The Story of a Secret Rescue Mission

St. Petersburg During the Russian Civil War

Group of older children who were rescued,
on deck of Yomei Maru, 1920.
Photo: Vladimir Lipovetsky

The calamities of the First World War with its massive loss of Russian lives greatly weakened the power of the Romanov dynasty and, in 1917, the Tsar was forced to abdicate his throne. A weak Provisional Government was formed in February 1917, but the losses from the war, the breakdown of the economy, and the violence caused by rival political factions created an opportunity for the Communists to seize power in the fall of 1917.

Russia then disintegrated into civil war as the Red Army of the Communist Party, which controlled St. Petersburg (Petrograd), Moscow and the central Russian heartland, found itself surrounded by conservative forces who wanted to crush the radical Bolshevik revolution. The opposition forces were called the White Army and the violence of Russians versus Russians quickly spread across the country.

The Plight of the Russian Children

It was during the chaos of these years of civil war that parents in St. Petersburg loaded thousands of their children and chaperoning teachers on trains headed a thousand miles southeast to the Ural Mountains, where they would be safe and well-fed, sheltered from the conflicts in the region around the Russian capital city of St. Petersburg.

Most of these children returned home at the end of the summer of 1918, but nearly 800 of them were trapped in Siberia as the civil war spread east. During battles between the Red and White Armies, the train line to the west was severed and the children, dressed in summer clothes, were facing hunger and the threat of winter without adequate clothing.

We now know a remarkable story about how these children were rescued by the American Red Cross. In the fall of 1918, Red Cross volunteers working in the Russian Far East heard rumors about hundreds of abandoned children dressed in rags and foraging for food in Siberian forests. The volunteers set out to find these children and, when they were located, put them on trains eastward to the port city of Vladivostok. Once in Vladivostok, the children were taken to a former barracks on nearby Russky Island where they remained until the summer of 1920. On the island, they were under the protection of the American Expeditionary Force that was deployed there to protect American military equipment loaned to Russia during World War I.

Riley Allen with one of rescued children,
on Russky Island off Vladivostok.
Photo: Vladimir Lipovetsky

As the American troops prepared to leave, the Russian children’s fate became an issue. At this point, the American Red Cross once again stepped in. A Red Cross volunteer, Riley Allen, arrived in the Russian Far East to report on developments there as a journalist, but when he learned about these children, he decided to help them. A Japanese cargo ship was refitted and used to transport 20 American Red Cross volunteers, 780 children, and their 50 teachers to California, where they arrived in August 1920. During the next six months, the children and teachers were brought back to St. Petersburg by way of Finland – a journey that had literally taken them around the world!

This remarkable story is now being told for the first time by Russians who want to make the rescue mission known. Most of the children involved in this adventure never spoke about their experience as they grew up because contact with foreigners was dangerous in the Soviet Union. One of the authors who wrote about this rescue mission is Olga Molkina, whose book has been published in Russian, but not yet in English. She said: “The Americans who worked in the American Red Cross were simple people, and those lost children were someone else’s. They didn’t have to do anything, but they did.”
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NOTE: This post is based on an article by Kathy Lally entitled “A Red Cross Rescue of Russian Children,” published in the January 7, 2012 issue of The Washington Post.

Solzhenitsyn’s Advice: Get Back to the Basics

As I was researching and writing the four-part series in December on “The Collapse of the USSR,” a thought occurred to me. If many of these young Russians who are now protesting against the corrupted election results of the December 4th parliamentary election are like their American counterparts, they probably have little knowledge of their recent history. I doubt that many of them – or many Americans -- know much about the underground movements of the 1970s and 1980s that monitored human rights and religious freedom violations or about the key role played by some leading dissidents, including religious leaders. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one -- his writings were of strategic importance in undermining the Soviet regime. I decided to remind both my American and Russian readers of his historic contributions. Here’s the second in this series.
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“From Under the Rubble”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one of the key forces in Russia that helped to undermine the Communist regime, but his writings are no longer read by most Russian young people. His seminal role in challenging the authority of the ruling Communist Party elites is often ignored now because he is considered out-of-step with current developments in Russia. This failure to consider the counsel of Solzhenitsyn is a serious blind spot, in my judgment.

