The Other Russia: 2the Experience of Exile

(4.5 stars) I cringed a bit when I saw that Michael Glenny (an infamously bad translator) was one of the editors of this volume, but in spite of that, I was really drawn into the book. It begins with a very long chapter on an oceanographer who escaped by jumping off of a cruise ship late at night and swimming for three days until he reached the nearest island, and goes on to give us the stories of Russian émigrés from three different eras--on the heels of the Revolution and Civil War, between the World Wars and during WWII, and in the post-WWII era. Quite a few of the people interviewed in Part One, and a fair amount in Part Two, came from the upper-classes (some were even royalty), and so had a radically different experience of those early Soviet days than did the people on the bottom of the social order. The people in Part Three all seem to be from normal classes, though, not a bunch of dispossessed countesses, governors, wealthy people, and what have you. And depending upon which socioeconomic class and geographical area one came from, the experience was going to be different; for example, someone from the ruling classes and in a place like St. Petersburg obviously was going to be against the Revolution from the start, whereas someone who lived in a poorer area in the Ukraine may have initially supported and welcomed these changes, only to find the new rulers were just as bad for them as the Tsar had been. A lot of these people went through some quite drastic things to survive and to escape, like illegally crossing borders, jumping off of a ship, forging identity cards, deserting the Army, and bribing officials, but they had to take these extraordinary measures because the idea of freedom was so very important to them. Many of them settled in places with large Russian colonies, such as London, Paris, Prague, Belgrade, Poland, Harbin (in China), Israel, the United States, Vienna, Germany, and Bulgaria, though some of them escaped to other places (at least temporarily), such as North Africa and Turkey. I loved almost all of the stories and found very few boring or uninteresting. Since this is partly a Michael Glenny book, though, there were some things that kind of annoyed me, albeit not so much they totally overwhelmed my overall enjoyment. For example, does anyone under the age of 100 still seriously use unnecessarily gendered words like "citizeness," "poetess," or "Jewess," or make superfluous references such as "a lady congregant" or "a woman cook"? Since a lot of these interviews were translated, I'm assuming that such dated sexist expressions were the work of the translators and not the speakers. (Unlike a lot of other languages, English is not a gendered language!) The chapter on the Dowager Empress's lady-in-waiting also employed the extremely archaic custom of capitalising all royal pronouns, which seems extremely distracting and pretentious today. It might have been considered proper a hundred years ago, but the language

This book is about "the Russian dustmen of Cannes", the Russians who fled during and after the Russian revolutions in 1918-1919 and tried to carve out a new life for themselves and their families in the West. The book is made up of 61 chapters, each by a different emigre. Mostly they are extracts from interviews by the book's authors with the emigres; a few are from written sources. A few of the emigres are whiners (the Bolsheviks "took all our lovely horses", one Countess complains) but most have interesting things to say. For royalty watchers, there is the account of Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna's lady-in-waiting of their captivity in the Crimea, and tales of Grand Duchess Ksenia in exile. There are tales of pogroms under imperial Russia, life during the revolution, escape from Russia in multitudes of ways, life in exile, life under the Soviet regime... The book's format makes it easy to skip around, and boring or annoying accounts are easily skipped over. The accounts seem to be weighted in favor of members of the nobility and bourgeoisie. A good book for anyone who is interested in how they lived during the revolution and after.