An exhibit at the Cooper Molera Adobe museum in Monterey, California. Photo: The Russian Reader
Cooper Molera Adobe is now pursuing the interpretation of Ohlone/Esselen/Costonoan Native Indian slaves at our historic site. This includes evaluating our history, beyond gaining simple historical information and respectfully work with descendants to then forge a richer, more diverse narrative and legacy.
Three pillars of multi-disciplinary research, relationship building, and interpretation as major benchmarks will guide our methodology as we move forward with this project. Cooper Molera Adobe has partnered with Woodlawn Pope Leighey and Shadows on the Teche as a working group in a large network of sites the National Trust has to move toward this collective goal.
Failing to tell the truth about race and slavery results in widely-held fears of engaging with people who look, speak, act or think differently than oneself. It is lived out in anger and despair in feeling marginalized, erased, and invisible due to demographics or identity.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and our website to see more of our updates in the future for this project.
On April 27, 1863, nearly five months after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, California abolished its system of forced apprenticeship for American Indians. Under the apprenticeship provisions of the state’s Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, several thousand California Indians, mostly children, had suffered kidnapping, sale and involuntary servitude for over a decade.
Newly elected California Republicans, eager to bring California in line with the national march toward emancipation, agitated for two years in the early 1860s to repeal Indian apprenticeship. And yet those Republicans’ limited vision of Indian freedom — one in which Indians would be free to reap the fruits of their labor, but not free from the duty to labor altogether — made for an incomplete Indian Emancipation Proclamation. Although California was distant from the battlefields of the Civil War, the state endured its own struggle over freedom that paralleled that of the North and the South.
The Republican campaign to abolish Indian servitude ran up against nearly a century of coerced Indian labor in California. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, thousands of California Indians worked on missions and ranches, bound to their employment through a combination of economic necessity, captivity, physical compulsion and debt.
With the United States’ conquest of California in 1847, the discovery of gold in 1848 and the formation of a state government in 1849, new American lawmakers expanded and formalized Indian servitude to meet growing demands for labor. The 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians authorized whites to hold Indian children as wards until they reached adulthood. Indian adults convicted of vagrancy or other crimes could be forced to work for whites who paid their bail.
Skyrocketing demand for farmworkers and domestic servants, combined with violence between Indians and invading whites in the northwestern part of the state, left Democrats in war-torn counties clamoring for the expansion of the 1850 Indian act. A “general system of peonage or apprenticeship” was the only way to quell Indian wars, one Democrat argued. A stint of involuntary labor would civilize Indians, establish them in “permanent and comfortable homes,” and provide white settlers with “profitable and convenient servants.” In 1860, Democrats proposed new amendments to the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians that allowed whites to bind Indian children as apprentices until they reached their mid-20s. Indian adults accused of being vagrants without steady employment, or taken as captives of war, could be apprenticed for 10-year terms. The amendments passed with little debate.
As the nation hurtled toward a war over slavery, Californians watched as their own state became a battleground over the future of human bondage. Apprenticeship laws aimed at “civilizing” the state’s Indians encouraged a robust and horrific slave trade in the northwestern counties. Frontier whites eagerly paid from $50 to $100 for Indian children to apprentice. Groups of kidnappers, dubbed “baby hunters” in the California press, supplied this market by attacking isolated Indian villages and snatching up children in the chaos of battle. Some assailants murdered Indian parents who refused to give up their children.
Once deposited in white homes, captive apprentices often suffered abuse and neglect. The death of Rosa, a 10-year-old apprentice from either the Yuki or Pomo tribes, provides a grim case in point. Just two weeks before the repeal of Indian apprenticeship, the Mendocino County coroner found the dead girl “nearly naked, lying in a box out of doors” next to the home of her mistress, a Mrs. Bassett of Ukiah. Neighbors testified that the child was sick and restless and that Basset shut her out of the house in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Huge bruises on Rosa’s abdomen suggested that Bassett had mercilessly beaten the ill child before tossing her out into the blizzard. Mendocino officials never brought charges in the case.
The horrors of kidnapping and apprenticeship filled the state’s newspapers just as antislavery California Republicans swept into power in 1861–2. Republicans assailed the apprentice system and blamed Democrats for the “abominable system of Indian apprenticeship, which has been used as a means of introducing actual slavery into our free State.” George Hanson, an Illinois Republican whose close relationship with Abraham Lincoln earned him an appointment as Northern California’s superintendent of Indian affairs, vowed to eliminate the state’s “unholy traffic in human blood and souls.” He tracked down and prosecuted kidnappers in the northwestern counties (with mixed success) and petitioned the State Legislature to abolish the apprenticeship system.
In 1862, Republican legislators proposed two new measures to overturn the 1860 apprenticeship amendments. Democrats blocked these bills and insisted that apprenticeship “embodied one of the most important measures” for Indians’ “improvement and civilization.” Indian servitude lived on.
By the time the legislature met again in the spring of 1863, however, all signs pointed to the destruction of the apprenticeship system. Republicans won firm majorities in both houses of the State Legislature, and in January California became the first state to endorse Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans again proposed to repeal the apprenticeship amendments, and this time they achieved their goal with no debate or dissent. Involuntary labor for American Indians died quietly.
