Surviving Siberia’s struggle

What Williams as a child couldn’t fully appreciate was that her Russian grandmother Olga’s stories weren’t run-of-the-mill yarns; they were tales of a childhood in a remote part of Siberia, of being an adolescent caught up in the events of the Bolshevik revolution, of carrying information over the Mongolian border to her White army brother Volodya, and of having to flee Siberia for China, alone, aged 19, with only the rubies sewn into her skirts to carry her on into a new life.
As a child, Williams says, she accepted all of these tales as "quite normal". It wasn’t until she was older that she began to appreciate the enormity of what her grandmother had gone through, and even then the story seemed vague and remote: "By that time she was getting old, the names of the places she talked about were in Russian, and she pronounced them in a deep Russian accent."
Only after Olga’s death, when perestroika finally made Siberia accessible for Westerners again, did Williams decide to investigate for herself the historical truth behind her grandmother’s dramatic accounts. She was then working as a journalist and realised that, "if I could uncover this story, it was one of the best I was going to get". The result, after many long years of research, is Olga’s Story (Viking, 2nd June, h/b, £17.99, 0670913766).
Not just ice and gulags
When Williams travelled to Kyakhta, the remote trading town in southern Siberia where her grandmother was born in 1900 (it was then called Troitskosavsk) she was, she says, "in a state of shock for some time afterwards". The place was "flyblown, dusty, so depressed; the old buildings hadn’t recovered from the revolution; the new ones were the usual Soviet high-rise blocks. Beside the cathedral was this immensely long queue of tatty, broken-down vehicles waiting to cross the border with Mongolia."
None of this fitted with what she remembered of her grandmother: "Olga was very elegant, very cultured, very well-read, and always beautifully dressed. I thought, ’How could a woman like that have come from here?’"
But as Williams did her research, a picture emerged of a pre-revolutionary Siberia that was very different from the ice and gulags image that now dominates our imagination. Yes, Troitskosavsk was remote and raw, but when Olga grew up there the area was also a centre for cultured Russian political exiles, who inspired the idea of a school for girls in the town. Though just an ordinary, middle-class girl, Olga was well-educated and aspired to going to university. And Siberia itself was a land of opportunity for merchants such as Olga’s father: "a bit like the Wild West, like going to California; there was gold, there was fur, there was the China trade. There was money to be made."
Visiting Kyakhta was Williams’ first chance to test Olga’s account of events there during the revolution. Olga had told of how the Bolsheviks took control of the town from the merchants, and how her brother Volodya, a captain with the White army, turned up one night scratching at her window, hideously wounded. She had hidden him in the bathhouse, and when he recovered, he slipped over the Mongolian border to the town of Mai-mai c’hen to join a group there pledged to free Siberia from the Red Guard. Olga would drive her cart over the border on regular trips to take him information and supplies.
"That was a story she often told: ’I’d have my horse and cart, my basket and my gun and head down the track to the border.’ I said to the director of the Kyakhta museum, ’Could this be true?’ He said, ’Yes, it was well known that the Whites had their headquarters in the valley.’ He also told me that the civil war had been so vicious in that part of Siberia that when perestroika was declared, at the museum they took papers relating to the civil war out and burned them." Other surviving documents, including crucially the papers of Boris Volkov, Volodya’s friend, also fleshed out Olga’s story.
In 1920 Volodya was killed, rape and murder were widespread, and the threat of arrest was so imminent that Olga’s father persuaded her to leave everything and everyone she knew behind, to travel alone first to Vladivostock, then later on to China in search of safety.
The young woman had to prove her resilience again and again on her harrowing journey. Many lone women in her position ended up as prostitutes; others committed suicide. But Olga was tough, and she survived, with the help of rubies her father had given her, and which she had smuggled with her on her journey, sewn into her clothes. (Williams still possesses one of those rubies, together with a locket given to Volodya in pre-revolutionary days by the Tsarina.)
She travelled to Tientsin, found a lowly job, and met Fred, a young Englishman. They married and had a daughter, Williams’ mother Irina. But the turbulence of the 20th century hadn’t finished with Olga yet: the family had to flee yet again when Japanese troops invaded.
Settled thereafter in England, the existence of the Iron Curtain made it too difficult, and potentially dangerous, for Olga to try to contact the Siberian family she had had to leave behind. After a few letters in the first months of her escape to China, her beloved sister Lydia had asked her to stop writing as it threatened their security. Olga never saw or heard from any of her family again.