For example, the volume he edited and later had published in Paris in 1974, entitled From Under the Rubble, offers remarkable insights into Russian life which still holds true today. In it he recommends that Russians “get back to the basics.” The story behind the writing and publication of this book is a fascinating one.
On February 12, 1974, the night Solzhenitsyn was arrested and subsequently sent into involuntary exile, he was working with one of his colleagues on a book of eleven essays written by seven Russians – a volume of immense importance to these intellectuals. The book was modeled after a famous set of essays published in 1909, with the title Landmarks (Vekhi). This remarkable book by radical Russian intellectuals of that time argued against adopting post-Enlightenment ideologies from the West and in favor of restoring Russia’s traditional spiritual values.

The authors of Landmarks warned Russians not to embrace a socialist revolution, which they saw coming. In a similar fashion, Solzhenitsyn and his colleagues were convinced that the Soviet regime would not survive in Russia for long and they pointed to a future for Russia that embraced its rich spiritual heritage.

The manuscript of this book was sent to the West through secret channels by Solzhenitsyn and his colleagues and was published in Paris in 1974 (appearing in English in 1975), while he was in exile. In other words, seventeen years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the authors of these essays were predicting this demise and offering advice about how Russia could rebuild itself, could come out from “under the rubble.”

Sound Advice

One of the principal themes of the book is this: For Russians to move forward and rebuild their country, a moral revolution is required, not primarily political action. These leading Russian intellectuals were convinced that “to create a good and just society, we must first become good people.” Solzhenitsyn argued fervently that the essential task facing Russians was not political liberation, “but the liberation of our souls from participation in the lie [Marxism-Leninism] forced upon us.”

I think one of the most remarkable essays in this book is Solzhenitsyn’s “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations.” In words that have been quoted many times over, Solzhenitsyn argued that “we are even now . . . . reluctant to recognize that the universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not even between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts across nations and parties, shifting constantly, yielding now to the pressure of light, now to the pressure of darkness. It divides the heart of every man, . . .”

It was Solzhenitsyn’s judgment that Russians need to repent of the evil they have done primarily to their own people. He wrote: “We have done evil on a massive scale and mainly in our own country, not abroad to others, but at home to our own people, to ourselves.” The only way to deal with this truth was repentance, which is “a clearing of the ground, the establishment of a clean basis in preparation for further moral action – what in the life of the individual is called ‘reform.’” What he pleaded for was “the healing of our souls! Nothing now is more important to us after all we have lived through, after our long complicity in lies and even crimes.”

This is very strong medicine and many Russians, especially in elite ruling circles, reject his counsel and refuse to apologize for anything. While repentance is a central theological doctrine in Russian Orthodoxy, it has rarely been seen in government leaders. Pointing out the necessity to rebuild the moral foundations of Russia, to rediscover Russia’s rich spiritual traditions – this “getting back to the basics” is one of Solzhenitsyn’s most profound contributions.

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NOTE: For an excellent introduction to the life, writings and Christian beliefs of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, see The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn by Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and Alexis Klimoff (ISI Books, 2008). Some of the reflections I shared came from this helpful source.

Solzhenitsyn: The Power of Truth

As I was researching and writing the four-part series in December on “The Collapse of the USSR,” a thought occurred to me. If many of these young Russians who are now protesting against the corrupted election results of the December 4th parliamentary election are like their American counterparts, they probably have little knowledge of their recent history. I doubt that many of them – or many Americans -- know much about the underground movements of the 1970s and 1980s that monitored human rights and religious freedom violations or about the key role played by some leading dissidents, including religious leaders. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one -- his writings were of strategic importance in undermining the Soviet regime. I decided to remind both my American and Russian readers of his historic contributions.
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Solzhenitsyn’s Early Life

Solzhenitsyn in 1953 after his release
from the prison camp at Ekibastuz

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and, shortly after his birth, his father died. The tragic consequences of the death of his father, who was killed in a hunting accident, were made even more difficult for his family because of the Russian Civil War that was tearing the country apart. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and aunt in poverty, in part a result of their family property being forcibly turned into a collective farm.

