will become of our heroes? Wounded colonels and generals will ride about in their cars. They took care of themselves during the war, hoarded up with their cash, stuffed their pockets with the soldiers' rations. And the hero soldiers, maimed with their medals? What will their fate be? Will they really have to go and join the beggars on the church porch? It's not a pleasant fate that awaits the hero and the savior of his fatherland. Even if he wears ten medals on his breast, the Tsarist government will not concern himself about him. It will not give him a thought. The hearts of the landowners and industrialists, the hearts of the masters will not grieve over the injured. What does it matter to them? It's not their brother who's suffering, wandering about the country cursing his fate. This is not a gentleman, but one of the lower orders. And the lower orders, the workers, the peasant, the artisan, were born precisely in order to serve their lords and masters, to shed their blood for them, and as their reward, to die of hunger under some fence. While the people themselves do not speak out on behalf of the heroes, while the people themselves do not take power into their own hands, while the people do not control the state finances, the crippled heroes will be unable to improve their lot. End quote. And among the soldiers who, you know, were experiencing these things and thought, hey, you know, d maybe there's something else we could do. Maybe there's somewhere else we can turn. And as Lily'll talk in a few minutes, one special person came around to take advantage of that. I'm gonna start uh her diary back again. Quote Following his tried and trusted formula, Tsar Nicholas II ordered the military to violently suppress riots, but this time the troops refused to obey him and sided with the people. Finally, in early 1917, Nicholas was forced to abdicate. He, his wife Alexandra, and their children were deported to Yekateransburg and murdered there July 16, 1918. This was the tragic end of centuries of absolute monarchy in Russia. The popular uprising of February 1917 was not without violence. One morning we were awakened by a wild shootout very close to our house. When we ran to the window, we saw that on the opposite bank of the canal, in the square in front of the Ministry of the Interior, army trucks had arrived, manned by armed Red Army soldiers. They first fired indiscriminately from the outside through the windows, then jumped from the trucks and stormed the building. With that same destructive fury, they attacked the nearby state liquor store, smashing the entire stock to bits so that the whole area was littered with broken bottles and liquors which flowed into the street and into the gutter. The pent-up fury of the crowd was directed mainly against the police. In the past, the police had treated the people, and especially the marginalized groups of society, such as street musicians, beggars, and drunks, with great brutality. If the crowd got hold of an individual police officer, he was mercilessly lynched. No wonder then that police officers banded together in groups, fled into townhouses, and, armed to the teeth, barricaded themselves into attics to defend themselves to the last shot, since they knew what would happen if they surrendered. A police squad had also barricaded themselves in our attic. The shooting only stopped when none of them were alive. This entire battle took place up our backstairs, right behind our kitchen door. For several days we didn't dare leave the house, as the unleashed mob was unpredictable. Only when the initial fury had subsided did a certain degree of calm set in. In places of the now defunct police, a red militia was formed as the force for order, recruited from the Red Army soldiers. Housing committees were established in the buildings to maintain a degree of order, and gradually the situation normalized. Finally, elections were held, resulting in a People's Parliament, the Duma, and a provisional government under Kerensky. I'm going to pause the diary here so that Thad can read an account of Alexander Korinsky, who, as she just noted, had become the leader of the provisional government.

