Forty-eighth installment from the diary of my great-grandfather’s sister Alise, written during the First World War. When the diary starts, she is living just a few miles from the front lines of the Eastern Front, and is then forced to flee with her husband and two young daughters to her family’s house near Limbaži as the war moves even closer. Her third child, a son, was born there in February 1916. The family has now relocated to a home near Valmiera, and the Russian Revolution is in full swing. For more background, see here, and click on the tag “diary entries” to see all of the entries that I have posted.

If there is mention of a recognizable historical figure and event, I will provide a Wikipedia link so that you can read more about the events that Alise is describing.

October 26, 1917

Worse and worse news arrives. Soldiers are doing mindless things, destroying, stealing, burning. The threat of famine is inching closer, there is news from Finland about total famine. Despair is stalking across the land. Unending bands of refugees, who have been turned out from their homes by the fire and violence of war. Everyone is calling for help. Winter and its harshness is at our doorstep. Rallies, meetings, without end. They have broken into the church in CÄ“sis and held their first rally. Words, words, and nothing is being done. There are no results from the promises that the Bolsheviks promised in their speeches, they have fulfilled none of them. There are rumours from Petrograd about pogroms, the fall of the Provisional Government, Kerensky committing suicide. Let’s hope that this is all bringing us towards peace, rather than destruction.