Or did it? Republicans had eliminated all the 1860 amendments authorizing the forced apprenticeship of American Indians. But they had left intact sections of the original 1850 act that mandated the forcible binding out of Indian convicts and vagrants. Moreover, repeal only prevented future apprenticeships; Republican legislation did not liberate Indians already legally apprenticed. After repeal, as many as 6,000 Indian children remained servants in white homes.
The incomplete nature of Indian emancipation in California reflected Republicans’ own ambivalence toward Indian freedom. Most Republicans opposed the kidnapping and enslavement of Indians. They believed that Indians, like former African-American slaves, should be entitled to reap the economic rewards of their own work. On the other hand, they asserted that the key to “civilizing” Indians was to force them to participate in the California labor market. They could not be free to support themselves through traditional mobile hunting and gathering practices that removed their labor from white supervision and tied up valuable natural resources. Such a lifestyle was, in Republicans’ minds, little more than idle vagrancy. Just as their Republican colleagues on the East Coast argued that ex-slaves should be schooled to labor by being bound to plantation wage work through long-term contracts, California Republicans began to advocate compulsory labor as the only way to cure Indian vagrancy.
The Republican vision for Indian freedom quickly took shape after the Civil War. Republican appointees who oversaw California’s Indian reservations compelled all able-bodied Indians to work on the reservation farms. Those who refused, or who pursued native food-gathering practices, forfeited the meager federal rations allotted to reservation Indians. By 1867, one Republican agent declared that “the hoe and the broadaxe will sooner civilize and Christianize than the spelling book and the Bible.” He advocated forcing Indians to work until they had been “humanized by systematic labor.” These policies persisted long after the war. At Round Valley Reservation, one critic observed in 1874 that “compulsion is used to keep the Indians and to drive them to work.” Indian workers received no payment for “labor and no opportunity to accumulate individual property.”
The ambiguous postwar liberty of California Indians reveals that the Civil War was a transcontinental conflict that reached west to the Pacific. The freedoms won in wartime, and the unfulfilled promises of emancipation, encompassed not only black and white, free and slave, but also American Indian peoples who suffered from distinctly Western systems of unfree labor. The Civil War and Reconstruction are best understood as truly national struggles over the meaning and limits of freedom, north, south and west.
Confusion about how sex trafficking works and who qualifies as a victim has compounded the problem. The government’s 2019 indictment charged Epstein with trafficking minors between 2002 and 2005, the period covered by his earlier Florida plea deal. The adult women Epstein entrapped after his 2008 conviction weren’t included in the indictment.
In 2019, prosecutors brought charges using the minimum number of victims needed to apprehend Epstein in order to keep the case secret and avoid him fleeing, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Prosecutors continued interviewing victims after his July 2019 arrest and had planned to expand the indictment, including potentially to adult women, had Epstein not died the following month, according to these people and a 2019 Justice Department memo released in the files.
For sex-trafficking cases involving adults, prosecutors must prove the victim was compelled into sexual exploitation through force, fraud or coercion. Fraud typically involves false promises of employment or a better life; coercion can be psychological and take the form of threats of deportation, blackmail or debt bondage, lawyers said.
Federal prosecutors have successfully prosecuted cases of adult sex trafficking. In 2019, the Nxivm group founder Keith Raniere was convicted for his exploitation of adult women and sentenced to 120 years in prison.
Most recently, the Alexander brothers were convicted in a case in which adult women testified that they had been lured to exclusiveparties and trips, then drugged and assaulted. Lawyers for the Alexander brothers said they planned to appeal.
Pyramid scheme
After his 2008 plea deal, Epstein shifted his focus to adult women who looked like teenagers—many of them fashion models from Europe and Russia. He dangled fake jobs linked to his famous connections, promising work at places like Victoria’s Secret. He rarely delivered.
Once inside his orbit, the women said they were coerced into performing massages that escalated into sexual demands. Several have said he required at least one such encounter a day, and when no other women were available, he turned to his “assistants.”
Immediately after Stalin’s death, an American airplane dropped a group of young anti-communists into Maykop. Among them was Alexander Makov, a member of the NTS (National Alliance of Russian Solidarists).
They were soon arrested, and four of them, including Makov, were shot.
Thirty-five years later, in Paris, I made the acquaintance of Makov’s daughter, Natalya. Natalya Makova’s husband was Boris Miller, an NTS leader. Although they had been born in Europe and had never lived in the USSR, they thought only of the Russia which they had lost.
They threw me a luxurious lunch à la russe, featuring vodka, pickled herring, and borscht. After the second shot of vodka, Miller cut to the chase: “When will we be summoned to rule Russia?” He was confident that the Congress of People’s Deputies would hand over power to the NTS.
