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Russian Revolution memoirs
JULY 2017
I N S I D E …
PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER MYERS
By Robert Friedman While Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly playing down the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Ellicott City resident Vladimir Marinich is marking the occasion with the publication of his grandparents’ memoirs of that historic event. Marinich, who is 80 and a retired Howard Community College history professor, has spent the last 10 years translating the memoirs of his maternal grandfather, Konstantin Ivanovich Globachev, who had led the czar’s political police in the then-capital of St. Petersburg, and his grandmother, Sofia Nikolaevna Globachev, who dodged many bullets during those tumultuous days in 1917 Russia. Globachev’s typewritten memoirs, written in 1922, were passed on to his son, Nicholas, who donated one copy to Columbia University and gave a second copy to Marinich. His grandmother wrote her own memoirs in 1949 as a legacy for her two grandchildren, Vladimir and his older brother, Oleg. “These memoirs are of eye-witnesses to the Russian Revolution, a husband and wife who lived through its turmoil and tragedy,” said Marinich.
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Two perspectives on turbulence
The dual memoirs make up The Truth of the Russian Revolution: The Memoirs of the Tsar’s Chief of Security and His Wife, 364 pages of prose and photos, as well as some commentary and biographical information added by Marinich. The book was published recently by the State University of New York (SUNY) Press. Marinich wants it known that he relied a great deal on his wife, Barbara Livieratos, for finishing the translation of the memoirs. “She proofread, made changes several times around, and spurred me on when I thought about quitting,” he said. “My grandfather’s memoirs are written in political terms,” said Marinich, who taught at HCC for 43 years and was a member of the original faculty of the college when it was founded in 1970. In contrast, “My grandmother’s memories are from the perspective of a wife and mother,” he said. Among other things, granddad Globachev, a major general in the Okhrana (the czar’s secret police), provided security for the infamous Rasputin — the heavy drinker, heavy
Vladimir Marinich recently published his grandparents’ memoirs about their experiences before and during the Russian Revolution of 1917 — from dodging bullets, to providing security for the infamous Rasputin. Marinich spent 10 years translating the first-person accounts by both his maternal grandfather and grandmother.
womanizer, heavy debaucher and mystical adviser who had tremendous influence over Czar Nicholas II, his family and his court. Marinich noted that his grandfather recalled in his memoirs that one early morning after Rasputin “got absolutely drunk,” he had to bail the czar’s mystical sage out of jail. [See excerpt on page 29.] The Globachevs fled Russia after the second upheaval of the year put the Bolsheviks in power. The first revolution, which occurred in February 1917, overthrew the czar, while the October 1917 Revolution brought about Communist rule, starting with Lenin’s, then Stalin’s, leadership.
Fleeing to America
First, Marinich’s grandparents went to Istanbul — then known as Constantinople
— where they wrote their remembrances. In 1923, the couple decided “their best chance for having a [normal] life was coming, as refugees, to America,” said Marinich. After a 1930-1934 stay in Paris, where Globachev led an underground intelligence group planning the overthrow of the Moscow government, the Globachevs moved to New York and settled there. Marinich’s grandfather became a commercial artist. He died in 1941, at the age of 71. His grandmother — who kept house, cooked for the extended family in the Russian-speaking household, made sure that Marinich and his brother had milk and cookies every day after school, and gave the first generation of American See MEMOIRS, page 28
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