HELEN RAPPAPORT
CAUGHT IN THE REVOLUTION
Petrograd, Russia, 1917—
A World on the Edge
St. Martin’s Press
New York
CAUGHT IN THE REVOLUTION. Copyright © 2016 by Helen Rappaport. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rappaport, Helen, author.
Title: Caught in the revolution : Petrograd, Russia, 1917—a world on the edge / Helen Rappaport.
Description: First U.S. edition. | New York : St. Martin’s Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043110| ISBN 9781250056641 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781466860452 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Saint Petersburg (Russia)—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Social aspects. | Saint Petersburg (Russia)—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Personal narratives. | Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Social aspects. | Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Personal narratives. | Saint Petersburg (Russia)—History, Military—20th century. | Visitors, Foreign—Russia (Federation)—Saint Petersburg—Biography. | Saint Petersburg (Russia)—Biography. | War and society—Russia (Federation)—Saint Petersburg—History—20th century. | Saint Petersburg (Russia)—Social conditions—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe Russia & the Former Soviet Union. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Historical.
Classification: LCC DK265.8.L4 R37 2017 | DDC 355.00947/210904—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043110
eISBN 978-1-46686045-2
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First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson, a Penguin Random House company
First U.S. Edition: February 2017
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Glossary of Eyewitnesses
Author’s Note
Map of Petrograd 1917
Prologue: ‘The Air is Thick with Talk of Catastrophe’
PART 1: THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
1 ‘Women are Beginning to Rebel at Standing in Bread Lines’
2 ‘No Place for an Innocent Boy from Kansas’
3 ‘Like a Bank Holiday with Thunder in the Air’
4 ‘A Revolution Carried on by Chance’
5 Easy Access to Vodka ‘Would Have Precipitated a Reign of Terror’
6 ‘Good to be Alive These Marvelous Days’
7 ‘People Still Blinking in the Light of the Sudden Deliverance’
8 The Field of Mars
9 Bolsheviki! It Sounds ‘Like All that the World Fears’
PART 2: THE JULY DAYS
10 ‘The Greatest Thing in History since Joan of Arc’
11 ‘What Would the Colony Say if We Ran Away?’
12 ‘This Pest-Hole of a Capital’
PART 3: THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION
13 ‘For Color and Terror and Grandeur This Makes Mexico Look Pale’
14 ‘We Woke Up to Find the Town in the Hands of the Bolsheviks’
15 ‘Crazy People Killing Each Other Just Like We Swat Flies at Home’
Postscript: The Forgotten Voices of Petrograd
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photographs
Also by Helen Rappaport
About the Author
Copyright
For Caroline Michel
List of Illustrations
1 The Nevsky Prospekt in Petrograd c. 1910. (Photo by Photoinstitut Bonartes/Imagno/Getty Images)
2 A sewing party at the British Embassy in Petrograd organized by Lady Georgina Buchanan, who stands at the head of the table. (Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)
3 Sir George Buchanan, pictured in 1912. (Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
4 Maurice Paléologue, the French Ambassador to Russia, c. 1914 (Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)
5 Sir George Buchanan dining with staff at the British Embassy in Petrograd (Courtesy of Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham)
6 US Ambassador to the Russian Empire David R. Francis and his valet Phil Jordan, pictured here aboard the Swedish steamship Oscar II headed to Oslo from New York (Courtesy of Missouri History Museum Library and Research Centre)
7 Francis with counsellor J. Butler Wright, being chauffeured in Petrograd by Phil Jordan in the US Embassy’s Model T Ford. (Courtesy of Missouri History Museum Library and Research Centre)
8 Leighton Rogers, a young American clerk at the National City Bank of New York in Petrograd (Courtesy of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress)
9 Julia Cantacuzène-Speransky, granddaughter of US President Ulysses S. Grant, American wife of a Russian prince, and subsequently a memoirist of the Russian Revolution. (Courtesy of Ulysses Grant Dietz Collection)
10 The intrepid war photographer and cinematographer Donald C. Thompson. (Author’s collection)
11 James Negley Farson, American journalist and adventurer. (Alamy)
12 Arthur Ransome, correspondent for the Daily News at the time of the Revolution. (Courtesy of the Arthur Ransome Trust. Reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library.)
13 Journalist Florence Harper, pictured while working as a nurse at an American Field Hospital in Ukraine during 1917. (Author’s collection)
14 A bread line in Petrograd in 1917 (© SPUTNIK/Alamy)
15 Nursing sisters and a wounded young soldier at the Anglo Russian Hospital (Library and Archives Canada)
16 The International Women’s Day parade in Petrograd, 23 February 1917 that sparked a wave of popular protest at bread shortages. (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)
17 Donald C Thompson’s picture shows how the February Revolution claimed fatal casualties faster than the morgues could cope with. (© akg-images/Alamy)
18 Revolutionary barricades on Liteiny Prospekt, March 1917 (Alamy)
19 Cossack troops on patrol in Petrograd. (Slava Katamidze Collection/Getty Images)
20 ‘Shoot the Pharaos on their roofs…’: a propaganda postcard urging popular resistance to the police (known derisively as ‘pharaohs’ or faraony) who would snipe at revolutionaries from rooftops. (akg-images)
21 The toppling of imperial monuments, February 27 1917. (akg-images)
22 Shop-front Imperial emblems thrown onto the ice under a bridge across the Fontanka Canal (© Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images)
23 Nurses with a wounded soldier at the Anglo Russian Hospital, observing events on the Nevsky Prospekt below. (Library and Archives Canada)
24 An artist’s rendering of the attack on the Hotel Astoria, February 28 1917 (Chronicle / Alamy)
25 The lobby of the Astoria after the attack, its floor bloodstained, a revolutionary sentry on guard (Author’s Collection)
26 Official buildings of the old tsarist regime, the first institutions to be attacked during the February Revolution: The District Court… (akg-images/ullstein bild)
27 … The Litovsky Prison (Illustrated London News Picture Library/Bridgeman Images)
28 … and Police Station No. 4 (akg-images / Sputnik)
29 A burnt fragment of a secret police record picked up on the street by American bank clerk Leighton Rogers (Courtesy of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress)
30 Soldiers digging the mass grave for the victims of the February Revolution at the Field of Mars. (akg-images/Sputnik)
31 The funeral procession for the dead of February (© Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy)
32 A crowded session of the Petrograd Soviet in the Tauride Palace (© SPUTNIK/Alamy)
33 Romanov coats of arms are burned in Petrograd, May 1917 (© Heritage Image Partnership/Alamy)
34 Troops of the Petrograd Women’s Death Battalion (© Tobie Mathew Collection / Bridgeman Images)
35 Commander of the Women’s Death Battalion Maria Bochkareva with Emmeline Pankhurst, their mutual regard clear (Everett Collection Historical / Alamy)
36 Jessie Kenney, suffragette and former mill worker who accompanied Emmeline Pankhurst to Russia. (Courtesy of Kenney Papers, University of East Anglia)
37 The Daily Mirror front page reports July Days violence in Petrograd. (© John Frost Newspapers/Alamy)
38 The American journalist John Reed, a ‘charismatic socialist and professional rebel’ (Granger, NYC/Alamy)
39 Feminist journalist Louise Bryant, who travelled to Russia with Reed, her husband (Evening Standard/Getty Images)
40 People run for cover during a gun battle on Nevsky Prospect in October 1917 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
41 A room in the Tsar’s Winter Palace, ransacked by the Bolsheviks after they took the Palace with little or no resistance. (Slava Katamidze Collection/Getty Images)
Glossary of Eyewitnesses
Anet, Claude (pseudonym of Jean Schopfer) (1868–1931). Swiss-born French tennis champion, antiquities collector, journalist and writer reporting for Le Petit Parisien.
Arbenina, Stella (Baroness Meyendorff; née Whishaw) (1885–1976). British actress from a long-standing family in the Anglo-Russian colony in St Petersburg; she married Russian aristocrat Baron Meyendorff. Arrested after the revolution; released in 1918, she settled in Estonia.
Armour, Norman (1887–1982). American career diplomat; Second Secretary at US embassy in Petrograd 1916–18. Returned to Russia not long after he left, to rescue stranded Princess Mariya Kudasheva, whom he married in 1919. Later served as diplomat in Paris, Haiti, Canada, Chile, Argentina and Spain.
Azabal, Lilie Bouton de Fernandez see Countess Nostitz
Beatty, Bessie (1886–1947). American journalist, worked in California for the San Francisco Bulletin before travelling to Russia. Continued in journalism after the revolution; during the 1940s based in New York City, became a popular radio broadcaster.
Berlin, Isaiah (1909–97). Russian-born British scholar and historian of ideas; grew up in Riga and St Petersburg; his family moved to Great Britain in 1921.
Bowerman, Elsie (1889–1973). English suffragette; orderly with a Russian hospital unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals; later the first woman barrister at the Old Bailey.
Bruce, Henry James (1880–1951). Head of the British Chancery in Petrograd; in 1915 he had married the Russian prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina.
Bryant, Louise (1885–1936). American journalist and socialist from the Greenwich Village set; travelled to Petrograd with her husband, John Reed, in 1917; married again after Reed’s death in 1920 and lived in Paris.
Buchanan, Meriel (1886–1959). Daughter of British ambassador Sir George Buchanan; volunteer nurse at British Colony Hospital in Petrograd run by her mother, Lady Georgina Buchanan, during World War I. After leaving Russia wrote numerous books and articles about her time there.
Bury, George (1865–1958). Canadian shipper and Vice President of the Canadian Pacific Railway; in Russia during World War I to report on the railway system for the British government. Knighted in 1917.
(Lady) Buchanan, Georgina (1863–1922). Scion of the influential Bathurst family, wife of British ambassador in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan, and mother of Meriel Buchanan; active in relief work in Petrograd during World War I and patron of British Colony Hospital.
(Sir) Buchanan, George (1854–1924). Distinguished British diplomat and son of an ambassador. Served in many locations, beginning with Berlin in 1901; British ambassador to Russia from 1910.
Cantacuzène-Speransky, Princess (1876–1975). Born Julia Dent Grant, American socialite, granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant. Fled to USA after the revolution and was doyenne of White Russian community in Washington; divorced her Russian husband in 1934.
Chadbourn, Philip (who wrote his account of Petrograd under the pseudonym of Paul Wharton) (1889–1970). American relief worker in France and Belgium during World War I; sent to Petrograd to inspect and report on camps for internees in Russia.
Chambrun, Charles de (1875–1952). French diplomat and writer; First Secretary at Petrograd embassy from 1914.
Chandler Whipple, George (1866–1924). American engineer and sanitation expert who travelled to Petrograd with the American Red Cross Mission as Deputy Commissioner for Russia.
Clare, (Rev.) Joseph (1885–?). English Congregational preacher and bachelor of divinity; pastor of the American Church in Petrograd from 1913. Settled in Illinois after he left Russia and took US citizenship.
Cotton, Dorothy (1886–1977). Montreal-trained nursing sister with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, who served at the Anglo-Russian Hospital November 1915–June 1916 and January– August 1917.
Crosley, Pauline (1867–1955). wife of US Naval attaché, Captain Walter Selwyn Crosley; in Petrograd March 1917–March 1918, the Crosleys had a hair-raising escape out of Russia during the Civil War.
Dearing, Fred (1879–1963). American diplomat, worked at Peking legation 1908–9; in Russia in 1916–17 oversaw the transition from ambassador George F. Marye to David R. Francis.
Dorr, Rheta Childe (1868–1948). American journalist, feminist and political activist; friend of Emmeline Pankhurst. Went to Petrograd as correspondent of the New York Evening Mail, and published one of the earliest American accounts of the July Days. A motor accident after her return to the USA seriously impaired her professional life thereafter.
Dosch-Fleurot, Arno (1879–1951). American journalist; remained in Europe as foreign correspondent after 1917 and became special correspondent for International News Service in Berlin. As an outspoken critic of Nazis, was arrested and interned; in 1941 settled in Spain.
Farson, Negley (1890–1960). Born in New York, he settled in the UK. In Petrograd during World War I, as agent for an Anglo-American export business trying to secure orders for motorbikes from the Russian government. Later turned to travel writing and journalism; sometime foreign correspondent of Chicago Daily News.
Francis, David R. (1850–1927). US ambassador to Russia 1916–18; formerly mayor of St Louis (1885) and governor of Missouri (1889–93).
Fuller, John Louis (1894–1962). Indianapolis businessman and insurance executive; trainee with National City Bank in Petrograd 1917–18. Colleague of Leighton Rogers, Fred Sikes and Chester Swinnerton.
Garstin, Denis (1890–1918). English cavalry captain seconded as intelligence officer in the British Propaganda Unit in Petrograd; killed during the Allied Intervention at Arkhangelsk.
Gibson, William J. (dates unknown) Born in Canada, he grew up in St Petersburg and served in the Russian army in 1914; newspaper correspondent in Petrograd 1917; left Russia in 1918.
Grant, Julia see Princess Cantacuzène-Speransky
Grant, Lilias (1878–1975). Hospital orderly from Inverness, serving with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals on the Eastern Front; visited Petrograd with her fellow orderly Ethel Moir.
(Lady) Grey, Sybil (1882–1966). British VAD, who assisted Lady Muriel Paget in the running of the Anglo-Russian Hospital; daughter of former Governor-General of Canada and cousin to British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.
Hall, Bert (1885–1948). American combat aviator who flew with the French Lafayette Escadrille prior to US entry into World War I.
Harper, Florence (1886–?). Canadian staff reporter for Leslie’s Weekly, who worked in tandem with war photographer Donald Thompson in Petrograd.
Harper, Samuel (1882–1943). American Slavicist; made numerous trips to Russia with official delegations as interpreter and guide, including the 1917 Root Mission to Petrograd. An unofficial adviser to David R. Francis.
Heald, Edward (1885–1967). Member of International Committee of the YMCA, sent to Russia to monitor the treatment of German and Austrian POWs. In Petrograd 1916–19.
Hegan, Edith (1881–1973). Canadian nurse from St John, New Brunswick, who served with Canadian Army Medical Corps in France before being posted to the Anglo-Russian Hospital in May 1916.
Houghteling, James (1883–1962). Chicago-born diplomat and newspaperman; special attaché at US Petrograd embassy; Vice President of Chicago Daily News 1926–31, later became a commissioner for US Bureau of Immigration & Naturalization.
Jefferson, Geoffrey (1886–1961). English surgeon at the Anglo-Russian Hospital; when it closed he transferred to the Royal Army Medical Corps on the Western Front. In later life he became an eminent neurosurgeon and FRCS.
