The Revolution of 1917
In the middle of WWI, poverty, hunger and violence forced the people of Russia to desperately seek a solution. Something, anything new. A ghost that had been wandering around Europe for the past few decades was reviving itself. Beginning with the protests in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Consequently, the military joined the people’s indignation and rising, took over the government of the Tsar and installed a provisionary institution instead that was familiar to the Empire before the Tzar: the Duma. All this, happened in February 1917. But the war wasn’t over and food hadn’t come, so people carried on with their demands. Finally the Tsar abdicated, we already know that story. But what happened between the end of the Romanov’s and the great communist State?
Vladimir Lenin came back from Switzerland to take advantage of the confusion and chaos (He had been exiled after the failure of the revolution 12 years before, which ended up in the holocaust of the Bloody Sunday). In April, he declared that all the power should be taken away from the new government and given to the Soviets (the worker’s unions). In order to get there, he had to remove all opposition to the Bolshevik party. Far from answering his demands, the official military lead by Alexander Kerensky, opened another war front deepening the crisis. People started to follow Lenin’s revolutionary rhetoric again, but again their protests were repressed. And, just like before, Lenin managed to run away.
Two months before the democratic elections, protests started once more. And Lenin saw a new opportunity to siege power with the Bolsheviks, so he came back from Finland, where he was exiled. They occupied strategic positions in official buildings and palaces in the middle of an October night. And just like that, they arrested all the ministers and leaders of the provisional government gaining real control over all the people of Russia. They made immediate reforms, took the country out of the war and installed a socialist State which removed all of the opposition parties. Not everyone was very happy with this, instigating a Civil War between the supporters of the former regime and the communists. The book Red Snow, Gold Clouds, which is still at work by Marianna Baker, tells the story of young Lydia Markova; her escape during the Civil War as she journeyed from Moscow to Harbin, China, in 1919.
Sources:
http://www.orlandofiges.info/section6_TheOctoberRevolution1917/index.php
http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yarframe.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution
Documentary:
The Lost Dynasty
Three hundred years of family business. Nineteen Emperors and Empresses ruling with elegance, charisma, intrigue and might. Starting with Mikhail, ending with Mikhail. Building palaces and conquering vast lands. Succeeding one after another to govern hunger and cold with hidden gold and huge power, given by the glory of God and the Church. The legacy of the Romanov Dynasty started in mysterious ways and was ended by dark means in the midst of new worlds.
It started in 1613 when Mikhail I, a 16-year-old boy, was elected as Emperor of Russia by an assembly of boyars, a traditional noble class of the time. Mikhail was the son of Feodor Nikitich Romanov (later crowned as Patriarch Filaret), and the grandson of Roman Zakharin-Yuriev, from whom the name came to existence. Mikhail was elected after the death of Ivan IV, the Terrible, who had killed his own son when his wife, Anastasia, was assassinated by the boyars. And Ivan’s youngest son, Feodor, died childless. Thus his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, was elected as Tsar in 1599 and did everything he could to keep the Romanovs away. This didn’t last long, because a wave of False Dmitriys, one after another, claiming to be Feodor’s children, took him down and restored the Dynasty.
After Mikhail, came his son Alexis I, in 1645, and his grandson Feodor III, in 1676. Feodor died without children, bringing rise to a new conflict between the descent of Alexis and Peter, and his stepbrother and sister Ivan and Sofia. We’re talking about Peter the Great, who started the importation of European influence and colonizing lands in Siberia. He founded the great city of St. Petersburg. (That’s where the name comes from.) He was the first one to call himself Tsar of all Russia. At his death in 1725, the boyars elected his wife, Catherine I, to succeed him, and after her came a few children, nephews and grandchildren who ruled in the new era of Russia continuing the tradition of fashion, magnificent palaces and powerful conquests. Until Catherine II, widow of one of the grandsons of Peter and Catherine I, conspicuously appeared in the throne in 1762. It is said that the nobles and the church forced him to abdicate in her favor.
A series of new conspiracies were formed in order to obtain the throne involving lots of murder. Alexander I, grandson of Catherine, and his brother Nicholas I, finally regained the power for the dynasty in 1825. And then a new Alexander and a new Nicholas came along. As the last one came to power, a whole new world was arising around the globe and Russia was not prepared. Just as Nicholas II was not prepared to be a Tsar. And was not prepared to fight two external wars and one internal civil war, of which we’ve learned already. In the end, all the members of the family were killed by the revolutionary army of the Bolsheviks. Mikhail, Nicholas’ brother, ruled for a few hours before he was banished and also executed, the finale of the Dynasty of the Romanovs, that had finally came to an end.
