Fleeing Revolution

In the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its civil war, thousands fled, many making their way to China. There they found refuge for a while, only to be forced into a second mass exodus by the Chinese Communists. The stories they tell are documented in a collection of papers held by the Museum of Russian Culture of San Francisco. The papers are included in forty-thousand documents being microfilmed and put online with help from the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace and support from NEH.

Among those who took flight: a world-renowned chemist, who left his children behind to escape the anti-intellectualism of the Soviets; the daughter of a military official who traded her …