Published Resources Details
Journal Article
- Title
- Between revolutions: an Australian view of Russia in 1917
- In
- Australian Slavonic and East European Studies
- Imprint
- vol. 25, no. 1-2, Miskin Hill, 2011, pp. 121-131
- Url
- https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:271388
- Format
- Description
John McNair was Russian Discipline Convener in the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. His research interests focus on Australian-Russian cultural contacts and the travel narratives of Australians in Russia.
- Abstract
Early in April, 1917, barely a month after the so-called 'February Revolution' had forced the abdication of Nicholas II, an Australian mining engineer arrived in the Russian Far East to conduct metallurgical surveys on behalf of the Engineering Company of Russia and Siberia and at the invitation of the new Provisional Government. Edward Rigby of Melbourne, already in his mid-fifties, discovered detailed instructions from Petrograd waiting for him on his arrival in Vladivostok from Japan, and proceeded forthwith to the Company's settlement at Tietiukhe in the Sikhote-Alin mountains some 500 kilometres to the north. So began a three-month journey through a country in ferment that ended on June 25 with his departure from Petrograd on a hardly less adventurous war-time itinerary which would take him by train and ship, via Tammerfors, Stockholm, Bergen, Lerwick and Liverpool, to London; the whole recorded in letters to his wife in Melbourne, subsequently edited into journal form, typed, bound and deposited in the Manuscript Collection of the State Library of Victoria. What follows is an account of what by any standard must be judged a noteworthy addition to the surprisingly diverse corpus of Australian travel writing on Russia which aims to share with a wider readership the impressions and insights of an intelligent and shrewd, if not always well-informed witness to the ferment in that country between the revolutions of 1917.
[Footnote 2] SLV MS11714 Box 1876/5