I decided that this was an endearing eccentricity on the part of people who knew absolutely nothing about the Soviet Union’s monstrosities and whose image of Russia was based on the novels of Lidia Charskaya. But they were quite serious and their efforts ended in a nightmare. Miller and Makova abandoned their comfortable life in Paris and moved to Yeltsin’s Russia, where all manners of horrors and humiliations awaited them. They were roundly windled, and Makova spent the rest of her savings on homeless girls, whom she decided to save in the Christian fashion. The girls paid her back with utter ingratitude, of course. Boris died in 1997, while Natalya died in poverty six years later. She had dreamed of obtaining an exoneration for her father, whom she considered a hero, but her application was categorically denied.
Yesterday, Makov’s interrogation records were declassified and partly published by the FSB—by way of showing that nothing has changed since 1953, either there or here, and nothing ever will change.
If I wanted to write a documentary novel about Russia, I would choose this story (but I don’t want to write such a novel).
The methods used by foreign intelligence services to undermine our country have not changed significantly over the years. In particular, enemy intelligence services have always been eager to employ traitors to the Motherland.
Materials declassified
The Central Archive of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has declassified materials from the case files on a reconnaissance team dropped by the Americans into the USSR in 1953.
Much was written about the American saboteurs after their arrest, and their names were at the time mentioned in almost all books about US intelligence operations against the USSR.
In the early 1990s, relatives of the team’s members attempted to obtain a decision from the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office regarding their exoneration, emphasizing that the group’s members did not work for American intelligence but rather “fought against Stalinism.” Nevertheless, even at the height of post-Soviet anti-communism, exoneration was denied.
So who did the Soviet secret services arrest in April 1953, less than two months after the death of the “leader of the peoples”?
“Alec,” “Pete,” “John,” and “Dick”
On the night of April 26, 1953, an aircraft of unknown origin violated Soviet airspace. The pilots managed to safely leave Soviet airspace after completing their mission—dropping a reconnaissance team.
The first two saboteurs were detained a few hours later—they introduced themselves as Vasilchenko and Matkovsky, code names “Alec” and “Pete.” They also revealed that “John” and “Dick” had parachuted with them.
The second pair of saboteurs did not get very far either: they were detained on the same day.
The group was equipped with weapons, ampoules of poison, four radio sets, radio beacons, and other equipment for sabotage and reconnaissance activities. The group also had gold with them, which was to serves as the financial basis for acquiring legal identities and carrying out their planned activities.
The Judas from Lysychansk
All four members of the group were former Soviet citizens who had collaborated with the Germans during the Great Patriotic War.
Vasilchenko, also known as “Alec,” was actually Alexander Lakhno, a native of Lysychansk. In 1941, he completed a course at an intelligence school in the Rostov Region and was sent to his hometown for underground work. But before he could really begin his activities, Lakhno was arrested by the Germans and told them everything he knew. In particular, he betrayed five Soviet intelligence officers whom he had known at the intelligence school.
The Germans liked Lakhno’s zeal and took him into their service. In 1943, as part of a Sonderkommando, he hunted down [Soviet] partisans in the Dnipropetrovsk Region, and then left with the Germans, who assigned him to the “Russian Security Corps”—an organization, established by White émigrés, which fought against the Yugoslav Partisans.
The radio operator from Kherson
Alexander Makov, a native of Kherson, voluntarily joined the German forces after his city was occupied. Initially, he mainly performed administrative tasks for them. During the Nazi retreat, attitudes toward collaborators changed, however and he was sent to one of the punitive units to fight Yugoslav Partisans in the Balkans. Makov applied himself zealously, for which he was transferred to the ROA [Russian Liberation Army]. There, the young man from Kherson was sent to reconnaissance school, and by the time the Nazis were defeated, Makov had completed courses as a reconnaissance radio operator.
The defectors
Before the war, Sergei Gorbunov had been sentenced to a year and a half in prison for theft, but as a minor, he was sent to a labor colony near Kharkov. Gorbunov was finally released at the war’s outset, but he did not want to fight for the Soviet Motherland—either because he was nursing a grudge against. it or because he thought that the Germans had already won. Be that as it may, he went to work for the occupiers and then retreated with them.
Dmitry Remiga, a native of the Stalin Region, expressed his desire to voluntarily go to work in Germany with his father after the occupation of his native land by Hitler’s forces.
All four ended up in the zone occupied by the Western Allies after the Nazis left. None of them wanted to return to the USSR, and they all sought ways to legalize their status in Europe.
From a trident-touting outfit to an American intelligence school
A career path was suggested by agitators from the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS). Incidentally, the NTS has a truly curious logo: the selfsame trident, so dear to Bandera’s followers, on top of the Russian tricolor.
The NTS explained that the West would soon declare war on the USSR, the Soviet regime would not survive, and those who proved themselves successful in the fight against the communists would live happily in the “Russia of the future.”
The four underwent training at an NTS propaganda school and then special training at the American intelligence school in Bad Wiessee.
As we have already mentioned, however, the preparation did no good—the team was quickly identified and captured.
The saboteurs explained that their mission included obtaining legal identities in Kiev and Odessa and further work with the American recon center. For more reliable legalization, any means were permitted: for example, they could murder a real Soviet citizen and take his papers.