Jones, James Stinton (1884–1979). South African-born mechanical engineer; worked in Russia 1905–17 for Westinghouse on the electrification of the Petrograd tramways; also oversaw installation of generator at Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo.
Jordan, Phil(ip) (1868–1941). Black valet, cook and chauffeur from Jefferson City, Missouri, in service to David R. Francis and his family from 1889; accompanied Francis to Russia in 1916.
Judson, William J. (1865–1923). US army engineer; military attaché at Petrograd embassy June 1917–January 1918, responsible for security of US citizens in Russia.
Kenney, Jessie (1887–1985). Yorkshire-born cotton mill worker who joined the suffragette movement; worked closely with Emmeline Pankhurst Muriel (1876–1938) in the WSPU. After 1920 gave up political campaigning; later pursued a writing career, but remained unpublished.
Knox, General (Major-General Sir Alfred Knox) (1870–1964). British army officer; military attaché in Petrograd from 1911, observer on the Eastern Front; in 1924 became a Tory MP.
Lampson, Oliver Locker (1880–1954). British MP; in 1914 appointed a commander in the Royal Naval Air Service’s Armoured Car Division, which was sent to assist the Russian army on the Eastern Front; returned to UK to continue serving as an MP after the war.
Lindley, Francis (1872–1950). Counsellor at the British embassy 1915–17; consul-general in Petrograd 1919; later served as British ambassador to Japan (1931–4).
Lockhart, Robert Bruce (1887–1970). British diplomat and spy, vice consul at Moscow 1914–17, but made frequent visits to Petrograd. Acting British consul-general after February Revolution; left Russia before the October Revolution, but was back in Moscow in January 1918.
Lombard, (Rev.) Bousfield Swan (1866–1951). English chaplain attached to the British embassy and the English Church in Petrograd from 1908, much respected in the British colony. Arrested and interned by Bolsheviks in 1918.
Long, Robert Crozier (1872–1938). Anglo-Irish journalist and author; Petrograd correspondent for Associated Press. From 1923 to his death, Berlin correspondent for New York Times.
Marcosson, Isaac (1876–1961). American journalist and writer from Kentucky; reported from Petrograd for the Saturday Evening Post.
Maugham, Somerset (1874–1965). English novelist and short-story writer; sometime spy with the British Secret Intelligence Service during World War I. These experiences formed the basis for his Ashenden collection of short stories published in 1928.
Moir, Ethel (1884–1973). Nursing orderly with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals on the Eastern Front; in Petrograd with fellow nurse Lilias Grant.
Naudeau, Ludovic (1872–1949). French war correspondent for Le Temps; arrested by the Bolsheviks in 1918, he spent five months in prison in Moscow.
Néry, Amélie de (dates unknown). French essayist and journalist, active 1900s–20s, who wrote under the pseudonym Marylie Markovitch.
Nostitz, Countess (Lilie Bouton de Fernandez Azabal) (1875–1967). French-American adventuress and socialite from Iowa; originally a repertory company actress in New York, as Madeleine Bouton. Fled to Biarritz after the revolution; after Nostitz’s death there in 1926 she married a third time and settled in Spain.
Noulens, Joseph (1864–1944). French government minister sent to replace ambassador Maurice Paléologue. In Petrograd from July 1917. Back in France, he remained an anti-Bolshevik campaigner, as leader of the Society of French Interests in Russia.
Oudendijk, Willem (later William Oudendyk) (1874–1953). Distinguished Dutch diplomat, in service 1874–1931 in China, Persia and Russia. Ambassador to Petrograd 1917–18. Awarded an honorary knighthood (KCMG) for his efforts on behalf of British subjects stranded in Russia after the revolution.
(Lady) Paget, Muriel (1876–1938). British philanthropist; set up soup kitchen for the poor in Southwark 1905; engaged in medical relief work in Russia during World War I. With Sybil Grey founded the Anglo-Russian Hospital in Petrograd.
Paléologue, Maurice (1859–1944). French career diplomat, contemporary of Sir George Buchanan. French ambassador to Petrograd 1914–17; elected to the Académie française in 1928.
Pankhurst, Emmeline (1858–1928). English suffragette leader, founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903; lifelong political activist and campaigner for women’s rights.
Patouillet, Louise (?–?). Nothing is known of the life of this French resident, in Petrograd from 1912, beyond the fact that she was married to Dr Jules Patouillet, director of the French Institute in Petrograd, but she left an extremely valuable diary of her time in the city, now in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in California.
Pax, Paulette (stage name of Paulette Ménard) (1887–1942). Born in Russia, Pax returned there in December 1916 as a member of the resident French troupe at the Mikhailovsky Theatre. She left Russia in September 1918, and in 1929 became co-director of the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris.
Poole, Ernest (1880–1950). American novelist, sent to report on the Russian Revolution for the New Republic and Saturday Evening Post; Pulitzer Prize Winner in 1918.
Ransome, Arthur (1884–1967). British journalist, correspondent of the Daily News. Briefly returned to Russia in 1919 for Manchester Guardian. Later a successful novelist, famous for his children’s series Swallows and Amazons.
Reed, John (1887–1920). American rebel, writer and poet, famous among the bohemian set of Greenwich Village for his social campaigning and outspoken left-wing views. Arrived in Petrograd September 1917 with his wife Louise Bryant.
Rhys Williams, Albert (1883–1962). American Congregational minister, labour organiser and ardent communist. Close friend of John Reed.
Robien, Louis de (1888–1958). French count, military attaché at French embassy in Petrograd from 1914 to November 1918.
Rogers, Leighton (1893–1962). Clerk with National City Bank of New York’s Petrograd branch 1916–18; volunteered for military intelligence 1918. On his return to USA worked in aeronautics for US Department of Commerce. Friend and colleague of Fred Sikes and Chester Swinnerton.
Seymour, Dorothy (1882–1953). English Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse (VAD) at the Anglo-Russian Hospital; daughter of a general, granddaughter of an admiral, she had a position at court as a Woman of the Bedchamber to Princess Christian.
Sikes, Fred (1893–1958). Princeton graduate who worked at the Petrograd branch of the National City Bank of New York 1916–18; retired as Assistant Vice President of the bank in New York. Colleague of Leighton Rogers and Chester Swinnerton.
Stebbing, Edward (1872–1960). English professor of forestry; sent on assignment to Russia during World War I to investigate wood supplies for British army trenches and light railways.
Stoker, Enid (1893–1961). English VAD at the Anglo-Russian Hospital; met Negley Farson while in Petrograd and married him in London in 1920. Their son was the writer and broadcaster Daniel Farson.
Stopford, Bertie (Albert) (1860–1939). English art dealer, specialist on Fabergé, socialite and friend of Prince Felix Yusupov.
Swinnerton, Chester (1894–1960). Massachusetts-born Harvard graduate; trainee clerk with the National City Bank’s Petrograd branch. Worked for the bank for many years in South America after he left Russia. Friend and colleague of Leighton Rogers and Fred Sikes.
Thompson, Donald (1885–1947). American war photographer and cinematographer from Kansas, in Petrograd January–July 1917.
Walpole, Hugh (1884–1941). New Zealand-born journalist and novelist; Red Cross worker in Russia when war broke out. Returned to Petrograd as head of the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau 1916–17 with Harold Williams and Denis Garstin.
Wightman, Orrin Sage (1873–1965). American doctor, served in US Army Medical Corps during World War I; in 1917 a member of American Red Cross medical mission to Russia.
Williams, Harold (1876–1928). New Zealand-born journalist, linguist and ardent Russophile. Petrograd correspondent for the Daily Chronicle and official at the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau with Hugh Walpole and Denis Garstin. Fiercely anti-Bolshevik, he fled Petrograd with his Russian wife and became foreign editor of The Times.
Wilton, Robert (1868–1925). British journalist; European correspondent of New York Herald 1889–1903, then Times Special Correspondent in Petrograd. Returned to journalism in Paris after leaving Russia.
Winship, North (1885–1968). American diplomat; consul-general in Petrograd and many consulate posts thereafter; retired as US ambassador to South Africa 1949.
Woodhouse, Arthur (1867–1961). English diplomat; British consul at Petrograd 1907–18.
Woodhouse, Ella (1896–1969). Daughter of British consul in Petrograd, Arthur Woodhouse.
Wright, J. [ Joshua] Butler (1877–1939). American diplomat; replaced Fred Dearing as counsellor at the US embassy in Petrograd October 1916. Later served as an ambassador in Hungary, Uruguay, Czechoslovakia and Cuba.
Author’s Note
In Russia in 1917 the old-style Julian calendar, running thirteen days behind the Western Gregorian calendar, was still in use, a fact that creates endless confusion and frustration for historian and reader alike. Many of the foreign eyewitnesses resident in Petrograd* found it confusing, too, and although living for some time in Russia, chose to ignore the Julian calendar, dating their diaries and letters home to the UK, USA and elsewhere by the Gregorian one. Some occasionally noted both dates, but most did not; others, like Jessie Kenney, struggled to maintain both dates in their diaries – and ended up in a total muddle.
In order to spare the reader considerable pain on this score, and because this book tells the story of the February and October Revolutions in Russia as they happened, by the Russian calendar (and not as March/November, by the Western calendar), all dates of letters, diaries and reports quoted in the text that were written in Russia at the time events were taking place, have been converted to the Russian old-style (OS) calendar, in order to fit the chronology of the book. The original Gregorian (NS) dates are clear to see in the original sources referred to in the notes, though in some cases, to avoid confusion, especially where an event occurred outside Russia, both dates are given.
Many of the eyewitnesses used widely diverging spelling styles for Russian names and places. In addition, Philip Jordan had his own extremely idiosyncratic style of punctuation, capitalisation and spelling, which has been deliberately preserved in order to convey the immediacy and excitement of his narrative. In order to spare the reader the endless repetition of [sic], these spellings, and any other spelling oddities in eyewitness accounts, have been retained as given, and explained where necessary.
* St Petersburg had been renamed Petrograd on the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914.
PROLOGUE
‘The Air is Thick with Talk of Catastrophe’
Petrograd was a brooding, beleaguered city that last desperate winter before the revolution broke; a snowbound city of ice-locked canals and looming squares. Its fine wide streets and elegant palaces of pink granite and coloured stucco fronted by rows of airy columns and arches no longer exuded a sense of imperial grandeur but, rather, a sense of decay. Everywhere you went amid the forbidding architecture of this ‘city for giants’ you could hear the ‘swish of the wind, and the tinkling of many, many bells of all sizes and tones’, rounded off by the ‘compelling boom of the great bell of St Isaac which comes from nowhere and envelops everything’.1 In the grip of winter, with its broad vistas laid open to the arctic cold blowing in across the Gulf of Finland, Russia’s capital had always assumed a chilly, haunting beauty on the grand scale that was peculiarly its own. But now, three years into the war, it was overflowing with thousands of refugees – Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians and Jews – who had fled the fighting on the Eastern Front. The capital was subdued and discouraged, and a ‘malign, disturbing atmosphere’ hung over it.2 The winter of 1916–17 was also marked by a new and ominous fixture on the landscape: the long silent queues of downcast women huddling in the cold, waiting interminably for bread, milk, meat – whatever they could lay their hands on. Petrograd was weary of war. Petrograd was hungry.
Such had become the daily grinding hardship for the majority of the Russian population at large; and yet, despite the visible and crippling wartime shortages and the anguish of deprivation etched on the faces of its inhabitants, the city sheltered a large and diverse foreign community who were still thriving. The city might be Russian, but big international industry was still humming across the River Neva in the working-class districts of Vasilievsky Island, the Vyborg Side and beyond – where the great cotton and paper mills, shipyards, timber yards, sawmills and steelworks were still being run largely by British owners and managers,* many of whom had lived in Russia for decades. The vast red-brick Thornton’s woollen mill – one of the biggest in Russia, founded in the 1880s – employed three thousand workers and was owned by three brothers from Yorkshire. Then there was the Nevsky Thread Manufacturing Company (established by Coats of Paisley, Scotland); the Neva Stearin Soap and Candle Works, run by William Miller & Co. of Leith, who also owned a brewery in the city; and Egerton Hubbard & Co.’s cotton mills and printing works.
