French view of the First World War by Janie Hampton

During the last four years we have seen the First World War from many angles. But how did the French see it? A few years ago I found two large-format bound volumes of the magazine L’Illustration in the street with a notice ‘Take Me’. Being an obedient citizen, I did. And then wondered what to do with them. Now I am glad I did not throw them out.  My school French can read the titles and the subject matter but not the detail. So I share with you some of the 100s of illustrations, drawn and photographed.

A fictional village in Alsace the day after German occupation
- suddenly the residents are very patriotic

French soldiers crossing the Canal d'Yser under fire....

..while officers of several armies enjoy life in the Café du Paix in Paris...

...and their daughters play in the Bois de Boulogne...

...and refugee children from the North hope for morsels of food.

Aeroplanes were a new weapon of war..

...but the French Army relied on donkeys for transport in the trenches.

...and reinforcements from the 43rd Battalion of Senegal.

L’Illustration dealt with subjects other than war, including the dangers of high heels (with X-Rays of damaged ankles to prove it); how to bottle apples; and the Russian Revolution (the editor of L’Illustration did not seem to like the Bolsheviks). In December 1918, advertisements reappeared on the back page. 

At the end of the war, there were celebrations across France. 

..while German prisoners-of -war wondered 'What next?'
Nearly 130,000 prisoners were taken at La Somme in August 1918.

France, depicted as a lovely woman, thanks a French soldier for saving her....

..while a surprised 'America' glares at a conquered 'Germany'.

After the war, soldiers rescued a bronze sculpture of  Eve, made by Auguste Rodin
in 1881 and buried in a garden in Douai, northern France

The British Prime Minister Lloyd George was awarded a double-page  portrait on the last page of L'Illustration 1918.

www.janiehampton.co.uk

Women of the Revolution by Alan Gibbons

Our guest for October is History Boy Alan Gibbons. October 2017 is a significant date in modern history and Alan has found a way of showing the role of women at that momentous time.

Photo credit: Robbie Gibbons

Alan Gibbons is a full-time writer. Born in 1953, Alan has written some seventy children’s and Young Adult books. The Revolution Trilogy is his first attempt at adult fiction. Winner of the Blue Peter Book Award “The Book I Couldn’t Put Down” and seventeen other awards, Alan has also been shortlisted twice for the Carnegie Medal. An honorary member of the librarians’ professional body CILIP and recipient of the Frank Jarvis Award for services to education, Alan has visited two thousand schools in the UK and overseas. He lives in Liverpool with his family.

We have male guest authors quite rarely so welcome to Alan.


Few events in history have divided opinion like the Russian Revolution. It reinforced enmities between the political Left and Right. People took sides when a savage Civil War erupted in early 1918, much of the Labour movement instinctively supporting the Red armies, most of the political establishment favouring the Whites. US, French, British and Japanese forces were just some of the interventionist armies that put boots on Russian soil. This wasn’t the only split. It also divided the Labour movement itself, parties of the Left suffering a dramatic schism between social democracy and communism. Anyone who remotely flirted with the radical Left prior to the collapse of Stalinism in the late 1980s and early 1990s will have been told to ‘go back to Russia’ more than once.

Stalin in 1943

Now, I am a writer, mainly of Young Adult fiction, who has roots in the political Left, so I have done a lot of recreational reading about Russia over the years, from the Marxist tradition and its opponents, Lenin, Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, Victor Serge, Paul Avrich, Orlando Figes, Robert Service and many others. I have enjoyed literature from the period of the revolution: Isaac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, Victor Serge again, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. As the anniversary of the Russian Revolution approached, I fully expected an outpouring of fiction set against the Russian Revolution, only it didn’t happen. Theresa Breslin has a new novel, The Rasputin Dagger, but there hasn’t been much else.