A “reference” from the CIA: the attempt to exonerate the saboteurs
On May 22, 1953, th USSR Supreme Court’s Military Collegium found Lakhno, Makov, Gorbunov, and Remiga guilty of planning sabotage and terrorist acts and sentenced them to the supreme punishment—execution by firing squad.
The wording used to seek their exoneration was a curious sight. In 1993, Vera Lvova, a Petersburg reporter for the Express Chronicle, claimed, “Ultimately, the authorities will be forced to admit that people who gave their lives for Russia’s freedom and American spies-slash-saboteurs are not one and the same.”
In other words, if you graduated from an American intelligence school, parachuted from an American plane and were loaded with weapons and all kinds of intelligence equipment, and had a mission from the US intelligence services, you were simply fighting for Russia’s freedom.
But that’s not all. Exoneration campaigners cited the testimony of CIA veteran William Sloane Coffin, who said with a straight face, “Yes, I trained them, but we never asked them to spy.”
The apotheosis of this nonsense was a statement from the NTS that the saboteurs had been “dispatched to the USSR on behalf of the NTS to conduct patriotic propaganda against Stalin’s dictatorship.”
Credit must be given to the Prosecutor General’s Office, who endured this session of collective madness and refused to exonerate those whom the Americans had used to achieve their goals.
More than forty years ago an item [in] the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta described me as “the minder of George Miller and a senior CIA manager.” The item caused considerable mirth among friends, while my wife pointed out that my salary as director of a modestly funded London-based think-tank seemed scarcely commensurate with my alleged role as a master spy. Moreover, far from minding George Miller (also known as George Miller-Kurakin), who worked for me at the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies as its research officer, I seldom knew where he was, or what he was doing.
Except for the fact that his suits came from Oxfam, George — bearded and with the social ease of a Russian aristocrat — could have stepped out of a novel by Tolstoy. He was born in Chile in 1955. His father Boris, an engineer, had migrated from Serbia where his own father, a White Russian émigré, had been murdered in front of the family. So began a pattern of events in which politics shaped the lives and hopes of three generations of the Miller family.
In Santiago, Boris Miller had met and married Kira Kurakin, a member of a distinguished family in Tsarist St Petersburg that had produced ambassadors and senior public servants over more than a century. In 1959, Boris and his young family moved to Frankfurt where he joined the counter-revolutionary National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), subsequently moving to London as the organisation’s UK representative. He was somewhat handicapped in his new role by his limited grasp of English. But his son, who knew no English on his arrival in London aged seven, went to a local grammar school, quickly becoming bilingual and speaking the language of his adopted country without a trace of accent by the time he had finished history degrees at Queen Mary College and Essex University. Whereupon he promptly followed in his father’s career as counter revolutionary.
George died from a heart attack in 2009, aged 54, having paid a heavy personal price for his vocation. But fond memories of him recently flooded back as the world marked the anniversary of the failed attempt by communist hardliners to take over the Soviet government in August 1991, an event which was followed in quick succession by the collapse of the Soviet government and the banning of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in November of that year — outcomes which George and his father had devoted their lives to help bring about.
In his twenties, George had relied for his income on his day job as my researcher, but he was an increasingly influential NTS member. Founded in the 1930s, the organisation operated underground in Russia but more or less openly in the rest of the world through a network of Russian exiles. Unlike many Western analysts, its members never doubted that the Soviet system would collapse, its spokesmen laying stress on the fact that communism went against the grain of human nature and was therefore doomed. Its declared aim was that of hastening the momentous day when Soviet communism would be replaced by a form of liberal democracy.
In describing their aims and tactics, George and his NTS colleagues were apt to compare the Soviet Union to an elephant being repeatedly bitten by a mosquito. At first the creature would be oblivious, but after a thousand stings, it would roll over without warning with its feet in the air, and die. The bites inflicted on the Soviet beast by NTS were numerous and unceasing.
Like the British Foreign Office, most British Sovietologists as well as politicians tended not take the NTS very seriously. Harold Wilson said that that the “u” in its title was silent. But the KGB took it sufficiently seriously to make assassination and kidnap attempts on its members and to arrest and imprison its members and contacts inside Russia. Soviet diplomacy was largely successful in pressing the Western governments not to do business with it, even persuading the West German government to close down the organisation’s Russian language radio station in Frankfurt. However, NTS members took evident comfort from General Secretary Andropov’s description of NTS as “public enemy number one.”
Recently, prominent members of the Conservative party and others in senior positions in business and British public life, now middle aged, have described how as young party activists they were recruited by George to take part in a clandestine NTS operation to carry banned literature into the Soviet Union. In this role Miller was assisted by radicals — mainly passionate Thatcherites — within the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) who relished the high excitement and sense of purpose which their clandestine activities afforded.
Among those recruited by George were the current schools minister, Nick Gibb, his brother Sir Robbie Gibb (Theresa May’s communications director during her premiership), and Peter Young (founder of the aid contractor, Adam Smith International). Another prominent FCS member, Russell Walters, now an executive with Philip Morris, echoed the sentiments of his fellow subversives when he commented, “it was the noblest act I have ever performed. I remain very proud of what we did.”
