George Guins was a professor of Slavic and political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was born in Modlin, Poland in 1887 and grew up in Kishinev, which is now the capital of Moldova. He graduated from St. Petersburg University, now known as St. Petersburg State University, in 1909, and after he passed the graduate examinations required to teach at the imperial universities, he became a civil law lecturer in 1916. In 1910, he joined the resettlement department of the Russian government, and he was eventually promoted to the position of minister’s officer for special assignments. In the wake of the February Revolution, he was appointed as chief counsel of the Ministry of Food Supply, and after the October Revolution, he joined the Regional Organization of the Consumer Cooperatives in Omsk as a board member and became a professor at the Omsk Polytechnical Institute. After the collapse of Admiral Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak’s government, he escaped to Harbin, Manchuria, where he became chief controller of the Chinese Eastern Railway. In this interview, Guins discusses the rise and fall of Kolchak’s government, his impressions of a trip he took in France from 1928 to 1929, his law practice and writings from 1930 to 1941, the Japanese military takeover in Harbin, and his immigration to San Francisco in 1941. This interview is part of a group of interviews documenting Russian émigrés in California.