I was in Moscow last year. Not only was there little sign of any commemoration of the two revolutions in 1917, in February and October, there seemed to be genuine ignorance of the events. People knew about the ‘Great Patriotic War’, many Russians’ name for the country’s involvement in World War Two from 1941 to 1945. Some described the revolution to me as ‘the great catastrophe.’ It was much the same in the UK. There was an exhibition at the British Library, but little else. As time went by, I thought, surely there has got to be something. There wasn’t. That was it, I made a last-minute decision to write something myself. That something is the Revolution Trilogy. The first book Winds of October has just been published. The second and third volumes, Reason in Revolt and Spurn the Dust come out next year. The big publishing houses didn’t seem interested so I am publishing the trilogy with a small publisher, Circaidy Gregory.

I have ironically sub-titled my book "Ten Days that Didn’t Shake the World," referencing Jack Reed’s eye-witness account of the revolutionary events. Yes, I wrote Winds of October at breakneck pace in ten days this summer, eight thousand words a day. That may seem rather eccentric. So, to some, will be my approach to the novel. Much of the iconography of the revolution is male. The main players always seemed to be men: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kerensky, Kornilov, Makhno, Zinoviev, Kolchak. I became increasingly interested in the other narrative of the revolution, that of the women. After all, it was the women workers of the Vyborg district in Petrograd who came out to demonstrate on International Women’s Day and initiated the first revolution. Once I had my ‘hook’, I started to investigate.

Alexandra Kollontai

There were so many tales to tell. There were the women revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks such as Alexandra Kollontai and Larissa Reissner. The Socialist Revolutionaries such as Maria Spiridonova and Fanny Kaplan. Then there were figures such as Maria Bochkareva, commander of the Women’s Battalion of Death. From England came suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst and her working class colleague, Jessie Kenney. There were so many angles.

Street kids in Russia

 My cast of characters formed. There is the student-revolutionary Kolya who becomes a member of the Cheka, the feared state police and Pavel, the Red Army commander, but it is the women who are the heart of the book, Svetlana, the factory worker and committed Bolshevik, Elena her niece, but most of all Raisa. I found her story in the tragedy of Russia’s street children, the besprizorny. By 1920 there were seven million of these ‘unattended’ children. Their parents were either dead or had abandoned their children in desperation. Raisa becomes a child prostitute, but a fortuitous event gives her a chance to escape life in a filthy brothel. The February revolution finally offers her a glimpse of a different, better world and she makes her escape, becoming a committed Bolshevik and falling in love with another woman.

The trilogy follows these core characters through the hope, conflict and tragedy of the years 1917-1921. War, revolution, conflict and betrayal seem to me the stuff of historical fiction, but there is another subject that seems to go to the very heart of this strand of the genre, and that is disillusion, of hope lost and aspiration betrayed. The anniversary of the Russian Revolution may pass relatively unmarked because of the grotesque distortion of revolutionary hope represented by Stalinism, but I will have offered my own, modest account of those years, seen through the eyes of my characters. I hope it may be something of an antidote to the more distorted image of those years presented in the corporate media.

(All black and white images from Wikimedia Commons)

Studies of Revolutionary Times by Imogen Robertson

Leo Tolstoy in 1908
Photograph by Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky

Memory is a slippery thing. At the end of my first year studying Russian at University I went on a month long trip to St Petersburg which included a trip to Moscow and a tour of some of the ancient churches that surround the city, and it was there that I first heard a women’s choir singing in an orthodox church. My memories are fractured - being ushered under low ceilings, between thick walls and seeing over the shoulders of my friends, a neon blue rucksack, a fleece with the insignia of a university rowing team on it, a room of smoke-stained icons - gold, red and brown and hearing the high, unearthly, sharpened voices of the women singing. Parishioners leant forward to kiss an icon, the air was heavy with incense, and I had for the first time a feeling of voyeuristic shame, observing a deep devotion I did not share. I can’t put those images together into a coherent narrative, but I’m sure that was the day I began to understand something about Russia.

