1 August 1917. Ivan Shmelev

Non-fiction

Project 1917 is a series of events that took place a hundred years ago as described by those involved. It is composed only of diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers and other documents

Ivan Shmelev

Moscow, Russian Empire

I found myself in one of Moscow’s suburbs. Each street invariably ends in a garden or a cul-de-sac. There is a pleasant August aroma of warm and wet gardens blended with the bitter smell of dried poplar leaves. Ripe red rowanberries laugh in the evening sun. A girl with a white plait sits under a fence, handfuls of berries gathered on her knees, utterly given over to a wondrous assignment - the threading of the berries into a coral necklace.

A little boy behind the rowan throws a bunch of berries at me and calls me a “bourgeois”... Even this out-of-place word fails to dispel the emotions that have seized me completely.

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Nicholas II

Tsarskoye Selo, Russian Empire

Three years ago Germany declared war on us; how I wish all had survived those three years! God help and save Russia. It was very hot. I took a short walk with Tatiana, MarieThird daughter of Nicholas II and Anastasia, and again a whole patrol from the Third Infantry Regiment came along. We worked in the same place as before. We cut down three trees and finished yesterday's fir tree. Now I am reading the novel by Merezhkovsky, Alexander I.

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Maxim Gorky

23, Kronversky ave., Petrograd, Russian Empire

Three years of merciless, senseless war; three years of daily bloodshed among the finest peoples of the earth; the priceless spirit of the cultural nations of Europe is being exterminated. The most villainous sort of these nations accuse those of their compatriots with the audacity to believe in global brotherhood of being dangerous madmen and heartless utopians with no love of country. See more

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Zinaida Gippius

Kislovodsk, Russian Empire

May this anniversary forever be damned. Three years of war.

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Mikhail Rodzianko

32, Kirochnaya street, Petrograd, Russian Empire

A different course of events could not be expected. However, people's minds start to clear up, thank God. Of course, all false teachers lost their authority. Ideas of communism were completely wrecked. Now it's obvious that instead of the motto "liberté, égalité, fraternité", people prefer cruel despotism based on violence, blood and murders. See more

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Konstantin Paustovsky

Moscow, Russian Empire

I have decided to visit my mother in the autumn. Moscow has exhausted me. In all the time I have been here I haven’t had the time to read anything besides a heap of political pamphlets, hurriedly printed on second-rate paper, detailing the fierce skirmishes of the various political parties. I maintained the fantastic dream of getting around to re-reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It seems today as if this novel was written two hundred years ago.

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31 July

Nicholas II is pleased with the weather

Is the royal family taken to Siberia?

Four months of the Revolution actually destroy the Russian army

1917. Zombies, drugs, and progress

Why did the Russian Empire collapse

1916: Year in Review.

+20

in Petrograd

+17

in Moscow