The round-the-world trip of Petrograd children (1918–1920)

Abstract

The publication includes a historical essay: the description of a forced round-the-world trip of about 800 children and adolescents with caregivers, sent from Petrograd, which was on the verge of a famine catastrophe, in May 1918 to the Urals and Western Siberia for three months in a “nourishment colony”. Cut off from home by the uprising of the Czechoslovak Legion and by events on other fronts of the Civil War in Russia, they began to suffer from cold and hunger in the autumn — winter of 1918 and ended up in the care of the American Red Cross, which in the summer of 1919 took them from the combat zone to Vladivostok, where they lived until July 1920. Due to the impossibility of returning through the Far East and Siberia, they sailed on a Japanese ship under the flag of the Red Cross along the route: Muroran (Japan), San Francisco, Panama Canal, New York, Helsinki, Koivisto (Finland), Petrograd. The paper includes the first publication of two colonists’ documents: a handwritten newspaper, ‘Kur’inskaia mozaika’ (Mosaic of Kurya), from July 13, 1918, and the handwritten diary of the colonist Mikhail Ivanovich Kholin for the period July 12 — September 18, 1920 (Vladivostok — Petrograd). The documents were received from A. L. Moyzhes (1910–2014).