REVIEW: One Man in His Time – Serge Obolensky (1958; Mystery Grove, 2021)
There are times in a man’s life when he must decide for himself whether to stay in the country of his birth or to leave it. Sometimes the writing for him is on the wall, erected quite literally by revolutionaries out for blood. And sometimes that writing takes the form of a wanted poster featuring his likeness, drawn up from the remains of a bullet-ridden portrait commissioned some years beforehand.
Not all of us have had such an experience, but Serge Obolensky certainly did, as he details about halfway through his memoirs. One Man in His Time tracks the arc of his life from its beginnings as a the son of high ranking Russian nobility during the reign of Czars Alexander III and Nicholas II, through three wars, a continental peace, and business adventures across two continents.
A considerable amount of the early chapters in the book detail not just his life in Russia, but also his comments on the agrarian reforms instituted by these rulers on behalf of the peasantry. His explanations of Russian field life in the first decades of the 20th century, of building revolutionary fervor is some of the most helpful content of the book, providing ample background to the chaos of the civil war that’s covered in far more detail in other volumes by other writers.
As others have noted, the build-up to the Revolution was a long time coming. Obolensky even dwells on the split in the Social Democratic Labor Party in his childhood through the words of his tutor’s commentary. “Bolsheviks were completely routed,” but,
my tutor was filled with misgivings. I have a vivid memory of his dejection and his prophecy as to what was going to happen. “The Bolsheviks are going to win,” he said. “It’s an awful thing to say, but I’m sure the way it is happening. We Mensheviks are theoreticians. The Bolsheviks will take over.” He said the Bolsheviks were only a handful, but they were disciplined and organized.1
Whether it was remarkable prescience or simply astutely reading the times, his tutor turned out to be right—though observers of history tend to note that, should they survive, the more radical elements of particular ideologies tend to be the trendsetters. It’s worth taking note, also, that the revolutionary ideology of the socialists had sympathizers up into the higher levels of Russian aristocracy. Obolensky himself, though refraining from expressing sympathies with the revolutionaries, did express interests insignificant reform. His own progressive mindset tended to see revolutionism as a more radical continuation of reformism, rather than a wholly separate and purely destructive reaction to it. His views would be tempered some by travel and age, however.
This is a bit more obvious in how he describes the state of Russian students during the first half of the 1910s: eager, hungry for knowledge, but bitter and disillusioned with the state of the nation. The universities of Russia had become disconnected from the realities of Russian life. This, combined with the infiltration of radically liberal thought from the rest of the continent, led to a state of educational chaos not dissimilar from what the US has been facing in the last decade: a plethora of graduates lacking useful skills and indoctrinated into radical ideologies. He writes:
There was tremendous intellectual stirring at the time; students rushed to the colleges by the thousands, worked their five years at law school, argued and debated, became bright and keen, with aspirations galore, and then graduated and learned there was nothing for them to do. There was no work for them. At best they might get a small government post at a salary.
They resented anyone having money; they resented every injustice and inequality; they resented everything. But they chiefly resented the system that gave them an inadequate means of earning their living after having provided them with the intellectual resources that led them to aspire to a better life. The system made socialists, made revolutionaries. It was the fault of the government, which should have encouraged technical training and fitted them for the work Russia needed. The failure to produce technicians was one of the greatest mistakes of the old government.2
But Serge, for his part, did not go to university in Russia. He went to Oxford, where he lived with a friendly cadre of men in a flat very near campus. His adventures in London and Oxford are amusing sidebars to the growing feeling of impending doom as the world, seemingly unaware, glided towards the morning of June 28th, 1914.
To put Obolensky’s flair for the absurd into context, that particular week was not, as one would expect, just like any other: the morning prior, he was nursing a particularly foul hangover after he and his team of Oxford polo players had won, more or less by fluke, an historic match against their rivals from Cambridge. Cambridge, perhaps understandably, demanded a fair rematch, and so the morning was spent honoring an humiliating and ritualistic game of polo; the entire Oxford team was pale green from the consequences of their own actions, using what stamina they still had simply to remain on their horses. “We had to do it boys,” one Cambridge player remarked to them, after it was all over: “We had to avenge it.”3 It’s the sort of hijink one would expect out of a John Hughes film, though dressed up in the trappings of prewar English high society. And quite literally on the eve of the war that would mark the death of the West.
