“Truth is the criterion of historical study, but its impelling motive is poetic.” The line on a quiet library wall in London might as well be the epigraph to Rhoda Power’s first book—an unvarnished, first-hand chronicle of Russia’s unravelling during the First World War and its revolutions. Long before she became a BBC pioneer of classroom history, Power was her own reporter, moving through Rostov-on-Don as empire cracked and new creeds marched in red caps beneath spring skies.
A Governess in a Cosmopolitan Borderland
Power arrived in Russia in the winter of 1915, a 24-year-old English governess bound for a wealthy merchant household in Rostov-on-Don. The city was a polyglot marketplace—Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Russians, Cossacks—where the war’s early disasters remained oddly abstract for the well-to-do. Inside the Sabaroff home (a pseudonym), life followed the choreography of the Russian bourgeoisie: a gymnasium education topped by French conversation hours, German exercises, a ballerina for dance, music lessons received in the bedroom because the dining room belonged to meals and the drawing room to guests.
Beyond the heavy doors and sacred icons lay a jumbled town of dazzling domes and stifling workers’ cottages—children, poultry, dogs underfoot; oleographs of the Tsar tacked to smoky walls. Domestic staff slept rolled in shawls on tables or floors, rarely literate, often cheated by cooks who padded market prices and paid hush-sugar to junior servants. Men-servants were “picturesque creatures and delightful liars,” cycling through sober months and catastrophic three-week benders on a substitute spirit they joked was furniture polish.
Power, a suffragist steeped in English habits of toleration, was chilled by the easy contempt for Jews and servants. In drawing-room talk a Jewish tennis partner could be “not worth a name.” In the street, the peasants spat at a mere mention. Class and confession were not arguments; they were reflexes.
War on the Periphery, Hunger at the Door
The war brushed Rostov obliquely and brutally. Columns of under-equipped soldiers clanked to trains without cheers; boots split and stuffed with sacking, rifles shared one to three. By the winter of 1916–17, shortages etched new hierarchies: bread queues of pinched faces; ration cards for sugar and flour; white loaves and milk still on the Sabaroff table. Power could not forget one worker—Anna Ivanovna, an orphan supporting two brothers—who stopped appearing at the bakery door. “It is the price of war,” the women murmured, crossing themselves.
February: Liberty in a Blue Sky
News of the Tsar’s abdication arrived by rumor, then by messenger, then like weather. Rostov remained orderly; meetings once criminal bloomed in gardens and streets. Students explained democracy; old men asked, “If we have a republic, who will be Tsar?” Servants declared they would work eight hours and no longer be addressed as “thou.” Only the old nurse wept for the “little father.”
May Day 1917 showed the soul of the moment: a brilliant sky, budding trees, the Marseillaise, banners—“Hail to Democracy,” “Long life to the Russian Republic,” “We have won Liberty, now we want Peace.” Prisoner Austrians marched unguarded and elated with the crowd; even thieves paraded under a scarlet banner announcing themselves with swaggering honesty. A young officer, plain-clothed behind Power, whispered, “Where shall we be next year?”
Cossacks, Cadets, and a Bourgeois Faith in Order
The Sabaroffs pinned their hopes on the Cossacks—frontier horsemen who had wrung a living from a desolate steppe and now refused to see their land collectivized. As the Provisional Government faltered and prices spiked, petty crime metastasized. A child was kidnapped and strangled; militias shot at thieves by night. The bourgeoisie put their faith in Kerensky’s voice and the Cossack whip.
When Bolshevik guards attacked the post office in November, Cossacks beat them back with casual good humor and sterner force. The Don district proclaimed martial law; later, independence. The rich poured into the street to cheer Ataman Kaledin. A day of funerals followed—three hours of open coffins grinding through snow, old relatives weeping, young ones marching with eyes fixed on a horizon only they could see.
A brittle normal returned. Natasha, the Sabaroffs’ daughter, wore diamonds to the theatre and shrugged at bodies in the street: “Only thieves; I am glad the Cossacks kill them, so that we can be comfortable and gay.” The Somme might have been on another planet. “Why don’t the English come and help us?” her mother asked, again and again.
“Blood, Blood, Blood”
By early 1918 the lines hardened. Schoolboys in ill-fitting uniforms drilled for anti-Bolshevik forces; older men drifted to cinemas. When the Red Guard advanced in strength—thirty to one, an officer told Power—Kaledin killed himself. Shells landed. The Sabaroffs fled without farewell, pausing only for Natasha to lace pink ribbons into her nightdresses. Power, left with a nurse and a British officer in a flat bearing the consul’s seal, watched the Cadets rounded up and shot. Bodies lay stripped in the snow until a cart came. Some surviving boys hid as “servants” in their parents’ homes; real servants denounced them. Others tried to flee in disguise and were betrayed by their hands and faces—class as a death sentence. For March 3, 1918, Power wrote only three words: “Blood, blood, blood.”
Expropriations, Paper Money, Narrow Rooms
The Bolsheviks nationalized the banks. Those slow to hide their accounts starved for lack of food to buy. Rostov was fined twelve million roubles for resisting. Five currencies swirled in madness—Tsarist notes, Kerensky money, emergency coupons, Don republic scrip, new Bolshevik issues. Big houses technically ceased to belong to their owners; rents were paid to the Red Guard; the bourgeois were allotted a single room while “tenants” filled the rest.
In a clandestine visit, Power found the Sabaroffs hiding “incognito.” Natasha—who affectionately called Power “Little spider” for her slightness—could not fathom why a German occupation would force a British subject to leave. “Pooh! What for to go away? The journey will kill you!” The day came anyway. At the station, Natasha wept and clasped a Caucasian bracelet around Power’s wrist; her mother shook hands coolly: “Ah, the cold English.” Later, Power learned the family had reached the West.
A Hard Road Home and a Harder Lesson
The trip north ran through fighting zones, lice, bedbugs, Spanish influenza, and a ship rated for 800 but loaded with 2,000. She reached safety at last, carrying diaries from a front where truth bled through every page.
Years earlier President Wilson had hailed the Tsar’s abdication as a “heartening” dawn for world peace. Those May Day songs in Rostov rang with a similar conviction: liberty won, peace next. The old regime had fallen; people spoke freely; servants demanded dignity; prisoners marched without guards beside their former enemies. The poetic motive of history was everywhere—the sunlit pageantry, the choruses riding the wind. And then came the ledger of consequences: class vengeance, summary shootings, expropriations, famine logic, the long shadow of Stalin.
The Poetry and Price of Upheaval
Power’s value as a witness is not that she explained Russia. She refused the false comfort of tidy causes. Instead, she noticed: the old nurse crossing herself before “the stranger’s religion” at her bed; a cab horse patient under gunfire while its driver revised the day’s news; a baker’s queue suddenly missing one face; schoolboys polishing bayonets that would meet their own doorsteps. She recorded the intoxication of liberty and the nausea that followed.
All revolutions, the historian Pieter Geyl wrote, move with the conviction that they inaugurate a new order—precisely what makes them “incalculably dangerous.” In Rostov-on-Don between 1915 and 1918, Rhoda Power saw that conviction made flesh, set to music, and then turned to iron. The truth of her pages endures; the poetry does, too. And together they leave us with a refrain that has not aged: When will they ever learn?