This was in 1992, so Russia was in a state of confusion and transition. It was a time of great want and great hope, and my fellow students and I staggered around in the middle of it suffering a continual whiplash of culture shock, trying to cope with the waves of frustration and fascination with which Russia often douses naive Western visitors. We weren’t as insulated from the realities of ordinary Russian life as the newly arrived Western businessmen, bankers and lawyers but of course we were still cushioned by each other, the dollars in our pocket and the sure and certain knowledge than unless we got caught doing something really stupid, we were only a few hours away from our comfortable, stable and familiar lives in Britain. 

When you start to study Russian literature, teachers tend to usher you first towards Tolstoy and for anyone who knows 19th century British and French literature, this feels like familiar ground even if the settings are different and it takes a bit of time to work out the names. Tolstoy tells you stories from above, he comments on the actions of his characters, watches them being pushed about by circumstance, history or their own nature and draws his moral lessons. You can sense Tolstoy, a great bearded sage in his peasant smock (on his country estate) handing down his moral and political wisdom - not God perhaps, but an un-jolly Santa who knows your secrets and will pass out punishments and rewards accordingly. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1872
by Vasily Perov

Then you encounter Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky is something rather different. The colours are over-saturated, the emotional volume turned so high it’s a scream of feedback. It’s messy and hard and it digs its claws into you. It’s like being chained to a madman on a bar crawl through the seediest parts of town, then through the drawing rooms of high society and back, once the crockery has been smashed, out into the gutter. He hauls you from one humiliation to another, one revelation to another, Mephistopheles to your Faust, and your safe word, the only safe word he allows is ‘God’. To an atheist like myself, that feels like an easy option, a throwing in of the towel, but I never doubt the sincerity of his conclusions.

When I first read him, safe in my university room, I sort of got it. I was having a fairly messy time, missing more lectures than I attended, drinking too much, the usual story, but even though I didn’t acknowledge it then, there was still a structure there. The lectures happened, dinner was served everyday, I was never hungry and I was never physically afraid, so even in that period when the colours of my own life seemed rather too bright to contemplate, I still didn’t get Dostoevsky in my gut. It took going to Russia in a time of continuing crisis for that to happen, and in particular being ushered into that church near Moscow, seeing those worshippers offering their devotions and resignation to God.

I started Russian from scratch at University, so I spent all of my year abroad there in a town about 300 miles south of Moscow. I got hungry, I got drunk, I made some close friends and sang folk songs round the dining table, exchanged toasts and listened to stories of lives lived under circumstances that seemed unendurable but which were endured. I began to get an idea of a culture which flowered in dark places, and grew strong and uncompromising in the soil of deep learning, black humour and cold winters. Some Russians talked, some prayed, and both methods seemed like valid techniques to deal with impossible times.

I haven’t been back since and when people ask me why, I often fall back on the excuse I’ve never had the time or the money to do so, but that’s not really it. I’m sure you have in your past a particular passionate all ravaging relationship that, though it caused you a great deal of pain at the time, you also recognise as being the making of you in some way. You probably still think of that person, but you don’t want to go and grab a quick coffee with them. Too complicated, too much history. For me, Russia is that lover. Popping over to Moscow for a week would be somehow a betrayal of the significance of the time I spent there. Does that sound melodramatic? Self-aggrandising? Fair enough, it’s probably both, but that’s what Russia does to you. 

Philosophers, 1917 (Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov)
by Mikhail Nesterov

I found this painting on wiki art. The artist is Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov, who was born in 1862 and survived the revolution to be an honoured artist of the Soviet Union. Not that medals were a guarantee of a comfortable life in that period. He was very poor when he died of a stroke in 1942. 