As a young boy, he was encouraged to pursue his interests in literature and science and was also raised in the Russian Orthodox faith by his mother and other relatives.
After studying mathematics at Rostov State University, he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. During these years, he became committed to the ideology of the Soviet regime.

World War II changed his life forever. While serving in the Red Army in East Prussia, he wrote letters to a friend critical of the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin and, despite being decorated twice for his bravery in the war, his letters were intercepted by the NKVD (the security service – a predecessor to the KGB) and lead to his arrest. He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and sentenced in July 1945 to an eight-year term in a labor camp.

During his eight-year sentence, Solzhenitsyn was moved between various work camps and one of these “special camps” was for political prisoners. The camp was located in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan and, while in this camp, he worked as a bricklayer and miner. It was this experience that lead him to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Following the completion of his eight-year sentence in 1953, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile in the northeastern corner of Kazakhstan, which often happened to political prisoners. During this decade of imprisonment and exile, Aleksandr rejected the Marxist ideology that he had embraced during his university days and gradually rediscovered his Christian roots.

When Khrushchev attacked Joseph Stalin in his “secret speech” in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and returned to Russia where he taught in a secondary school during the day and secretly pursued his passion for writing at night. He later commented that until 1961 he was convinced that he would never “see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime.”

The Writing and Publication of “One Day”

Solzhenitsyn later noted that the idea for his book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, came to him during a dreary workday in Ekibastuz in the winter of 1950-51. When he decided to finally write the story in 1959, he said it “simply gushed out with tremendous force” and took only forty days to complete.

The story focuses on a single individual, a fictional character who served in the Red Army, was captured by the Germans, but later escaped and returned to the USSR. As happened to many Soviet soldiers who were captured by the Nazis, the Communist regime subsequently accused him of being a Nazi spy and sentenced him to ten years in a Soviet prison camp,

The book tells the story of a single day in the life of Ivan. The incredible suffering that he experienced and the brutality of the prison camps laid bare the true nature of the Soviet regime under Stalin’s leadership. By 1951, the period described in this book, the total population of the forced labor camps is estimated to have been approximately 10 million – that is no fewer than one sixth of all Soviet adult males.

As I re-read this 175-page story, I was stuck once again by the moral character of Ivan, who took pride in his work as a bricklayer in the bitter cold and endured long years of imprisonment by maintaining his integrity and self-respect despite his degrading, violent surroundings. I was particularly interested in Ivan’s comments about his fellow-prisoner, Alyoshka the Baptist. The faith of Alyoshka impressed Ivan because he saw how this Christian’s conduct demonstrated that the human spirit can triumph over unjust suffering.

When Khrushchev decided to allow the publication of this book in 1962, seeing it as a helpful tool in his campaign to discredit Stalin, he had no idea the impact it would have on the USSR and beyond. Solzhenitsyn’s short novel was published on November 20, 1962, in Novy Mir, a monthly Soviet literary magazine and it was an immediate literary sensation. Within a day, all 95,000 copies of the magazine were sold and additional press runs followed. Overnight Solzhenitsyn became known worldwide and his book was translated and circulated around the globe.

The political impact of the book was recognized immediately and it is now clear that this work of fiction, together with his nonfiction The Gulag Archipelago, contributed substantially to the unraveling of the Soviet regime. As David Remnick notes, it was “the pen against power” and Solzhenitsyn’s writings were one of the first tools used in undermining the Soviet dictatorship.

There is history here that must be understood, if Russia is to heal the wounds of its seventy years under the Communist Party’s brutal control. The power of truth, the power of the pen, reminds us of the old adage, “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Speaking the truth is more effective in bringing down unjust rulers than any other action.

NOTE: For an excellent introduction to the life, writings and Christian beliefs of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, see The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn by Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and Alexis Klimoff (ISI Books, 2008).  Some of the reflections I shared came from this helpful source.