Thad 56:34

He writes about the the morning that he woke up and encountered the revolution just kind of out of the blue. This is from Russia and History's Turning Point by Alexander Korinsky. Chapter 13. From The Days of Destiny. At about 8 a.m. on Monday, February 27, 1917, my wife awakened me with the news that Nechrosov had telephoned to say that the Duma had been suspended. The Volin regiment had mutinied, and I was wanted immediately at the Duma. Despite the fact that the political situation had grown ominously stormy during the last few days, it was several moments before I grasped the full significance of Nechrosov's news. The stage had long been set for the final showdown, but as often happens in such cases, no one had expected it to become when it did. It did not take me long, however, to realize that the hour had struck at last. I dressed quickly and set off at once for the Duma building, which was about a five minutes' walk from my home. My first thought was that the Duma must be kept in session at all costs, and that the close contact between the armed forces and the Duma must be established. Before I left my apartment that morning, I had called some of my friends and urged them to go to the barracks of the insurgent regiments to try to persuade the troops to come to the Duma. During the few days before the revolution, the deputies had come to regard the Duma's left wing as the only group that knew the mood of the masses and that was in contact with the developments in the city. In fact, we had been fairly successful in organizing an intelligence and news gathering service all over the capital, and every ten or fifteen minutes, reports were telephoned into us. As soon as I appeared in the hall, I was surrounded by people and bombarded with questions. I told them that there were riots all over the city and that the insurgent troops were on their way to the Duma, and that I knew the revolution had begun. I said that as representatives of the people it was our duty to welcome them and to make them make common cause with them. The news that the soldiers were heading towards the Duma was at first caused some alarm among the deputies, but this feeling was soon forgotten in the excitement of the prospect of their arrival. In the meantime, the soldiers of one regiment after another began pouring into the streets without their officers. Some of the officers had been placed under arrest, and there were a few cases of assassination. Others had slipped away, deserting their units in the face of obvious hostility and distrust of the enlisted men. Civilians were joining the troops everywhere. Great crowds of workers came pouring out into the city from the suburbs, and there were lively exchanges of gunfire in a number of areas. Clashes with the police were soon reported. Police machine gunners were firing at the crowds from rooftops and belfries. For the moment, the throngs of people in the street did not seem to have any particular aim, and it was difficult to see at that stage how things would develop. One thing was clear, however. The government intended to take advantage of the growing disorder for its own nefarious purposes. Everyone thought that the hunger riots and disintegration of the military and the quote disloyalty of the Duma would be used as an excuse by the Protopovov clique to make an open move toward the conclusion of a separate peace treaty with Germany. As an aside, Produpopov was the Minister of the Interior and had control of St. Petersburg at that point in time. So when Kerensky is talking about him, he's talking about the government of Tsar Nicholas, and Propopov being the man in charge would have been leading the resistance to the revolution at that time. Continuing on, I cannot recall all the topics discussed on that Monday morning in the Council of Elders, and later at the unofficial session, which met from twelve to two PM, but the decision was made to form a provisional committee with unrestricted powers. At 1 PM, the soldiers still had not arrived, and when someone at last shouted to me from the main entrance that they were in sight, I raced toward the window, hardly believing it could be true. From the window I saw the soldiers, surrounded by civilians, lining up on the opposite side of the street. It was clear that they felt awkward in these unusual circumstances, and they looked lost without their officers. Without stopping to put on a coat, I ran out through the main entrance to greet those for whom we had waited so long. I hurried to the center gate and shouted some words of welcome on behalf of the Duma. As a detachment of the Prabinsky Regiment surged around me in a confused throng, Chikidzi and Sobolev, several other deputies reached the gate behind me. When Chikidzi had spoken a few words of greeting, I urged the soldiers to follow me into the Duma building in order to disarm the guard and defend the building in case of attack by troops loyal to the government. At once the soldiers lined up in orderly ranks and marched in after me. We went straight to the guard room through the main entrance to the palace. I was afraid that it might be necessary to use force to remove the guard, but they had apparently fled some time before we got there. I gave the command of the post to a noncommissioned officer and explained to him where the sentries should be posted. By three o'clock that afternoon, the Duma was unrecognizable. It was packed with civilians and soldiers. From every direction, people approached us for instructions or advice. The provisional committee, which had only just been formed, was compelled to act as an executive power. We were like the general staff of an army during war operations. We could not see the battlefield, but we learned what was going on from reports, telephone messages, and eyewitness accounts. Although we did not have a detailed report of every single development, we had a good overall picture of events. The reports came in at a bewildering rate. Hundreds of people wanted attention, gave advice, and asked for work. There was a constant hubbub of excitement which sometimes bordered on hysteria. We had to keep our heads, for it would have been disastrous to waste precious time or to show any lack of self-confidence. We had to decide on the spot what answers to give, what orders to issue, when to encourage and when to discourage, where to send troops and reinforcements, how to find room for the hundreds of people being arrested, how best to utilize the services of competent people, and, last but not least, how to feed and house the thousands of people crowding the Duma. Apart from all that, we had to think about the formation of a new government and about drafting a program acceptable to all parties. At the same time, we had to keep track of events outside Petrograd, particularly at Army headquarters