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Chapter 1 Out of Russia Shortly after eleven p.m. on November 6, 1917 (New Style calendar), the Bolsheviks seized power by storming government buildings and the Winter Palace in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). After months of violent disorders throughout Russia, the revolution was under way; and as the majority members (Bolsheviki) of the Socialist Party believed in "dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants," thousands of wealthy landowners and businessmen realized their lands and businesses would be confiscated, and fled the country with all the money and possessions they could take with them. Supporters and/or relatives of Tsar Nicholas II (government ministers, army officers, princes and grand dukes with their wives and children) also took flight, and when fighting between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik forces erupted across the country, thousands more fled their homes to become refugees from a savage and devastating civil war. Among the refugees were two families, one rich, one poor, living three thousand miles apart. A daughter of the rich family and a son of the poor family eventually emigrated to California, met in San Francisco, and were married on February 8, 1938. The Russian Orthodox ceremony took place at the Russian church on Fulton Street, when the bride was almost five months pregnant, and the following July a future star was born. In 1917, Stepan Zudilov was forty-two years old, a portly, prosperous middle-class businessman who owned soap and candle factories in Barnaul, southern Siberia, and an estate in the outlying countryside. By then he had fathered a large family: two sons and two daughters by his first wife, who died in 1905 after giving birth to their younger daughter; and by his second wife, whom he married a year later, two more daughters followed by two more sons. His youngest daughter, Maria Stepanovna, born in 1912, claimed years later in California that her mother came from an aristocratic family with Romanov connections, and had "married beneath her." But this was Maria the fabulist speaking, with her dreams of nobility, and Zudilov the outspoken tsarist and land-and-factory owner had no need of Romanov connections to qualify for the Bolshevik hit list. The Zudilovs were known as "gentry," and to the Bolsheviks all landowning gentry were suspect, like the family of the great Russian writer Ivan Bunin (who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933). "Any of us who had the slightest chance to escape did so," Bunin wrote after he fled from his estate in central Russia to France by way of Romania. But the armies of the new government headed by Lenin were slow to gain control of an enormous country, and for almost a year the Zudilovs, like their tsarist neighbors, were in no imminent danger by remaining in Barnaul. It was not until the summer of 1918, six months after the civil war broke out, that the Bolsheviks managed to gain control of all southern and central Russia. On the night of July 16, Tsar Nicholas II, his entire family, their doctor and servants, were executed by a squad of Red Guards at Ekaterinburg, the western terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. When the news reached Barnaul, it sent tremors of fear throughout the neighboring gentry; and by late November, Red Guard units were only a hundred miles from the town, after executing suspected tsarists en route. Zudilov had arranged to be warned of their approach in advance, and when the alert came, the family hurried to a prepared hiding place on the estate, stuffing as much money and jewelry as they could inside loose-fitting peasant clothes. Forgotten in the panic of the moment was eighteen-year-old Mikhail, Zudilov's eldest son, who happened to be out of the house. After the soldieLambert, Gavin is the author of 'Natalie Wood A Life' with ISBN 9780375433153 and ISBN 0375433155.
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