Friends and Comrades (review)

Friends and Comrades: How Quakers Helped Russians to Survive Famine and Epidemic

by Sergei Nikitin, translated by Suzanne Eade Roberts.

reviewed by Margaret Kelso

Friends and Comrades: How Quakers Helped Russians to Survive Famine and Epidemic is a history of the years of support that British and American Quakers offered to the Russian people during times of crisis in the early twentieth century

Written by Sergei Nikitin and translated by Suzanne Eade Roberts, this book is based on extensive research into diaries, letters, and oral histories. It gives a detailed account of the Quaker relief work headquartered in Buzuluk, a town in southeastern Russia.

Friends and Comrades speaks to a variety of readers. Students of history, especially Russian history, will find it fascinating. Anyone interested in overseas humanitarian work will appreciate the detailed account of a successful mission by a few Quakers to offer help to a desperate, starving people. The book is also a work of spiritual inspiration, demonstrating the translation of faith into social action.

Nikitin goes beyond a dry accounting of strategies and logistics. Although he includes details, plans, and deliberations of the Quakers, he also highlights the drama and personal narratives in these projects, which makes this book engaging.

The destruction and suffering incurred by civilians after World War I was the circumstance that motivated a group of English Friends to travel to Russia in April 1916. There they were joined by a group of American Friends a year later. The goals of this Quaker mission were to open hospitals, outpatient medical facilities, and children’s homes. The mission also offered work and job training to refugees as well as distributing clothes and food rations to the community. The mission workers succeeded despite their youth and inexperience, their limited or non-existent knowledge of the Russian language, the suspicion that locals felt toward foreigners, and the ongoing warfare of the Russian revolution.

Eventually, as the revolution heated up, foreigners were ordered to leave Russia. In scenes worthy of an action movie, Nikitin shares a detailed account of the exit of Theodore Rigg and Esther White – first crossing the war’s front lines on a barge, then traveling on a series of crowded steamboats and trains, and then taking refuge with Leo Tolstoy’s son. Finally, in a tense scene that occurred on the banks of the Belo-Ostrov River, with Soviet guards on one side and a small detachment of Finns on the other, Rigg and White waited while names were called out one by one, giving permission to cross the bridge out of Russia.

In 1921, Quakers again chose Buzuluk as the center of their famine relief administration. They started out with feeding programs and moved on to agricultural training.

Some people criticized these Quakers in Russia as “useful idiots,” naively exploited by the Bolsheviks. But Nikitin defends them: “We can hardly hold it against the Quakers that they cooperated with the Bolsheviks. You had to get permission from the authorities to travel into the country and help starving people . . .”

Friends and Comrades is inspiring. It details how a small group of dedicated Quakers provided relief to large numbers of people under the worst of circumstances. This book, with a very readable English translation, is available only on Kindle.

Margaret Kelso is a member of Humboldt Friends Meeting (PacYM)