FAREWELL TO RUSSIA
by
Princess Lydia Alexandrovna Volkonsky
and
EPILOGUE
by
Prince Oleg Valentinovich Volkonsky
The 244-page book is an eyewitness account of events from 1905 to 1946. With the exception of perhaps the first two chapters, in which life in pre-revolutionary Russia is described, the narrative moves fast against a broad panorama of historical events: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, the Soviet-Polish War of 1920 and World War II. Nothing is fictionalized.
The scenes of the events described in Lydia Volkonsky’s memoirs range from Western Russia, her home area close to the Polish border, to Kiev, Petrograd, Warsaw, southern Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Italy.
Everything is seen through the eyes of the author, a young art-student caught in the turmoil of war and revolution. The book is divided roughly into two parts. The first half of the book describes the events of the World War I period and the Russian revolution. The second half is devoted to the World War II era. There is an interlude of peace during the 1920s and 1930s.
Lydia (nee) Rybnikov was born in 1895 into a family of landed aristocracy. At the beginning of the twentieth century her father, Alexander Rybnikov, possessed about 1,500 thousand hectares of land at an estate called “Romeiki” in Western Russia. Alexander Rybnikov was a patriarchal figure, both for his large family and for the local villagers. He had a passion for horses, could never part with them and bred so many that they began to grow wild on his estate. The first date mentioned in the book is 1905 during the author’s childhood. This was the year of the Russo-Japanese war and of civil unrest in the towns and in the country; a portent of the Russian revolution.
In 1914, war with Germany broke out. As the battlefront approached their home, the family left for Kiev to live in one of the villas belonging to Valeri Rybnikov, Lydia’s wealthy uncle. Lydia's elder brother, Vladimir, went off to war. Lydia learned of his death from a Kiev newspaper report, which gave an account of his act of heroism and assumed death in the battles of 1916 on the river Stokhod. Two years later, Lydia was to discover that Vladimir had not been killed as reported, but had been wounded and taken prisoner. Vladimir "comes back from the dead." Back in Russia, he narrowly escaped death from a Bolshevik firing squad, only to meet a tragic fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks twelve years later.
At the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917 the author was in Petrograd studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. She gives an eyewitness account. Life in Petrograd became too dangerous and Lydia moved once again to Kiev. During the Civil War life in that city was not much safer. Kiev changed hands eleven times in the fighting between various armies and governments. The author lived through most of these sieges and left on the very last train before the Red Army finally took over. Lydia Rybnikov had been going to art school and was in love. That was the real reason she preferred the hazards of Kiev to the relative safety of her home in Western Russia, as she admits in her memoirs. Due to the vagaries of war, the author was never to see her first love - Valeri, a fellow art student – again. Lydia Rybnikov journeyed the several hundred miles home, partly by hitching rides on troop-trains, and partly on foot, as the Polish and Red armies pushed back and forth. Her traveling companion, a Jewish business acquaintance of her uncle’s, who had insisted on accompanying her, was shot by the Poles on one of these trains as a Bolshevik spy. Lydia’s only piece of luggage was her paint-box. Her parents had virtually given her up for dead.
During the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, the Red Army drove the Poles all the way to Warsaw. But there, the Polish forces scored a surprise and decisive victory. As a result, when peace was signed, Poland's borders shifted about a hundred miles to the east, along the so-called "Curzon Line." The Rybnikov estate was now in Poland. During that war the Rybnikov estate had served as headquarters for both Polish and Red Army units.
Within a year, Lydia departed for Warsaw, together with her younger sister, Helene, to study art again. There, they met two young men; Prince Valentine Volkonsky and his friend Michel de Vassal, a Russian from Odessa, despite his French name. In 1922 Prince Volkonsky and Lydia Rybnikov were married. De Vassal married Helene.
Lydia and her husband settled on her part of the Rybnikov estate.
Prince Volkonsky was a scion of one of Russia' s most illustrious families. He was descended from Rurik, the founder of the principalities of Novgorod and Kiev in the ninth century. The Volkonsky family has been the subject of many historical works as well as of fictional literature in Russia. For example, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, hero of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is, although he is a fictionalized character, modeled on a member of the Volkonsky family. (Tolstoy's mother was a Princess Volkonsky.)
Although the reader meets Valentine Volkonsky "half-way through the book" his story runs parallel with that of the author.
