By Jonathan Movroydis
In this interview, Gary Hamburg, Otho M. Behr Professor of the History of Ideas at Claremont McKenna College, talks about Russia in War and Revolution: The Memoirs of Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff, which he edited for Hoover Institution Press.
Drawn from the Russian collection of the Hoover Library & Archives and published for the first time, Olferieff’s memoirs describe his life as a Russian military officer, his eyewitness accounts of the final years of Russian imperial rule, and the violent revolution and civil wars that followed.
Hamburg, who also wrote a companion essay to the memoir, details Olferieff’s beginnings from a Russian noble family, as well as the Russian military officer’s perspectives on the Romanov monarchy, the inherent injustices in Russian society prior to Soviet rule, problems within the ranks of the imperial army, and atrocities committed by Bolshevik revolutionaries.
The conversation also includes commentary by Tanya Alexandra Cameron, Olferieff’s granddaughter. Cameron donated Olferieff’s papers to the Hoover Library & Archives and translated the manuscript from its original Russian to English.
How can the memoirs of Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff [1885–1971] inform us about developments in modern Russia?
Gary Hamburg: Oferieff’s memoirs help us understand Russian realities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, because they illustrate the intimate link between developments inside Russia and in the Russian diaspora. Because Russian history since 1900 has been so full of disruptions and violence, there have occurred three waves of emigration: the Olferieffs were part of the first, following the 1917 revolution and civil wars; the second occurred in the wake of the Second World War, when some Soviet citizens and soldiers, displaced by the war, avoided returning home; the third wave occurred during the Brezhnev years. Within the Soviet Union, the tendency was to regard émigrés as enemies no longer relevant to the country’s history; however, émigré communities were strongly affected by developments inside the Soviet Union and also, in various ways, exerted influence upon it. In fact, the diaspora and home polity shared a complex history and together charted an unpredictable historical path full of twists and turns. The appearance of Fyodor Olferieff’s memoirs, nearly sixty years after their completion and a full century after the events he described, is a major contribution to the complicated history of Russia: it represents the recovery of memory partially obliterated by the revolution and thus constitutes a fuller, richer vision of the country’s past. Olferieff’s memoirs teach us that community, stretched thin by political divisions and frayed by organized hatreds, nevertheless extends beyond borders. These often invisible bonds are more durable than we may think.
Who was Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff, and why did he write these memoirs?
Gary Hamburg: Fyodor Olferieff grew to maturity in tsarist Russia at a moment of high political drama, when the Romanov dynasty was under attack by revolutionaries and also collapsing from its own flaws. He was from a prosperous noble family, was educated at the Imperial School of Pages and later at the Imperial War Academy, and therefore knew Russia’s governing circles from the inside. He served in an Imperial Guards unit protecting Saint Petersburg during the revolutionary days of 1905, and later was involved in military policing of the Baltic provinces. During the Great War, he fought in various places on the Polish front, sometimes facing German and other times Austrian units. In late 1916, he received an appointment to military headquarters [Stavka], and from there he witnessed the overthrow of the monarchy in early 1917. Olferieff’s commissions in 1917 took him to key military posts and enabled him to meet Russia’s most prominent fighting commanders. In December 1917, he was on duty at Stavka when Bolshevik forces killed the army’s acting commander in chief, General Dukhonin. In 1918, Olferieff fled central Russia, first stopping in Kiev and later in Odessa. He and his wife boarded the last ship evacuating Odessa in 1919.
How did the Hoover Institution acquire his papers?
Tanya Alexander Cameron: I donated them to the Hoover Institution because my grandfather wanted his story to be told. In my youth, I remember my grandfather as a kind and good man. As an adult, I began to appreciate his incredible life and the tragedy that the family endured in their escape from Russia and arrival to the United States. The miracle is that they survived and that my grandfather was able to tell his eyewitness account of major historical events and people from his perspective.
What makes this memoir unique in literature about the Russian empire’s last days and the Russian Revolution?
Gary Hamburg: Olferieff’s memoirs are extraordinary, for two reasons. First, during the crisis of Russia’s old regime he had access to members of the royal family and leading military men but also to common people in the army and cities. He had a very good eye for assessing character, so many of his observations about Russian government are telling. Second, he was an honest, introspective man, who saw his own shortcomings but also the inadequacies and hypocrisies of his social class. This quality gives his memoirs unusual power.
Will you discuss Olferieff’s perspectives on his own upbringing and his perceptions about injustice and inequality in Russian society?