But even amid the news of the assassination, life, it seemed, would go on:
There was a shock, of course, and a great alarm throughout the world, but not so great as later generations might imagine. […] But even if we sensed the war was coming we had no concept whatever of its terrible scope.4
Obolensky’s time at war was spent mostly with horses, fighting dizzying skirmishes on the Eastern Front. He spends somewhat few pages in recounting his time in combat; much of his time amounted to catching up to front lines, returning back to them after raids or recon, and waiting for his leave in the rear. Injury accounted for a lot of days, as well. The War in Russia was markedly different from the four years of incomprehensible siege that defined the trenches across France and Belgium; cavalry, mobile machine gunning units, and motorcades were used in attempts to secure a front that effectively spanned from the Black to the Baltic seas. Obolensky details some of the logistics involved in this endeavor, but as he was not a particularly high-ranking officer, most of his explanations are limited to his own field of experience.
As history informs us, the war effort of many soldiers transitioned chaotically in 1917. In certain cases, soldiers went from fighting Prussians to fighting Reds or Whites, and sometimes, both simultaneously. Obolensky found himself in the Don, running partisan activity against the communists at about the time that General Wrangel was securing southern Ukraine and Crimea. When the Tatar regional government collapsed, Obolensky and his men “decided to take to the hills and become guerrillas.”5 By this point, he’d married his first wife—a princess about twelve years his senior—and found that the Reds had made him a marked man. He was wanted dead or alive.
Thus commenced his adventures undercover for about a year. He details the Soviet Terror during this period, and the unrecognizable state that Russian life had disintegrated to. The countryside was full of frightened but sympathetic peasants who hid in their homes, while the cities had become totalitarian states in which people regularly disappeared. Obolensky secured for himself the care of friends and a position as a small factory administrator while he unintentionally reconnected with his wife. Soon, they were all out of Russia, taking refuge in France now that the guns were silent.
I’ve only touched here on roughly the first half of the book. Obolensky’s life in peacetime was, admittedly, slightly less adventuresome than it was during the wars, though he’d see action again as an American commando in the forties. I haven’t here written about his experiences in the Second World War, where he learned how to parachute, traveled with Theodore Roosevelt’s son around Africa, and later took out a German power station. His exploits in business during the interwar period haven’t been mentioned, either. Even most of his adventures living briefly under soviet rule, isolated from most of his friends and all of his family, and operating under a fake identity, aren’t touched on. This is because there’s simply so much in the book to talk about that it’s impossible to get to all of it in under a couple thousand words.
He divorces a princess, romances the daughter of an American tycoon, sets up a business venture in Australia. He settles down in America. He even gets a room dedicated to him at a gentleman’s club in New York City, which is still there today. One would think that Obolensky’s status as aristocracy would die with the destruction of the Russian Empire, and indeed, with the destruction of the entire old world that followed the November Armistice. And yet, although the times had changed, his aristocratic character did not. We can wax romantic about what noblesse oblige might have meant back when titles carried tangible meaning, when royalty knew its place, and when nobility commanded political power—but there are many, many cases like Obolensky, where this aristocratic character is self-evident. Materialist attempts to flatten aristocracy down to a mere oligarchical apparatus of social control fail to explain how nobility could produce so many upstanding characters, particularly when contemporary liberalism, which has its own oligarchs, produces so few.
This speaks also to the general framework of his memoirs. Serge’s time was not one that witnessed the mere transformation of his own native region, or country. It was one that witnessed the transformation of the entire world, and his migrations eastward serve to highlight this pretty well. The agrarian fields of Russia, although transformed by the reforms of the Czars, remained socially oriented around structures mostly untouched since medieval periods. But it was modernization which spurred on the revolution, and it was the revolution that spurred his exile from the lands of his birthright. During the interwar period, he spent his time in Europe, where the decline of royalty & nobility reduced both to the curious jeweled accouterments of an age outdated by Americanized commercialist sensibilities. Setting foot in America, a land in which the mobility of wealth, work, and pleasure presented itself as an almost exact inversion of his native country, Obolensky quickly established himself as a capable businessman. He adapted, he lived in the times, he remained tied to them, but consider the perspective of that man removed so thoroughly from his childhood lands as he was from his childhood times. In this sense, although his own story was rather adventuresome, the transformation he witnessed was one that his entire generation experienced.
These passages of Obolensky don’t form a manual of counterrevolutionary tactics or thinking quite the way something like Always with Honor does. Neither are these the wartime memoirs of a cavalryman and commando, although Obolensky details his adventures as both. To a large extent, they really aren’t even the adventuresome tales of a globetrotting swashbuckler, although again, Obolensky fills this role as well—at least insofar as he passes for the archetype of a well-connected gentleman of high society. Rather, the arc of his memoirs fulfill exactly the meaning of the title: a man both of and in his time, fulfilling the age even as he was shaped by it.
142.
256.
399.
4Ibid.
5150.