A host of specialist stores in the city catered to the needs of such privileged expatriates, along with the wealthy Russian aristocracy. Even in 1916 you could still window-shop in front of the big shining plate-glass windows of the French and English luxury stores along the Nevsky Prospekt: Petrograd’s equivalent of Bond Street. Here the French dressmakers, tailors and glovers – such as Brisac, couturier to the Empress, and Brocard the French perfumier, who also supplied the imperial family – continued to enjoy the patronage of the rich. At the English Shop (better known by its French rendering as the ‘Magasin Anglais’) you could buy the best Harris tweeds and English soap and enjoy the store’s ‘demure English provincialism’, fancying yourself ‘in the High Street in Chester, or Leicester, or Truro, or Canterbury’.3 Druce’s imported British goods and Maples furniture from the Tottenham Court Road; Watkins & Co., the English bookseller, was patronised by many in the British colony; other foreign expatriates could catch up with the news back home by stopping off at Wolff’s bookshop, which sold magazines and newspapers in seven different languages. Everywhere, still, in Petrograd, ‘there was not a single shop of importance but displayed boldly lettered notices: “English spoken”, “Ici on parle Francais” [and, until the outbreak of war], “Man spricht Deutsch”’.4 French was still the lingua franca of the Russian aristocracy and bureaucracy, the Journal de St-Pétersbourg being the semi-official organ of the Russian Foreign Office and much in demand during wartime, with so many French diplomats and military attachés in the city. But English had even greater exclusivity, as the language of the ‘higher circles of the Court’ and the imperial family.5
By the autumn of 1916 the diplomatic community in wartime Petrograd was dominated by the Allied embassies of Britain, France and Italy, and the still-neutral USA – the large diplomatic contingent of Germany and Austria-Hungary having departed in 1914. Expatriate life in the city had always traditionally devolved to the dominating presence of the British colony of some two thousand or so nationals, its embassy and its gossipy focal point, the Anglican Church on the English Embankment, popularly known as the ‘English Church’. Recalling his years in Petrograd, the church’s resident priest, Rev. Bousfield Swan Lombard (who also served as chaplain to the British embassy from 1908), spoke of a community that was ‘hospitable beyond all expectation’, but whose outlook on life he had found disturbingly ‘ultra-conservative’. ‘So far from being broad and unfettered’, the colony was ‘narrowed by convention to such an extent that it took me quite a long time to realize that such conventionality was possible’. It was a highly insular community that had remained mistrustful of change or innovation. ‘Any new suggestion was met, not by “it is impracticable, or unworkable”,’ wrote Lombard, ‘but by either “it has never been the custom here” or it is “quite out of the question”.’6 He admitted regretfully that he was ‘amazed at the narrowness and small-mindedness of the British colony; it resembled a little gossipy English village, or perhaps better still, a Cathedral close’.7
Life in this socially incestuous Barchester-like enclave was largely reduced to ‘small coteries of intimate friends’, as antiques dealer and socialite Bertie Stopford remembered.8 Many doggedly clung to their English ways, to the extent of refusing to learn or speak Russian, and sent their children back to boarding school in England; most of the rest insisted on English or Scottish governesses and tutors, or else, failing that, French ones. For their social life the British colony tended to prefer their own parties, concerts and theatricals, though they all loved the Russian ballet. They baffled the Russians with their passion for sport, and ran their own cricket, football, tennis, yachting and rowing clubs; they even had a club for racing pigeons. They played golf together at Murino – a course they had constructed ten miles north-east of Petrograd, ‘in a stubborn attempt to let nothing stand in their way of expressing themselves’.9*
The closed, clannish society of the British colony extended also to its New English Club at number 36 Bolshaya Morskaya. Although a few British diplomats were allowed honorary membership of the ultra-elitist Imperial Yacht Club immediately opposite – patronised by the aristocracy and senior members of the court and imperial civil service – it was the New English Club that was the exclusive preserve of the colony, frequented by ‘practically all the clubbable Britons’ in the city, its chief function being to promote the interests of British business under the chairmanship of the resident ambassador.10 It allowed only a handful of chosen Americans to be members. Negley Farson, an American entrepreneur who had been in Petrograd for some time grappling with venal officialdom in his attempts to sell motorcycles to the Imperial Russian Army, abhorred this narrow world. The British expats ‘lived like feudal lords … in baronial fashion, with their abonnement [subscription] at the Ballet, their belligerent private coachmen, their New English Club on the Morskayia, their golf club, their tennis club, their “English Magazine” [the Magasin Anglais]’, which was the ‘only place in Russia where one could get good shoes or leather goods’, and their ‘hordes of servants’. He resented the social cachet they enjoyed, which opened doors far more easily than those he was banging on, notably at the Russian War Ministry. ‘An Englishman, any Englishman in Tsarist Russia, was automatically a Milord – and treated as such,’ he noted.11
In Petrograd during the war years there was certainly no ‘Milord’ more to the manner born than the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, who oversaw the diplomatic mission and the British Chancery at its prime position at number 4 Palace Embankment, located a short walk from the Winter Palace and facing the River Neva. The embassy occupied a section of a grand mansion rented from the Saltykov family, who retained rooms at the back of the house facing the Field of Mars – the large military parade ground located not far from the Winter Palace. Arriving in St Petersburg in 1910 from an ambassadorship in Sofia, Bulgaria,* Buchanan and his wife Lady Georgina had inherited the existing furnishings of reproduction Louis XVI furniture and de rigueur crystal chandeliers and red brocade hangings of any embassy, but had augmented them with their own collection of fine furniture, books and paintings collected during their long diplomatic life in Europe. This personal touch, as their daughter Meriel recalled, gave the rooms ‘a more homelike appearance, so that sometimes with the curtains drawn, one could almost imagine oneself in some old London square’.12
Sir George had in fact been contemplating removing the embassy to better premises for some time, only for the outbreak of war in 1914 to put paid to such ambitions. Although it might have looked grand on the surface, the embassy had several shortcomings. Its sewerage system was antediluvian and the building was in need of considerable restoration and redecoration. It required a substantial staff to maintain its baroque state rooms, its Chancery offices, located on the first floor, and – two flights of circular stairs above – the ballroom and large dining room that were used for bigger official functions. An all-essential English butler, William, was supported by a host of footmen, housemaids and an Italian chef, as well as numberless Russians employed to do menial household tasks and run the kitchens.13 The Buchanans had brought a motor car with them, and their own English chauffeur, but also maintained carriages and sledges and a Russian coachman to drive them.
Occupying centre stage not just at his own embassy, but as the acknowledged dean of the diplomatic community in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan was highly regarded by Russians and foreigners alike and inspired the greatest loyalty – if not hero worship – in those who worked for him. He was that archetypal gentleman-diplomat: an austere, monocled Old Etonian, the son of Sir Andrew Buchanan (himself a diplomat who had also served at the embassy in St Petersburg), and a man of honour in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Tall, slim and urbane, Buchanan was a classical scholar and a good linguist (though he spoke no Russian), who was widely read but who secretly loved detective novels and enjoyed nothing better than an undemanding game of bridge. His ‘imperturbable serenity’ and formality could at times be misinterpreted as excessively austere, and some of his staff found his ‘baffling simplicity’ and slightly effete absent-mindedness disconcerting. ‘He was as gentle at bridge as in all else, but dreamily unaware of whether he was playing bridge or Happy Families,’ recalled one of his staff.14
But there was no doubting Buchanan’s modesty and – when the time came – his courage, or his unswerving loyalty towards those in his employ. It was abundantly clear to all who worked with him in those last dying days of imperial Russia that Sir George was by now a sick man, whose ill health, eroded by his unstinting dedication to duty and an increased workload during the war, had been made worse by his anxieties about the precarious position of the Tsar and the growing threat of revolution.* Although Sir George occasionally managed a fishing trip to Finland or a game of golf at Murino, by the end of 1916 he seemed, to British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart, ‘a frail-looking man with a tired, sad expression’. But he had become a familiar and respected figure on the streets of the capital, and ‘when he took his daily walk to the Russian Foreign Office, his hat cocked on one side, his tall, lean figure slightly drooping under his many cares, every Englishman felt that here as much as the diplomatic precincts of the Embassy itself was a piece of the soil of England’.15
If at times Sir George might be seen to be fading, his formidable wife made up for his flagging energies. Lady Georgina, née Bathurst, was herself ‘of the purest purple’. ‘As every Britisher knows,’ quipped Negley Farson, ‘there exist only three families: “The Holy Family, the Royal Family – and the Bathursts”.’16 Lady Georgina was an imposing woman, whose ‘heart was in proportion to her bulk’, and her prodigious energies were matched by her decided and well-voiced opinions. She was ‘indiscreet and quick to take offence: a generous friend but a dangerous enemy’, as some of her female associates in the British colony came to discover, and she ‘sat on a dozen committees and quarrelled with the lot’. She ran the domestic life of the embassy ‘like clockwork’ and ‘never fail[ed] in that passion for punctuality which in the Ambassador amounted almost to a mania’.17 Since 1914, Lady Georgina had also risen to the challenge of war work, commandeering the embassy ballroom and filling it with long tables loaded with cotton wool, lint and materials for her twice-weekly sewing parties. Here ladies of the British colony came to ‘roll bandages, to make pneumonia-jackets, all kinds of first-aid dressings, pyjamas, dressing jackets, and dressing gowns’ – some for the wounded at the front, the rest for use in the British Colony Hospital for Wounded Russian Soldiers. Located in a wing of the large Pokrovsky Hospital on Vasilievsky Island, the hospital had become Lady Buchanan’s personal fiefdom after she had set it up on the outbreak of war; her daughter Meriel also worked there as a volunteer nurse.18
After Russia had entered the war in 1914, the old established expatriate community in Petrograd was augmented by the arrival of a newer, brasher breed of Americans: engineers and entrepreneurs dealing in war materiel, manufactured goods and munitions. American staff at International Harvester (the farm-machinery manufacturer), Westinghouse (for several years involved in the electrification of Petrograd’s trams) and the Singer Sewing Machine Company (which had brought the first machines to Russia in 1865) now rubbed shoulders on the streets of the city with fellow countrymen sent from New York to run the Petrograd branches of the National City Bank and the New York Life Insurance Company, not to mention with American YMCA workers who had set up the Russian equivalent – the Mayak (Lighthouse) – there in 1900. In April 1916 the Petrograd diplomatic community had found itself welcoming a new American ambassador, after the incumbent George Marye had unexpectedly resigned – supposedly due to ill health. The gossip suggested, however, that he had been quietly pushed by the State Department, which had thought him too pro-Russian at a time when the USA was still neutral in the war.
Marye’s successor was the most unlikely of candidates. A genial Democrat from Kentucky, David Rowland Francis was a self-made millionaire who had made his money in St Louis from grain-dealing and investments in railway companies. He had served as governor of Missouri (1889–93) and had lobbied for St Louis to stage the highly successful Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 – better known as the St Louis World’s Fair – as well as the summer Olympics later that same year. His ambassadorial experience was, however, nil, although in 1914 he had been offered and had declined an ambassadorship in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, the choice of Francis for Petrograd seemed logical: he was a man of proven business acumen, whose primary role would be to renegotiate the US trade treaty with Russia that had been broken off in December 1912 in response to the tsarist government’s anti-Semitic policies. Russia, as Francis well knew, was eager to buy US grain, cotton and armaments.
On 21 April (NS; 8 OS) 1916 Francis had sailed from Hoboken in New Jersey on the Swedish steamship Oscar II with his private secretary, Arthur Dailey, and his devoted black valet-cum-chauffeur, Philip Jordan. His wife Jane stayed at home in St Louis in the care of the couple’s six sons, due to her poor health and her dread of facing the legendarily freezing Russian winters; Francis had not insisted on her accompanying him, knowing full well that his wife ‘would not like it’ in Petrograd.19 In her absence, and reticent about embracing the social life of the city (like his counterpart Buchanan, he spoke no Russian), Francis relied very heavily on the protective ‘Phil’, as he liked to call him: a man he respected as ‘loyal, honest and efficient and intelligent withal’.20
Jordan, whose African American origins are unclear, was a small, wiry man who had grown up in Hog Alley – a squalid slum district of Jefferson, Missouri, notorious (much like New York’s Bowery) as a haunt of thieves, prostitutes and drunks. His early life had been spent as a hard drinker and gang member, regularly caught up in street fights. Later he worked on the riverboats along the Missouri, before, in 1889 – and now ostensibly a reformed character – he had been recommended to Francis, the newly elected governor of Missouri. After a brief period working for the subsequent governor, Jordan returned to the Francis family’s grand mansion in St Louis’s prosperous West End in 1902, serving as valet or, as Americans then termed it, ‘body servant’. Here he had seen four US presidents – Cleveland, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson – come and go as visitors, and had been taught to read and write by Mrs Francis, who was considerably more forgiving than her husband of Jordan’s occasional lapses into heavy drinking, and to whom Jordan became devoted.21
The culture shock awaiting Francis and Jordan – freshly arrived from the balmy American South to cold, wartime Petrograd – was enormous. During their crossing Francis’s Russian interpreter, a young Slavist named Samuel Harper, had done his best to give the inexperienced ambassador ‘a crash course on what he might expect in Russia’. Harper came to the conclusion, on hearing Francis in conversation with some American businessmen heading to Petrograd on the same ship, that he was a ‘very blunt, outpoken American, who believed in speaking his mind regardless of the rules of diplomacy’.22 The contrast with the buttoned-up and immaculately schooled Sir George Buchanan could not have been clearer; the two ambassadors were to have little in common.
Upon arriving in the Stockholm Express at Petrograd’s Finland Station on 15 April, Francis had headed for the US embassy, only too painfully aware of what awaited him: ‘I had never been in Russia before. I had never been an Ambassador before. My knowledge of Russia up to the time of my appointment had been that of the average intelligent American citizen – unhappily slight and vague.’23 Such disarming candour made it inevitable that his peers in the diplomatic community would view him disparagingly. As Robert Bruce Lockhart put it, ‘Old Francis [did] not know a Left Social Revolutionary from a potato’ but, to his credit, ‘he was as simple and as fearless as a child’. Francis’s kind-hearted, tolerant and well-meaning manner was not, however, admired by some of his more experienced embassy staff, to whom he seemed a ‘hick’ from St Louis with no understanding of Russian politics. Lacking the public-school background and years of assiduous honing in the arts of continental diplomacy that had come so naturally to his colleague Buchanan, Francis seemed ingenuous, to say the least. Arthur Bullard, an unofficial US envoy to Russia, thought him ‘an old fool’; and ‘a stuffed shirt, a dumb head’ was the opinion of Dr Orrin Sage Wightman, who arrived in the city later with a US Red Cross Commission.24 But to the Russians, who saw in America the prospect of lucrative and much-needed commercial relations, the new ambassador was ‘easily the most popular diplomat in Petrograd’.25 Francis, moreover, was socially engaging in a way that his British counterpart was not. He made no bones about his enjoyment of the finest Kentucky bourbon and fat cigars; he chewed plugs of tobacco and was able to ‘ring’ the spittoon at a distance of several feet. Unlike the dithering Buchanan at his games of bridge, Francis’s amiable simplicity did not extend to cards; he was ‘no child at poker’, as Lockhart learned to his cost. Whenever he joined the US ambassador for a game, Francis always cleaned him out.26
In the summer of 1916 Francis and chauffeur Phil were delighted to finally take delivery of the ambassador’s Model T Ford, specially shipped over from Missouri. They took great pride in riding around in it with ‘a three-foot Stars and Stripes wired to the radiator cap’, which made people wonder ‘whether the breeze of the car’s motion wave[d] the flag or the flag waving ma[de] the Ford go’.27 The US embassy was very well positioned at 34 Furshtatskaya, in a well-to-do district in the centre of the city populated by Russian civil servants and other foreign diplomats. It was also a short walk from the Duma, the tsarist State Assembly housed at the Tauride Palace on Shpalernaya, and beyond it the Smolny Institute, which would become the focus of Bolshevik activities during the October Revolution. Like the British embassy, it was rented from a Russian aristocrat – Count Mikhail Grabbe – and suffered from similar limitations. It was, recalled special attaché James Houghteling, ‘a disappointing two-story affair without dignity of façade, squeezed into the middle of a block with a big apartment building on one side and another modest residence on the other’.28 Its interior was in need of decoration and was poorly furnished, so much so that Francis thought it looked like a ‘warehouse’.29 He soon started looking for better premises but, much like Buchanan, was thwarted in his attempts to find anything that suited while there was a war on.
Francis’s office – from the balcony of which he could stand and observe the street below – was located on the second floor, along with a bedroom and sitting room. But the rooms were very cramped. The embassy was understaffed and in disarray; far worse, as far as Francis was concerned, the coffee was ‘not very good’, either.30 He liked to entertain and to dine out with fellow Americans, as he missed his large family back in St Louis. US businessmen – especially executives of the National City Bank that had recently set up in Petrograd – were often invited to join him for meals. He also struck up a friendship with the American socialite Julia Grant, a granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant who had married into the Russian aristocracy as Princess Cantacuzène-Speransky (though her friends in the US colony somewhat crassly called her ‘Princess Mike’) and who had a suite at the Hotel d’Europe.* The Princess lavishly entertained Francis, as did other wealthy aristocrats, either in their Petrograd town houses or in private rooms at their favourite hotels.
