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Jan. 9th, 2021 12:02 pmI was about halfway through writing my Yuletide fic this year when I realized that I was spending enough time stopping to check references that I really needed to just stop and read a whole book on the Russian Revolution to refresh my memory of the atmosphere and the timeline.
I ended up with Caught in the Revolution: Witnesses to the Fall of Imperial Russia, which I already had open in a Google Books tab to track info about how people even got to Russia from the States in the middle of WWI to begin with. (John Reed is appallingly short on information about his travel arrangements in Ten Days that Shook the World. Tell me about your steamer ship, John!)
My feelings about this book were a little mixed because, on the one hand, I have a certain amount of doubt and discomfort about the project of framing the events of the Russian Revolution entirely through the eyes of Relatable Westerners who were there at the time, and on the other hand research-wise it was in fact exactly the book I needed to write this fic ... so I'm very glad it exists, I just very strongly feel that it should not be anyone's only exposure to the events of the Russian Revolution, especially since -- while the socialist journalists who traveled to Russia to report on events are included in the very broad roundup -- the authorial POV seems much more closely aligned with the diplomatic staff whose primary concern was Making Sure Russia Stayed In The War without much empathy or deeper understanding for what was driving the Bolshevik movement in Russia.
That said: I did very much enjoy reading this book, and ended up semi-liveblogging it in a series of group chats because I kept wanting to post snippets of it and couldn't for Yuletide Secrecy. The book covers the events of the year 1917, from the overthrow of the Tsar through the aftermath of the October Revolution, and does its best to at least dip in on any of the American, British and French visitors who recorded memoirs of their time there, from moderately famous people like Emmeline Pankhurst, John Reed, Arthur Ransome and Somerset Maughan to people living through the day-to-day as bank staff, nurses, and significantly less famous reporters (including the only known account from a Black American during the Russian Revolution, who was there working as a butler to the American ambassador, which is fascinating although the author makes some choices around dialect that I would consider dubious.)
I was really charmed by the endnote wherein Helen Rappaport enthuses about how deeply fascinating all her subjects were and asks that any of their descendents contact her personally if they happen to read the book, she would just love to know any more of their stories! This is relatable and I do actually just want to read half the memoirs that she cites, especially Red Heart of Russia, written by Bessie Beatty who was one of several socialist reporters bouncing around Petrograd in 1917 and whom I liked so much I gave her a cameo in my fic.
Some personal favorite anecdotes:
- the prima ballerina who complained that just enough people turned up to the performance on the night of the February revolution that they couldn't go ahead and cancel, WHY, WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE STILL AT THE BALLET
- the French ambassador who, whenever invited to a party in the early days of 1917, would go home and write darkly in his diary that there had ALSO been PLENTY of gaiety in Paris on the night of 5th October, 1789! ... but then as soon as events started being broadly compared to 1789 came home and wrote snootily in his diary that REALLY it was more like 1848. Revolution connnoisseur!
- the account of a nurse who saw "one fierce officer, covered with decorations and looking very much annoyed, try to saunter down the Nevsky, pursued by a crowd of women who stripped him of his arms. His sword fell to a gray-haired woman who shrieked apparently uncomplimentary Russian epithets at him as she contemptuously bent the sword over her knee, broke it in two, and lightly tossed it into the canal"
- the bank teller who, upon being informed that the Bolshevik coup was likely to happen on a certain date, went ahead and pushed back the date when he was supposed to move apartments by three days to avoid intersecting with it ... only to have the coup delayed by three days and end up moving apartments on the day of the coup, again. This is so horribly funny and relatable, one could so easily imagine being this person ... is what I wrote in the late days of December 2020 and it is, of course, even more true now.
And, I mean, the situation that we are currently living through here is in many ways not at all comparable to 1917 Russia, but for its flaws in viewpoint this is in many ways a book about what it is like to live day-to-day, to have a job (or not) and housing (or not) and ordinary personal concerns while large and traumatic events are occurring around you, which is certainly a thing one understands better now on a visceral level than when one first started reading about the Russian Revolution ten-odd years ago.
