A Red Cross rescue of Russian children

World War I was drawing to a close in 1918 when American Red Cross volunteers in Russia’s Far East heard rumors about abandoned children, dressed in rags and foraging for food in Siberian forests. They set off on a rescue that would turn into an extraordinary around-the-world journey little known today.

All these years later, two Russians have been trying to get the story told because, they say, it shows the United States and its institutions, such as Washington’s American Red Cross, in a warmer light than their country’s leaders traditionally present them.

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The improbable tale began in the spring nearly 94 years ago, when the hungry city of Petrograd — now St. Petersburg — put thousands of its children and chaperoning teachers on trains headed a thousand miles southeast to the Ural Mountains, where they would spend the summer eating nourishing food in fresh air, far from the city where the deprivations of World War I were still being felt.

Most of the children returned to Petrograd uneventfully at the end of the summer, but nearly 800 who had been sent east of the Urals found themselves trapped because of the civil war that had begun that year. During skirmishes between the Reds and the Whites, the train line to the west was cut. Sent from home in summer clothes, the children — ages 5 to 16 — were growing cold and hungry as fall approached.

When the Red Cross volunteers found them, they put them on trains eastward to Vladivostok, a Pacific port city full of refugees of various nationalities from both wars. That turned out to be the beginning of a 2¹ / ₂-year odyssey that would take the children, their teachers and Red Cross protectors around the world and finally home.

“It is a wonderful story,” said Susan Robbins Watson, archivist at the American Red Cross in Washington.

Olga Molkina, a St. Petersburg teacher, and Vladimir Lipovetsky, a former fisheries-vessel researcher from the Russian Far East, both have written books about the Petrograd children and want to make what happened more widely known. Most of the children never spoke of their adventure even after growing up — contact with foreigners was dangerous business in the Soviet Union.

Molkina knew because her grandparents and great-aunt were among those rescued. Lipovetsky’s ship had put into Seattle in 1978 when he heard about the death of an elderly man who had saved Russian children. He has been captivated by the story ever since.

Keeping the story alive

Molkina knew she had to write a book after her aunt died in 2000 at the age of 99. “She was one of the last survivors,” Molkina said, “and I realized that with her passing away this story would be lost for my family. I decided to preserve it.”

That took her as far as Washington and Maryland for research at the Library of Congress and the National Archives, and she eventually wrote “Under the Sign of the Red Cross” in Russian.

“The Americans who worked in the American Red Cross were simple people, and those lost children were someone else’s,” Molkina said in an interview. “They didn’t have to do anything, but they did.”