Posing as tourists, the couriers took in medical supplies, money and office equipment as well as books, all strapped to their bodies under baggy clothes. They brought out uncensored accounts of the harsh realities of Soviet life, the imprisonment of dissidents and the evidence of economic failure as well as literary works which for political reasons their authors could not publish in Russia.
In all, George recruited around 60 couriers, a handful of whom were arrested and briefly held by the Russian authorities. On those occasions their arrest was effectively used by him to attract headlines in the international media in order [to] drive home the totalitarian nature of the Soviet system and the violation of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 which pledged the signatories to respect fundamental freedoms.
The couriers’ task took nerve as well as idealism but the risk they took was less great than that taken by their contacts. Simon Clark, another of George’s couriers, said recently, “we could leave the Soviet Union on the next plane. Our contacts couldn’t. The risks they took every day were enormous and potentially life changing. My principle contact was arrested a year or two after my visit. He received a three year prison sentence. I don’t know what happened to him after that.”
The materials brought out were used by NTS to brief Western newspapers, the Russian service of the BBC, Radio Liberty and any parliamentarian who was prepared to listen. Sharing seemingly little of his FCS friends’ ideological zeal — he had joined the young Liberals rather than the Conservative Party for what I suspect were tactical reasons — George, personable, humorous and pragmatic, provided an increasingly trusted source of information. This was stored in the NTS’s British office, the semi-detached home of George’s parents in Baring Road, Lee, an unfashionable part of south east London.
George used his growing influence in London to arrange for a weekly summary of extracts from Russian opposition publications to be published in The Times. He also persuaded large numbers of friends and contacts to send pamphlets through the post to individual Russians identified from Soviet phone books.
Shortly after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, George travelled there to gather first hand evidence of the use of poison gas against the Afghan fighters. Forging links with National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, he subsequently drew up detailed analysis of the role of the different elements of the gas attacks. With others, he is believed to have persuaded the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, to provide anti-aircraft weapons to the Afghan resistance.
Some three years after his first visit to Afghanistan, George asked my permission to leave immediately for a few days’ holiday, a request which seemed quite out of character. Eight weeks later, he returned smiling with a Boots folder containing what he described as his holiday photos. These turned out to be pictures of him in company of members of the mujahidin over whom he towered as he waved a Kalashnikov.
I later discovered that George — who had been accompanied by other NTS members including the novelist and historian, Vladimir Rybakov — arranged for two captured Russian soldiers to be allowed to be released and given safe passage to the West, an act which may well have saved their lives. George also provided me with a compelling account of how US military aid was falling into the hands of anti-Western factions. This, as he pointed out, necessarily had the effect of strengthening them in in relation to relatively pro-Western rival groups.
I arranged for him to meet a well-connected American friend who was as impressed and alarmed as I had been by George’s detailed and authoritative account. As subsequent events have demonstrated, it was advice that should have been heeded, but my contact later reported, “it’s no go. The US State Department regards the enemies of America’s enemy as its friend. It lacks the imagination to grasp that this particular enemy of our enemy might also be America’s enemy.”
George’s range of anti-Soviet activities was more extensive than most of his friends realised at the time and demonstrated imagination as well as George’s ability to inspire trust from those with whom he worked. Julian Lewis, the chairman of the Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee with whom Miller worked to counter the activities of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), described him “as compassionate and courageous. He was mystical, spiritual, selfless and humane, a hero of our times.”
When a tiny Moscow-based “Group for Establishing Trust” was cited by members of CND as evidence that a peace movement could be built inside the Soviet bloc, George sent FCS members to Moscow to distribute anti-nuclear leaflets on the Moscow underground. One was arrested and kicked out causing just the kind of publicity that was needed to demonstrate the stupidity of the CND position. He subsequently arranged for one of the group’s advisers, Oleg Popov, to visit London where he was enthusiastically welcomed by CND as well as by George. But the latter evidently made a bigger impression on Popov than the CND leaders. At a press conference, Popov thanked the disarmers for their support but declared, “unilateral disarmament is no answer. It is nonsense and potentially dangerous.”
Other activities included the creation of the Association for Free Russia and the editorship of Soviet Labour Review, a detailed and authoritative bimonthly journal of labour relations in the USSR.
In 1986, Miller successfully sabotaged what was intended as a major Soviet propaganda coup to weaken support for Western nuclear deterrence. The occasion was the Copenhagen “Peace Congress” staged by the Soviet controlled World Peace Congress. His wrecking strategy had been worked out in cooperation with the Coalition for Peace Through Security, an anti-CND outfit run by two future Tory MPs, Julian Lewis and Edward Leigh. As the event opened, George and two others could be seen on the platform unfurling a giant banner on the platform which read “This is the KGB’s Peace Congress.” Photos of the trio being manhandled off the stage dominated the following morning’s Danish press. And when on the final day of the event dozens of activists who had been mysteriously provided with delegate credentials mounted a vociferous campaign against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan the resulting mayhem received worldwide media coverage.