and in the Tsar's train. I think it was approximately four o'clock when someone came to see about finding space in the Tarid Palace for the Soviet workers' deputies, who had just also just been formed. With Rodzhenko's consent, room thirteen was turned over to them, and they convened their first meeting there without delay. Naturally, the representatives of the workers had been selected more or less at random, since it had been quite impossible to organize a proper election at short notice. The Soviet elected elected a temporary executive committee with Chikzi as chairman and Skobilev and myself as vice chairman. I only learned of my election later, as I was not present at the meeting. In fact, I seldom attended the meetings of the Soviet or its executive committee. From the very beginning, my relations with the leaders of the Soviet were strained. They hated the way that I continually opposed the theoretical socialism which they tried to impose on the revolution. But I am speaking of the executive committee as it was during the first few weeks. Later on, both it and the Soviet, as a whole, changed for the better. But the Duma was the only national center of power. The committee had acted without any prompting from the extreme left wing. It had set the revolution going simply because the time was ripe. In fact, the first news communicated to the front was an account of the Duma proceedings, and the revolution was successful chiefly because all the soldiers in the field, with their commanding officers, welcomed the change from the very first. The men at the front saw the gravity of the country's plight, and they, more than anyone else, accepted the Duma's authority. By sundown, on february twenty seventh, the entire city of Petrograd was in the hands of insurgent troops. The former government machinery had ceased to operate, and some of the ministry buildings and government offices had been occupied by revolutionaries. Other buildings, such as the headquarters of the secret police, the police stations, and law courts, had been set on fire. Inside the Duma, we had by now set up a central body to control the troops and the insurgents. At times, the crowds had been so enormous that they seemed about to engulf us all, but then they would subside and give us a few moments respite. The Towried Palace had seemed to groan and sway under the pressure of the mighty human waves. From the outside, it looked more like a military camp than a legislative institution. Boxes of ammunition, hand grenades, stacks of rifles, and machine guns lay about everywhere. Every available corner was taken up by soldiers, among whom, unfortunately, there were very few officers. Due to the impossibility of tackling the fundamental issues of government during the daytime, in the maelstrom of men, reports, and events, we had been forced to wait for nightfall when the crowds dispersed and the halls and lobbies emptied. As soon as calm was restored, endless discussions, conferences, and impassioned arguments filled the rooms of the Provisional Committee. There, in the stillness of the night, we began to sketch the outline of a new Russia. We were confronted, first of all, with the problem of organizing emergency emergency defenses with the task of taking over the Petrograd garrison. On the first day, however, we had very few officers at our disposal and few men with adequate technical knowledge. One of our first actions that evening was to set up an ad hoc military commission, which initially comprised civilians with some knowledge of military affairs and a sprinkling of officers and enlisted men. It was Yanko and myself. It was the task of this commission to direct operations against Protopopov's police, who still offered armed resistance to the revolution. While the commission was being organized, the first infantry reserve arrived at the Duma. It was the first regiment to arrive with its personnel complete, headed by its colonel and officers. However, despite this darth of officers, we managed to improvise the capital's defenses, although it was painfully clear that we could never resist an all-out attack, and that the enemy could gain complete control of the city with two or three well-trained regiments. However, the former government did not have a single soldier in Petrograd willing to turn against the people and the Duma. We and the Duma knew that victory was ours, but we had no idea what forces the former government had at its disposal outside the capital. We did not even know the government's whereabouts or what it was doing. Eventually, a report came in that the officials were sitting at the Marinsky Palace. A detachment of troops with armored cars was immediately dispatched to arrest all the members, but the soldiers returned at midnight, having been unable to reach the palace on account of gunfire. Later, the members of the former government were said to be hiding in the Admiralty, which was guarded by troops and artillery from Getina. Another report came in that the Tsarist troops were approaching from Finland, and we hastily organized defenses in the Vybork district of the city along the Russian-Finnish railroad line. At the same time, the Provisional Committee sent Alexander Bubakov, who had been a member of the Fourth Duma with a detachment of soldiers to take over the Central Railroad Telegraph Administration. This well-timed step gave the Duma control of the entire railroad system, and henceforth no trains could leave without Bublikov's consent. It was Bubakov, acting upon instructions from the Vision Provisional Committee, who telegraphed the first news of the revolution to the rest of the country. The railroad workers welcomed the revolution with great enthusiasm. At the same time, they maintained excellent discipline, and it was entirely due to their efforts that military trains ran to the front on schedule. By now, we had made such headway that a return to the past was no longer possible. The rift between the old and the new regime was final. The provisional committee had virtually wrested power from the Tsarist authorities. All through the night we talked and argued in the Dumas President's office, and every item of news or vague rumor was subject to intense scrutiny. The formation of the Soviet earlier in the day was regarded as a critical event, since there was now a danger that unless we formed a provisional government at once, the Soviet would proclaim itself the supreme authority of the revolution. Rodzenko was one of those who wavered longest. Finally, just before midnight, he announced his decision to accept the post of president of the Provisional Committee, which would now assume supreme power pending the formation of a new government. When the clock struck midnight, on f February 27th, 28th, Russia possessed the nucleus of a new national government.

