MEMORANDUM

mostly civilians. 33 Needless to emphasize the World War, followed by the upheavals
caused by the revolution and civil war caused enormous hardship in Russia through the
ravages of war and lack of the most basic necessities, resulting in large numbers of people
fleeing Russia.
After the Bolshevik coup Leontief Sr. may have been in danger as a political foe but
he was never arrested. In Leontief’s view this “probably because of the traditional and
deep-seated respect among the Russians for academic people and particularly university
professor.” 34 REF But Leontief may not fully have understood his father’s politics and the
perils involved. For a shorter period in 1918 the Leontief family went into hiding in the
countryside 400 km east of Petrograd. After returning to St. Petersburg the Leontief family
was in 1919 evicted at 24 hours notice from their flat on Petrovskii Island in St. Petersburg
by “revolutionary sailors.” 35 According to Leontief his parents never complained about
their fate or expressed anger about what was going on. They retained their revolutionary
view they had supported at the outset of the 1917 revolution. Leontief recalled that the
parents once said to him that they used to think that they had enough money to pay for his
education abroad, but “now we do not. … you must try to do it all by yourself.” The
Bolshevik coup meant the end of the Leontief family’s control of the company and a severe
loss of family owned assets.
The Bolshevik regime made early attempts at reforming the school system and from
1918 Leontief’s school became a Unit School. The teaching staff remained much the same
as before the revolution with little or no inculcation of politics. But politics had become a
subject of bitter divisions among the pupils who split up and fought with each other, driven
by their political positions and sympathies. Curiously, Leontief had as class mates both the
son of Kerensky and a daughter of Trotsky. Leontief graduated in the spring of 1921.
In Leontief’s reminiscences about his early life the politics of his father is unduly
subdued. Leontief regarded himself as coming from the bourgeois class and emphasized
that his father, a true Russian intellectual, was in no way a defender of the old Tsarist
regime. 36 In fact most intellectuals and also many others Russians were opposed to the
Tsarist rule. And it was a rather backward leaning way of describing Leontief Sr. as the
evidence indicates that he since very young had been politically engaged through the SRs,
the Russian brand of socialism and political thought. The abolishment of the Constituent
Assembly in 1917 followed by the suppression of the SR’s a couple of years later could
hardly have been felt by Leontief Sr. as anything but a crushing defeat, and even more so
33 See Mawdsley (2007, p.287).
34 From autobiographical notes by Leontief 1954.
35 Kaliadina (2006, pp. 348-9). In unpublished notes Leontief denoted the evictors as “Lenin’s
sailor shock troops”.
36 Rosier (1986, p.78).
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