The two men in the painting are Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky and Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov. Both spent their philosophical energies grappling with the ideas of faith and science, Russian destiny, her intelligentsia and her people and the relationship between them. Both found some accommodation with the Bolshevik regime for a time. Florensky, on the left, was a remarkable scholar, mathematician and philosopher who ended up working on the electrification of the Russian countryside after the Bolsheviks closed the church where he was a priest, working alongside government officials while still wearing his priest’s cassock. He refused to go in exile and was arrested in 1928, and shot near St Petersburg in 1934. Bulgakov was expelled from Russia in 1922 on board the Philosopher’s Ship and died in Paris in 1944. The worldview, the opinions and policies of both men could not be further from my own, but there is something about this portrait of 1917 that transcends those differences. It it the attitude of engagement, of dedication and concentration, the nerve shredding attempt to understand rather than accept which punches through this image. It seems to me an portrait of struggle, how struggle is undertaken or understood. Nesterov apparently painted it ‘at one stroke’, without sketches or drafts. For me it is as powerful and as enlightening an image of the Russian revolution as any of the stills from Battleship Potemkin. 

I also recently read a novel dealing with individuals facing revolutionary change in Russia - The Last Summer by Ricarda Huch, translated by Jamie Bulloch and published by Peirene Press. I blurbed it, in fact. Huch was a remarkable German writer and historian who was born two years after Nesterov and died five years after him in 1947. 

The Last Summer was published in 1910 and like the painting, it is a small but telling study of Russia and revolution. Perhaps another reason I link them in my mind is that the novel is epistolary, consisting of the letters of a privileged Russian family from their summer estate (I imagine it looking like the landscape in the painting) caught up in the intimacies and betrayals of their own home, and in the larger violences of the time. In both works of art a character study sheds light on wider conflicts while remaining personal and particular. The novel is mix of very different voices, a clamour of them in fact, and deals with those ideas of what we accept, what we try to change, what we resist and what we sacrifice for peace or a higher cause.

This year has left me concerned that we are now caught up in the bow wave of revolutionary times, so I find myself  looking at European and Russian history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in a very different light, and discovering in the art and novels models of resistance and engagement which have become relevant and immediate once more. Prayer? Struggle? Accommodation? Resistance? Perhaps all and none of the above, but in the meantime I’m listening to history, trying to catch its repeating rhythms and learn from them. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

Slate will be discussing Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov early in 2017, and for Slate subscribers there's an excellent discussion available of Tolstoy v. Dostoevsky.

And is you subscribe to anything this year, I do recommend Peirene Press 

Anastasia Romanov and The Royal Ballet by Janie Hampton

Earlier this month I attended a performance of the Royal Ballet’s extraordinary production ‘Anastasia’. In gorgeous and arresting dance and music, events were portrayed surrounding the young Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov.

Grand Duchess Anastasia and her sisters on board the yacht Standart with  Princess Viktoria of Shaumburg-Lippe, grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, sister of the German Emperor Wilhelm II,  ('Kaiser Bill') and cousin of Tsar Nicholas II

In Act One we met Tsar Nicholas II and his family enjoying a holiday during the summer of 1914 on their grand yacht Standart. Anastasia, the youngest and most attractive of the four daughters, whizzed onto the stage on roller skates – quite obviously the love of both her family and the Russian sailors. Their shared happiness was interrupted when news of war against Germany arrived and the Tsar left to join his army.

Little Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich  Romanov  on board the imperial yacht with his carer the sailor Nagorny.

Act Two began with Anastasia’s coming-out ball. Amid much joyous dancing, Rasputin loomed menacingly, slithering between the Tsar and Tsarina. Vast chandeliers hung over the scene in a disconcerting un-perpendicular way, prompting the question – was what we were seeing real or imagined? Anastasia’s privileged life came to an abrupt end with the storming of the Winter Palace.
The music in these acts came from Tchaikovsky’s first and third symphonies, and the dance was classical in style.

Act Two of Anastasia , Royal Ballet, 2016. C 2016 ROH, photo by Tristram Kenton.