Robyn 1:08:54

So that was Kerensky's account of the one day that the revolution happened. It was a very long account, but it just demonstrates how much happened over the course of one single day. I'm going to go back to Lily's diary now. Quote In the eight months between the popular uprising of February 1917 and the so-called Great October Revolution, Russia experienced a period of intellectual freedom, such as it had never known before. There was complete freedom of the press and of opinion. There were many newspapers of all different persuasions, and everyone could express their opinion completely unhindered, without fear of reprisals. In Parliament, in addition to a small number of splinter parties, there were several large parties, including the Liberals, the Social Democrats, who represented the nobility and large sections of the bourgeoisie, and the communists, who at that time were divided into two camps, the moderates, which were the so-called Mensheviks, and the Radicals. The Bolsheviks' strategic mastermind, Vladimir Ilyak Ulinov, who called himself Lenin, had meanwhile returned to Russia from his exile with the help of the German government. The Germans had brought him from his Swiss exile, smuggled him through Germany in a sealed train car, and brought him to Russia to sow as much unrest as possible and destabilize the situation, which also he did with the help of his comrade in arms, Trotsky, and they succeeded thoroughly in doing this. When Lenin was still at the beginning of his career and by no means famous, I once unexpectedly ran into him. I was walking home one afternoon from my violin lessons when I noticed a crowd of people gathered in front of a house. The people raised their arms with clenched fists and shouted something I couldn't understand from a distance. Curious, as teenagers are, I came closer to see what was going on. Then I saw the crowd of people looking up the second floor of the house. Up there on the balcony stood a man with a cat. He had Mongolian features and a goatee. He gave a rousing speech and called for revolution. His followers responded with the cry, Long live the revolution. I asked an older man standing next to me, can you tell me who that man is up there? He replied, Of course. That's Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks. In the heated atmosphere, I felt uneasy and made my way home. And never expected that what I had just seen would be the man who would become a great historical figure. Lenin acted very skillfully and managed in a relatively short time to win over the largest and most important population groups, the soldiers and the peasants, the war wary soldiers by promising to conclude a separate peace with Germany immediately after taking power, and the peasants by promising to take the land away from the aristocratic landlords and distribute it among them. Once Lenin was certain of the support of these two large segments of the population, he staged his storming of the Winter Palace, the seat of the provincial government on the night of October 25, 26, 1917. The much celebrated, celebrated battleship Aurora filed a single signal shot, and the Red Army marched into the Winter Palace virtually unopposed. The only defenders were a very few young officer cadets from the cadet school, among them the brother of one of my classmates, Boris Weiss. My classmate told me that he was the only one who managed to escape alive from the rooftops. After Lenin seized power, he fulfilled his two promises. On March 3, 1918, he immediately concluded a separate peace with Germany, which went down in history as the Treaty of Breslopovs, and he took the land of the aristocratic landowners. However, instead of distributing it among the peasants, he established collective farms everywhere. Then he turned to his next opponent, the bourgeoisie middle class. One day, all safe deposit box owners, including my father, received orders to appear at their bank on a specific day with their safe keys. Here, they had to unlock their safes, and the red militia members came in with large sacks, and the contents of the safes were thrown, unsorted, into them, shaken, whether it was securities, jewels, silverware, or personal documents. In this way, my father saw his savings of 20 years disappear before his eyes. In the same sack, my baptismal certificate, my confirmation certificate, and my high school diploma also disappeared forever. My father begged the militian man, at least let me take out the personal documents, you can't do anything with them anyway. But it was no use. They replied, Oh, we'll sort them out later. Which of course never happened. When my father came home, all he had left was his checking account, from which he was allowed to draw two thousand ruples a month, and nothing else. Since he was manager of a factory branch and therefore, in the eyes of the communists, an arch capitalist, he had no prospect of ever getting any other work. With that, our livelihood was lost and we were faced with the question of what would become of us. There was only one way out immigration to my parents' old Baltic homeland, which was also very familiar to us children. The immigration was made possible for us by the Treaty of Brestitovsk because one of the conditions of the treaty was the establishment of the independent states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which were intended as buffer states between Germany and Russia. Anyone who could prove their