From the outset, Phil Jordan had a strong sense of responsibility for ‘The Governor’, as everyone had customarily addressed Francis since his years in the post in Missouri. He acted as the ambassador’s minder whenever Francis ventured forth on the streets of Petrograd, and together they proceeded to muddle through the difficulties of becoming acquainted with all things Russian, notably its cuisine. As Francis told his son Perry: ‘Phil and I are still trying to get along with the Russian cook whom he is having great difficulty in instructing how to prepare a meal in the American way, as she does not understand a word of English, and he can’t speak a word of Russian.’31 Help was soon at hand in the guise of an acquaintance Francis had made on the ship to Russia: Madame Matilda de Cram, a Russian returning to Petrograd, who lived nearby and became a regular visitor at the embassy, volunteering also to teach Francis French and Jordan Russian. Francis’s friendship with Madame de Cram, which included taking her to the races on his day off, was conducted much to the consternation of his staff and of Allied counter-intelligence, who had her marked as a German spy, out to seduce the gullible new ambassador.32*
Nevertheless, thanks to Madame de Cram, the resourceful Jordan soon had adequate Russian to go shopping unaided, claiming that ‘I’m making out pretty well since I learned the language.’ So resourceful was he that Jordan was soon finding kitchen utensils and furnishings for the embassy, including a decent-sized dining table that could seat twenty.33 Having found their feet, Francis dispensed with the Russian cook and thereafter Jordan prepared his breakfast, until they managed to engage a ‘negro cook who is very black, a West India negro named Green’. Since his arrival, Jordan had been greatly struck by how ‘few negroes’ there were in Petrograd, and ‘none like our negroes’.34 Francis noticed, too, explaining to his wife that Phil, who was ‘relatively pale skinned’ and was ‘almost white enough to pass for a white man’, did not go out on the streets with the Trinidadian cook because he was ‘so black’.35 Jordan and Green seemed to spend most of their time ‘scheming to get food’, and somehow or other conjured dishes for the ambassador’s table despite the extreme shortages, for, armed with his pidgin Russian, Jordan turned out to be ‘fearless about roaming the streets and haggled at the markets, mixing in with the multicultural, polyglot crowd’.36† There was no doubting how much Francis missed his American luxuries: he waited months for the case of hams and bacon that he had ordered from New York to get to Russia, and even longer for two cases of Scotch whisky shipped from London that still hadn’t arrived, come October.37
The resourceful Phil Jordan had rapidly become ‘invaluable’ in all matters relating to the day-to-day running of the embassy.38 As embassy official Fred Dearing noted in his diary: ‘One sees in the instant that Phil is somebody. No one could be less obtrusive, but definitely somebody.’39 He was close at hand to assist Francis when, to celebrate the Fourth of July, Francis had bravely mounted a successful reception for over one hundred guests. ‘I engaged a first class orchestra of nine pieces,’ he told Jane, and ‘thanks to Phil we had a delicious punch in addition to the tea served from the samovar which we had recently bought. We had caviar sandwiches, tomato sandwiches, and what appeared to be unknown to the Russians, we had delicious ices.’40 The members of Petrograd’s American colony had greatly welcomed such a party and its culinary treats, but getting himself known on the snobbish Russian and diplomatic social circuit was quite another matter for the new ambassador. Francis admitted to Jane in July that ‘I have made comparatively few social acquaintances among the Russians.’41 He eschewed the genteel tea and cocktail parties of the British embassy and the incestuous chit-chat of the continental diplomatic corps, preferring a good game of poker. They in turn were somewhat disdainful of his diplomatic dinners. Sir George Buchanan, a man tainted by the social snobbery and racial prejudice of his generation and class, dreaded invitations from Francis. If asked to dine at the American embassy, Buchanan would lament, ‘Ah, we’re going to have a bad supper … cooked by a Negro.’42 And on most such occasions there was no orchestra, merely the loyal Phil, who as general factotum wound up the gramophone behind a screen, in between serving the guests.43
If the truth be told, neither Francis nor Buchanan particularly enjoyed the social round of Petrograd society. It was their flamboyant French counterpart, Maurice Paléologue, who was the most accomplished socialite in the diplomatic corps and who also ‘held the best dinner parties for the smartest and most frivolous set’.44 Indeed, the suave and gossipy Paléologue seemed to spend more time socialising than on diplomatic business. He was regularly seen at the ballet and opera – both of which were enjoying their heyday during the war. When not there, he seemed to be ‘forever in the grand ducal drawing rooms gossiping with the Princesses’, or dining out with the Petrograd glitterati.45
For members of the diplomatic community like Paléologue, as well as other foreign nationals in the city, war till now had not been so hard to bear. The hottest ticket in town was still a night at the ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre. All Petrograd society – Russian and expatriate – went to see and be seen at its Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon performances, and all still dressed up for the occasion. Most seats were sold by private subscription and well in advance; people would pay up to 100 rubles to obtain one of the few made available for sale. Even at this time of food queues, you could still see crowds standing in line for tickets for the ballet. Ambassador Francis rated the autumn season at the Mariinsky the ‘best in the world’; together with most of the diplomatic community, he had sat ‘spellbound’ through a three-hour performance of Don Quixote starring prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina.46 The two other major Petrograd theatres were still flourishing: the Alexandrinsky, for straight theatre, and the Mikhailovsky, with its resident French troupe, which was the centre for French culture among the Russian intelligentsia and was where they all went to practise their French.
Petrograd, for all its privations and its growing atmosphere of social disaffection, still provided ‘the perfect life of dissipation’ for those unrepentant sybarites craving excitement and self-indulgence.47 Nicholas II might have introduced a ban on vodka sales in 1914 to control the legendary drunkenness of Russia’s largely peasant, conscript army, but if you had the right money you could still be served fine wines, champagne, whisky and other hard liquor in the cabinets privés of the best restaurants and hotels in the city.48* In former years the Hotel de France and Hotel d’Angleterre had enjoyed the patronage of the French and English colonies, but during the war it was the Astoria that gained precedence. It had been built in 1912 on the eastern side of St Isaac’s Square at the corner of Bolshaya Morskaya and Voznesenskaya, to cater to tourists coming to St Petersburg for the 1913 Romanov Tercentenary; and it was named by its Swedish architect, Fredrik Lidvall, in honour of the renowned New York hoteliers, the Astor brothers.
Such had been its popularity with British visitors that the Astoria had set up a bureau to deal specifically with their needs and boasted a ‘gigantic map of the London tube system and a large library of English books from Chaucer to D. H. Lawrence’.49 With ‘ten elevators, an electric light system for calling servants, city telephone lines, an automated vacuuming system, steam-driven central heating, as well as 350 rooms soundproofed with cork insulation’, the hotel also had a grand restaurant that catered for up to two hundred people, a Winter Garden atrium and Art Nouveau banqueting hall.50 Its French restaurant had become a place of welcome retreat for war-weary Russian officers home from the front, as well as for Allied attachés, embassy officials and expatriates – a magnet, too, for discreet high-class prostitutes. Although its rival, the Hotel d’Europe, which also offered a roof garden and luxurious glass-domed restaurant, was a favourite haunt of Ambassador Francis, most new foreign arrivals in the city headed for the Astoria. Such, however, had been the influx of visiting military men that by the end of 1916 the hotel had lost much of its pre-war glamour, so much so that Italian-born restaurant manager Joseph Vecchi felt it had become ‘a kind of glorified barracks’.51
Vecchi rued the severe shortages that prevented him from providing the kind of grand dinners that even a year ago he had still been able to conjure up for private parties. For food supplies to Petrograd had, by the end of 1916, shrunk to about one-third of what was needed. A severe lack of manpower on the land had affected output, with so many peasants conscripted into the army; but many of the shortages were artificial, caused by profiteering and the breakdown in the national railway system. At depots and supply centres in the food-producing south, flour and other food supplies lay stranded and rotting, for lack of rolling stock to bring them by rail to Russia’s hungry cities in the north. There was still plenty of food available out in the provinces, as many foreign visitors testified, and hard-pressed housewives often made gruelling journeys out of the city in attempts to buy butter, eggs, meat and fish from the local peasantry. By now stories were rife in Petrograd about the deliberate stockpiling of flour, meat and sugar by speculators in order to push the prices ever higher. Even the moneyed classes could no longer obtain white bread, but they could certainly still lay their hands on fine food when they wanted to have a party, as National City Bank employee Leighton Rogers noted with amazement, when invited that winter to the house of a Russian acquaintance for ‘just a little family affair’:
The huge buffet in a reception room looked as though a food warehouse had burst open – pickled fish, sardines, anchovies, smelts, herrings, smoked eel, smoked salmon; bowls of caviar, entire hams, tongue, sausage, chicken, paté-de-fois-gras; red cheese, yellow cheese, white cheese, blue cheese; innumerable salads; basket of celery, pickles and olives; sauces – pink, yellow, lavender. All this and much more was piled in three great tiers, with an immobile cascade of fruits in the centre, and flanked by rows of vodka and kummel carafes.52
It turned out that this bacchanalian feast was merely the zakuski, or hors d’oeuvres, preceding a full sit-down dinner of salmon, roast venison and pheasant, followed by ice-cream bombe and yet more fruit and cheeses, served with wines from claret to burgundy and champagne. At the end of the dinner, as a special treat, Rogers’s Russian host had produced the ultimate treat for his American guests: ‘two packets of Beeman’s Pepsin chewing gum’.53
Beyond the doors of this and other comfortable private mansions ‘Russia lay like a prostrate Mars, starving to death,’ wrote Negley Farson, who till now had led an unrepentant sybaritic life in the clubs and restaurants of the city.54 But even he had become disenchanted with staying up all night on binges with his expatriate friends and cronies, enjoying champagne and crayfish in the company of prostitutes in the cabinets privés at the Villa Rodé – a restaurant near the Stroganovsky Bridge that was patronised by Grigory Rasputin, the Tsar’s and Tsaritsa’s controversial spiritual guru and adviser. All the fashionable restaurants were feeling the pinch – including Contant’s, haunt of the Dutch ambassador Willem Oudendijk (later known as William Oudendyk); and the Café Donon, a favourite of US embassy official J. Butler Wright. The old expatriate life at the New English Club had also ‘dwindled to nothing’: ‘Its beefsteak dinners had vanished forever’ by the end of 1916, as Farson recalled.55
Most basic foodstuffs, like milk and potatoes, had quadrupled in price since the outbreak of war; other crucial commodities such as bread, cheese, butter, meat and fish were as much as five times more expensive. Ella Woodhouse, daughter of the British consul, recalled that ‘we had to keep a maid, whose only job was to stand in queues for milk, for bread, or whatever else there was to be had’.56 As winter set in, the queues got ever longer and more resentful, with ‘more and more talk of inefficiency and corruption in high places’. Official wastage and mismanagement of food and fuel supplies (with only wood and no coal available) were on a colossal scale; corruption among Russian officials was rife. Petrograd felt like a city under siege: no one had the appetite for self-indulgence any longer. ‘The Roman Holiday atmosphere of the Hotel Astoria was gone. Fear had now taken its place.’57 In his daily walks along the Embankment, Sir George Buchanan was appalled by the long queues for food. ‘When the hard winter weather sets in these lines will become inflammable material,’ he wrote in November 1916. At the US embassy, Fred Dearing had much the same sense of foreboding: ‘The air is thick with talk of catastrophe,’ he wrote in his journal.58
For those in big business – the textile mills, copper factories, munitions works – the profits continued to mount, while for their workers the spectre of famine seemed ever more present. ‘An air of deep despondency already by then hung over the capital,’ recalled Willem Oudendijk. ‘It was clear that the war put too heavy a strain on the country’s economic life … Cabs had practically disappeared and tramcars rumbled along, packed to overflowing.’ The muddy streets were shabby and the shops depleted. The Russians to whom he spoke put it all down to the rottenness of the bureaucratic system:
Conversations were carried on mostly in whispers as if one was afraid of being overheard, although there was nobody near, and the conviction was expressed that things could not go on as they were, that a storm was approaching, although nobody seemed to have a fixed idea whence it would come nor how much damage it would cause.59
‘Everyone from Grand Dukes to one’s sleigh driver all thunder against the regime,’ observed Denis Garstin of the British Propaganda Bureau in Petrograd.60 From the grandest mansion to the shivering bread queues, one topic of conversation prevailed: the Empress’s relationship with Grigory Rasputin. Against all the objections of the imperial family, Nicholas and Alexandra had stubbornly refused to remove him from his favoured position, and had made matters worse by appointing a series of increasingly reactionary ministers. With Nicholas away at army HQ, Alexandra was left alone, alienated from the Russian court and most of her relatives, and relying ever more heavily on their ‘friend’. In her intense isolation she took nobody’s advice seriously, except Rasputin’s. Repeated warnings were sent to Nicholas of the escalating danger to the throne; his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich, begged him to stop his wife from bringing the monarchy into further disrepute by meddling in the affairs of government. ‘You stand on the eve of an era of new troubles,’ he warned. Sir George Buchanan was of the same mind: ‘If the emperor continues to uphold his present reactionary advisers, a revolution is, I fear, inevitable.’61
In this atmosphere of ‘strained suspense’, people were talking openly about the need for a palace coup and for the Empress to be shut up, out of harm’s way, in a nunnery.62 Unrestrained innuendo and gossip about ‘The Dark Powers’ that she and Rasputin represented were the sole topic of conversation in the exclusive clubs, where ‘Grand Dukes played quinze and talked of “saving” Russia.’63 The assassination of Rasputin seemed the only solution – the panacea that would avert crisis and save the monarchy from the brink of disaster.
On the night of 16–17 December 1916 Rasputin went missing. Over at the Mariinsky Theatre, French ambassador Paléologue had been enjoying Smirnova dancing the lead role in Sleeping Beauty that night, and recalled that her ‘leaps, pirouettes and “arabesques” were not more fantastic than the stories which passed from lip to lip’ about plots to remove the Empress and her ‘friend’ from power. ‘We’re back in the days of the Borgias, Ambassador,’ confided an Italian diplomat.64 When Rasputin’s body was fished out of the river a few days later, Alexandra was ruthless in her response, confining Rasputin’s hotheaded young murderers, Prince Felix Yusupov to his estate in the country, and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich to house arrest, while the Russian public celebrated their act of ‘heroism’.
