When I was bigger I remember that first morning after Rasputin was drowned. All the papers were full of it. I also have a general impression of the first revolution, when the Provisional Government was in. There was such joy at the revolution and the government, they all felt that Russia was ready for democratic government, Irina Sergevna Tidmarsh. After collectivization, life was difficult, there were queues for food and people were accused of being wreckers and of deliberately sabotaging ... Soviet newspapers were full of stories about depression and unemployment in the capitalist world'....

Preserving the childhood memories of some of the last generation of White Russian women to experience the Revolution first-hand, this poignant collection of interviews and photographs provides a unique and moving record to life in Imperial and Bolshevik Russia.
The accounts give a personal insight into how the Revolution devastated the lives of the aristocracy, the intelligentsia and the foreigners of Mosocw and St Petersburg in the few weeks after the October 1917 upheaval. These people, previously amongst the wealthiest in Russia, were reduced to a life of poverty, persecution and...