LIBRARY LECTURE: Russian Anzacs - Presented by Dr Elena Govor, Parliament House, Canberra on 21 April 2021

I was growing up in the Soviet time with military parades celebrating the might of the Soviet Union, with school excursions to military museums, with numerous books and movies glorifying the exploits of the Soviet people, with the cult of war heroes and the cold grandeur of the monuments in every city square, at the foot of which we joined the young pioneer league. [...] One of the strongest impressions was left by the gallery on the walls of which were the endless columns of names of all the fallen. [...] Charles Bean, in the opening pages of his Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, asserts of Australia in those years: Library lecture: Russian Anzacs 1 The percentage of Australians who came of any other stock [that is, other than English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh] was negligible; the population of this vast unfilled land was as purely British as that of the two islands in the No. [...] But the main factors of the mass enlistment were causes of an economic and political nature: unemployment; suspension of naturalization of Russian citizens by Australian authorities; and the pressure exerted by the Russian Consul-General Alexander Abaza, who informed the Australian authorities that all the natives of the Russian Empire of military age and even their adult children born in Australi. [...] The first to reach out a helping hand to the Anzacs in the post-war years were the British, Australian, Russian and Jewish women who married the Russian Anzacs and with them built a new life in a new country.