George was in London at the time of the Communist hardliners’ botched August coup of 1991. But his father — sensing that dramatic change might be imminent — had flown to Moscow and made contact with those loyal to Boris Yeltsin, standing besides Yelstin as he faced down the Russian tanks outside the Russian parliament. Yeltsin subsequently passed a special decree making him a Russian citizen.
George arrived in Russia for the first time shortly afterwards, kissing Russian soil on his arrival, keenly anticipating a process of democratic reform and the privatisation of the Russian economy in which he hoped to play a significant role. His wife, Lilia, and two children were to follow him from England.
But subsequent events did not evolve as he would have wished. In January 1991, a meeting of the NTS council, of which George and his father, Boris, were members, was split on whether or not its representatives should join the new Yeltsin government. George argued powerfully that the historic opportunity should not be missed to help shape Russia’s democratic future. An opposing faction, which included his father, argued that the offer was a trap set by its old KGB enemies and that it would be better to wait for a more propitious moment to enter government; perhaps both proposals contained an element of wish-fulfilment. Boris’s faction won by a single vote, resulting in a lasting rift between father and son, and George’s immediate resignation from the NTS.
Boris died penniless in a Moscow hospital following a heart attack in 1997. He had spent his last years as the Russian head of an international human rights body, appearing regularly on Russian television to denounce various human rights violations.
Although he had little practical knowledge of privatisation and of business, George went on to work to in the Economics Ministry under Anatoly Chubais, the privatisation minister. But he grew rapidly disillusioned by the emergence of crony capitalism. Several of the reforms he sought did not materialise and he grew increasingly aware that a new class of oligarchs, many with KGB backgrounds were exclusively concerned with personal enrichment.
George complained to friends that Russia now resembled America’s Wild West. But as the historian, Norman Stone, pointed out, the difference was that in America’s Wild West there was a judge, a sheriff and a preacher. I had often teased George by suggesting that he might not like living in the Russia that would emerge if he and his friends succeeded in destroying the Soviet system: the sad truth is that he did not.
Keenly aware that he had neglected his family’s material interests and his own health by the single-minded pursuit of political aims, he now sought consultancy work advising Western companies on business opportunities. But by this time his wife had returned to Britain and what funds he had saved went on a divorce.
I last saw George about 18 months before his death after he rang to suggest a meeting. George remained cheerful and showed no sign of bitterness. He declared his intention to remain in England where his children were being educated and asked me whether I would run a new think-tank for which he would find funds. Its purpose, he explained would [be] to analyse threats to liberal democracy, including those posed by the country which he had struggled to free from communism, as well that posed by China. The money would come from backers of various environmental projects in which he had become enthusiastically involved, including one with plans develop the means to turn pig dung into energy. Companies were set up in his name, but little progress was made and there was no income stream. As we parted, I pondered on whether the project had come to fill the place of an earlier vision that had died.
Like me, the couriers recruited by George Miller remember him with fondness and respect. The Soviet elephant did indeed roll over and die. The proximate reason for the Soviet collapse may have been Western policies vigorously promoted by Reagan and Thatcher which in turn prompted the Soviet leadership to attempt to modernise, unleashing forces which it was powerless to control. But George, along with a relatively small number of anti-communist activists and scholars shaped the environment which made those Western policies possible. Although he had been given ample reason to reflect on the need to think carefully about what he wished for, I don’t think he regretted any of his counter-revolutionary activities.
The grave of NTS founding chairman Duke Serge von Leuchtenberg de Beauharnais (aka Sergei Nikolaevich Leuchtenbergsky) at El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey, California. Photo courtesy of Comrade Koganzon
Duke Sergei Nikolaevich Leuchtenbergsky (1896, St. Petersburg–June 27, 1966, California) was a Russian politician, translator, founder and first leader of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), and great-great-grandson of Russian Emperor Nicholas I.
He was born in 1896. In the Civil War, he served under his father, Major General N.N. Leuchtenbergsky, during the formation of the Southern Army and the Don Army. In exile, he graduated from the noncommissioned officer school of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS). From 1930 to 1933, he headed the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS).
During World War II, he served as a translator in the German 9th Army, then headed the propaganda department and was a translator for the Rzhev Commandant’s Office and the headquarters of the German VI Corps.
In 1925, he married Anna Alexandrovna Naumova (born 1900), and they had four children. A year after his divorce (1938), he married Kira Nikolaevna Volkova (born 1915), but their marriage was annulled in 1942. In 1945, he married Olga Sergeevna Wickberg (born 1926), who bore him two children.
He died on June 27, 1966, and is buried at El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey, California.