Prince Volkonsky graduated as a midshipman from the last class of the Imperial Naval Academy in 1917. This was already after the abdication of Czar Nicholas II, the February Revolution, and at the time of Kerensky’s “Provisional Government.” He saw some action against the Turks in the Black Sea shortly before the new Bolshevik Russia dropped out of World War I. At the time of the October Revolution Valentine Volkonsky, together with his younger brother Alexander, were in Petrograd. Disguised as ordinary seamen, they made their way south to their ancestral home at Zadonsk near Voronezh. There, local peasants, who drove them to safety in a cart under a pile of hey, rescued them from the marauding Bolsheviks. Together, they trekked further south and joined the White anti-Bolshevik forces commanded by General Denikin. Valentine Volkonsky fought as a gunner on board an armoured train. On one occasion, during a retreat across the hills into Rumania, was wounded and left with a revolver and one bullet in case he was captured by the Red forces. These found him in such a condition that they left him to die without their help. But he recovered, eventually reached Kiev, and went into hiding. After yet another change-of-hands in that city, the short-lived independent government of the Ukraine came to power. Volkonsky re-emerged and fought in a flotilla of gunboats, which controlled the river Denieper for a while. One of the organizers of the flotilla was a Ukrainian merchant navy officer, Sviatoslav Shramchenko, who was later to marry Lydia Volkonsky’s youngest sister Maria.
Physically, Volkonsky was extremely strong. He was wounded seriously at least once (shot through the stomach) and twice survived Typhus, the greatest cause of death on both sides during the Civil War.
With the defeat of the White forces in 1920, the younger of the Volkonskys, Alexander, was evacuated from the Crimea and eventually settled in Paris. Valentine Volkonsky found himself in Warsaw.
Having married Lydia, Valentine, despite a total lack of experience in agriculture,
started farming, for which he discovered a natural talent. During the years of peace, which lasted until 1939, the couple prospered and brought what had been a piece of property abandoned and devastated by war, back to a flourishing enterprise. They had two children Helen, born 1922 and Oleg, born 1939. The future looked bright.
The one dark spot was that Volkonsky had lost a leg in a train accident. But, having recovered, this did not prevent him from being up at the crack of dawn and spending the whole days on horseback overseeing the work on the land.
1939 was a fateful year. According to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler invaded Western Poland and two weeks later Stalin invaded the Eastern half. Prince Volkonsky realized that for his family to remain and fall into Soviet hands would be tantamount to a sentence of death. They decided to flee – westward.
According to their escape plan they had to separate. Lydia as a woman with two children, one an infant boy, the other a girl, stood a better chance of getting through the Soviet-German lines than a man. Also Volkonsky's artificial leg was a hindrance.
It was decided that Valentine together with his brother-in-law, Michel de Vassal, who was staying in Romeiki at the time, should go by car, through the town of Kovel about a hundred kilometers to the west, and head for Warsaw. They left almost immediately after the Soviet invasion. The Red Army, while the Polish army was making a last stand, had already occupied one side of Kovel. They literally "drove down the middle."
Lydia and Helene de Vassal and the two children with the infant boy, Oleg, strapped Eskimo-style, to his mother's back, went sometime later by a different route — by foot through the forests around Bialystok, past guards who shot on sight. The foot-journey lasted most of one day and the whole of following night. The last stretch had to be made in total silence and darkness.
The "guide" who had been paid a large sum of money in gold to take an escape party over the Soviet-German lines, disappeared into the night at the sign of an approaching Soviet patrol. Fortunately for Lydia and her family group, they had fallen behind. The rest of the party had shaken them off, fearing that the child might awake and make a sound. The party walked into a Red Army patrol. Their fate is unknown, but can be assumed. Lydia and her group, at the extreme point of exhaustion, got through.
When Lydia Volkonsky eventually reached Warsaw, she found the city devastated. But she managed to find de Vassal alive and well. He informed her that her husband was also alive and staying in Czestohowa in Southern Poland with the Schramchenkos, that is, with her younger sister Maria and her husband.
Lydia and Valentine Volkonsky were reunited. For several weeks they had thought that the other had perished.
In Poland, with time, Lydia Volkonsky learned of the fate of the members of her family who had not fled west. All, except her father who had died earlier of natural causes, had perished at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Her aged mother was deported to Siberia in a cattle car, as were hundreds of thousands during the mass deportations in Soviet occupied territory in Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries between 1939 and 1941. Most probably she did not survive the journey. Her elder brother Vladimir was seized by the Soviets and put in a concentration camp. Shortly after this he died. Another brother was arrested, tortured, and also died in captivity. Her two other brothers were conscripted into a Red Army "punishment battalion" and used as human minesweepers.
Life in Poland under German occupation was by no means safe either. For a while the family lived under very difficult circumstances. By a stroke of luck Prince Volkonsky found work as a manager of a large farm, which had been requisitioned by the occupying Germans. In a way he found himself to be a buffer between the German authorities and the local Poles. At night, in the attic, he would listen to the BBC for the real news of the war. Meanwhile, the staff of a Wehrmacht unit occupied the country house - a short walk from the manager’s house where the family lived.
