“Villages and towns were burning”. The ‘Russian displacement’ of the First World War in the reminiscences of an eyewitness

The events of the First World War affected millions of the civilians in the Western territories of the Russian Empire, who, unlike the residents of the interior of the country, had to leave their native lands, as it turned out, for many years to come, fleeing from the offensive of the enemy army. The whole drama of the mass exodus of the civilians unfolded in the summer and autumn of 1915 at the stage of a long and tedious horse-drawn movement of the refugees to railway stations. Reliability and completeness of coverage of the evacuation in 1915 of the multimillion cohorts of the refugees is impossible without using the memoirs of the refugees themselves, as well as of the events’ eyewitnesses directly involved in the evacuation and assistance to the refugees. The article examines the reminiscences of a native of the Grodno province, T.M. Trakhimyuk, who was born in 1899. In his memoirs, he describes in great detail the entire process of the evacuation to the remote regions of the Empire; he also depicts all other stages of his family’s 7-year displacement: the everyday life routine in a temporary accommodation in the Saratov province, the Bolsheviks’ rise to power and the bloody Civil War in which he took part on the side of the Reds, demobilization and return to his native village, his homeland, in August 1922. The special attention of the author of the article was drawn to that part of the memoirs, which contributed to the disclosure of the reason why T.M. Trakhimyuk had participated in the Civil War on the side of the Reds under the slogan “Death – to the bourgeoisie, all power – to the Soviets”. Because, the refugees, judging by their own reminiscences, tried in general and en masse to avoid participation in the Civil War, to say nothing of the voluntary participation. T.M. Trakhimyuk’s return to his homeland after demobilization is indicative in the sense that the land owned by a peasant has always been a supreme value.

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