A powerful, fatalistic atmosphere had descended over the city by the end of the year. ‘The approaching cataclysm was already in every mind, and on everybody’s lips,’ recalled Robert Bruce Lockhart.65 The sense of doom was made worse by the blackout of the streets at night, ‘for fear of the Zeppelins’, the darkness broken only by searchlights fanning the sky for them. Russia could not hold out much longer against Germany on the Eastern Front. Fourteen million men had been mobilised since 1914 and losses so far amounted to more than seven million killed, wounded or captured. Yet still the demand for conscripts was insatiable; all over the city – on the Field of Mars, Palace Square and the embankments along the Neva – one could see the constant drilling of column upon column of soldiers and field artillery. Ordinary Russians looked on with increasing indifference; ‘the desperate and embittering old problems of how to get enough to eat reabsorbed their attention’.66
For Leighton Rogers, Petrograd in winter was ‘the weather waste heap of the world’; he had hardly seen the sun since his arrival in October and, when it did emerge, it was gone by 3.00 p.m. ‘We seem to be away up on top of the world shrouded in white mists which swallow its brilliance.’67 As flurries of snow and intense cold set in, everyone wondered how much longer the current explosive situation would prevail, how long it would be before ‘the lines of shivering women, their feet numb and frozen, their trembling fingers clutching their shawls tighter round their heads’ might vent their anger and storm the food shops.68 Everywhere you went there were groups of them:
shuffling, pushing, jostling each other; eager, trembling hands outstretched for their basin of soup, querulous voices asking for just a little more, begging for a bottle of milk to take home to a dying baby, telling long, rambling, pitiful stories of want and misery and cold.69
Wilfully blind to the gathering resentment on the streets, the demi-monde indulged in a last gasp of spending as Christmas approached, partying in the theatres and cabarets and nightclubs of the city:
Through the revolving-doors of the Hotel Astoria passed the same endless procession of women in furs and jewels and men in glittering uniforms. Across the bridges limousines passed to and fro and troikas made music in the streets – the music of sleigh bells and steel runners on the snow … As ever, the streets were thronged, the tramcars crowded to suffocation, the restaurants doing a roaring trade. And everywhere people talked, as they only talk in Russia, the land of endless talk.70
Out across the Neva the squalid, barrack-block tenements of the industrial quarter of the Vyborg Side had seen a major strike by 20,000 metal and armaments workers on 17 October. Ground down by war, disease, unsanitary living conditions, low wages and hunger, they were demanding improved pay and conditions ever more vociferously. ‘Every unusual noise, even the unexpected sound of a factory whistle, was enough to bring them into the streets. The tension was becoming painful. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, was waiting for something to happen.’ In the workers’ quarters, revolutionary talk ‘ran like fire through stubble’ and revolutionary agitators were there to further fan the flames of dissent.71 After a second major strike on 26 October, thousands of workers were locked out. By the 29th, forty-eight factories were in lockdown and 57,000 workers on strike. Fierce clashes with the police continued until these workers were reinstated.72
To many in the diplomatic community, the collapse of Russia seemed imminent and British subjects were already being urged to go home. But although Sir George Buchanan was emphatically predicting revolution, David Francis was of the opinion that this would not happen ‘before the war ends’ or, more likely, ‘soon thereafter’.73 He and his staff celebrated Christmas US-style (on what was 12 December, on the Russian calendar) with ‘turkey and plum pudding’.74 Sir George, meanwhile, had more serious things on his mind. Deciding to make one final attempt to warn the Tsar of the danger of imminent revolution, he set off for the Alexander Palace, fifteen miles south of the city at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘If the Emperor received him sitting down,’ he told Robert Bruce Lockhart before he left, ‘all would be well.’75 When Buchanan arrived on 30 December, the Tsar received him standing. Nevertheless, Buchanan tried hard to persuade him of the seriousness of rising discontent in the city, and urged him to do his utmost to restore confidence in the throne by making social and political concessions before it was too late: ‘it rested with him either to lead Russia to victory and a permanent peace or to revolution and disaster,’ Sir George later wrote. But Nicholas dismissed his concerns and said he was exaggerating.76 Half an hour later a gloomy Buchanan left. He had said his piece and was relieved to ‘have got it off his mind’.77 But his advice had fallen on deaf ears, as he had anticipated. Nicholas had further alienated public opinion recently by appointing the arch-reactionary Alexander Protopopov as Minister of the Interior – a man bent on preserving the autocracy at any cost, and a known associate of Rasputin – an act that, moreover, prompted other ministers to resign en masse in protest.
As New Year 1917 arrived, over at the US embassy Phil Jordan had somehow managed to get hold of contraband Russian champagne for a party. The rugs were rolled back and there was dancing into the early hours.78 French ambassador Paléologue saw the old year out at a party at the home of Prince Gavriil Konstantinovich, where everyone talked of the conspiracies against the throne and ‘all this with the servants moving about, harlots looking on and listening, gypsies singing and the whole company bathed in the aroma of Moet and Chandon brut imperial which flowed in streams!’79
At the Astoria Hotel the band played ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ during dinner, as an English nurse looked forward to leaving the city, after witnessing the misery of Polish refugees at the British colony’s soup kitchen:
And here we are in the Astoria Hotel, and there is one pane of glass between us and the weather; one pane of glass between us and the peasants of Poland; one pane of glass dividing us from poverty, and keeping us in the horrid atmosphere of this place, with its evil women and its squeaky band!80
With even the tsarist secret police now predicting the ‘wildest excesses of a hunger riot’, the smashing of that one fragile pane of glass seemed inevitable.81
* Germans, too, but they had all left with the outbreak of war in 1914.
* According to Negley Farson, the British embassy had their own golf balls sent out from England in the embassy despatch bags, as ‘golf balls were as valuable as hawk’s eggs in wartime’.
* Buchanan had previously served in Vienna under his father, as well as in Rome, Tokyo, Berne, Darmstadt, Berlin and The Hague.
* The climate in St Petersburg never suited Sir George and his health suffered, so much so that when Sir Edward Grey discovered how often Sir George was ill, he offered him the post of ambassador to Vienna – but Sir George opted to stay in Petrograd.
* Julia Grant and her prince had enjoyed a swish high-society wedding at one of the Astor mansions on Newport Rhode Island in 1899, in the presence of the glitterati of the East Coast, who had lavished the couple with gifts of diamonds, Sèvres porcelain, monogrammed silver and Lalique glass. Grant was one of several American ‘buccaneers’ who married into the Russian aristocracy and were doyennes of the Petrograd social set before the revolution.
* With no solid evidence to substantiate such allegations, and suggestions that his marriage was not happy, it seems more likely that the lonely Francis, who liked a pretty face, simply enjoyed Madame de Cram’s female friendship and company.
† More significantly, with Francis’s assistance, Jordan was one of only two Americans granted permission by the Petrograd Chief of Police to take photographs in the city.
* Ordinary Russians could only get alcohol on the black market, or on a doctor’s prescription.
PART 1
THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
1
‘Women are Beginning to Rebel at Standing in Bread Lines’
In November 1916, Arno Dosch-Fleurot,* a seasoned journalist working for a popular US daily – the New York World – had arrived in Petrograd fresh from a gruelling stint covering the Battle of Verdun. A Harvard-trained lawyer, from a prestigious Portland family, he had turned to journalism and had been covering the war since August 1914, when his editor in New York offered what seemed to him the dream ticket: ‘Suggest you might like to go to Russia.’1 But getting there wasn’t easy in war-torn Europe; Fleurot had had to cross the Channel to England to pick up a boat from Newcastle to Bergen. This had been followed by a long rail journey through Norway, Sweden and north to the Finnish checkpoint at Torneo, where he had grown frazzled, arguing with customs officials about ‘letting [his] typewriter though without paying duty’. As he boarded the train for Petrograd’s Finland Station, the customs officer had attempted to defuse his enthusiasm: ‘I know how your papers like sensations,’ he said, ‘but you won’t find any in Russia, I am afraid.’ Fleurot was expecting his assignment to last twelve weeks or so; in the end he would spend more than two years in Russia.2
Although he had wired ahead and booked a room at the Hotel de France, on arrival he found that it was full. They offered him the billiard-table to sleep on. It was, he recalled, very hard, ‘and more conducive to reflection than sleep’.3 He was excited to be in Russia after two years on the Western Front, but this was virgin territory for him and he was full of all the classic preconceptions:
I checked up on my notions about Russia and found I had a sordid one from reading Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment, a tragic one from seeing Tolstoy’s Resurrection, a terrible one from reading George Kennon’s Darkest Siberia.* I recalled for the first time in years, stories a nurse of Finnish origin used to tell us children about cruel czars poisoned by apples, of boyards who threw serfs to wolves … I had a jumble of Nihilists with bombs, corrupt functionaries, Red Sundays, cruel Cossacks.4
Acknowledging how ‘very little’ he and his fellow Americans knew or understood about the Russian situation, Fleurot was soon given a briefing on what to expect by Ludovic Naudeau, correspondent for Le Temps, whose despatches from the Russian front had impressed him greatly. Naudeau had taken Fleurot to Contant’s swanky restaurant for smoked salmon and caviar, where he warned him that ‘Russia hits all writing men the same way’:
You fall under a spell. You realize you are in another world, and you feel you must not only understand it: you must get it down on paper … you will not know enough about Russia to explain anything until you have been here so long you are half-Russian yourself, and then you won’t be able to tell anybody anything at all about it … You will find yourself tempted to compare Russia with other countries. Don’t.5
Fleurot and Naudeau were by no means the only foreign journalists in Petrograd just before the revolution broke. The reports of Reuters correspondent Guy Beringer, as well as those of Walter Whiffen and Roger Lewis of Associated Press, were being syndicated in the West, and there was an established coterie of other, mainly British reporters in the city: Hamilton Fyfe for the Daily Mail, Harold Williams, a New Zealander writing for the Daily Chronicle,* Arthur Ransome of the Daily News and Observer, and Robert Wilton of The Times, all of whom were filing regular reports, though generally without bylines.† Fleurot was soon joined by fellow Americans Florence Harper – the first American female journalist in Petrograd – and her sidekick, photographer Donald Thompson, both of whom worked for the illustrated magazine Leslie’s Weekly.
The unsinkable Thompson, from Topeka, Kansas, was a scrawny but feisty five feet four inches, familiar for his signature jodhpurs and flat cap, the Colt in his waistband and the camera he carried with him everywhere. He had tried eight times to get to the Western Front as a war photographer – each time being turned back by the military authorities, his film or cameras confiscated. He finally made it, filming at Mons, Verdun and the Somme, among many locations on the front line, and smuggling his film back to London or New York. He had headed to Russia in December 1916 with Harper, having been tipped off that ‘they expect trouble here’, and with an additional commission to shoot footage for Paramount.6
Like many Americans in Russia for the first time, Thompson, Harper and Fleurot, as well as others who followed, had ‘come breezing into Petrograd with that all-conquering, all-knowing American optimism’. But ‘gradually the weather, the melancholy of the Russians, the seriousness of everything under the sun, would dampen their mood’.7 To get to Petrograd, Harper and Thompson had taken the alternative route into Russia then available: a boat across the Pacific to Japan and thence to Manchuria, where they picked up the Trans-Siberian railroad. They arrived complete with Thompson’s bulky cameras and tripod and Harper’s extensive and mostly unsuitable wardrobe, Thompson having noted with amusement that ‘Florence Harper, on account of her extra baggage, had to buy six extra railroad tickets’.8 Arriving in Petrograd at 1.00 a.m. on 13 February 1917, they headed to that beacon for all foreign visitors – the Astoria Hotel – only to be told there were no beds. After much wheedling, Harper was given ‘a cubbyhole so small that there wasn’t even room for my hand luggage’.9 Thompson, however, was obliged to spend his first night wandering the freezing-cold streets in a blizzard until he was able to find a cheap third-class hotel.
The difficulties of finding accommodation in the city were now extreme. US special attaché James Houghteling had noted that ‘Every hotel is jammed and no house or apartment for rent stays on the market for twenty-four hours. Guests sleep in the private dining rooms and the corridors of the hotels, and one can never get a bath before nine A.M. or after nine P.M. because some unfortunate is bedded down in every bathroom.’ Arriving in January, he had noted that his own hotel smelt ‘like a third-class boarding house in Chicago’.10
Much of the desperate shortage of rooms in the capital was a consequence of Germany having issued a threat in mid-January that its submarines would torpedo even neutral ships on sight; no passenger or cargo boats were running from the main terminals into Russia from Norway and Sweden, leaving many foreign nationals and travellers trapped in Petrograd. ‘There are hundreds of people waiting here to get away, and hundreds more in Sweden and Norway,’ wrote Scottish nurse Ethel Moir.11 Arriving in Petrograd in January, she and fellow nurse Lilias Grant had found themselves dumped out of the train from the Romanian front, into a ‘great steep bank of snow’, after which they had struggled with their kit bags to find droshkies,* and had then only secured one night in a hotel, sleeping on the floor.12 After a fruitless search the following day, they appealed to Rev. Lombard at the English Church, who managed to get them rooms at the colony’s British Nursing Home. It had been such a pleasure for them, after the rigours of the field hospitals, to spend the evening with Lombard, revelling in ‘a real English fire, comfy armchairs, hot buttered toast’. These were ‘such unheard-of luxuries’, as too was the experience of sleeping ‘in real beds and between sheets’ again. But they were anxious about getting home: ‘It’s easier to get into Russia than to get out of it!’ wrote Moir. ‘And from what we hear, it will become yet more difficult – there are rumours of a revolution on all sides – one hears it everywhere.’13
While waiting to leave the city and get back to the UK, Moir and Grant visited Lady Georgina Buchanan and her daughter Meriel and learned something of the tireless relief work being undertaken in Petrograd by the members of the British colony, particularly with the thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting in their eastern homelands. They were pouring into the Warsaw Station after days crowded into freight cars, and from there were sent to filthy temporary wooden barracks nearby. These were little more than sheds filled with triple or quadruple rows of bunks, housing two to three hundred people each. Other refugees sought shelter in the draughty open hangar that was the station itself – sleeping on the cold stone floors or climbing into empty trucks and freight cars. Some were housed in damp, windowless cellars. Disease was rife, particularly outbreaks of measles and scarlatina; everywhere one looked, the refugees ‘lay all day long with expressionless, bulging eyes, half stupefied in the stifling stench of the place.’14
The sight of so many pitiful children with insufficient clothing and often no shoes, their bodies and hair crawling with lice, had galvanised a surge of expatriate philanthropic work. Twice a day the lines of refugees formed at the door of the feeding station set up for them, shivering in their rags and waiting for the brass token that entitled them to a piece of black bread and a bowl of English porridge, ‘doled out to them by the bustling ladies of the British Colony’ and led from the front – as always – by the redoubtable Lady Buchanan.15 Donations of clothes and shoes for the refugees were sorted at the British embassy by more groups of lady volunteers, whom she had also commandeered; the room used for the purpose, as her daughter Meriel recalled, ‘resembled nothing more than an old rag-market’.16 Not content with her work at the embassy and at the refugee feeding station, Lady Buchanan was also patron of a maternity hospital for Polish refugees in Petrograd, which had been opened by the Millicent Fawcett Medical Unit in Russia, with substantial help from the Tatiana Refugee Committee, named for the Tsar’s second daughter, who was its honorary head.
