Dearest Ones at Home: Clara Taylor's Letters from Russia, 1917-1919 - Paperback

by Katrina Maloney (Editor), Patricia Maloney (Editor)

On November 5, 1917, Taylorville, Illinois native Clara Taylor stepped off a Trans-Siberian Railway train into a city then called Petrograd, Russia. Employed by the YWCA as an industrial expert, Clara had been sent to Russia to help establish Associations in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and Moscow. Her main charge while in Russia was to survey and report on factory conditions, but Clara only spent a fraction of her stay in Russia visiting factories; due to the vagaries of the political, social, and economic revolution--the upheaval of an entire culture--Clara and her colleagues spent most of their first year in Russia teaching English, home economics, book keeping, literature, and basketball, and sponsoring lectures, dances and sing-alongs for Russian working women. Clara's letters, collected in this book, tell of both the mundane and the extraordinary: what the YW staff ate for dinner; how the Bolshevik suppression of free speech impacted Americans' ability to communicate with those at home; shootings in the streets; bartering for pounds of sugar; conversing with nobility, with intellectuals, and with workers; attending the opera; and sight-seeing at monasteries. Together, Clara's letters to her family--her "dearest ones at home"--tell a compelling story of one American woman's experiences in Revolutionary Russia.

Author Biography

Katrina Maloney, Ed.D. lives and writes in southern New Hampshire. She is a former professor of natural sciences and education. When not at her day job as a legal assistant, she kayaks, reads, writes, plays music, and gardens on her property, which faces Mount Monadnock in Marlborough, NH.

Patricia M. Maloney grew up in Nebraska but went east to attend college. She and her husband raised their three children in Connecticut. After her career as a Director of Christian Education, she retired, and she now enjoys boating and swimming at her lake cottage and traveling abroad. She is actively involved in her church, plays the organ and piano, and sings in local chorales.