origin from one of these countries was allowed to return there. You had to contact the German consulate in Petrograd and prove your origin, then get a corresponding confirmation that was entered into the list of those wishing to immigrate. After some time, one received notification from the consulate about the scheduled departure date, because by then resettlement transports to the Baltic states were regularly running every two weeks. My father had no difficulty proving his origin since he still possessed his identity card, which dated that he came from Latvia. When we learned that we could leave at the end of May, my parents prepared everything for our departure. My father went, as required, to turn in our ration cards. Instead, he got a voucher for a specific quantity of food, which had to last until the day of our departure. My parents rented out four rooms of our six room apartment to a Russian business associate of my father's, a certain Mr. Olikin, starting June first. We kept the two remaining rooms at the time to store all of our belongings. At that time, we still thought the political situation in Russia would change and allow us to return. However, we were completely wrong about that. We packed our most valuable possessions, silverware, crystals, furs, into a chest and entrusted it to Philip Konikov, my father's very devoted office clerk, who lived with his wife and son in a one room apartment with the kitchen and the office of the paper mill branch. The faithful man kept them conscientiously and we received everything back undamaged five years later, in 1923, when an opportunity arose for its return to the Latvian consulate. And then we had great bad luck. Two days before the scheduled departure date, we received notification from the German consulate that, due to unforeseen diplomatic difficulties, the departure date had to be postponed indefinitely. This caused us great difficulties, especially because our food supplies were running out. The Ehrlman family, who were friends of ours and lived nearby, found themselves in the same predicament as they had the same departure date.

unknown 1:16:34

Mr.

Robyn 1:16:34

Ehrlman was a physics teacher at our St. Petra school. The Ehrlmans had three sons. The two older ones, Wolfgang and Gerhard, were two years and one year older than me, respectively, and had graduated from high school a year ahead of me. They were both now studying at Petersburg University, one medicine, the other naval architecture. The youngest son, the fifteen-year-old student, Vicky, had been sent ahead earlier by his parents with relatives. He had arrived safely and was already living in the house of Miss Erlman's brother, who was a pharmacist in Vero, Estonia. My father and Mr. Ehrlman took turns going to the German consulate every day to inquire about a possible departure date, but always in vain. There was no end in sight to the difficulties, so we had no choice but to take the risk of traveling on our own to the Russian border station. We had to attempt to cross the border somehow. First, the difficulty of obtaining train tickets had to be overcome. Since so many people were eager to leave Communist Russia at that time, long queues formed in front of the station ticket counters, and one usually had to wait days to reach the counter. Here, the very well disposed porter of our building proved to be a friend and our helper. Through the mediation of his brother-in-law, who worked at a ticket clerk in the Baltic station, he was able to get for us, which naturally considered a huge surcharge, eight second-class tickets from Petrograd to the border station of Touroshina. So we left Petrograd the morning of June 7, 1918, and boarded the scheduled trains to Touroshina at the Baltic station. Up to that point, the journey had been smooth and uneventful. Since there were eight of us, we had a compartment all to ourselves, along with the Earlmans. We watched the passing scenery through the compartment window, ate our packed lunch, read and chatted, and could pretend to ourselves that we were just ordinary travelers. Towards evening, we arrived in Toroshino, and when we got off the train there, we were met with a completely unexpected sight that burst the illusion of a normal journey, like some sort of soap bubble. It was impossible to get into the station at all, as it was completely blocked by refugees and their luggage. And on the ground surrounding the station building, there was an extensive refugee camp. It was made of tents and hastily nailed together shacks. Whole families seemed to be living in them. We initially placed our luggage in the open air along a fence, and we women and children sat on the luggage to watch over them. The men tried to get to the ticket counter to inquire about what to do next. After some time, they returned with good news and bad news. The good news was that in the village of Toroshino, one kilometer away, one could buy plenty of bread, butter, and sausage at the open market, and that boiled hot water was served around the clock at the train station. The bad news was that we would have to spend the night under the open sky as there was no place to stay. Also, that a Russian commissar would come the next morning at 10 a.m. to process our departure. His decision would determine whether we could remain there and wait for an opportunity to cross the border, or whether we'd have to return to Petrograd. This was devastating news, but we had to accept it. First, the