ABSTRACT
Medtner viewed the ‘Great October Revolution’ with grave apprehension. Although he confessed to understanding nothing about politics, he shared the deeply ingrained conservative attitude of most of the privileged classes and many of the intelligentsia towards the new regime. His own family was to suffer much at its hands; his more affluent friends, Morozova among them, found themselves dispossessed of their estates and wealth, and for everyone the civil war that followed the revolution made even more difficult the already grim practicalities of daily life. In Moscow, desperate shortages of food and fuel, the breakdown of public services and the general chaos drove many of its citizens to seek refuge in the countryside, reducing the population by nearly half over the next three years. Those who could looked for ways of escaping abroad. Among the first to go, in December 1917, was Rachmaninoff, who providentially had been offered a concert tour of neutral Scandinavia, enabling him to obtain an exit visa to travel there with his family; he never returned.
