Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 29, 1992 TAG: 9203290085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MIDDLEBURG LENGTH: Long
The flute of Zamfir whispers from the tape deck as the Lincoln drifts into the path of an oncoming car, then swooshes elegantly aside.
Such is the seemingly insulated world of Baroness Margarita Rida von Luelsdorff.
She is Russian aristocracy by blood, German nobility by marriage. But she is American do-gooder by inclination, and now von Luelsdorff is up to her diamond-and-pearl earrings in a one-woman crusade to relieve the suffering masses of Russia.
The baroness began last year with a few boxes of donated goods. When she leaves Middleburg next weekend on her seventh overseas mission, she will shepherd about 20 tons of clothes, food and medical supplies.
This is not mere noblesse oblige, the way the baroness tells it. This is one soul who suffered and found prosperity and who now "Many people have asked me, including my son, on occasion, `You have suffered so much. How in the world can you go back?' " she said, her voice a musical concoction of Russian and English accents.
"Maybe we are sort of being thrown into this, because only people like myself can understand the pain and need of such places. People who have plenty will never understand."
The baroness lives on a hill outside Middleburg, an aggressively picturesque village about halfway between Winchester and Washington, D.C. Her mailbox says simply "Rida," and that is what she likes to be called.
Her Colonial-style home, filled with exotic antiques and bathed in vistas of the Blue Ridge mountains, exudes the kind of comfort and plenty to which Rida says she was born.
Her life story, told in a whisper over tea and crumpets, would make a scriptwriter's head spin: Rida's father and grandfather were emissaries to China for Czar Nicholas II. After the Bolshevik Revolution, royalists fleeing communism took shelter at the family estate in a Chinese province.
Rida was born in China in 1938, and a year later Stalin's army destroyed her family. Her father and grandfather were tortured, she says; five older brothers and sisters vanished; and she and her pregnant mother were sent to a prison camp.
There were separations, more labor camps, and a reunion in the 1940s with a mother Rida and her younger sister no longer recognized. "We were smuggled out of the camp in the back of a truck with potato sacks, and flour, and onions. That, I remember - the smell of the onions," she said.
Back in China, mother and daughters were victims of another revolution; this time they were imprisoned by Maoists. When they finally escaped in 1951, the three wandered in search of a home - the Philippines, Australia, Europe, Africa and finally South America.
"When we reached there I told my mother, `This is it. To continue this sort of life is impossible.' "
At age 16, Rida left her mother and sister in Paraguay for refuge in the United States. Illiterate and knowing no English, she survived on menial jobs until a pair of kindly Americans helped her through night school and eventually college, she said.
Rida met her husband, the baron, at Georgetown University, where she finally earned a degree in linguistics.
There followed a 22-year career in the World Health Organization, and the means at last to settle her mother and sister in comfort. The women fit well into an established Washington, D.C., network of Russian aristocrats. There were annual balls at Russian New Year's; dinners with urbane families of the dynasty of Ivan the Terrible; international guests like Anatoly Karpov, the chess champion.
Then, in 1990, Rida learned through a series of events that one of her missing older sisters was alive in Russia. By that time, Soviet hatred of Old World gentry was crumbling along with communism, so Rida went to visit.
What she saw made her head pound and her heart ache, she said. Her sister had to rely on an outdoor privy. When her nephew went to the clinic with a toothache, the nurse had only one syringe of painkiller for all the patients. Food was scarce.
Now the nation that had oppressed her family was itself in misery. So, back in Middleburg, the baroness decided to act.
She called the White House, she said, but never got a response. She called some national relief organizations, but they seemed to delay too much. She called Gov. Douglas Wilder's office, and they suggested she call evangelist Billy Graham. She did, but Graham never called back.
In desperation, Rida gathered clothes from some local charities, booked a flight and took them over herself.
When she got back, she tried some more charities, and gathered more donations. Each trip, her efforts expanded by word-of-mouth and by mileage on the Lincoln.
A lawyer she met through her My mother died in 1984, so she has never learned that Russia is free. That was her wish, just to gain the freedom of that land from the anti-Christ - that was her word. That would give her the greatest pleasure in the world. Baroness Margarita Rida von Luelsdorff son - who owns the aptly named Baron Transportation Service - got Rida registered with the state as Operation Helping Hand and began trying to help raise money. Now Aeroflot, the Russian airline, donates cargo space, though the baroness buys her own ticket and pays all expenses.
And now the goods are pouring in. On Friday, her car was filled with boxes, bags, even a wingback chair. Rida, who once broke her back and can't lift or bend over, dragged the packages into her basement garage and kneeled to sort them. Someone sent a bag of toys, someone else a leopard-skin rug - with the head attached.
And someone sent a single box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, wrapped in tape and addressed in Russian to an elderly set of relatives.
"The people who are sending, it is all they can afford," she said. "Even this, they know it's going to help. And you can't say no to that."
And so as Rida waltzed back onto the scenic lanes of Fauquier County in her Lincoln, swathed in the trappings of a Europhile's dream, her thoughts were far away.
"My mother died in 1984, so she has never learned that Russia is free," the baroness said. "That was her wish, just to gain the freedom of that land from the anti-Christ - that was her word. That would give her the greatest pleasure in the world."
Rida was driving to a hardware store in Warrenton, to pick up 50 spray bottles for a Russian clinic that will use them to spray disinfectant donated by Finland.
She pushes the hardware store to give the bottles for free, but will settle for paying $1 each. The baroness doesn't hammer such people with her title. She prefers to prod them with her works.
"They never know who I am," she said. "And in all honesty, I'm no one. I'm one human being in the world."
WANT TO HELP? Anyone who wants to donate food, clothing or medical supplies to the Russian relief efforts of Baroness Magarita Rida von Luelsdorff can call\ (703) 687-3919 or \ (301) 868-2801 for information is trying to chart the same path for others.
by CNB