TSARIST RUSSIA

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21412, 2 March 1935, Page 15

TSARIST RUSSIA

AN ARISTOCRAT'S MEMORIES One Crowded Hour: An Autobiography. By Count Bohdan K. de Castellane. Allen and Unwin. 285 pp. (12/6 net.) The story of any man's life, provided it is well told and the narrator is observant and really alive, can be counted on to make an interesting book. When the narrator has lived in unusual surroundings, in conditions that cannot now be repeated, when he has survived the overthrow of a whole social order, and into the bargain is able to convey something of the zest with which his own life has been lived, his book becomes something out of the ordinary. Such a book is Count Bohdan K. de Castellane's autobiography. It gives a lively and natural picture of the sort of life lived by the large landowners in Russia before the revolution; it pleases by its straightforward account of the author's boyhood and university days, and it is valuable as a record of the way the revolution appeared to one member of the Russian ruling class. As a member of an ancient Polish family living on great estates in Russia the author spent his youth in a way that must have been typical of his class. His earliest memories are of the great palace of Roma Nova, on his father's estate in the Ukraine, with its more than 300 rooms, its vast, park, its army of servants, and the 200 horses of its stables. Later he lived on an estate of 130,000 acres of wild steppe in Bessarabia, with the nearest railway station and post office 80 miles away. Here are accounts of hunting wolves with borzoi dogs, of bear hunts, and of man hunts when horse thieves were attracted by the famous stud of the estate. The author gives an impression of a splendid, free life, of carelessness about money, of unthinking acceptance of obedience from the peasants, and (in spite of a certain benevolence) of an entire failure to understand the unrest which even 30 years ago was agitating them. It is interesting to note that a similar unrest, with its purpose undefined, existed among the students at the University of Kiev while the author was there. These students were members of the ruling class, yet in their revolt against authority they created disturbances which caused many of them to be sent to Siberia. The character of the notorious Rasputin is put in a pleasanter light by the author, who claims that though the peasant's influence on the Tsar, particularly in affecting appointments to political and military posts, may have been unfortunate, whatever Rasputin did was dictated by a fervent patriotism, though ignorant and self willed. "Rasputin was never a monk or a priest; neither was he a holy devil nor a saint," he writes. "He was a simple peasant from Siberia, the son of a prosperous and even comparatively wealthy peasant. . . All of his activities, which I admit were often wrongly directed, were taken with the sole purpose of serving his country in the way in which he in his peasant's mind thought was for its greatest good." From his account of the first two years of the revolution it appears that in many parts of Russia members of the old ruling class remained for quite a long time unmolested on their estates, though this was natural in a country so vast as Russia. Even in Moscow the terror of the revolution seems to have been capricious. While some of the old aristocracy were taken and shot out of hand, others were not troubled beyond being deprived of their mansions and their wealth. They constantly faced starvation, but many of them remained in the city for at least two years after the revolutionaries took power, and some—

particularly those with special knowledge—were even given posts under the Bolshevik Government. The book can be recommended not only as a lively narrative of an unusual life, but as giving a new view of part at least of what happened in Russia in the worst of the revolution.