Vladimir Lipovetski
| Kovcheg detei. | The Children's Ark Documentary novel. Azbooka Publishers. St. Petersburg 2005. (English sample translation available) |
| Foreign rights: | France, Poland |
The true story of 800 children sent away from war-torn St. Petersburg in 1918 because of food shortages.They returned three years later after an odyssey around the world, rescued with the help of a courageous American Red Cross volunteer.
This is a true and for most people an unknown story of how in the summer of 1918, a group of 800 children was sent to the Urals because of food shortages in war-torn St. Petersburg (formerly known as Petrograd). It was meant to be a three-month sojourn, but as the Russian Civil War raged on, it became impossible for the children to return.
At the same time on the other side of the world, Riley H. Allen, a journalist in Hawaii left for Vladivostok to report on the Russian Civil War. When he arrived, he learned of the dire situation of the children and decided to help by joining the Red Cross. His mission was to bring back the children to their parents. He could never have guessed that the fate of the 800 children would lay exclusively in his hands and that for the next three years, he would be travelling around the world.
Riley managed to get the children under the protection of the Red Cross and because of complications, it took an entire year before they could leave. In the meantime, propaganda in Russia told how Americans had kidnapped the children. The children’s letters to their parents never arrived.
Riley paid 5,000$ a day for a cargo boat to take the most incredible journey in the history of the Red Cross. They began a three year odyssey around the globe with stops in San Francisco, the Panama Canal, New York, Brest and Helsinki. During this time, Riley and a Russian governess fell in love. Some children tried to escape and some even died during the voyage, but 780 returned home safely eventually returning to Petrograd the long way around the world via the Russian Far East, Asia, USA and Europe.
Upon arrival in 1921, the children and their parents had trouble recognising each other.
The existence of the journey was kept hidden to the Soviet public because the children were rescued by officers from the American Red Cross. The children who made the journey kept their travels a secret.
