Marina Yurlova

Biography

Yurlova published a three part trilogy of her life from age 14 at the outbreak of The Great War, to her eventual maturity and life in the US. She ran away from home with a group of women who were following their husbands and brothers into battle as part of the Kuban Cossack group which mobilized and travelled by train south towards Armenia and the Turkish enemy. She originally worked as an official Volunteer army groom in Armenia; She was mentored and protected by a sergeant in the army of the Caucasus named Kosel, who procured a uniform for Marina and made her a sort of mascot for his unit. In 1915, she was on a dangerous mission in which Kosel was killed, and she was shot in the leg while blasting bridges across the Araxes River near Yerevan. She was treated at the Red Cross hospital in Baku and then returned to the Southern Front, where she trained as an auto mechanic and became a military driver. As the war progressed, Armenia was devastated and she advanced with the army to the siege and capture of Erdogan. She was assigned to a laborer unit where 1917, she was wounded during an artillery barrage and ammo dump explosion which buried her alive with only her head and one damaged arm remaining above ground, unable to free herself. As the Revolution initiated mass murders and riots, Cossacks like her became groups targeted for extermination and she was nearly killed just trying to reach treatment for her injuries. She spent nearly the entire year 1918 in a hospital in Moscow, suffering from concussion and apparent neck trauma, as well as shell shock causing memory loss of the entire hospitalization period, in which most of Moscow was destroyed and burned by revolutionaries. Modern readers will recognize PTSD as she characterizes her feelings and physical reactions to subsequent events, such as when she was thrown into a prison by Bolsheviks where all male prisoners were murdered while she, the lone female POW, was abandoned in her locked cell when the Bolsheviks left. She continued to flee eastward by train across Russia in winter. En route she was conscripted into White Russian forces under command of Captain Kappel while weak with the pervasive lack of food and still not fully recovered. In a fight she was shot again, through the armpit muscles and shoulder by Bolsheviks while on patrol. According to her autobiography, she was wrongly sent to an asylum in Omsk for a period of about three weeks as she recovered from this wound and from shell shock.

Due to the intervention of a friendly officer, she was released and given passage and 500 rubles to travel to Vladivostock. The train she was a passenger on was stopped in the middle of the Siberian wasteland, sandwiched between two Bolshevik armies. Led by a contingent of Russian officers, she abandoned the train along with a party of about 100 Royalists (both men and women) and walked through Siberia for a month evading war and destruction of the populace, eventually reaching the Russian military hospital in Vladivostok. This is where she ends her first book in the trilogy.

Her second book Russia,Farewell, demonstrates both her unique force of character and unique status as female combat veteran soldier-volunteer. At the military hospital she is placed in a small ward with a few senior officers, and she quickly became a staff favorite. By this stage in the long war and revolution, the collapsed national economy has already caused several years of food shortage and famine, lack of medical care, vanished government services and total societal col!apse from warfare and marauding gangs pillaging and massacring villages across the continent. The military who gave their all in service their nation, to preserve life and order, were hunted down and killed along with all administrators, intelligentsia, businessmen both large and small, clergy, and royalty at all levels whether rich or poor.

The three weeks in Vladivostok describe in depth the sense of loss and place of a nation destroying itself on an unparalled scale. Nations from across the world shipped supplies, relief organizations, and both naval and land forces in the doomed attempt to stave off the mass murders and warfare. Those making it to this last toehold area of stability drew Marina into their forced gaiety amidst desperation. Her military class ward mates provide her the understanding of scale in a parallel to the current conflict rift in US society:

" Colonel Selov," I said timidly. "Has the Revolution affected the hardest people as a whole, or have we individuals suffered most? Every person seems to have such bitter complaint against it, yet if you look around you see the great mass of the people accepting it dumbly and dutifully. It seems dreadful to me, this dumb suffering of which you spoke a while ago- much worse than the tragedy of one individual. It reminds me of the newspapers we used to have, where all sorts of descriptions and stories in detail were given when one man was killed, but the wiping out of an army or the perishing of thousands in some great catastrophe gained only a tiny paragraph and a sigh from a few readers."

The hospital was funded by American Red Cross donations and an American Doctor there approved her for evacuation. Marina said the hospital "was quite perfectly run, quite perfectly kind". After recuperating there for three weeks, she was given passport and passage to a sanatorium at Chigasaki, Japan. The three days aboard ship are described in detail, and after disembarking she suffers another nervous breakdown en route to her destination. She doesn't describe her months of treatment, but her open description of her hard efforts and determination to succeed are interrupted by short periods of panic, against a backdrop of destitute royal Russian expatriate refugees adrift and desperate in daily life in a vibrant Japan twelve years prior to invasion of Manchuria. Her efforts to develop employable skills, memorize the English dictionary, and fully embrace life are based upon a strong set of moral values instilled by her Cossack work ethic formative years and Christian life in the Russian Orthodox Church. She remained a steadfast Christian throughout her life. During the first two books she was repeatedly approached by men who wanted her in manners either respectful or not, and she openly shares her conflicts in dealing with results of an outgoing personality who had moral values, progressively increasing in sharp contrast with her ex-pat group, while she matures from a girl to a woman as all things Russian collapse, her recounting diametrically both stark and poignant.

The second book ends with her third flight away from turmoil, to the US in 1922. The Only Woman picks up her life there.

Cossack Girl leaped back into print in paperback upon the centennial of The Great War, with broadcast of 14 Diaries of The Great War, however there is little chance the second and third books will be republished. Russia, Farewell copies are rare, editions of The Only Woman even more so.

In 1922, she immigrated to the United States, where she performed as a dancer. She married filmmaker William C. Hyer and became a U.S. citizen in 1926.

She won the Cross of Saint George for Bravery three times.

Yurlova published an autobiographical trilogy. The first in the series, Cossack Girl (1934), covered her life from age 14 through five years of war and societal collapse. The second-Russia, Farewell(1936) was published by Michael Joseph LTD., 14 Henrietta Street, W.C.2, printed by Mayflower Press, Plymouth, England, following a court case in which Liberty Press in the US published a defamatory article.

In the three years between article and trial, key documents apparently disappeared from Liberty defense attorney offices. Court records seem to indicate that Liberty Press did a bait and switch on Yurlova, promising her a thousand dollars for a story they promised to publish and Yurlova dropping the libel charge against them. Their attorney took the payment, gave her seventy-five dollars-evidently convincing her he would get the full amount for her- and kept the rest. The court ruled no libel against Liberty Press. There is no record if she subsequenty sued the attorney for fraud.

Her third book, The Only Woman (1937), was published in the US by Macauly in 1938. In 1984, she died at the age of 84 years.

In popular culture

Yurlova is one of those whose wartime experiences are described in Women Heroes of World War I: 16 Remarkable Resisters, Soldiers, Spies, and Medics by Kathryn J. Atwood in the Chicago Review Press.

She is one of the 14 main characters of the series 14 - Diaries of the Great War. She is played by actress Natalia Witmer.