In studying cataclysmic events like revolutions, historians generally search for underlying causes, impersonal forces, immutable laws of development, and, more recently, for quantifiable data. As a result, the experiences of individuals, especially those who do not make history but are instead shaped by it, get little attention. Yet without mention of such people, historical analysis could easily become a mere abstraction. It is, in part, for this reason that the following excerpts, despite the obvious limitations of their author, are presented. Born in 1864, the daughter of a wealthy Ekaterinoslav landowner, Princess Vera Urusov had until the Revolutions of 1917 known only comfort and respect. Her family estate included not only the second largest residence in Ekaterinoslav, but also numerous summer places, one of which had a seventy-two acre wooded garden and a library of 27,000 volumes. Prince Nikolai Petrovich Urusov (1863-1918), whom she had married in 1894, was an important tsarist official, serving as governor of Grodno, Poltava and Vladimir provinces and, later, as head of Red Cross operations on the Southern Front. Once the Bolsheviks seized power, however, the Princess' elegant world collapsed. Her possessions were threatened, and worse yet, in November 1917, her husband had to flee to the Caucasus where a year later he was arrested and shot by the Bolsheviks (in Piatigorsk, October 18, 1918). Within a month of her husband's departure, the Princess could no longer get letters through to the Caucasus. She then began a diary written as if to the Prince. Of the diary's 193 pages, 141 cover in detail the Princess' troubled existence in Ekaterinoslav from December 28, 1917 to May 26, 1918, describing the chaotic conditions of the city under Bolshevik rule and during the first two months of the German-Austrian occupation. The diary also contains a brief description of events after the outbreak of the war to November 1917, and a short concluding section on the Princess' activities up to her escape to Italy in 1924. In 1930 she sent the diary to her former tutor, Mrs. George E. Kirby (nee Amy Coles), who was living in Canada at that time. Mrs. Kirby had spent four years (1879-83) in Rus-