By August 1944 the Red Army was at the gates of Warsaw. The front was approaching. It was time to leave once more. It was decided to head westward and southward, in the general direction of the Western allies. The Germans in the house up the road were under no illusions about the outcome of the war.
An aristocratic officer tipped the Volkonskys off about a train which was leaving from the Polish border, in the direction of Vienna and Linz, worked out a travel plan, provided documents and even a car and chauffeur to the train. A civilian official called Zimmermann, who sympathized with the Volkonskys' situation, provided names and addresses of relatives in Austria.
The train turned out to be flatbeds carrying damaged military vehicles. In one of these, an old ambulance, the Volkonskys lived for several days, while the train picked its way slowly forward.
When they reached Vienna the city was being bombed daily. The family used to seek refuge in bunkers and the cellar of the Rathaus.
It was clear that Vienna would soon fall to the Red Army. The Volkonskys moved on westward, heading for a small town called Solbad Hall (now called Hall-im-Tirol) near Innsbruck where Herr Zimmermann’s mother lived. Outside Salzburg, the line was bombed. The family trudged for miles in the deep snow, taking whatever they could carry, and circumventing the town to reach the head of the line where trains were still running. They arrived in Hall in the middle of the night and waited on the platform till morning before seeking out and disturbing Frau Zimmerman.
Frau Zimmerman, who actually lived a short walk from the railway station, put them up in the basement of her house. Solbad Hall was sometimes bombed, but not heavily. Except for one occasion.
On that day the family were away from home when the alarm went off. They scrambled into the cellar of a nearby house - a solid looking structure with thick walls. The house received at least four direct hits. The heavy masonry crumbled. But the walls of that corner where the family was gathered - held. After a while they were dug out. Of the original twenty or thirty people in the cellar, only a few survived.
When they returned to Frau Zimmermann's house they found nothing but a deep crater where their basement had been. They were housed in a farmhouse in the little village of Thaur in the foothills of the mountains overlooking Innsbruck.
One day a convoy of unfamiliar-looking trucks appeared along the road in the valley below. They were American. The war was over.
But with the coming of peace another danger arose - forced repatriation to Russia.
NKVD squads appeared and had the free run of Austria, Germany and other European countries at the time, rounding up any Soviet and White Russian refugees, ex-prisoners-of-war, slave labourers in the Third Reich, and members of Gen. Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army they could find. This was “Operation Keelhaul” and the result of one of the secret agreements between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Treaty of Yalta in February 1945. Altogether about three million people were forcibly repatriated. Many were shot even before they got to the Soviet Union. Only a few survived the concentration camps.
Meanwhile, Volkonsky had established contact in Innsbruck with a liaison officer of the Free Polish Forces based in Italy. One day a truck bearing the Polish insignia trundled up to the farmhouse in Thaur. The Volkonskys were told to pile in and bring everything with them. The truck headed southward across the Brenner Pass into Italy. A few days later it arrived at a military base of Gen. Anders’ Second Polish Army Corps at Barletta in Southern Italy.
The Free Polish Forces had distinguished themselves in North Africa against Rommel and at Cassino in Italy. At war’s end they were an army without a home. They had elected not to return to Soviet-occupied Poland. Gen. Anders sympathized with Russian refugees who also did not wish to be repatriated. A considerable number were recruited into his army. At that time the Free Polish Forces in Italy amounted to some 200,000 men. It was quite a formidable force.
As a soldier Volkonsky, being an invalid, was of no use. But he was given a minor administrative job at the base. In Barletta, Volkonsky also discovered an old acquaintance – Archbishop Savva of Grodno (a town not far from the border of Poland, which now was back in Soviet hands). The archbishop had been appointed Orthodox Chaplain General in Gen. Anders’ exiled Polish army. Although that army was predominantly Catholic, it included a number of Russian Orthodox.
In the autumn of 1946, in view of a possible new war against the Soviet Union, and in order to be kept in reserve just in case, Gen. Anders’ Army was moved en bloc to England.
The final pages of Lydia Volkonsky's book describe the departure from Italy, the unfolding landscape of Western Europe as the train heads northward towards the English Channel, towards a civilized and quieter land, leaving behind the memories, dreams and nightmares of the past, and bidding distant Russia an eternal farewell.
.
LIST OF MAIN PERSONAGES
Princess Lydia Alexandrovna Volkonsky (nee Rybnikov) – the author.Prince Valentine Mikhailovich Volkonsky – her husband
Alexander Rybnikov, her father
Helene Rybnikov (de Vassal) her sister
Michel de Vassal, friend of Valentine Volkonsky in Warsaw. Married Lydia's sister, Helene.
De Vassal's forefather came to Russia with Napoleon's army in 1812, was taken prisoner-of-war, but decided to stay. He made a fortune in South Russia importing French vines and Marino sheep. DeVassal was an aviator during World War I.