The third and final act provided a stark contrast and was if anything more enthralling. With modern dance set to electronic music and Martinů’s 1953 Symphony, the setting was now an austere mental hospital with a single bed and uniformed nurses. The story told was of a young woman fished out of a Berlin canal in 1920 whom many people believed to be Anastasia herself, the sole survivor of the massacre of the Romanovs in 1918. She had been found without any papers and was called simply Fraulein Unbekannt, or Miss Unknown. In the anguished title role, Natalia Osipova danced in a state of unsettling frenzy. When not sitting inert and motionless, staring at silent newsreels of her previous life, she threw herself around, light as a feather but taut as steel, wrenched by a juddering forces. Traditional ballet movements, such as a grande jeté (big leap) were subverted as she pushed against an invisible wall. Memories and nightmarish fantasy intermingled in her recall of surviving assassination and an attempted suicide. Writing in The Guardian, Judith Mackerel described ‘violent shards of dance evoking fragments of Romanov history and a mind boiling and buckling with insanity’.

Natalia Osipova as Anna Anderson in Anastasia.  C ROH 2016, photo by Tristram Kenton.

It mattered little to her many devotees among the White Russians living in the West, that Miss Unknown spoke no Russian, English or French but only Polish and German; that she looked nothing like Anastasia; and had forgotten her table manners. A German law court spent thirty years weighing the evidence for the patient’s claim before deciding that ‘it could neither be established nor refuted’. After Miss Unknown became Anna Anderson and left the mental hospital, she married an American amateur historian called Jack Manahan and lived in an untidy house full of cats in Charlottesville, Virginia. Ten years after her death in 1984, DNA tests identified her as a Polish peasant, Franziska Schanzkowska, who had suffered severe trauma during the 1914-18 war and then been forgotten by her family. When the bones of all the Romanov family were eventually exhumed, their DNA was tested against HRH Prince Philip, the closest known living relative, and this confirmed that the Grand Duchess Anastasia’s death had indeed occurred in 1918.
MacMillan's wonderful reworking of this story is a must-see for History Girls, illustrating vividly the complex psychodrama of a woman’s memory and identity. Catch it at the Royal Opera House or in a cinema near you.

References:

Queen Alexandra's Christmas Gift Book -photographs from my camera, Daily Telegraph 1908.

 Frances Welch, The False Grand Duchess Anastasia, Royal Ballet, 2016. 

Four Sisters, by Clare Mulley

To mark ‘Women’s History Month’ I am dedicating my March blog to four Russian sisters…

A couple of years ago the Russianist, historian, translator and author Helen Rappaport decided to write about four sisters. I was researching three very different sisters at the same time, so I hoped that collectively we could write about seven sisters, and meet occasionally in north London to toast our progress. Sadly, my chosen sisters fell by the wayside (at least for now), but Helen’s wonderful book: Four Sisters: The Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses was published this week.

The British hardback of Helen Rappaport's Four Sisters

A fluent Russian speaker, Helen is a specialist in Russian history and 19th century women’s history. Her subjects have ranged from a blackmailing Victorian beautician to Lenin’s years in exile, and from the stories of women in the Crimean War of the 1850s to an encyclopedia of female social reformers.

Author Helen Rappaport, photo by John Kerrison

Four Sisters is Helen’s second look at the Imperial Romanov family. In 2009 she examined the last painful fourteen days of the dynasty in her history, Ekaterinburg. Now she widens her lens to provide a deeply moving account of the four Romanov sisters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia.

Important chiefly as dynastic assets in their own lifetime, these women were perhaps the most photographed and talked about young royals of the early twentieth century. Presented essentially as beautiful, demure figures, flanking their parents, in gauzy white dresses, it would have been unthinkable that not one of them would find a husband. However, in 1918, they were all brutally murdered, along with their parents, thirteen-year-old brother, and loyal personal staff, by members of the Bolshevik secret police. 

Olga, Maria, Nicholas II Alexandra Fyodorovna,
Anastasia, Alexei and Tatiana, 1913
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Fyodorovna_of_Hesse

The fate of the Imperial Romanov family is well-known, and yet this is a story still obscured by confusion, deceptions and myth. Inevitably perhaps, such a tragic tale of innocence and brutality has often been reduced to a binary narrative about good and evil. However, presenting the four Romanov sisters simply as innocent victims without independent character, fault or value, does little to further our understanding. The apparently irrepressible desire to believe that Anastasia escaped her family’s fate, despite all evidence to the contrary, has further romanticized the story.