Source: Wikipedia (Russian). Translated by Bad Robot with the Russian Reader
In love, Cancer? The Russian-American Company’s logo (RAK) on signage at Fort Ross State Historic Park in Sonoma County, California. Photo by the Russian Reader
Is it true that not only Alaska, but other huge territories of the American continent were Russian? Yes, its stretched all the way down to Northern California. And Fort Ross, Russian fortress and settlement of the early 19-th century, which still located 90 miles north of San Francisco, on the banks of Russian river at that time marked the southern border of the Russian Empire. At the peak of its power Russia suddenly abandoned its colonies. Why? What happened? In our days, an international TV crew arrived at Fort Ross National [sic] Historic Park to make a documentary. Dmitry-Russian reporter already famous in his country, Margo, long legged sound engineer, very pretty, and very independent American girl in her twenties, and videographer Jeff, the guy from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, same age as Margo-meet in New York and soon became friends. As a result of the mysterious anomaly, Dmitry was thrown into the past. Into the Fort Ross of 1820s, where he saw a thriving international community of the colonists: Russians, Aleuts, Native Americans, Spaniards. Ripening field of rye, peach orchards, vineyards, flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. In the bay, merchant’s ships at anchor, waiting for the goods to be loaded-paradise and nothing else. To his surprise, he found out that his ability to travel in Time happened because of the strange malfunctioning of his iPhone. How great it would be to take a few real historical shoots from the past! However, soon he will realize that what they have in their hands is much more serious than just an opportunity to make an unprecedented documentary footage. Why not try to change the Future itself? But in favor of what country, Russia or America? It’s not an easy question to answer. Dmitry, taken aback by this unknown to him chapter of Russian history, sees the new opportunities for Mother Russia. Margo, as an American, is very disturbed. She, who has an Indian blood in her veins, knows pretty well what awaits her people. On the other hand, she fascinated by the peaceful coexistence of Russians and local Kashaya tribe. As for Jeff, he is just torn apart between his pledge to his new homeland, his Russian origin, his new friend and his new love for Margo. Not being able to resolve all these issues at once, friends decided to disguise themselves as Franciscan friars and Margo as an Indian girl, and go for the brief exploration into the Past. And return to modern time, as quickly as possible. But Fate had other plans for them. This description may be from another edition of this product.
Native American reaction to the establishment of Ross appears to have been favorable in the initial years of occupation. In 1811, Kuskov arranged for the construction of the settlement adjacent to the Kashaya village of Mettini. Apparently, the Russians purchased rights to the Ross vicinity from a local chief, Pana-cuc-cux, for three blankets, three pairs of trousers, two axes, three hoes, and some beads, although K[i]rill Khlebnikov noted that the Pomo village at Ross was called Mad-shui-nui, and that the chief who ceded it to the Russians was named Chu-chu-san. […] In 1817, Lieutenant Captain Leontii Hagemeister visited Ross in order to extend and formalize the agreement with the Pomo. A number of prominent Pomo and Coast Miwok headmen, including the chiefs Chu chu-san and Vale-lie-lie, met with Hagemeister and agreed to the Russian’s request for a formal agreement. The arrangement that resulted from this effort represents one of the few official treaties ever made by a Euro-American power with a California Indian tribe. In 1825, Governor Muravyov visited Ross and met with Mannel, a local Pomo chief, in order to reconfirm the Russian treaty. The Russians also arranged an agreement with the Bodega Miwok in order to develop Port Rumyantsev on Bodega Bay. Rights to Bodega Bay were purchased from the Bodega chief, Iollo, for an Italian-style cape, a coat, trousers, shirts, arms, three hatchets, five hoes, three files, sugar, and beads.
Source: E. Breck Parkman, “Fort and Settlement: Interpreting the Past at Fort Ross State Historic Park,” California History, 75.4 (Winter 1996/1997), p. 359
Source: Kan, S. (1991). The Khlebnikov Archive: Unpublished Journal (1800-1837) and Travel Notes (1820, 1822, and 1824). Edited, with introduction and notes, by Leonid Shur. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 15.4. http://dx.doi.org/10.17953
As Mission Santa Cruz developed following its establishment in 1791, the coastal terrace lands to the north as far as Point Año Nuevo became the mission’s main livestock grazing lands. Rancho Arroyo del Matadero (“Stream of the Slaughtering Ground Ranch”) was one of four mission cattle ranches strung along the coast. In 1839, the former ranch lands were granted to the three Castro sisters: María Candida, Jacinta, and María de los Angeles Castro. The three were daughters of José Joaquín Castro (1768–1838), deceased grantee of Rancho San Andrés. Candida Castro married José Antonio Bolcoff in 1822.
José Antonio Bolcoff (1794–1866) was born Osip Volkov in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Siberia. Working for a Russian fur trading company, Bolcoff deserted a Russian ship at Monterey in 1815. After arriving in California he quickly assimilated into the Spanish culture, using the Spanish name José Antonio Bolcoff. Bolcoff acted as an interpreter for Governor Pablo Vicente de Solá. In 1822, Bolcoff settled in Branciforte and was alcalde in 1833. In 1833, Bolcoff was granted Rancho San Agustin, which he sold to Joseph Ladd Majors (1806–1868) in 1839. Majors married Bolcoff’s sister-in-law, María de los Angeles Castro (1818–1903). Jacinta Castro lived with the Bolcoff family before joining the convent at Monterey. In 1839, Bolcoff replaced Francisco Soto as administrator of Mission Santa Cruz.
