Reginald Urch

Reginald Oliver Gilling Urch , also known as RGO Urch (born May 13, 1884 in Mark , Somerset , † May 15, 1945 in Stockholm ) was a British language teacher, writer and newspaper correspondent.

Reginald Urch

Life and activity

After attending school, Urch studied Slavic Studies at the University of London . He traveled to Germany and Russia to deepen his knowledge . In 1907 Urch, who by now had mastered the Russian language like a native speaker, settled in Riga , where he founded a language school around 1910. Before the outbreak of World War I , he began teaching at the Riga Polytechnic.

In 1915, the advance of the German armies in the Baltic States forced Urch to flee to Moscow with his family , where he continued to earn his living as a language teacher and at times as a university lecturer. There he witnessed the Russian Revolution in 1917 , the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and the civil war that followed. He processed his experiences in the report We Generally Shoot Englishmen published in 1936 : According to this, he was arrested and held for two months in 1918 by the Cheka Bolshevik secret police on account of a denunciation that accused him of anti-revolutionary activities. His wife and children were allowed to leave Russia in 1919, and he himself in 1920, when he was exchanged for Bolsheviks who were in British captivity.

As a result of the poor economic situation in Great Britain after World War I, Urch returned to Riga, where he found a job as editor of The Latvian Economist , an English-language commercial paper of the Latvian government.

Since 1922 Urch was in addition to his work for the Latvian government in the service of the London daily The Times , whose Russia correspondent he was at that time. In 1926 he resigned from the Latvian Economist to become a full-time correspondent for the Times. He held this position until 1938. During these twelve years he reported u. a. on industrialization and the forced collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union under the rule of Josef Stalin . He also published two books about Russia: on the one hand the already mentioned experience report about his years in Moscow from 1915 to 1920, on the other hand the novel The Rabbit King of Russia , which is based on the description of a fictitious individual case - that of the eponymous " Rabbit King of Russia " , an enthusiastic young communist who took part in the campaign propagated by the Soviet government in the early 1930s to raise meat for the population to raise rabbits as a replacement for the country's livestock, which was depleted by the mass deaths of larger breeding animals during the years of the civil war -, Tried to make the real living conditions of the average Russian at that time understandable to an English audience. The concept of the book revolves around making the novelty of the communist system in relation to the existing state systems clear by describing the utopian-fantastic-absurd government projects of the Soviet rulers. In this sense, the novel describes projects of the Soviets such as the aforementioned rabbit breeding program, the attempt to replace the dairy cow with the production of milk from soybeans, the efforts of the Soviets to produce virgin wool by shearing dogs, attempts to produce a motor oil made from locusts as well as attempts to process bugs and insects into soap.

In November 1938, Urch was transferred to Warsaw as a correspondent for the Times . After the German invasion of Poland , he fled to Stockholm. After the outbreak of the Finnish-Soviet winter war from 1939 to 1940, Urch reported from Helsinki about it. He then moved to Sweden , from where he continued to report on events in Eastern Europe as a special correspondent for the Times in Stockholm. Especially after the German attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, his reports on the eastern theater of war received great attention in the Anglo-Saxon press.

Urch died in Stockholm in May 1945, shortly after his 61st birthday, in Serafimerlasarettet hospital in Stockholm, after being admitted there due to a heart attack.

family

In 1909 Urch married Edith X, with whom he had a son (* 1911) and a daughter Edith (* 1914).

Fonts

• "English", manuel de langue anglaise , 1933. (together with Edith G. Urch)
• We Generally Shoot Englishmen. An English Schoolmaster'S Five Years of Mild Adventure in Moscow, 1915-1920 , 1936.
• Latvia: Country and People , 1938. (first published in Riga in 1935)
• The Rabbit King of Russia , 1939.

literature

• Obituary by Peter Tennant in The Times, June 12, 1945, p. 7
• Peggie Benton: Baltic Countdown. A Nation Vanishes .