As self-appointed grande dame of the colony’s war work, Lady Buchanan had therefore been somewhat put out when her domain was invaded by a rival, in the guise of the small, frail but feisty Lady Muriel Paget. A passionate philanthropist, who had spent nine years running soup kitchens for the poor in deprived parts of London, Lady Muriel was, like the ambassador’s wife, from the upper echelons of the aristocracy: a daughter of the Earl of Winchilsea and married to a baronet.17 Having heard of the appalling casualty rates suffered by the Russian army on the eastern front, Lady Muriel had lobbied a distinguished committee of supporters in the UK, including Alexandra the Queen Mother, for an Anglo-Russian Hospital Unit to be set up in Russia under the auspices of the Red Cross.18 As its chief organiser, she headed the hospital’s team of surgeons, physicians, orderlies and twenty trained* and ten volunteer (VAD) nurses; she also had plans for three field hospitals to be established in Russia. Funded by donations from the British public, the hospital had beds for 180 wounded Russian soldiers, or two hundred if the staff pushed the beds closer together. It had been fortunate to secure for its premises Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich’s neo-baroque palace, loaned for the duration of the war thanks to some persuasion by Sir George Buchanan.
Located at number 41 Nevsky, on the corner of the Anichkov Bridge opposite the Dowager Empress’s palace on the Fontanka River, the palace was a handsome, dark-pink stuccoed building with cream pilasters and surrounds, but its suitability as a hospital left much to be desired.* Its drainage was primitive and the plumbing non-existent.19 Running water, baths and lavatories had to be installed as a matter of urgency, while the lofty, gilded concert hall and two interconnecting large reception rooms were turned into hospital wards. An operating theatre, X-ray department, laboratory and sterilising rooms were created in other partitioned rooms. All the palace’s lovely parquet floors were covered in linoleum and the tapestries and damask-silk wall hangings, as well as plasterwork cherub carvings, were masked with plywood.
Lady Buchanan’s modest British Colony Hospital on Vasilievsky Island, with its forty-two beds for soldiers and eight for officers, was inevitably eclipsed by the grander and better-funded new Anglo-Russian Hospital, which proudly raised the Union flag above its front door.20 On 18 January 1916 it had been officially opened by the Dowager Empress and the Tsar’s two eldest daughters, Olga and Tatiana, with various other grand duchesses and dukes as well as the Buchanans in attendance. Lady Buchanan had posed for the obligatory group photograph swathed in large hat and furs, but did not disguise her resentment: ‘I have nothing to do with the Anglo Russian Hospital,’ she would complain to her sister-in-law, ‘as Lady Muriel Paget has carefully kept me out of it.’21 It was just as well, for all Lady Georgina’s time was already consumed by her own relief work, which even extended to the mounting of a benefit performance in February of Lady Huntworth’s Experiment, by Mrs Waller’s Company, a London-based troupe that had been touring Europe – all proceeds going to the purchase of ‘warm clothing for the Russian soldiers’.22
Lady Georgina was ubiquitous that winter: not just at the embassy workroom and the refugee feeding station, but sorting hospital stores at a Red Cross depot and helping escaped Russian prisoners of war as they arrived back home. ‘I have given shirts, socks, tobacco etc to nearly 3000 besides giving them all clothes for their wives and children. They write me such letters of gratitude,’ she wrote in a letter home. But by the beginning of 1917 she was complaining of never having ‘a moment to sit down, and as for reading a book or any such luxuries one never can indulge in even thinking of the like’. Her hospital was full. No bed was empty for more than a day; ‘in fact they telephone every day to ask if we can’t possibly take in more … everything is beginning to run short’.23 The Anglo-Russian Hospital was also besieged. Since opening, it had been rapidly filled to overflowing with serious cases, many of them with terrible septic wounds. In the main these were the result of gas gangrene, the scourge – so surgeon Geoffrey Jefferson observed – of the Russian front. The smell from the suppurating wounds was terrible, for many of the wounded had taken four or five days to be brought to Petrograd from the front. But it was far too cold to throw open the windows for more than a few minutes at a time to clear the air.24
Dorothy Seymour, a VAD who had recently transferred to the Anglo-Russian Hospital from nursing on the Western Front, had found her arrival in Petrograd rather disconcerting. The city was ‘very smelly, very large and very unwarlike, much more so than London’.25 The war may have seemed a long way away, but not, however, the heightened sense of social tension that she encountered: ‘politics are thrilling out here but it’s difficult to get a grasp of them at all, it’s such a glorious muddle,’ she wrote to her mother. But they were lucky: ‘being Red Cross we are very well fed’; they even had the luxury of having their ‘hot water bottles filled at night and hot water in the mornings’.26 As the daughter of a general and granddaughter of an Admiral of the Fleet, and holding an honorary position at court as a Woman of the Bedchamber to Princess Christian,* Dorothy was extremely well connected. But she failed to be impressed by the ambassadress: ‘Lady G.B. is very sniffy about who she invites and has a deadly household, so nobody takes much notice of her,’ she told her mother. Apparently the snobbish Lady Buchanan ‘drew the line at VADs’ when inviting people to tea, so Seymour cultivated her own contacts on the Petrograd social circuit, going to the ballet, to the opera to see Chaliapin sing Boris Godunov and dining out almost every night with British naval and military attachés – noting with surprise that in wartime Petrograd ‘no man changes for dinner’. She counted herself lucky that her work in the bandaging room at the ARH was ‘light’. It was difficult enough coping with learning Russian, but for many of the VADs – missing their English Cross & Blackwell jam and having to share cramped, inadequate quarters or spend hours making up bandages at the Winter Palace hospital, instead of nursing – Petrograd was a challenge.27
Seymour’s eighteen-year-old fellow VAD, Enid Stoker,† was not having an easy time of it. She was shocked by the level of suffering endured by the wounded – shocked in equal measure to her admiration of their stoicism in extremis and their simple peasant faith, expressed in frequent prayers before the icons that hung in the corners of their wards. They sang a lot and played the balalaika and had a childlike gratitude that touched her, but some of their stories were heartbreaking.28 She remembered one young soldier, Vasili, from Siberia who had had both legs amputated. One day he was lying on the top of his bed with his stumps on a pillow, ‘when an old peasant came into the ward. He had travelled, goodness knows how, nearly a thousand miles to see his son,’ as Stoker recalled. But as soon as he saw him, he began to shout, ‘the tears pouring down his cheeks’. Stoker was dismayed to be told by their interpreter that the old man was cursing the boy:
Why hadn’t he died? Then they would have got a small pension for him – now look at him, a hopeless burden. How could he work on the farm now? Just another useless mouth to feed and they were nearly starving already.29
In Russia there were by now more than 20,000 repatriated soldiers who had lost either arms or legs. Dorothy Seymour rather enjoyed her work taking men such as these – ‘the cripples’ – out for drives in droshkies around snow-covered Petrograd and treating them to tea.30 Some of them had never left their villages till they were conscripted, and after months on end in the hospital had not yet had sight of the capital. It was better than sitting rolling bandages all day. Much to Lady Buchanan’s chagrin, Seymour – thanks to her position at the British court, with the Tsaritsa’s aunt, Princess Helena – was delighted to receive a personal invitation to visit her at Tsarskoe Selo. How could she resist the opportunity to see a woman who was ‘busy making history that will count large in the future’?31 The words were rather more prophetic than Seymour could have imagined.
By January 1917 the Petrograd winter was wearing down everyone at the hospital. Lady Paget’s deputy, Lady Sybil Grey* (another well-connected aristocrat who was the daughter of a former Governor-General of Canada), was finding the cold hard to endure.32 ‘The sun doesn’t shine like in Canada,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘If people like us rarely get our rooms above 50° what must it be for the poor?’ Yet the city could still look spectacular: St Isaac’s Cathedral, which could be seen from the hospital, ‘lately completely covered with snow is quite beautiful, pillars and all looking like white alabaster, bronze statues against the white, the whole surmounted by a golden dome. The two lovely slender graceful gold spires take every glimpse of sunshine one ever gets.’33 For all the privations, Grey – like other nurses at the ARH – acknowledged that there was something exhilarating about the place: ‘I wouldn’t be out of Russia for anything now.’ She was certain that the recent murder of Rasputin had been the prelude to something far more dramatic. ‘It is curious isn’t it that things of immense moment and importance can only be accomplished by intrigue and murder,’ she wrote home, referring to the killing of Rasputin by close members of the royal family, Prince Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. ‘Can you imagine Tecks, Connaughts etc.* doing the like in England?’34
While Seymour was keen to stay and watch events unfold, elsewhere in Petrograd there were British nationals, such as nurses Grant and Moir, who were desperate to get home. British consul Arthur Woodhouse, based in offices on Teatralnaya Ploshchad near the Mariinsky Theatre, had been busy since the outbreak of the war helping repatriate British subjects stranded all over Russia – from the Baltic to the Urals. ‘There was a stream of people wanting to go home, which was to turn into a flood, with the refugees from territories overrun by the Germans,’ recalled his daughter Ella, noting that many of them were ‘those who had lost their jobs in the general upheaval, like the hundreds of governesses who had been employed by wealthy families all over the country … After years abroad, these pathetic women were returning to the old country, many of them with no real homes to go back to.’ It was a sad sight; ‘such numbers of them came in tears that we named them the H.H.H. class (helpless, hopeless, hystericals)’.35
Embassy business struggled on, in the face of this mounting workload and predictions of imminent social breakdown. The first day of the Russian New Year, a day of intense cold, had been marked by a glittering reception for eighty members of the diplomatic corps in the ballroom of the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. While US ambassador Francis – along with his nine members of staff – had eschewed the formal diplomatic paraphernalia of knee breeches, buckled shoes and plumed hats, choosing to wear a dress coat and wing collar, the rest of the diplomatic community travelled out in full rig, on the ‘sumptuous’ special train provided.36 From there they processed in sleighs laden with fur rugs through the swirling snow, past the frosted trees of the park, to the ringing of sleigh bells. All it needed was ‘some baying wolves’ to make it the classic Russian scenario, thought American diplomat Norman Armour.37 ‘There this enchanted wonderland lay before our eyes,’ wrote French diplomat Charles de Chambrun: ‘The ornate façade of the palace stood waiting for its guests, illuminated by a thousand lights and surrounded by a semi-circle of whiteness.’ Still, he wondered – as did many of his fellow diplomats – ‘after all that had already happened, and all that people were saying, and all that was still brewing, how were we going to find the master of all this magnificence?’38
‘After shedding countless wraps’ the assembled diplomats waited until the double doors to the red and gilded reception hall were thrown open by two tall Ethiopian guards in turbans and they were ‘ushered into the most imposing room that I had ever seen, lined with endless gold mirrors and countless electric lights,’ recalled J. Butler Wright. They were then arranged in groups in order of precedence, behind their ‘dean’, Sir George Buchanan, and his staff, when Nicholas II, simply dressed in a grey Cossack cherkeska, entered the room to greet them. During the course of the two-hour reception he conversed charmingly, with his usual smiles and handshakes, and in perfect English or French. ‘He asked me how long I had been here, how I liked it, whether the cold was too severe and promised beautiful weather in the summer,’ recalled Wright.39 Nicholas was a master of such empty pleasantries, but he became visibly uncomfortable when Sir George Buchanan seized the opportunity to impress upon him ‘the necessity for a strong offensive on the Eastern Front to relieve pressure on the Western’. Norman Armour thought this inappropriate of the British ambassador on such a purely social occasion: ‘I watched as the Emperor twisted his astrakhan cap, displaying increased irritation as Buchanan talked on.’40
Otherwise, the Tsar’s responses in conversation were mundane, his eyes kindly but vacant. In the opinion of Charles de Chambrun, it was clear that he was ‘not taking much interest in the replies’.41 Ambassador Francis, seduced by the Tsar’s superficial charm, failed to notice his air of exhaustion: ‘We were all impressed with the cordiality of His Majesty’s manner, by his poise and his apparent excellent physical condition, as well as by the promptness of his utterances,’ he noted in his diary. To his mind, the Tsar ‘gave appearance of having supreme confidence in himself’, so much so that he was happy to go off ‘for a smoke’ with US naval attaché Newton McCully and talk about ‘the fall of Porfirio Diaz* in Mexico’ – rather than the state of Russia.42 But Wright, like his companion Armour, had thought Nicholas ‘seemed very nervous and his hands fidgeted continually’. French ambassador Paléologue concurred: Nicholas’s ‘pale thin face’ had ‘betrayed the nature of his secret thoughts’.43
All in all, it was an impressive gathering, of which much was made retrospectively by memoirists, Francis included, as marking ‘the glitter and pomp of a dying era’.44 ‘Little did any of us realize that we were witnessing the last public appearance of the last ruler of the mighty Romanoff dynasty,’ he later wrote in his memoirs; the Tsar had seemed to have no idea that ‘he was standing on a volcano’.45 Chambrun’s overall impression was that Nicholas had looked ‘more like an automaton needing winding up than an autocrat fit to crush all resistance’.46 A wider air of exhaustion and foreboding had been detected, too, by Ambassador Paléologue: ‘among the whole of the Tsar’s brilliant and glittering suite, there was not a face which did not express anxiety’. After enjoying the sherry and sandwiches and tipping the staff ‘liberally’, the diplomatic corps headed back to Petrograd.47 A few hours later Wright was drinking vodka and gorging himself on caviar and zakuski at Armour’s flat on the Liteiny, to celebrate the New Year. In the days that followed, Wright enjoyed trips to the opera to see Tchaikovsky’s Evgeniy Onegin, the ballet with Meriel Buchanan at a packed Mariinsky Theatre, bridge at Princess Chavchavadze’s (‘a rather brilliant gathering’), dinner at the Café de Paris and skating at an exclusive private club, where being a member of the diplomatic corps ‘was always and everywhere an Open Sesame’.48 If the Tsar was standing on the edge of the volcano, then so too were most of the diplomatic community, along with the blinkered sybarites of Russian high society.
