The accounts give a deeply personal insight into how the revolution devastated the aristocracy, the intelligensia and foreigners of Moscow and St. Petersburg in the few weeks after the October 1917 upheaval. The memories of the women in this book have remained very sharp, with a volume and precision of detail, and intensity of recall, found in those whose premature transition to adulthood coincided with the whose premature transition to adulthood coincided with the traumas of revolution.