Vladimir Rybnikov, her brother, an officer of the Russian Army.
Valeri Rybnikov, her uncle from Kiev
Nina Rybnikov, Valeri Rybnikov's daughter and Lydia's cousin and companion in Kiev and Petrograd. Nina married a man called Garnitch-Garnitsky on a whim and soon divorced him. In exile, she owned a restaurant for many years called “Mayak” – “The Lighthouse” near the Russian cathedral on the rue Darue in Paris.
.
“Farewell to Russia” appeared in Russian on Internet (www.vgd.ru) in 2004 and it is shortly to be published in Moscow in book form. It was first published in 1972 by the "Russian Life” daily newspaper of San Francisco. On January 7, 1989, (Christmas Day according to the Russian church calendar) excerpts were read from the book in a nationwide broadcast over Moscow Radio in a semi-dramatized version accompanied by music. The 60-minute programme, billed as a special "Christmas Show" - was the first of its kind in the Soviet Union. It was followed by an interview with the author's son, Prince Oleg Volkonsky. The programme reflected the beginnings of Gorbachev’s new era of “Glasnost.” (“Openness”). Two-and-a-half years later the communist regime in Russia was to come to an end. In August 2005, the first part of the Epilogue to the book by Prince Oleg Volkonsky was added to the Internet version. The rest is due to appear shortly.
The Epilogue was at first envisioned as a relatively short account of the family’s life after their arrival in England. Prince Valentine eventually went on to work for the Royal Navy as a language instructor at the Joint Services School for Linguists in Scotland. He died in 1960. Later, Princess Lydia emigrated to the USA and joined her sister Helene de Vassal living in Philadelphia. Lydia Volkonsky died in 1977. Their son Oleg graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, in 1964 and went on to a life-long career in radio broadcasting to the Soviet Union through Radio Liberty in Munich, the B.B.C. in London, and the Voice of America in Washington, D.C.. He now lives between Washington and Moscow and has a son, Alexander, who is studying at the Corcoran School of Art. At the suggestion of his friend, Professor S. Frederick Starr, former Vice President of Tulane University and former President of Oberlin College, the Epilogue has been expanded by its author and brought up to date. It covers events up to 2005, thus spanning exactly one century in the history of the family and of their home country.
Lydia Volkonsky never set herself the goal of commenting on the momentous
historical events surrounding her. She merely describes them. This cannot
be said of her son, the author of the Epilogue, which now forms Part 3
of the book. He comments on them extensively. The aim of the Epilogue is
to set the events described in “Farewell to Russia” into a historical and
political context. Considerable attention is given to the abdication of
Czar Nicholas II in 1917 (during his lifetime Prince Oleg Volkonsky has
known three members of the Romanov family closely) to the subsequent Bolshevik
revolution and the Civil War, to World War II, to the Cold War, and to
Russia’s situation in the world today.
The emphasis is on lesser-know facts of history, for example: the murder
of Czar Nicholas and his family was a ritual murder. The Bolshevik revolution
apart from being financed by the German High Command was financed and supported
to no lesser extent by Wall Street. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin planted
the seeds of the Cold War at their conferences during the Second World
War. Berlin (and Prague) was needlessly given to the Red Army. The behaviour
of the Red Army to a great extent created the climate for the Cold War.
The Red Army did not liberate, but occupied Eastern European countries,
which has led to anti-Russian feelings in general. These are not decreasing
with time, but increasing as more and more historical facts come to light,
particularly in the Baltic countries and the Ukraine. Roosevelt knew everything
about the attack on Pearl Harbor, provoked it and prevented its defenders
from taking any action. His prime concern was war against Germany
“through the Japanese door.’ Gen. Patton was probably murdered. Roosevelt’s
policies of pleasing and appeasing Stalin (often at the expense of Churchill)
eventually resulted in the deaths of 100,000 Americans in the Korean and
Vietnam wars. The Soviet victory over the Third Reich, the 60th anniversary
of which was celebrated with great pomp on Red Square in May 2005, was
a Phyrric victory.
Some of these facts are quite well known in the Western world, but still not too well known in post-Soviet Russia today. Until Russia squarely looks in the eyes at some of the more unpleasant aspects of its own history, and until some of the many generally accepted lies at home and abroad are challenged and exposed, she cannot expect a spiritual revival as a great and civilized nation. That day will come. But Russia has still a long and painful way to go. That is perhaps the main message.
Princess Lydia Volkonsky was a professional artist. Her son is an amateur one (with several exhibits to his credit). “Farewell to Russia” – all three parts – is illustrated by family photographs and by drawings and paintings by its two authors including a self-portrait by Lydia Volkonsky.
