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Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff (1885-1971) led a remarkable life in the shadows of history. This book presents his memoirs for the first time, translated and annotated by his granddaughter Tanya A. Cameron. Born into a noble family, Olferieff was a Russian career military officer who observed firsthand key events of the early twentieth century, including the 1905-7 revolution, the Great War, the collapse of the imperial state, and the civil wars in Ukraine and Crimea. Olferieff wrestles with moral and political questions, wondering whether his own advantages could be justified-and whether, if born a peasant, he might have thrown himself into the revolution. As Gary Hamburg writes in an illuminating companion essay, Olferieff wrote "to understand himself and to record his broken life for posterity" as a privileged observer of a bloody, historically pivotal era.
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"Originally published in Yiddish, in New York, in 1933 this is an account by Mendel Osherowitch, a social-democrat who was born in Trostyanyets, Ukraine (then part of the Tsarist Russian empire--he spoke fluent Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish and English) about a visit he made to his hometown and other parts of Soviet Ukraine in February/March 1932. He provides first-hand descriptions about the beginning of what has come to be known as the genocidal Great Famine of 1932-33 in Soviet Ukraine (the Holodomor), widespread discontent and despair, death by starvation, extensive poverty, peasant insurrections and their repression by the regime, the silence of Western journalists in Moscow about the true conditions in the USSR, repeatedly recounting how he was told the food situation was going to get even worse. While sympathetic to the alleged ideals of the Soviet Union, Osherowitch returned disenchanted by what he had witnessed, having understood the human costs of the Soviet experiment."-- Provided by publisher