Visit our sources:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/coll/214.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Romanov
There’s also a great series of documentaries about the dynasty:
The Old Believers
When reading ‘Red Snow, Gold Clouds‘ thriller, you will find that some characters seek refuge in places full of hidden mysteries and ancient traditions. One of the most important being a lost temple of Old Believers—a religious sect who, despite the odds, still live in places that are completely isolated from any external contact or technological innovation. There are some families who never heard about the war except for a few distant explosions and sporadic aircraft flights.
This is the case of Agafia Lykova, an Old Believer who survived isolation for more than 70 years after her father took her, along with her mother and siblings, to the cold Siberian Taiga fleeing from war and persecution. After her mother starved to death to feed the family and after her brothers and father were killed by viruses that an unexpected scouting party brought, Agafia was completely alone. And she survived. The tools she had and the strong work habits she learned from her father were enough to feed herself along with the company of just a few pets. Besides that: she had her faith.
So who are the Old Believers? Their history dates back to the mid-seventeenth century. In the year 1666, the Moscow Patriarch Nikon introduced a series of reforms to the dogma of the Orthodox Church in order to reduce the differences with the Greek tradition, seeking to unify faith with the old times. We now know that Nikon’s ideas were not that correct and actually contrary to what he wanted because it increased the differences and created new gaps within his own people. Old Believers are those who kept the original faith from before the reforms took place.
The differences between one tradition and the other would seem trivial today, but for people like Agafia, they mean everything. Using two fingers instead of three for the sign of the cross, or seven proshpora instead of five for the liturgy, constitute the essence of one ritual or another and in everyday religious details make a difference. God’s help is achieved with honesty and integrity. The Old Believers had been persecuted and killed for centuries for not adhering to official dogma and for not having the power to do something about it.
If you want to learn more about the Old Believers, you can visit these sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
http://library.uoregon.edu/ec/oldbelievers/index.html
You can also watch this great documentary about Agafia:
The Treasure Train
The missing gold is a permanent mystery. That is what it has been during the last century, ever since its disappearance in August 1919. It could be in a monastery, hidden in caves, buried in a forest on the outskirts of a town, in the cellars of a bank or buried in containers in the bottom of a lake. Or all at once. In the fictional reconstruction of Red Snow, Gold Clouds, Marianna Baker explores the diverse theories on the gold`s fate. It should be noted that one of the antagonistic characters in the story, Zharkov, works for the Bank of Kazan, in which part of the official story occurs. Though also, the protagonist`s grandmother sought refuge with the gold in an Old Believer monestary in the Taiga, Siberia. And Zharkov`s wife died in Lake Baikal. Which clue will lead us to the gold?
After the Admiral Kolchak was commissioned by the White Army to hide the gold, he engaged the services of the Czechoslovak Legion to help him in this mission. The particular objective of the legion was to protect the Trans Siberian Train from possible Bolshevik attacks on its journey between Kazan and Irkutsk. However, the Legionnaires` lack of interest of in a foreign war led to an attempt to get some of the treasure for themselves. Thus, in one of the stops at the Kutin station, the Czechs signed an agreement with the Bolshevik army to deliver Kolchak in exchange for a share of the gold (representing in fact, more than half), resulting in his execution.
Plus, on a previous stop in Omsk, one of the wagons had already been robbed by unknown hands, who broke the seals of the train, emptied the containers and killed some of the officers. Through the discovery of an unsent telegram, it was learned that Lenin gave the order to stop the Czech’s treachery and keep all the gold inside the Russian borders. In the end, the Czechs got away with it, returning to Czechoslovakia where they founded a nationally recognized bank. There are numerous records of these dark deals and their results, which still have impact today. But with time, there have been other findings that suggest the treasure has multiple destinations.
For example, a number of medals belonging to the KGB were found in a private building in the city of Tyumen, with irrefutable records that they belong to the treasure. In addition, they have found the remains of tools connected to the train and its protectors in both caves and under Siberian monasteries. And in 2009 a large batch of containers and train parts were found at the bottom of Lake Baikal. Clearly, the gold found its way into many hands leaving a large collection of treasue maps to be discovered.