Eight days after the Tsar’s reception an Allied delegation of high-ranking British, French and Italian officials led by Lord Milner – an eminent member of David Lloyd George’s War Cabinet – arrived in the city for a major conference aimed at consolidating continuing cooperation with Russia and keeping her in the war. Although the expatriate community looked forward to the inevitable junketing that such a visit would generate, it came at a time of serious industrial unrest. For on the very day the mission arrived in the capital, 150,000 workers went on strike and marched in commemoration of the massacre of peaceful protesters, killed that same day, twelve years previously. Bloody Sunday 1905 was an ever-present memory for the oppressed working classes of Petrograd, as tension continued to build in the city.
Tsarist officialdom, however, was preoccupied with the more immediate crisis in Petrograd’s desperate accommodation shortage, which the arrival of the mission had provoked. Guests on the ground floor of the already overcrowded Hotel d’Europe had their rooms commandeered for the duration, but found there was ‘nowhere to go and no rooms to be had at any price’.49 A last-ditch orgy of official parties beckoned over the next three weeks, prompting a brief lifting of spirits in the weary capital. ‘For a short time one could almost have imagined oneself back in pre-war St Petersburg,’ recalled Meriel Buchanan, who made the most of the glittering social whirl:
A sudden gaiety swept over the town. Court carriages with beautifully groomed horses and the crimson and gold of the Imperial liveries passed up and down the streets. An endless stream of motors stood at all hours of the day before the Hotel d’Europe, where the Missions had been lodged. Dinners and dances took place every night; the big royal box at the ballet was filled with French, English and Italian uniforms.50
Nicholas II once again put on his gracious public face for a gala dinner at Tsarskoe Selo, with Sir George Buchanan sitting at his right hand. The gathered delegates joined in the charade of sharing ‘meaningless remarks about the Alliance, war and victory’. Nicholas was, as always, ‘vague’ in conversation and, after a succession of dutiful and dull exchanges, withdrew with a smile.51 The reclusive Empress had, as usual, been absent. It was left to the leading ladies of the Petrograd aristocracy, in the guise of Grand Duchess Vladimir and Countess Nostitz (an American adventuress who had married into the aristocracy)* to organise some of the other lavish entertainments laid on for the mission, with Nostitz claiming that she had been chosen to host the reception on 6 February at her home because ‘the Empress was too ill to receive at the Palace’. It would leave an abiding impression on her:
The night of that last splendid reception is stamped forever on my memory. I have only to close my eyes to see again our rose and gilt salon with its magnificent old family portraits, its exquisite tapestries, crowded with that brilliant assembly of guests. All the Court, the cream of Petrograd society, three hundred of its greatest names, all the Diplomatic Corps and their wives, the members of the Delegation – Lord Milner, one of England’s foremost Ministers, Lord Brooke, Sir Henry Wilson, Lord Clive, Lord Revelstoke, Sir George Clerk, General de Castelnau, France’s hero, Sociologue, the Italian delegate, Gaston Doumergue, they were all there that night.52
When the visit came to an end, few felt it had achieved anything of political significance. Robert Bruce Lockhart had been far from impressed with the ‘interminable round of festivity’, later observing that ‘rarely in the history of great wars can so many important ministers and generals have left their respective countries on so useless an errand’. Ambassador Paléologue felt likewise: the conference had dragged on for three weeks ‘to no purpose’, and ‘no practical result ha[d] emerged from all the diplomatic verbiage’. What point was there, he asked, in the Allies sending Russia huge consignments of materiel – ‘guns, machine-guns, shells and aeroplanes’ – when she had ‘neither the means of getting them to the front nor the will to take advantage of them?’53
Lord Milner had also confided that he thought the trip a waste of time, having realised ‘the inefficiency of the Russians’ at getting anything done, and had decided that Russia was doomed – at home, and at the front. It was, however, ‘the general consensus of informed opinion, both Allied and Russian’, that ‘there will be no revolution until after the war’.54 Maurice Paléologue, though, saw it differently. As the French delegates prepared to return home, he gave them a message to take to the President in Paris: ‘A revolution crisis is at hand in Russia … Every day the Russian nation is more indifferent towards the war and the spirit of anarchy is spreading among all classes and even in the army.’ The October strikes in the Vyborg Side had, in Paléologue’s view, been ‘very significant’; for when violence had broken out between strikers and the police, the 181st Regiment – called on to assist the police – had actually turned on them. A division of Cossacks had had to be ‘hastily called in to bring the mutineers to their senses’. If there were to be an uprising, Paléologue warned, ‘the authorities cannot count on the army’. And he went even further: the Allies must also quietly prepare for the likely ‘defection of our ally’ – out of the war and, with it, its role in the defence of the Eastern Front.55 Sir George Buchanan was now so consumed by a mounting sense of imminent disaster that he reported to the British Foreign Office in London that ‘Russia will not, in my opinion, be able to face a fourth winter campaign if the present situation is indefinitely prolonged.’ Trouble, ‘if it comes, will be due to economic rather than political causes’. And it would begin ‘not with the workmen in the factories, but with the crowds waiting in the cold and the snow outside the provision shops’.56
By February the daily consignment of flour to Petrograd had dropped to just twenty-one wagonloads, instead of the normal 120 needed. What white bread there was ‘had become greyer and greyer until it was uneatable’, due to excessive adulteration. Official mismanagement, corruption and wastage of supplies were prodigious, made worse by a crippled rail network that was unable to transport food efficiently from the provinces – where it was still plentiful – to the cities that most needed it. People were incensed to discover that, due to the hikes in the price of oats and hay, much of the black bread – the staple diet of the poor – was being fed to the capital’s 80,000 horses to keep them alive: ‘every horse was eating up the black bread allowance of ten men’.57 Sugar was now so scarce that many of the patisseries and confectionary shops had had to close. Word spread like wildfire about food going to waste, of ‘millions of pounds of cheap Siberian beef’ being left to rot in railway sidings:
Few of the munition-workers, whose wives or children spent more than half their time in the queue before a bread-shop, had not heard of the ‘fish graveyards’ of Astrakhan, where thousands of tons of the spoiled harvest of the Caspian were buried; and all classes had heard of the ‘saccharine rivers’ which travellers had seen flowing from leaky sugar warehouses in the great beet-growing districts of South Russia and Podolia.58
‘While we put jam in our tea and work-people drank it unsweetened,’ wrote US official Philip Chadbourn, inspecting internment camps for Germans in Russia, ‘everyone knew that the country was full of grain, and that the provincial towns were full of flour’.59 On 19 January an official announcement of imminent bread rationing – as little as one pound per person a day – sparked panic buying. People were now standing so long in line at the bakers’ shops that they were suffering from hypothermia. If they were lucky enough to get any, they would hurry off, ‘hugging close to themselves the warm piece of bread they had bought, in a vain attempt to receive from it a little heat’.60
Even the foreigners were suffering, albeit relatively speaking. ‘We are so short of everything here now, that ham or bacon is more acceptable than a bouquet of orchids,’ complained J. Butler Wright at the US embassy, adding that ‘whisky is in the same category’. He was overjoyed when a courier arrived from Washington with twenty-seven pouches of mail, as well as ‘bacon, Listerine, whiskey, dioxygen,* marmalade, papers, etc etc’.61 Trying to keep warm in his hotel room, photographer Donald Thompson could still get coffee, ‘but it’s coffee only in name and the bread is not bread at all’. He was, he admitted, ‘beginning to feel the pangs of hunger – even in the Astoria Hotel’.62
Hunger was made worse by the continuing sub-zero temperatures affecting the supply of fuel to the city by rail. Rowing boats on the Neva were chopped up for firewood, and even more desperate measures were resorted to: ‘at dead of night’ people slunk into the nearest cemetery ‘to fill whole sacks with the wooden crosses from the graves of poor folk’ and take them home for their fires.63
Once more there was a wave of strikes. This time, the tsarist police were taking no chances. On Minister of the Interior Protopopov’s orders, machine guns were being secretly mounted on the roofs of all the city’s major buildings, particularly around the main thoroughfare, the Nevsky. J. Butler Wright noted the darkening mood on 9 February:
The Cossacks are again patrolling the city on account of threatened strikes – for the women are beginning to rebel at standing in bread lines from 5.00 A.M. for shops that open at 10:00 A.M., and that in weather twenty-five degrees below zero.64
He had it on reliable information that ‘the day set for the opening of the Duma will be the day for a socialist outbreak’. In anticipation of this, 14,000 Cossacks had been brought in to Petrograd to bolster army reserves.65* They were patrolling the streets of Petrograd on 14 February when the Duma reopened after its Christmas recess, but the predicted trouble never came. Proceedings at a densely crowded Tauride Palace were carried off in an atmosphere of despondency rather than confrontation. Thinking the crisis over for now and that it was safe to ‘take a short holiday’, an exhausted Sir George Buchanan and his wife set off for a much-needed ten-day rest at the dacha of a friend in the British colony located on the little island of Varpasaari in Finland.66
* Dosch-Fleurot was the son of a German immigrant to Oregon. He had adopted his French mother’s surname, Fleurot, during the war to avoid difficulties when reporting on the Western Front.
* Kennon (1845–1924) was a notable American traveller and explorer who had written numerous exposés of the Russian penal system in Siberia.
* Williams’s reports were also syndicated to the Daily Telegraph and New York Times.
† Many of the reports were simply credited as being ‘by our Petrograd correspondent’ – or something similar – and it is difficult applying credit where due to some of the front-line reporting by British and American journalists during the revolution.
* A droshky was a two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage for hire, the Russian equivalent of a hansom cab or taxi.
* The trained nurses were Red Cross sisters, principally from St Thomas’s and St Bart’s, London.
* Built in the eighteenth century as the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace, it was reconstructed in the nineteenth and in 1883 was bought by Grand Duke Sergey and his wife Ella, sister of the Empress. After the Grand Duke was assassinated in 1905, his wife took the veil and gifted the palace to Dmitri Pavlovich, who retained his own private apartments there on the ground floor. It was here that he and Felix Yusupov took refuge, hysterical and covered in blood, after they had murdered Rasputin.
* Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Helena, was married to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein.
† Enid was a niece of Bram Stoker, author of the Gothic novel Dracula.
* A ‘very charming and sensible woman, worth 17 Lady Muriels’, in the view of ARH surgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. ‘They are all very fed up with Lady M here, as she has such silly ideas and is always wanting some fresh scheme.’ The triumvirate of Grey, Paget and Lady Georgina Buchanan would prove to be volatile, with one nurse describing them as ‘formidable, brave, dutiful and decidedly rivalrous’.
* These were aristocratic families closely linked to the British royals.
* The Mexican president, ousted in a coup in 1911, who had died in exile in 1915.
* Her real name was Lillie (Madeleine) Bouton. Daughter of a grain elevator worker from Iowa and sometime actress in American repertory theatre and on the Continent, she had charmed the extremely wealthy Count Grigory Nostitz, a military attaché at the Russian embassy in Paris, into marrying her; he was the second of three aristocratic husbands.
* Dioxygen was apparently used as a tooth-whitener at this time.
* Most of the army units now in Petrograd were reservists, the cream of the regular army having gone to the front, leaving largely inexperienced conscripts in the city, some of whom were industrial strikers, forced into the army as punishment.
2
‘No Place for an Innocent Boy from Kansas’
On Saturday 18 February 1917 a dispute over the sacking of workers at the vast Putilov munitions works on the south side of the city sparked a walkout in the gun-carriage shop. Soon the rest of the workforce followed and the management enforced a lockout. Tens of thousands of laid-off workers were milling on the streets, and the pitiful queues at the bakers’ shops were getting ever longer. Beyond their hotel windows, Florence Harper and Donald Thompson could see the people lining up overnight, and they went out onto the bitterly cold streets, looking for a story. Billboards everywhere were pasted over with proclamations from the military police ‘imploring the people not to make any demonstrations or cause disorders that might halt the manufacture of munitions or paralyze the industries of the city’.1 Thompson recalled how the people ‘tore them down the minute they were posted and spat on them’. Some of the shops on Bolshaya Morskaya near their hotel were already boarding up their windows. The two Americans knew that trouble was coming. ‘In fact, I was so sure of it,’ Florence Harper later wrote, ‘that I wandered around the town, up and down the Nevsky, watching and waiting for it as I would for a circus parade.’ Thompson was delighted. He had brought his favourite Graflex cameras made by the Eastman Company of New York and had police permits to ‘photograph any place in Petrograd’. ‘If there’s a revolution coming … I am in luck,’ he crowed.2
Political agitators – Socialist Revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, anarchists – were now out in force among the striking Putilov workers and in other factories across the river in the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides, all of them ‘preaching a general strike as a protest against the government, food-shortage and war’.3 Over dinner with Maurice Paléologue, Grand Duchess Vladimir had told him that she expected ‘the most dire catastrophes’, if Nicholas continued to resist the need for political change. ‘If salvation does not come from above,’ she warned, ‘there will be revolution from below.’4
Paléologue had lately been reading the Philosophical Letters of Petr Chaadaev, the Russian philosopher exiled to Siberia in 1836 for his supposedly seditious writings. Chaadaev had observed that ‘The Russians are one of those nations which seem to exist only to give humanity terrible lessons.’ Paléologue felt that the country was once again living out that prediction. The brief ‘stimulant’ of the Allied mission had already evaporated. ‘The artillery, war-factory and supply and transport departments have fallen back into their old casual and leisurely ways,’ he noted despairingly. The mission’s attempts to galvanise the Russian war effort had been met with the ‘same dead weight of inactivity and indifference, as before’.5 The only thing that cheered him was the prospect of music and dancing at a ‘large and glittering party’ to be held at Princess Radziwill’s on the coming Sunday, the 26th. But he had to admit it was ‘a curious time to arrange a party’, and a dangerous time, too, for the Emperor to have left the capital and gone back to army HQ five hundred miles away – under the false reassurance, from his Minister of the Interior, Protopopov, that the situation was under control.6
For fully three weeks the average daily temperature had been -13.44 degrees Centigrade and there had been heavy falls of snow.7* Walking on the Liteiny Prospekt on the morning of 22 February, Paléologue was struck by ‘the sinister expression on the faces of the poor folk’ who had been standing wearily all night waiting for bread. The public mood was shifting from stoicism to anger; many women were spending forty hours or more a week like this and, in indignation, some of them had thrown stones at the bakers’ windows that day. Others had joined in and some looting had taken place. Cossack patrols were out in force, ‘an evident intimation to the city to keep quiet’, and there were also a lot more soldiers on the streets. ‘The age of the new recruits’, as J. Butler Wright noted, was ‘younger than ever before’.8
Donald Thompson left the Astoria that morning to buy a new pair for boots for his Russian interpreter, Boris – a young wounded soldier, now out of hospital, whom he had requested be assigned to him, as Boris spoke very good English. One of the bakeries near the Astoria was under police guard, after the queues had smashed its windows to try and get at the bread. A besieged milk shop nearby had just put out a sign saying, ‘No more milk’. ‘If you could see these bread lines and see the looks upon the faces of these people as you pass,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘you would hardly believe that this is the Twentieth Century.’9 He was ashamed, he told her, to have to walk past such people while wearing his ‘heavy fur coat’, while they stood in the cold ‘almost in rags’. Groups of striking workers from across the river had made their way into the city, prompting some of the shopkeepers on the Nevsky to close their premises. People on the streets were ‘nervous, jumpy, starting at shadows, waiting for they knew not what’.10
Although the temperature was still -9 degrees, Thursday 23rd dawned gloriously sunny. When he went out that morning Thompson noticed that ‘dozens of machine-guns’ had been mounted on the tops of buildings overnight. Boris, who had been out on a night-time recce on Thompson’s behalf, had come back assuring him that ‘we are going to have a revolution in Russia’.11 Thompson went to the telegraph office to send his wife a message, but the woman on duty told him not to waste his money – ‘nothing was allowed to go out’. Later, with Florence Harper, he was walking near the British embassy and saw a crowd of women gathering at the Field of Mars, the big parade ground located behind it; soon these women were joined by a group of workmen, and then ‘almost as if by magic hundreds and hundreds of students came into view’.12
It was International Women’s Day, an important date in the socialist calendar, established in 1910 by the German Social Democrat Clara Zetkin to promote equal rights for women, and the embattled working women of Petrograd intended that their voices should be heard. Hundreds of them – peasants, factory workers, students, nurses, teachers, wives whose husbands were at the front, and even a few ladies from the upper classes – came out onto the streets. Although some carried banners with traditional suffrage slogans, such as ‘Hail, women fighters for freedom’ and ‘A place for women in the Constituent Assembly’, others bore improvised placards referring to the food crisis: ‘Increase rations for soldiers’ families’, or even more openly revolutionary calls for an end to the war – and the monarchy. But food was, fundamentally, what they all called out for that day: ‘There is no bread,’ they shouted as they marched, ‘our husbands have no work.’13
As columns of women converged on Nevsky and Liteiny Prospekts, more militant female textile workers at five of the major manufacturers on the Vyborg Side had gone on strike that morning. They had then descended on the major metalworks and munitions factories – shouting, banging on doors and pelting the windows with snowballs – to get the men, including those at the crucially important state Arsenal, to come out in sympathy.* By midday 50,000 workers across the river had walked out. Some of them went straight home, but others marched to the Liteiny Bridge to cross over to the Nevsky Prospekt and swell the ranks of the Women’s Day marchers, only to encounter police cordons on the bridge barring their way. The more determined among them had scrambled down onto the frozen river and made their way across the ice instead; others managed to get through the police block at the Troitsky Bridge from the Petrograd Side, only to be forced back by police when they crossed the Neva.