I ended up with Caught in the Revolution: Witnesses to the Fall of Imperial Russia, which I already had open in a Google Books tab to track info about how people even got to Russia from the States in the middle of WWI to begin with. (John Reed is appallingly short on information about his travel arrangements in Ten Days that Shook the World. Tell me about your steamer ship, John!)
My feelings about this book were a little mixed because, on the one hand, I have a certain amount of doubt and discomfort about the project of framing the events of the Russian Revolution entirely through the eyes of Relatable Westerners who were there at the time, and on the other hand research-wise it was in fact exactly the book I needed to write this fic ... so I'm very glad it exists, I just very strongly feel that it should not be anyone's only exposure to the events of the Russian Revolution, especially since -- while the socialist journalists who traveled to Russia to report on events are included in the very broad roundup -- the authorial POV seems much more closely aligned with the diplomatic staff whose primary concern was Making Sure Russia Stayed In The War without much empathy or deeper understanding for what was driving the Bolshevik movement in Russia.
That said: I did very much enjoy reading this book, and ended up semi-liveblogging it in a series of group chats because I kept wanting to post snippets of it and couldn't for Yuletide Secrecy. The book covers the events of the year 1917, from the overthrow of the Tsar through the aftermath of the October Revolution, and does its best to at least dip in on any of the American, British and French visitors who recorded memoirs of their time there, from moderately famous people like Emmeline Pankhurst, John Reed, Arthur Ransome and Somerset Maughan to people living through the day-to-day as bank staff, nurses, and significantly less famous reporters (including the only known account from a Black American during the Russian Revolution, who was there working as a butler to the American ambassador, which is fascinating although the author makes some choices around dialect that I would consider dubious.)
I was really charmed by the endnote wherein Helen Rappaport enthuses about how deeply fascinating all her subjects were and asks that any of their descendents contact her personally if they happen to read the book, she would just love to know any more of their stories! This is relatable and I do actually just want to read half the memoirs that she cites, especially Red Heart of Russia, written by Bessie Beatty who was one of several socialist reporters bouncing around Petrograd in 1917 and whom I liked so much I gave her a cameo in my fic.
Some personal favorite anecdotes:
- the prima ballerina who complained that just enough people turned up to the performance on the night of the February revolution that they couldn't go ahead and cancel, WHY, WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE STILL AT THE BALLET
- the French ambassador who, whenever invited to a party in the early days of 1917, would go home and write darkly in his diary that there had ALSO been PLENTY of gaiety in Paris on the night of 5th October, 1789! ... but then as soon as events started being broadly compared to 1789 came home and wrote snootily in his diary that REALLY it was more like 1848. Revolution connnoisseur!
- the account of a nurse who saw "one fierce officer, covered with decorations and looking very much annoyed, try to saunter down the Nevsky, pursued by a crowd of women who stripped him of his arms. His sword fell to a gray-haired woman who shrieked apparently uncomplimentary Russian epithets at him as she contemptuously bent the sword over her knee, broke it in two, and lightly tossed it into the canal"
- the bank teller who, upon being informed that the Bolshevik coup was likely to happen on a certain date, went ahead and pushed back the date when he was supposed to move apartments by three days to avoid intersecting with it ... only to have the coup delayed by three days and end up moving apartments on the day of the coup, again. This is so horribly funny and relatable, one could so easily imagine being this person ... is what I wrote in the late days of December 2020 and it is, of course, even more true now.
And, I mean, the situation that we are currently living through here is in many ways not at all comparable to 1917 Russia, but for its flaws in viewpoint this is in many ways a book about what it is like to live day-to-day, to have a job (or not) and housing (or not) and ordinary personal concerns while large and traumatic events are occurring around you, which is certainly a thing one understands better now on a visceral level than when one first started reading about the Russian Revolution ten-odd years ago.