The elaboration of this post was based on the following documentary:
Mystery of the Russian Tsar’s Lost Gold
When a crown has held power for centuries, it isn’t hard to believe that it will do anything to protect its wealth and power when warning its own vulnerability. Just in the case the proximity of its defeat is mistaken. The Czar’s lost gold is one of the oldest mysteries in the modern world.
As explained in last post, after the revolution there was a red side and a white side that confronted each other for the control of a nation that was mired in scarcity and uncertainty. The whites were defending the interest of the royal family. It is said that the gold reserve of the Romanovs was one of the largest amongst all European kingdoms. It is also said that they managed to keep it safe from the Red Army, thanks to Admiral Alexander Kolchak, after whom the treasure was renamed. What happened to the gold is the body of the mystery.
Theories and conjectures of all kinds have raised and hundreds of searchers have gone to find the treasure using historical documents and mathematical calculations. Kazan, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Lake Baikal and even Beijing and Tokyo, have all been visited by secret, official, and unofficial missions throughout the 20th century. It is probable, however, that each theory has some truth in it and that the gold is distributed in several of these places, scattered along the transiberian railway, which was used as an escape route of the White Army and its resources. It is also possible that the gold had simply been used by the military to supply and fund themselves in the remaining time of the war, which they obviously intended to win. If this is true, the mysterious treasure could have ended up with no pain nor glory in the hands of European Banks and companies that added billionaire interests to the debt.
We can’t be sure of anything. What we do know is that Admiral Kolchak was killed by the reds and that the official record of the gold is missing. Red Snow, Golden Clouds provides a new approach to the query of this mystery, that doesn’t seem to ever die. Our two protagonists Andrew and Katya find the two halfs of a treasure map. Will it lead them to the gold. Will they be able to discover the real fate of the Czar’s lost gold?
If you want to learn more about the lost gold of the Czar you can visit these sources:
http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/international/kolchaks.shtml
And you can also watch this video:
“Red Snow, Gold Clouds” thriller by Marianna Baker and Anna Baker
The Russian Civil War 1918-1922
The plot of the thriller Red Snow, Gold Clouds by Marianna Baker and Anna Baker is based on the diary of Lidia Markov, the great-grandmother of Andrew Bartholomew, the book’s main character. The diary narrates Lidia’s dramatic escape from the Russian Civil War in 1919 to Harbin, China, and tells of Lidia’s tragic love affair with General Baratov and how they and two White Army officers hid seven boxes of the Czar’s Gold in the Siberian taiga. Chapters seven and eight focus on their dramatic journey to a new life. You may want to read a short account of the Russian Civil War to help you better understand the story’s setting.
Two revolutions, two armies, millions of deaths. Russian Civil War can be told in numbers if we’re trying to create a general background, but in this case, the facts are more important.
When the October Revolution of 1917 finally came to an end, giving the victory to the Bolsheviks, (renamed as the Red Army), they had to confront a new difficulty: the inevitable union of all their enemies. The new unified force was known as the great White Army or the White Movement. It was made up of the Czar’s imperial army, the fierce Kozakhs, the Mensheviks and some other left groups defeated in the revolution, and nationalist groups from every territory of the recently extinct empire.
In the wake of the Czar’s assassination and later with the end of the European war; new armies, regional governments, foreign interventions and all kinds of factions started to form in order to continue their own agendas (with the promise of exterminating all the others eventually.) Czarists, liberal republicans, communists, anarchists, Czechs, Ukrainians, Mongols, Allies from other countries, and many others, confronted each other restlessly in what was probably the cruelest and most bloody civil war of the western history.
We’re talking about nearly six years of civil war between November 1917 and June 1923. Historical leaders such as Czar Nicholas II and Alexander Kolchak on the white side (both killed in different moments) and Lenin and Trotsky on the red side (whose implacable strategies would result victorious), headed this long and messy battle for power in the vast territory that would eventually turn into the controversial world power of the Soviet Union. According to some, the final death toll was above three million souls, evaporated between blood and gold, deception and secrecy.
If you want to learn more about the Russian Civil War you can visit these sources:
http://spartacus-educational.com/RUScivilwar.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/civil-war-of-1917-1922
You can also watch this video: