Good morning,

A history based Fem Friday today, as this week I went to the British Library exhibition on Russia. It was superb, and it finishes on Tuesday, so if you are in or near London I highly recommend it as a Bank Holiday weekend activity.

To start with, here is a detailed and nicely illustrated article about the role of women in the revolution, civil war and subsequent government:

Historians generally agree that the February Revolution began in Petrograd on International Women’s Day, 23 February (Old Style: 8 March) 1917, when thousands of women from different backgrounds took to the streets demanding bread and increased rations for soldiers’ families. […] The Women’s Day demonstration is often upheld as the main (and even sole) example of women’s involvement in the Revolution. Yet, […] women activists and workers played a crucial role throughout 1917. In the months leading up to the October Revolution, for example, working class women and Bolshevik activists staged a number of strikes and demonstrations to protest the continuation of the war and poor working conditions.

https://www.bl.uk/russian-revolution/articles/women-and-the-russian-revolution

It being a British Library exhibition, a lot of it is made up of books, so naturally I stood and gawped for minutes in front of every diary I could find. One of these was Nelly Ptachkina’s – she was an early teenager when the revolution started, and you can read her story and excerpts from her diary here:

Nelly flits between astutely describing and reflecting on the political situation and relating her girlish and adolescent thoughts, interests and dreams, the latter giving away the fact she was only 15 when she began this diary in 1918. She is conscious of the gravity of the events unfolding around her and writes of her wish to record them:

Truly we are going through a terrible, terrible time … It would be a good thing to collect the newspapers, but that is impossible as we move from place to place; at least I have my diary.

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/european/2015/06/child-of-the-revolution.html

Here – and much more showy – is the diary of Clare Sheridan, Londoner in Moscow in 1920. She was a sculptor who had been summoned (via friends of friends! I suppose that is how a lot of things happen) to sculpt the likenesses of key Bolsheviks. Her first few weeks in Russia were pretty grim as she didn’t speak the language and there was, apparently, a lot of red tape involved in trying to meet Lenin. Here’s Clare in that period failing to read a room:

And here she is, having finally met Lenin, discussing her cousin Winston Churchill with him:Have a great weekend and let me know if you make it to the exhibition!

Alex.