Russia 1917-18: what Rhoda Power saw

In the Storm: Caught in the Chaos of the Russian Revolution 1917-18, Rhoda Power, Marble Hill, £12.99

This is a remarkable book, written by a remarkable person. Originally published in 1919 as Under Cossack and Bolshevik, its author was subsequently to become a well-known broadcaster on the BBC and the writer of over 40 children’s history books. In December 1916, when she set sail from Newcastle for Russia, all of this was far in the future. The next 18 months, however, were to show Rhoda Power to be someone of indomitable spirit and an observer of great compassion and lucidity.

Power’s purpose in travelling to Russia was to take on the role of tutor to the daughter of a rich industrialist in Rostov-on-Don. If her charge turned out to be predictably spoilt, possessing no other ambition than to find a husband, what Power was to see unfold around her was anything but predictable. Situated on the Sea of Azov, Rostov was a thriving centre for trade with a bourgeois elite that showed little hesitation in flaunting and enjoying its substantial wealth. As Power wrote: ‘while we ate cakes and chocolates at twenty roubles a pound, caviar, and good fresh meat, peasants stood shivering hour after hour outside the bakery, their tickets clutched between blue fingers, waiting for a loaf of bread’. Then ‘the Revolution came’.

What follows is a narrative of what Power witnessed and heard in the months before she finally returned from Murmansk to England in the summer of 1918. By then she was frail and ill, having experienced considerable hardship and lived in continual fear of losing her life. Nights were spent listening to machine gun and artillery fire as Rostov passed from Bolshevik to Cossack control and back again. Armed drunken soldiers broke into her apartment. Bayonets were thrust in her face. Journeys, whether by car or by train, were interminable and at times terrifying. To walk down the street was to pass dismembered bodies left lying naked in the snow, the clothes and boots of the dead sold by their callous murderers. When the Bolsheviks buried their fallen comrades, Power records, the air was full of the ‘sickening odour of putrefaction’. The sight robbed her completely of the ability to move.

Yet Power provides more than an eyewitness account of what befell her and those around her during these turbulent weeks and months. Unwittingly, she describes something that was to become tragically familiar in the years that followed: the unerring descent of a revolution inspired by the hope of human emancipation into the reign of murder and chaos.

News of the revolutionary events in Petrograd and Moscow was slow to reach Rostov. Only the sense that something had changed was apparent. If the rich immediately feared pogroms and food riots, Power writes: ‘the town was wonderfully orderly, and but for the open-air meetings, the processions, and red flags of liberty floating everywhere it might have been an ordinary feast-day’. There was no bloodshed, but servants and workmen ceased work as and when they wished, disregarding the demands of their employers. Discipline in the army gradually weakened. Next, the prisons were freed of their inmates, liberating not only political prisoners but habitual criminals, with the result that thieving and murder became commonplace. More ominous still, resentment against the rich and threats to their property grew among the populace. Widespread food shortages and depreciation of the currency caused price increases, fuelling discontent and calls for the expropriation of the ‘bourguikas’.

Little by little, Rostov descended into a state of lawlessness. One of Power’s diary entries reads as follows: ‘This morning we were told that men broke into our neighbour’s house and cut the throats of three people before making off with their money.’ Not long afterwards, the young son of a friend of Power’s employers was kidnapped and a ransom demanded. The boy was subsequently found buried in a field. He had been strangled.

The situation became only worse with the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government. Fighting between Cossacks and the Red Guard followed soon afterwards. Briefly, there was hope that order might be restored, but, as the Red Guards approached Rostov, the rich prepared to flee, burying their money, jewels and wine in gardens and cellars, trusting naively in the loyalty of their domestic staff. The chief topic of conversation among the peasantry was now the division of land. For their part, the Bolsheviks went from house to house, arresting and killing anyone found to possess a military uniform or a gun. Those trying to escape in disguise were betrayed by their slim fingers and fine features, and bayonetted. ‘Children’, Power writes, ‘saw their parents killed. Wives begged in vain for their husbands’ lives.’ One of Power’s diary entries reads simply: ‘Blood, blood, blood.’ One wonders, she later reflected, ‘how life could have been bearable’.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks started to implement new laws. First came a takeover of the banks, all their money becoming the property of the state. The property of the rich was confiscated and they were heavily taxed. Foreign nationals were not exempt. Opposition newspapers were closed. Promises to end bread shortages proved illusory, with even black bread difficult to find. Schools closed and, when reopened, prayers and religious instruction were removed from the curriculum. Universities suffered, as both their staff and students were suspected of belonging to the bourgeoisie. Academic specialisation was banned. ‘Conditions’, Power writes, ‘did not improve, and people lived their lives from day to day making no plans, trying to forget the immediate past and not daring to think of the future.’ What remained of the bourgeoisie longed for a German victory.

The final twist in Power’s tale comes with the seizure of power by the Anarchists. They were, she writes, ‘like children playing at brigands with real fire-arms’. They broke into houses, she continues, ‘in the approved cinema style, bound all the inmates but one with cords, and forced the free person at the point of the bayonet to give up anything of value’. It became a common sight to see a lorry driven by sailors trundling down the road loaded with ‘stolen carpets, bicycles, bedding and chairs’.

With the departure of her employers into hiding, Power moved into the relative safety of a house shared with other British nationals, but the approach of the German army determined her to leave. ‘The last glimpse I had of Rostov was the dusty platform crowded with soldiers and motionless beggar-women, and in the midst of them the slim blue-clad figure of [a] red-headed girl, standing and waiving her handkerchief, while dust-coloured Armenian babies tumbled over her feet.’ What followed was a harrowing journey to Murmansk, followed by a lengthy stay in a squalid and disease-ridden refugee camp and eventually a ship home. ‘At last’, Power writes, ‘we arrived, so dirty, weary and infectious, so worn-out with a journey that had covered a period of three months, that we could hardly realize it was summer and we were in England.’

In his informative introduction, Rhoda Power’s godson Basil Postan writes: ‘I still find it remarkable that the Rhoda I knew as a small boy in the 1950s, my frail immaculate childless late-middle-aged godmother living peacefully in Notting Hill, should have been through such experiences as she describes in this book.’ A quite remarkable woman indeed.