Gregory I. Samoylenko papers

Gregory I. Samoylenko was born in the village of Temirgoevskaia, Russia in 1897. In 1917, while training to become a naval aviator at Petrograd Polytechnic Institute, he witnessed and chronicled the first days of the February Revolution. Transferred from Petrograd, he continued his studies at the Baku School of Naval Aviation in Azerbaijan, where he witnessed the effects of the October Revolution. He later joined the Volunteer Army, which fought against the Bolsheviks on the Southern front during the Russian Civil War. In 1920 he made his way to Constantinople, where he found work first as a chauffeur and then as a ship’s mechanic and captain for the French oil-shipping company, the Comptoir Franco-Oriental du Napthe. Samoylenko immigrated to the United States in 1922 and began working for the Lynn, Massachusetts branch of the General Electric Company while studying toward a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which he earned in 1928. In 1929, he was hired as an engineer by the Boston Edison Company where he remained until retiring in 1962. Samoylenko married Olive Grace Olson on June 20, 1931 and had two children, John Gregory Samoylenko and Marsha Samoylenko. He died on May 28, 1976 in Newton, Massachusetts.

Following his emigration, Samoylenko began drafting an autobiography, “My Slavic Saga,” intended to detail his experience during the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent civil war. Never completed, the manuscripts and typescripts included in this collection provide a personal account of Samoylenko’s childhood as a peasant in the Russian Empire and a brief eyewitness account of the February Revolution and its immediate aftermath in Petrograd and along the Finnish border. The documents in series 2 further evidence his active participation in the Russian Civil War.