I asked Helen why these four women’s lives have not been more critically examined before, despite their fame, and about the politics of writing about women who are primarily known for their relationship to, or association with, more famous men.

     ‘The perennial problem with telling the story of interesting women in history’ Helen told me, ‘is the lack of sufficient source material. Sometimes the only way we can learn anything about women is when they are shown as an adjunct to the much more famous men in their lives and the results are not always satisfactory. I don't believe in trying to aggrandize the role of such women, but by taking a close up look at the key role they played - as in the case of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife - one can find fascinating perspectives on the bigger story. Similarly, the lives and upbringing of the four Romanov sisters hopefully sheds much valuable new light on their parents and the whole dynamic of Russia's last imperial family.’

The tragic fate of the Romanov family provides a brutally direct metaphor for the end of Imperial Russia. How did you balance the focus between the personal drama, and the political context?

     ‘I think the reason that people are so endlessly fascinated by the last imperial family has a lot to do with the murder of those five innocent children in 1918. And yes, it is indeed a metaphor for the dreadful, savage and bitter civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup in October 1917. Millions of people died in the first formative years of the new Soviet Russia, many of them innocent women and children. The Romanov children represent the murder of innocence and also the difficulty, even now, that people in Russia have of coming to terms with the savagery of their own past.’

What is new in your approach to the story?

     ‘The sisters have always been perceived as an adjunct to the much bigger story of their parents and their haemophiliac brother. I had never had any interest in writing standard biographies of, say, Nicholas or Alexandra, nor have I ever considered myself to be a political historian. I was interested in the Romanovs' private, domestic life, as a family and how they interacted with each other.
     As a mother of daughters myself, I wanted to write about them as any other young women – i.e. without preoccupation with their status and titles. I wanted to view their development as one would any other developing girls - with the same interests, impulses, hopes and disappointments. I wanted to show their very different personalities and how each of them had qualities that were uniquely their own. This was no bland collective, as they are so often presented, but four very interesting young women who were on the brink of life and who, in their own very different ways, had a great deal to offer.’

How important was your fluency in Russian during your research?

     ‘My Russian was crucial. There was much that I wanted and needed to read in the Russian original, especially the girls' letters and diaries, even though a lot of source material has now been published and translated. I visited Russia several times to refuel my sense of place, but not so much to discover new things. I found much new material by other means, even without going there. Being in Russia helped me connect with the four girls and their story in an important emotional and spiritual way.’

Finally, how would you like the four Romanov sisters to be remembered?

     ‘As four very different contrasting personalities who deserve to be remembered more than as just pretty girls in white frocks and big picture hats. They were not a bland collective, they were a fascinating quartet of young women who at heart were decent, loving, honest and inherently altruistic and caring. They deserve to be remembered for the love and devotion they showed each other, their parents and their sick brother without complaint and with a gentle stoicism that I find admirable and touching.’ 

Maria, Olga, Anastasia and Tatiana
in captivity, Spring 1917
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Nikolaevna 

Helen is passionate about uncovering the neglected truths behind well-known stories and releasing women from what she calls ‘the footnotes and margins’ of history. Four Sisters gives individuality and vibrant identity back to Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, presenting them not just as pawns in the hands of their Imperial family, symbols of an out-of-touch regime, or tragic victims of the brutal revolution, but as young women with hopes, dreams, frustrations and fears of their own. Here they are actors in their own right, each responding distinctly to the circumstances, opportunities and constraints of their lives, and living without the foreknowledge that usually clouds perceptions of them. Their personal stories are told lightly but with such scholarly authority that it is easy to forget how new it is to consider them in this fresh and sensitive way. 

History like this shows how women’s lives have often been doubly marginalised, first in life, and then in their retrospective historical treatment. Helen Rappaport not only liberates the Romanov sisters to great degree but, in doing so, she shows how revisiting the lives of women living in the shadow of more powerful men can illuminate history in all sorts of new ways.