The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Tyrkova-Williams’s memoirs provide an indication of the mindset of idealistic (and frequently revolutionary) Russian youth. The author was much influenced by her mother who, she says, was a person of the 1860’s—one who obtained her liberal views from Christian ethics and from broad reading. Her grandfather’s copy of Lamartine’s work on the Girondists was also very influential. She read it several times when she was thirteen. The poetry of Nekrasov found even more resonance in the young Aleksandra. The events of the day, disputations, political literature, and the arrest and exile of her brother to Siberia made certain that her path would become an oppositional one. Ultimately her own high sense of morality and justice made her turn away from what the Revolution spawned. Taken from Aleksandra Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode [On the Paths toward Freedom]. New York: Izd. Imeni Chekhova, 1952.

I am not writing a history. I do not have any books, or documents at hand, not even the notes which I occasionally jotted down. This is merely a remembrance, a story of what I saw and heard, of the setting in which I grew and lived. I write only of that which has remained in my memory. I began writing at the end of 1940 in Pau, a small town in the south of France with a beautiful view of the Pyrenees. Currently, I am writing in Grenoble with no less a gorgeous view of the Alps. Where will I end? Will I be able to complete this? Who knows? At the age of 73, one looks at tomorrow carefully, especially now, in 1943. But I will try to preserve in human memory that which I witnessed, sometimes as a participant, and relay the development and spirit of the events over which future historians will puzzle. Unless history, publishing, libraries, and archives, the building blocks of culture, are swept away by storms.

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Aleksandra Tyrkova-Williams, A Woman’s Autonomy

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I have chosen to write my memoirs because I think it essential to retain a remembrance of our era which concluded a specific period of Russian life, perhaps not even just the Russian. I will try to speak less of myself, though I do so. I was a part, even though small one, of that oppositional ferment which was called the liberation movement. Now after all that Europe is going through, and all that Russia is suffering, I have different perceptions regarding that which occurred and the events in which I participated in one way or another. Our weaknesses, errors, and delusions have become clearer. But I do not disavow my past and those ideals which I served as well as I could— human rights, freedom, humaneness, and respect for the individual. I bitterly regret that our generation was unable to translate them into life, could not effect in Russia the free and democratic order for which we strove. Catherine II once said that she set the well being of each and everyone as her goal. There is much wisdom in these words. The term “each and everyone” denoted Russia to her. We transferred the center of gravity onto the person, each individual, forgetting the dictum of another great sovereign, Peter I: If Russia were only to live . . . We forgot this, not that we wanted Russia’s destruction, but because of a childish, unthinking confidence in its stability.

The basis of our concern was a striving for universal well being, not for our personal bliss or enrichment, as was frequently the case with European politicians. Therefore, in the Russian opposition, there was much that was immature, naïve, unreasoned and, what turned out to be most dangerous, much simple-mindedness about the nature of statecraft.

The more that I recall the past, the more surprised I am to observe that the European calamity and collapse of today is a continuum of what we Russians thought and acted on a half century ago. If at the end of the last century, and at the beginning of this one, the more active, determined, and ardent segment of Russian public opinion had not been blind to Russian reality and not possessed by the passion of protest, there would not have been two European wars or Asian unrest. I would be peacefully writing my memoirs at home in Russia, and not in an alien land. But things turned out otherwise.

That which we considered to be our Russian cause, our Russian struggle for a new life, was transformed into the preface which awaited Europe and which was reflected in the life of people on all the five continents. That of which I write became a part of their history. Marxism, which now has such an enormous influence on the world’s politics, became a real force thanks to the Russian Revolution, even though in the beginning it was only one of its components. It began on 14 December 1825. From that time on, revolutionary sparks either smoldered or flared in agitated minds until, in the XX century, they raced across all of Russia, and then the whole world, like fire in the steppe.

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Chapter Five