Susannah Clapp: To the Dacha

Susannah Clapp

Rhoda Power photographed around 1910.

As a child I worried about the Russian Revolution. After all, it failed. At least that’s what schoolfriends, teachers and neighbours said. Yet I knew believers: my parents and a small core of companions who flew the red flag in improbable outposts, first Bath, then the London suburbs. Up to his death in the mid-1980s my dad, far more hardline than my mother, went each year to the GDR in search of a communist society: caustic about English newspaper accounts, open to what he read in the bulky East German magazines which arrived every few weeks. As the English equivalent of a red diaper baby, I am stained pink, tender not about the politics but about the combination of scepticism and idealism.

I doubt that my father looked at Rhoda Power’s account of the events of 1917, first published in 1919 as Under Cossack and Bolshevik (did no one think that droll?) and now reissued as In the Storm (Marble Hill, £12.99). Power sailed from Newcastle to Russia in the winter of 1916. She was 27, had a degree in political science and was engaged by a prosperous industrialist in Rostov-on-Don to teach his daughter English. ‘Awakened by screams and shots’, ‘awakened by cries of “Thief” and “Murder”’, she charts the waves of violence encircling her wealthy hosts steadily and without overt political comment.

She barely mentions her own responses, an abstinence that now looks like a period attribute. Describing an early May Day procession, she indicates long histories of pain, slog, deprivation and expectation. Women,

red-clad, walking under an arch of banners, greeting a democracy that had recognised the justice of their claim to citizenship … the starved workers who had paid for their books by going without meals; the dreamers with eyes full of vision … the young sportsman … not quite knowing what it was all about but wanting ‘to be in the thing, you know?’… hundreds of factory-girls, some pathetically young and delicate, whose white faces contrasted horribly with their scarlet caps of liberty.

Later she is visited by a 12-year-old boy – with hand grenades, wire clippers and ‘shining eyes’ – who had joined the anti-Bolshevik Dobrovolcheskaya (volunteer) Army as a bomb-thrower. In the street she watches children competing to see who can land a snowball on the nose of a severed head. She can distil a large hope or loss in an incisive moment. On the journey to the family’s rented dacha, their jewels stuffed under her mattress on the train, there is a pause, a suspension while she sees red clay, turquoise sky, poplars, as if for a moment the land was unriven. To return to England, as she did in the spring of 1918, she had to cross the country covertly, picking up a troop train in Moscow and living for weeks in a cattle shed.

Absurdity always hovers and often lands: ‘The Committee of THIEVES greets the Russian Republic’; after the revolution, trains carried an instruction to the tovarishchi to ‘kindly refrain from throwing passengers onto the lines while the train is in motion’. Gentle peculiarities – the floor polisher who moves the cleaning cloth with his foot, tango-style – might have been written by Chekhov. As might Power’s pupil, Natasha, a teenage version of her namesake in Three Sisters. Self-absorption is the girl’s shield. When her driver, seeing corpses on the road ahead, abruptly changes course on the way to the theatre (I wish Power told us what they were going to see), Natasha does not stop powdering: ‘It is only thieves … is my nose very red?’ The servants who lace up her boots are ‘pigs’ but when the Germans come ‘all will be comfortable.’ She pays a teacher to write her essays and comes closest to heavy labour when threading pink ribbons into her nightdress: the family, watching the flash of cannon across the river, are preparing to run from Rostov and ‘the maids were too busy to help her.’

Terror is cloaked in pantomime; easily penetrated disguises are continually being adopted to avoid reprisals. When Power slips out into the street to investigate gunfire, she twists a shawl around her head for instant proletarianism. Schoolboys swap their grey uniforms for the black tunics of errand boys. Officers waddle around with greatcoats over their military uniforms or put on sheepskin hats. But they were often discovered and bayoneted – betrayed, Power claims, by their ‘refined features’ and slim fingers.

Power is herself quick to classify by physical features, picking out an ‘illiterate voice’, a ‘low type of head’ and, in the case of a Gypsy encampment, faces that were ‘almost inhuman’. Of the time, no doubt, but surprising in the light of her future career as a progressive, boundary-smashing educational broadcaster. I was a fan of her hit children’s novel Redcap Runs Away (1952), which was – along with Geoffrey Trease’s Bows against the Barons – once essential to a little leftie’s library but is now impossible to buy: stories about blacksmiths’ sons running away to join minstrel troupes in the 14th century seem not to be on trend. With her elder sister, Eileen, she also produced volumes featuring Boys and Girls of History: ‘Pocahontas, the Little Tomboy’ etc. Eileen, an economic historian and medievalist, sinophile, collaborator with R.H. Tawney and H.G. Wells, is vividly summoned by Francesca Wade in her book Square Haunting (2020). Their younger sister, Beryl, was a suffragist and prominent civil servant, ‘an alarming character … with pince-nez’ who in her eighties wrote her own Times obituary before taking a lethal dose of alcohol and barbiturates. Here is another sister trio to add to the Weird, the Graces, the Brontës, along with the Three who, unlike Rhoda, did not get to Moscow.

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