Gary Hamburg: Olferieff understood the fundamental unfairness of Russian institutions. He saw that students in the School of Pages were most often Russian nobles and families with previous ties to the school. Minority nationalities were underrepresented at the school and also at army headquarters, if they were represented at all. Olferieff also realized that Russian peasants felt excluded from key political agencies and therefore unable to influence important decisions. They profoundly resented their subordination, and that resentment surfaced strongly during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
What were his beliefs about the Russian monarchy?
Gary Hamburg: Olferieff served the monarchy loyally, because the monarch was a symbol of national unity essential to the empire’s survival. As he grew up, he noticed that many common people viewed the monarch with something like religious reverence. On the other hand, Olferieff became aware of Nicholas II’s personal foibles and of his blindness to the difficulties of life in peasant communities and cities. Starting in 1905, Olferieff worried about whether the monarchy would survive, in spite of the common people’s favorable predisposition toward the regime. By early 1917, he came to believe that Nicholas II had squandered the people’s trust and deserved to lose the throne.
Will you discuss his perspective on the leadership of the Russian imperial army and its eventual disintegration?
Gary Hamburg: The imperial army was, in Olferieff’s view, a magnificent fighting machine with marvelous historical traditions, but by the early twentieth century, it was no match for the German army, its principal competitor. The chief problem was not so much incompetent Russian military leadership, although Olferieff pointedly criticized several Russian generals for misunderstanding the challenges of modern warfare or for making tactical and strategic blunders. No, the main problem was that the empire had not invested in the education of its common people, and therefore Russian peasant soldiers lacked the technical and political sophistication of German soldiers. Russian peasant soldiers, in Olferieff’s view, were patriotic but had not completely internalized Russia’s war goals; therefore, they were susceptible to defeatism and to socialist agitation. By 1915, during the Great Retreat, morale at the front was already frayed. A year later, common soldiers were demoralized by the mechanical slaughter at the front.
What was Russia’s Volunteer Army, and can you describe Olferieff’s participation in that organization?
Gary Hamburg: The Volunteer Army was a group of fighters engaged in the struggle against Bolshevism from late 1917 onwards. According to Olferieff’s observations, its leadership consisted of excellent field generals who possessed little political sense. He did not think of these generals as political reactionaries: indeed, during 1917, at least in most cases, they did not consistently support the monarchy. Their chief mistake in 1917 to 1918 and thereafter was their failure to outline a political program that might have competed with the Bolsheviks’ ideas. Olferieff did not wholeheartedly embrace the Volunteer Army, but he did fight in Kiev to keep the Bolsheviks from capturing the city. He also helped the French command to defend Odessa against advancing Red units. He was dismayed by Bolshevik atrocities during the civil wars but also by those of the Volunteer Army.
What were his views about the Bolshevik revolution?
Gary Hamburg: Olferieff thought the Bolshevik revolution was a tragedy for Russia inasmuch as it shattered the Russian state and destroyed the empire’s valuable traditions. However, he recognized that the revolution had deep historical roots and that by 1917 it could not have been averted. His memoirs offer a vivid picture of the revolution’s growing radicalism—which Olferieff calls the revolution’s “deepening”—in the turbulent year. After the revolution, even though he occasionally participated in fighting against the Bolsheviks, he had little hope that the anti-Bolshevik cause could succeed. Retrospectively, as he viewed the revolution from America, he noted that it had opened the way for a new era in Russian history—that is, the possibility that common Russian people might shape their own destiny. He did not approve of the Soviet government, but he saw the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 as proof of the greatness of common Russian men and women.
Can you describe his eventual migration to the United States?
Gary Hamburg: Olferieff’s emigration from Russia to the United States occurred in several stages, beginning with his family’s evacuation from war-torn Odessa and ending with its settlement in California. Like many other families in the “first wave” of California Russians, the Olferieffs settled in San Francisco, where they found work (Mary as a college French teacher, Fyodor in a variety of jobs) and tried to rebuild their lives. They made their way, and as they did so, kept informed about developments in the Soviet Union. Fyodor donated a paper to the Hoover Institution in 1932 on Soviet defenses in the Far East. After the Second World War, he wrote his memoirs—a process that stretched from 1946 to 1962. He managed to free himself of the passions of the Cold War to compose memoirs that traced his fractured life in imperial and postrevolutionary Russia. Meanwhile, the Olferieffs contributed to American life through their work and by joining pro-emigration organizations.
