This is a follow-up to my previous story about William Rust. It will make more sense to read that one first. The information is mostly gleaned from Francis Beckett’s book, Stalin’s British Victims. There was a 30 minute BBC Radio 4 programme made about Rosa, which was broadcast in August 1998. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have made its way to BBC Sounds.
Rosa was born on the 26th of April 1925 at the Charing Cross Hospital, London. Her full name was Kathleen Rosa Rust but she was known as Rosa. Her parents were William Rust and Kathleen O’Donoghue. She was Mary Alice Willis’s second cousin 1X removed.
A few months after Rosa was born, William (Bill) was arrested and sent to prison for 12 months on a charge of seditious libel and incitement to mutiny. During her first year, Rosa only saw her father in the visitors room at Wandsworth Prison.
On his release from prison, Bill continued his work for the Communist Party cause and in 1928 he was appointed to a job at Comintern in Moscow. Kathleen and Rosa accompanied him. On arrival in Moscow, Rosa went down with scarlet fever and was confined to hospital for two weeks. Bill and Kathleen were not allowed to visit. The nurses didn’t speak English and Rosa didn’t speak Russian. She quickly learned to speak Russian and once she went away to school, English was soon forgotten.
The family stayed at the Hotel Lux, a hotel where foreign communists stayed whilst in Moscow. It was convenient for the Kremlin and Comintern Headquarters. Bill and Kathleen (known as Kay) were both leading busy lives, Kathleen had a job as a junior reporter on the Moscow Daily News and Bill was becoming more important at Comintern. Rosa was left to her own devices and fell in with gangs of children on the street, “I became a little hooligan, stealing things in shops for the excitement. It was better than sitting at home, alone.”
Bill returned to Britain to launch the Daily Worker newspaper at the end of 1929. By this time he and Kathleen had parted company and Bill had taken up with Tamara Kravets. The timeline becomes a bit confused here, but it seems that Bill returned to Comintern in Moscow at the end of 1932 and then went back to Britain in the mid 1930s. Kathleen and Rosa didn’t go back to Britain.
In 1933 Rosa had another visit to the hospital, this time to have her tonsils removed. In Russia at the time it was the practice to carry out the operation without anaesthetics. Kathleen had the flu at the time and Bill was busy with important Comintern business, so Tamara was designated to accompany Rosa to the hospital. The two did not get on. Tamara dumped Rosa at the hospital and left Rosa to it, much to the annoyance of Kathleen.
Because of Bill’s importance in a foreign communist party, Rosa was entitled to a place at the Ivanova-Vosnesensk boarding school. Pupils at the school included the children of China’s Mao Tse-Tung, Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito and Hungary’s Matyas Rakosi.
While Rosa was away at school, Kathleen became involved with, and possibly married, a Russian man by the name of Misha. Rosa liked him very much, describing him as “kind and bubbling, a bear of a man”. The secret police came for him at 3am in the morning in early 1937. He was shot soon afterwards. He is thought to have been charged with Trotskyism. It was necessary for Kathleen to get out of the country as quickly as possible to avoid suffering the same fate. She made a hurried visit to Rosa at school and promised to come back soon to collect her. Kathleen did not return.
Rosa had to leave school at the age of 15 and in 1940 she was sent to a hostel for political immigrants in Moscow. There were fifty or so other young people of the same age and Rosa liked it there very much. In 1941, when the Russians joined the Second World War, she was supposed to be studying for examinations. She was spending too much time enjoying herself and didn’t achieve the required grades. The rest of her fellow students were sent on holiday to the country and then back to their old school. Rosa was left behind in Moscow.
She was assigned to join a group of Germans and they were told that they would be assisting the war effort. They spent several days travelling to Stalingrad and then they travelled by barge down the River Volga to a small village in the Volga German Republic, close to the front. She made friends with a German woman. Rosa was allocated 12 hour shifts at a canning factory.
After about three months, Rosa was on the move again. Stalin believed that the Volga Germans were ready to welcome an invasion from the advancing German army. There was a three day journey across the Caspian Sea by ferry and then a train journey in cattle trucks. Food was very scarce. She was put to work in a copper mine about 100 miles from the Chinese border.
Eventually, Rosa decided to write to a former school friend to ask for help. The letter was passed to the head teacher and in early 1943, Rosa received a pass, signed by the head of Comintern, together with 500 roubles to get her to Moscow. The journey took weeks. Trains were in short supply and overcrowded. Eventually, she arrived back at the Hotel Lux. A cable was sent to Bill Rust, Rosa had to decide whether to stay in Moscow or travel to Britain. She decided to come back to Britain. It was arranged with the British Embassy that Rosa would travel with a convoy of ships from Murmansk to Leith in Scotland, a journey of three weeks. One ship in the convoy was sunk and German planes opened fire on the men in lifeboats.
From Leith she travelled to Edinburgh by train. Not an easy journey as by this time she spoke no English and couldn’t read the station signs. Foreign Office officials met her at Edinburgh and a couple of days later she was put on a train to Euston, London, where her parents met her. It took a while to recognise each other as it had been such a long time since they last saw one another.
Rosa went to live with Kathleen in London and set about learning English again, although apparently she retained a strong Russian accent for the rest of her life.
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