Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:35, 26 November 2005

Revision as of 22:55, 26 November 2005

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===1917 Revolution and Emigration===

After the [[February Revolution]] of [[1917]], Tyrkova-Williams was a member of the [[Petrograd]] Committee of the Kadet party and coordinated their publications as well as the work of the Kadet faction in the City [[Duma]]. In September 1917 she was elected to the Pre-Parliament. After the [[Bolshevik]] seizure of power during the [[October Revolution of 1917]], she ran for the [[Constituent Assembly]] in November elections and, with [[Alexander Izgoev]], briefly edited the newspaper ''Borba'' until it was shut down by the Bolshevik government. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks, she helped organize anti-Bolshevik resistance in the South of the country and then emigrated to Great Britain in the spring of [[1918]], where she published an account of the first year of the Russian revolution, ''From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk''. She went back to Russia in the spring of [[1919]] when Harold Williams was sent to the areas controlled by Gen. [[Anton Denikin]] to report on the progress of the [[White Movement]]. By then she had moved even further to the Right and wrote:

:We must support the army first and place the democratic programs in the background. We must create a ruling class and not a dictatorship of the majority. The universal hegemony of Western democracy is a fraud, which politicians have foisted upon us. We must have the courage to look directly into the eye of the wild beast -- which is called the people {{ref|Beast}}.

After Denikin's defeat in late 1919, she returned to Great Britain in early [[1920]]. She was one of the founders of the [[Russian Liberation Committee]] in London, edited its publications and raised money for Russian orphans {{ref|Committee}}. In later years, she published a biography of [[Alexander Pushkin]] ([[1929]]), a book about her late husband Harold Williams ([[1935]]) and 3 volumes of memoirs ([[1952]]-[[1956]]).

==Notes==