I have been looking all over for this, but only found the ending. It's the memoirs of the wife of Paul Vornov, ex 'love interest' of GD Olga N. It describes the final days in Russia and what a relief it was to be out, and know she would not have to worry about being killed anymore.
EPILOGUE
We stayed on deck until the Russian coast had been replaced on the horizon by an endlessness of tossing gray water. Danger was left behind on that vanished coast for us —and yet, for me, this new strange security was constantly to be invaded by the ghosts of the dangers we had survived. For long months the noise of an automobile stopping in front of the house would set my pulse to hammering and I would have to conquer an impulse to rush to the window and see who approached so that I might prepare for the worst!
While the danger had been present I had usually succeeded in holding to my self-possession and calm; but my nerves had all the time been storing up an alarm that had eventually to be released. Not until we finally were within the hospitable boundaries of the United States of America did I find myself able to think back over the years of my youth and the following years when I had to see so much suffering and cruelty around me. Then I thought that I would try to write of my experiences—they would interest my daughter, Tatiana, who was born in exile while Paul and I were still in France.
Tatiana will never see Russia as it was. I hope that my story will help to give her a more complete and familiar picture of Russia than perhaps she could get by general reading—since most of the recent books on Russia seem to me to be very onesided. I have been many times shocked by the false parallels often drawn between the Tsarist regime and the bolshevik tyranny. It seems to me that most such books are written by individuals who seek to bulwark preconceived social or political theories or who do not know the country, and I have thought that the story of a woman who offers no viewpoint but the personal and human one might perhaps give a more complete and truthful picture of Russia to others as well as to my daughter, Tatiana.
I am one of the most fortunate of all the fugitive victims—I think we may be called that—of the Russian revolution, for not only did my husband miraculously survive it but so did my mother and all three of my sisters, though I have my brother to mourn.
Clair, my eldest sister, escaped to Bulgaria, though her children caught the influenza on the way there from the Crimea, and died. Clair's husband did not learn of this cruel misfortune until much later; he joined Clair safely in Bulgaria after the Crimea had been left by the Army, and several years later he followed his children into the grave. Ella and my mother and stepfather were safely with us in Paris before we sailed to America.
My mother contrived to bring with her a few photographs, and these are the only tangible reminders of the old days that I possess. Tata is still living in Paris. She has not changed at all in her character; she is as cheerful and reliable in a crisis as ever and as stubbornly tied to whatever place she may be in. She very sweetly but firmly refused to come and live with us here, giving as her reason the mere fact that she did not feel like leaving
Paris yet.
Before we left Paris we learned the fates of many of our friends. Madame Charitonenko got successfully to France, though she died a few years ago. My maid, Katia, did not come with her, but sent me a touching letter telling me how much she missed us. Unfortunately Katia gave no address so I could not answer her letter and have now, I am sorry to say, lost track of her. Mr. T——, the manager of our sanatorium in N—— had left his place while we were still in Russia; he and his wife escaped to France a few months later. In Paris I met the pretty young divorcee of the sanatorium in N——. Her brother whom she so courageously saved from the bolsheviks had died from typhoid fever while in the White Army. I had also the surprise—a rather disagreeable one—of meeting the brother of our treacherous escort, Nitikin. He told us that Nitikin, with whom he corresponded, was occupying a high position in Soviet Russia, which made us wonder what he was doing abroad. My cousin, Peter Kleinmichel, brother of the Nicholas who was killed at N——, had met his death at the hands of the "Greens"; they took him from his farm in the Caucasus and killed him in the woods. A neighbor found his body—it had only one large wound, a deep cross cut in his breast.
The last we heard of our socialist friend, Mr. 2——, who had sheltered us so loyally in his home, was that he had enlisted in the White Army and had been wounded in one of the battles. What happened to him or to his family after that we never have learned; nor have we heard anything .further of Peter, the adventurous little boy who spent several days with us in Novorossisk, except that he did succeed in joining his family.
to be cont...
