Book Description

The Russian Revolution marked a series of events in imperial Russia that culminated in 1917 with the abolition of the czarist monarchy and the establishment of the Soviet communist state under Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. While Lenin and his followers purportedly advocated the rise of the Russian peasantry, opposition to the Bolshevik Party erupted into a bloody civil war and was met with Lenin's ravaging "Red Terror" campaign. The revolution effected a severe change in all economic, political and social relationships in Russian society--a change that would endure until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This historical memoir imparts distinctive social and cultural insights into the realities of the Russian Revolution and the later effect of World War II on the people who suffered under the Soviet Union. Narrated in sequential first person by a mother, Nadia Stakhanova, and her two daughters, Natasha and Vera Stakhanova, the book gives the factual account of a family whose privileged way of life was shattered by Communism and war. Ranging in setting from czarist Russia to present-day Melbourne and the campus of Vassar in New York, the story follows the family through a period of perpetual poverty and crisis, beginning with the sentencing of father Vladimir to death for loyalty to the White Russian faction. It continues with the family's subsequent evasion of the Russian secret police, the German occupation of their home city during World War II, their forced abandonment of five-year-old daughter Natasha, and their flight to the West through Russia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Italy and Austria. The reunification of the family in Australia marks the story's climax.