men went to the village to shop at the open market and soon returned with wonderfully fragrant rye bread, butter, and sausage. We got boiled water at this train station. Luckily, the Earlmans had a teapot with tea in our luggage, so we brewed some tea, cut thick slices of the delicious rye bread, butter, and sausage, and finally enjoyed having a proper meal after so long. Then we wrapped ourselves in blankets and tried to sleep, sitting on our luggage with our backs against the fence. But that was out of the question. The station was incredibly noisy, trains were shunting, locomotives were whistling on the tracks, and it wasn't much quieter in the refugee camp. In the makeshift shelters, people ate and drank by candlelight or lanternlight, arguing, laughing, singing, accompanied by the accordion. It wasn't until well after midnight that things gradually quieted down, but by then the cold kept us awake. I hadn't known until then that a June night could be so cold, especially before sunrise. We had to keep getting up, moving around to keep ourselves warm. Only when the sun had risen and warmed the air did we feel more comfortable again. After we washed ourselves as best we could in the station toilets and freshened up a bit, we had a hearty breakfast of tea and buttered bread, followed by a nerve-wracking wait for the Russian commissar. At precisely 10 o'clock he appeared, a young man in a leather jacket with a red cap, followed by two Red Army soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders. By chance, he first addressed Mr. Ehrlman and demanded to see his personal papers. He checked them carefully, then looked at Mr. Ehrlman, grinned broadly, and to our astonishment said in perfect German, So you're Mr. Ehrlman, the physics teacher from St. Petri's School? Do you remember your former student, Mr. Dombrowski? And do you remember that you almost failed me once? Dombrowski? Of course I remember, said Mr. Ehrlman, laughing. You were the notorious slacker who always came up with new excuses to explain why he hadn't prepared his homework that day. No wonder you almost failed your university entrance exam. And now the two men became engrossed in old memories until finally the commissar said, Actually, I could return the favor and send you back to Petrograd. But I don't want to be like that. You can stay here as far as I'm concerned. But I can't help you any further. The only connection to the German occupying forces is a small special train that comes over every day at noon and consists of only a locomotive and one freight car, manned by a few German soldiers under the command of a lieutenant. Only the lieutenant gets off to collect some documents. Then the train goes back. The lieutenant doesn't speak to anyone and has never taken anyone with him. Now your situation is different. You're ethnic Germans and can speak German with him. I can only advise you to try, and I wish you the best of luck. He quickly went through our personal papers, stamped them, signed them, and said goodbye. After he had disappeared, my father said, Mr. Ehrlman, you helped us so much with the Russian commissar. Now let me try my luck with the German lieutenant. I will try to speak to him. At precisely twelve o'clock, the announced special train arrived. The lieutenant got off, and my father walked towards him. Then he suddenly stopped as if thunderstruck, and exclaimed in surprise, Mr. Delman, is that really you? The lieutenant replied, Mr. Lehman, how did you get here? Lieutenant Detman was the son in law of the director of the paper factories, a certain Mr. Goka, who had often been to St. Petersburg on business with his son-in-law. The two gentlemen had frequently visited us. Mr. Detman had even jogged with my dad a couple times. My father then explained her situation to him and concluded with the words And now we're sitting here in Torshino, and don't know if we have any prospect of crossing the border. But of course, replied Mr. Detman, it goes without saying that I'll take you with me. I still have some things to take care of here at the station. In the meantime, load your luggage into the freight car, get in and wait for me. I'll be back soon, and then we'll set off. When Commissar Dabrowski saw that the conversation with the German lieutenant had gone well, he waved to his two Red Army soldiers, who helped us carry and load the luggage, and also helped us get into the freight car, which involved some difficulties. But the German soldiers pulled from above and the Red Army soldiers pushed from below, and finally we made it up to safety, to the stunned amazement of those left behind on the platform in the refugee camp. And if anyone claims that there are no more miracles these days, they are mistaken. We experienced two real miracles in a row on our departure. And there are still angels these days. You just have to recognize them. Even if they may appear in the form of a communist commissar in a leather jacket, or a gray field uniform of a German lieutenant. After the lieutenant returned, the train set off to cross the border. We breathed a sigh of relief. We had made it, happy and grateful to have escaped communist Russia, and we traveled towards our familiar Baltic homeland, and, as we hoped, a better future. I left my birthplace in St. Petersburg on June 7, 1918, at the age of 19, only to see it again in 1979, at the age of eighty, as a West German tourist. Thus ends the St. Petersburg chapter of my memoirs.