Bolcoff’s name is not mentioned in the original grant, but he took control of Rancho Refugio in 1841. Bolcoff transferred the title to Rancho Refugio to his two sons, Francisco Bolcoff and Juan Bolcoff.
With the cession of California to the United States following the Mexican-American War, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo provided that the land grants would be honored. As required by the Land Act of 1851, a claim for Rancho Refugio was filed with the Public Land Commission in 1852, and the grant was patented to Francisco and Juan Bolcoff in 1860. A claim by Joseph Ladd Majors and his wife, María de los Angeles Castro, for one-third of Rancho Refugio filed with the Land Commission in 1852 was rejected.
Here we must name the people on the Ilmena who were captured along with Elliot and who were mentioned in the journal: Fyodor Sokolov, Dmitry Shushkov, Pyotr Druzhinin, “the American-Bostonian Lisa Cole,” Osip Volkov, and Afanasy Klimovsky. Klimovsky was obviously the future famous explorer of Alaska. As for Osip (aka Joseph and José) Volkov, he was a well-known figure in California, where he found his second home and lived a long life (he died in 1866). The Russian administration ultimately took a lenient view of Volkov’s sojourn in California, where he could be useful to the RAK. Governor Yanovsky, using Volkov’s case as a pretext for Khlebnikov’s visit to Monterey in 1820, enabled Volkov to be issued a “residence permit.” The report in the journal refutes the widespread misconception that Volkov jumped a Russian ship.
Elliot reports that “Afanasy and Osip” lived in Lieutenant Gomez’s house. The order in which Antipater Baranov lists the captured prisoners may indicate their ethno-social status: first come the Russians, then the American, and then Klimovsky and Volkov, both Creoles. The fact that Volkov was a “Creole” who also had a poor command of Russian (“little knowledge of the Russian language”) is reported by L[eonty] Hagemeister, who spoke with him directly during a visit to San Francisco in 1817.
Elkhorn Slough, as seen from the Carneros Creek watershed. The Western Flyer is moored in the marina at Moss Landing, where the slough flows into Monterey Bay (near the smokestacks on the center right). Photo by the Russian Reader
I have never directly acknowledged the fact that, since May 2021, this weblog has come to you from Monterey-by-the-Sea, California, where I have happily found many things to do that have nothing to do with Russia and the heavy, steady flow of bad news from there. I want to share that happiness with you by way of saying goodbye to 2024 and thanking you for sticking with the Russian Reader this past year.
The distinctly Monterey story, told below in four short but fascinating videos, is a fascinating, inspiring, and happy one. I hope you enjoy it as much I did. See you next year! ||| The Russian Reader
Western Flyer Foundation Channel, “The Western Flyer with Nick Offerman”
The Western Flyer sails again! Come aboard with Emmy-award-winning actor and comedian Nick Offerman for a fun new look at the life, near-death, and resurrection of the famous old fishing boat in John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951). From the coast to the deep sea and from the tide pool to the stars, the nonprofit Western Flyer Foundation stirs curiosity using a blend of science and art inspired by John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and their 1940 journey on the Western Flyer.
Learn more about the vessel’s history, adventures, and exciting future or marine science and education at http://www.westernflyer.org.
CBS Mornings, “John Steinbeck’s ‘Western Flyer’ gets brought back to life”
After writing “The Grapes of Wrath,” author John Steinbeck explored the Gulf of California in a famous boat called the Western Flyer. Since then, the boat has inspired adventurers and scientists for generations, but the original ship was nearly lost. CBS News’s Jeff Glor reports on the person determined to give it new life.
Western Flyer Foundation Channel, “The boat John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts made famous. Western Flyer: The Next Chapter”
Almost lost forever, the iconic vessel that carried the acclaimed novelist John Steinbeck (who penned Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath and more) and marine biologist Ed Ricketts to the Sea of Cortez on an epic scientific mission gets new life and a new mission.
Jimmy Kimmel Live, “Jimmy Kimmel Reacts to Donald Trump Winning the Presidential Election”
Last night we had the choice between a prosecutor and a criminal and we chose the criminal, more than half of the country voted for Donald Trump, it turns out the election wasn’t rigged even though he said it was while people were in line voting, Jimmy’s kids were very upset at the news, Jimmy received a lot of texts from anxious friends and family members, President Biden watched all of the action from the White House and he called Trump today to congratulate him, Kamala Harris also called Donald Trump to concede and she gave a speech at her alma mater Howard University, the voting itself went relatively smoothly despite a number of bomb threats that were sent into heavily democratic precincts, it was a terrible night for so many in America, Jimmy offers some thoughts about how we move forward, Cousin Micki shares something positive, and we head out to Hollywood Blvd to ask people if they voted in the election today (even though it was yesterday).
Natalia Corazza and Raven Cook, “Young Readers’ Reverie,” 2023. Acrylic paint on cement. Monterey (CA) Public Library. “If you can read this, thank a teacher, a parent, and your local library.”
The marine biologist Ed Ricketts — the inspiration for John Steinbeck’s character Doc (Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday) — stands with Ukraine.Monterey, California, 19 March 2022. Photo by the Russian Reader
