Tattered Banners: An Autobiography

“War, like love, is an experience that each generation must learn for itself.”

Born into Russian aristocracy at the end of the 19th Century, Paul Rodzianko led an extraordinary life. With humor and infectious joy, he recounts the adventures of his charmed childhood--playing with his cousins at the Winter Palace on Sunday afternoons; riding horses at the “Wolf’s Den,” one of his family’s many country estates; ice skating at the Tauride Palace; and, most spectacularly, serving as a page in the court of Tsar Nicolas II.

Then, on August 1, 1914, Russia and Germany declare war on each other, and Rodzianko writes, “The hurricane descended and swept our world away.” Serving in the Chevalier Guards, he fights first against the Germans and then, after the Revolution, against the Reds in Siberia. He writes movingly about WWI and the Russian Civil War: the initial excitement about going to war and the grim realities, the frustrating shortages of munitions and the failures of the railroads, the shocking execution of the Romanovs, and the brutal deaths of millions of young men.

In Tattered Banners Rodzianko depicts the breathtaking opulence of pre-Revolutionary Russia as vividly as he details the horrors of the wars that followed. It is an evocative and haunting account of a time and people that have continued to intrigue us for more than a century.