On the Field of Mars, Harper and Thompson watched as several men and women were raised up on the shoulders of others, shouting, ‘Let’s stop talking and act.’ A few of the women began singing the Marseillaise. ‘It was a queer Russian version that one couldn’t quite recognize at first,’ recalled Harper. ‘I have heard the “Marseillaise” sung many times, but that day for the first time I heard it sung as it should be.’ This was because, she asserted, ‘the people there were of the same classes and were singing it for the same reason as the French who first sang it over a hundred years ago.’14 As the crowd moved off, heading for the Nevsky, ‘a tram came swinging round the corner’. They forced it to stop, took the control handle and ‘threw it away in a snowbank’. The same happened to a second, third and fourth tram, ‘until the blocked cars extended all the way along the Sadovaya to the Nevsky Prospekt’.15 One tram full of wounded soldiers in the care of nurses even joined in, as the crowd, now numbering about five hundred, surged forward, still singing the Marseillaise, the women holding boldly to the centre of the Nevsky as the men took to the pavements.
Thompson and Harper found themselves carried along with the tide. Every policeman they passed tried to stop the marchers, but the women just kept on forging ahead, shouting, laughing and singing.16 Walking at the head of the column, Thompson saw a man next to him tie a red flag onto a cane and start waving it in the air. He decided that such a conspicuous position at the head of the marchers was ‘no place for an innocent boy from Kansas’.17 ‘Bullets had a way of hitting innocent bystanders,’ he told Harper, ‘so let’s beat it, while the going is good.’
That day, in response to increasing tension in the city, the commandant of the Petrograd garrison, General Sergey Khabalov, had had posters pasted on walls at every street corner, reassuring the public that ‘There should be no shortage in bread for sale’: if stocks were low in some bakeries, this was because people were buying more than they needed and hoarding it. ‘There is sufficient rye flour in Petrograd,’ the proclamation insisted. ‘The delivery of this flour continues without interruption.’18 It was clear that the government had run out of excuses for the bread crisis – lack of fuel, heavy snow, rolling stock commandeered for military purposes, shortage of labour – and the people would not be fobbed off any longer. Hunger was rife, fierce and implacable in half a million empty bellies across the working-class factory districts. Times correspondent Robert Wilton was appalled at official dilatoriness in dealing with the shortages: ‘Here was a patent confession of laxity. Whom was it expected to satisfy? The Socialists who had already made up their minds for revolution, or the dissatisfied “man in the street” who did not want revolution, but pined for relief from an incapable Government?’19 An urgent conference of ministers was being held at the Duma that day, the people were told, to settle the food crisis and organise the revictualling of Petrograd. But by now the crowds were convinced that the bakers were deliberately withholding bread from them.
As the day went on, the ranks of women marchers in and around the Nevsky swelled to around 90,000. ‘The singing by this time had become a deep roar,’ recalled Thompson, ‘terrifying, but at the same time fascinating.’ There was ‘fearful excitement everywhere’.20 Once more the Cossacks ‘appeared as if by magic’, as J. Butler Wright observed, their long lances glancing in the sunshine. Thompson watched them time and again attempt to scatter the columns of marching women by charging them at a gallop, brandishing their nagaikas (short whips), but the women merely regrouped, cheering the Cossacks wildly each time they charged.21 When one woman stumbled and fell in front of them, they jumped their horses right over her. People were surprised: these Cossacks weren’t the ‘fierce guardsmen of Tsardom whom the crowds had seen at work in 1905’, when hundreds of protesters had been killed in the Bloody Sunday protest. This time they were quite ‘amiable’, playful even; they seemed eager to capitulate to the mood of the people, and took their hats off and ‘waved them to the crowd’ as they moved them on.22 It turned out that many of the Cossacks were reserves, their reticence about driving the people back compounded by the difficulty some of them had in handling their horses, which were unused to crowds.23 So long as they only asked for bread, the Cossacks told the marchers, they would not be on the receiving end of gunfire. There were, inevitably, many agents provocateurs in their midst, eager to turn the protest into a violent one, but for the most part the crowd remained ‘good tempered’, as Arthur Ransome noted in that day’s despatch to the Daily News. He hoped there would be no serious conflict. ‘The general character of excitement,’ he concluded was, for now, ‘vague and artificial’ and without political focus.24
And so it went on, until six in the evening. As the mob surged to the constant drumbeat calls for khleb (bread), the Cossacks charged and scattered people in all directions, ‘but there was no real trouble’. The police had rounded up anyone who had attempted to stop and give speeches, but protesters had otherwise walked the streets with their red flags all day long and, much to Thompson’s surprise, had not been fired on. But he knew this was not the end of it: ‘I smell trouble,’ he wrote to his wife that evening, ‘and thank God I am here to get the photographs of it.’25
It was left to the tsarist police to finally disperse the crowds, who had largely gone home by 7.00 p.m. as the cold of evening drew in. But public antipathy and violence towards the police was growing, in particular towards the special mounted police on their black stallions, whom people despised as faraony, ‘pharaohs’ – that is, tyrants (an allusion to the ‘tall shaving-brush busbies of black horsehair’ that they wore). ‘Their appearance wiped the smile away,’ noticed Arno Dosch-Fleurot, ‘and when they began really roughing the crowd with their sabres drawn’, he heard ‘the first murmuring of the snarl which only an infuriated mob can produce’.26
Across the river, in the industrial quarters, acts of sporadic violence had erupted throughout the day. On the Petrograd Side at Filippov’s large bakery – a Moscow franchise that supplied many of the bakers in the city daily by rail – the babushki in the bread line had finally lost patience after standing in the cold for hours, only to be told there would be no bread that day.27 They had broken in the front door and raided the place; it was later said that they had ‘found quantities of black bread in the rear storerooms’. Grocery stores nearby had had their windows smashed, too; in another bakery that was stormed, the babushki who had led the assault found white bread rolls ‘meant for the restaurants’. After breaking the bakery’s windows, they took the rolls and sold them off for a quarter of the price to those desperate for bread.28
That evening Harper and Thompson ventured across the Troitsky Bridge to find out what was going on in the industrial districts. They found the street in some places ‘jammed with excited men and women’ and stayed until 11.00 p.m., when Thompson noticed that rather too many people were eyeing Harper’s expensive seal coat. Boris, their translator, advised a speedy exit; he’d overheard some of the women say that ‘she ought to have her face cut to pieces’. ‘Look how she is dressed! Yes, she gets bread but we get nothing.’29 The women clearly had mistaken Harper for a rich Russian. Hurrying back to the Astoria at midnight, the two journalists were stopped several times by police and had their papers checked. They couldn’t help noticing that a ‘great many troops were patrolling the city’ – for that day a disorganised and elemental force had finally been let loose on Petrograd. The flame of revolution had been lit among the hungry marchers on the Nevsky and the strikers across the river. Throughout the night strike-committees in the Petrograd and Vyborg Sides were plotting to seize the moment. Revolution – ‘so long talked of, dreaded, fought against, planned for, longed for, died for’ – had come at last, ‘like a thief in the night, none expecting it, none recognizing it’.30
Overnight the levels of disquiet in Petrograd rose considerably, as rumours spread about the introduction of a ‘bread ticket system’. Resentment was further fuelled by the fact that the bread was being released for sale at times when people were at work and could not go out to queue to buy it. On Friday 24 February things took an inevitable, violent turn: more bakers’ shops were attacked and destroyed, and as Arthur Ransome reported to the Daily News, such was the desperation for food now that people even ‘seized bread from those who had succeeded in buying it’.31
It was another bright and sunny morning, and a five-degree rise in the temperature to -4.5 degrees had encouraged huge crowds to come out of doors and gather again on the Nevsky.32 Anticipating an escalation in protests, General Khabalov had posted further proclamations overnight announcing that ‘all gatherings on the streets are absolutely forbidden’ and warning that he had commanded his troops ‘to use their arms freely and to stop at nothing in maintaining order’.33 An American working at the consulate in the Singer Building heard people talking of seeing ‘armoured street cars mounted with searchlights’ patrolling the city for several nights now, with ‘many machine guns sticking out of the portholes’. ‘All the police stations are full of machine guns, with soldiers dressed as policemen to handle them,’ he was told. ‘Rot,’ said someone else, ‘the soldier-boys won’t shoot at their own people.’34
The seething sense of resentment made itself felt especially on the few overcrowded trams that were still running. Many were already out of commission and stood idle and empty, with ‘no one to repair them and no new ones’; others had been derailed and even overturned by the crowds.35 Everyone on the streets that morning seemed ‘sure now of having a spectacle’, as Arno Dosch-Fleurot noted. He was out among them near the Kazan Cathedral. Green student caps were conspicuous everywhere, and one of the students told him that ‘the universities had gone on strike in sympathy with the bread demonstration’.36 The shops were open, however, and the city still had ‘a certain effervescence’, with most people on foot and less willing to move on, when ordered by the police, than they had been the previous day.37
People were crossing the Neva all morning from the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides, where a succession of excited factory meetings had been held. Most of the workers there had gone on strike and had been urged to arm themselves with ‘bolts, screws, rocks’, even lumps of ice, and go out and ‘start smashing the first shops you find’.38 En route to the Liteiny Bridge, strikers had once more targeted the bakeries; scuffles had broken out, followed by looting. The route across the bridge was again blocked by soldiers and Cossacks, though the latter refused to charge the strikers when ordered to do so. Once again the strikers resorted to the ice – around five thousand of them – to cross to the city centre.39 From the windows of their Chancellery, French diplomats Louis de Robien and Charles de Chambrun saw them making their way over the Neva ‘like a chain of black ants’ ‘in Indian file’, as they weaved in and out of ‘conglomerated blocks of ice and thick snow’. The Cossacks on the other side watched them, galloping up and down the embankment, ‘very picturesque on their little horses’ and brandishing lances and carbines; but they did not venture on to the ice to stop the strikers.40
By midday there were about 36,800 people marching on the streets of central Petrograd.41 The trams had come to a standstill and, with the roads impassable, the izvozchiki (droshky drivers) had given up and taken their horses home. The crowds continued to push and shove their way forward, squeezing past and even under the bellies of the Cossacks’ horses when they tried to bar their way. French resident Amélie de Néry sensed a difference between these protesters and the ‘elated and mystical’ ones of 1905, whose marching had had the air of a religious ceremonial. These 1917 crowds were realists, she noted. ‘Two years of war had hardened them far more than a century of tranquillity and peace could have done.’42 As they progressed, the crowds were ‘met by a good deal of bullying and harrying by police and troops’ – again without the use of lethal weapons.’43 The Cossack squadrons caracoling over the snow on their wiry little horses continued to surprise with their restraint, even as more and more red flags appeared among the columns of marchers. Whenever they halted, ‘the men and women gathered about them and invited them to join them’. ‘You’re ours,’ they shouted at them, as the Cossacks smiled and parted to let them through. ‘You are not going to fire on us, Brothers! We only want bread!’ Times reporter Robert Wilton heard them say to the armed troops they encountered. ‘No, we are hungry like yourselves,’ replied the Cossacks.44
Bert Hall, a US aviator attached to the Russian Air Service, was in Petrograd that day and, like Thompson and Harper, his first experience of Russia was proving a baptism of fire. He wrote in his diary of ‘endless mobs of people marching along singing wild songs, throwing bricks into street cars’. He saw workmen carrying placards not just calling for bread, but saying ‘Give us land!’ and ‘Save our souls!’, and at the end of one procession ‘a little girl carrying a tiny banner’ on which was written ‘Feed your children!’ It was, he recalled, ‘the most pathetic thing I ever saw in my life’. Why didn’t the Russians just ‘go ahead and have a revolution and get it over?’ he said to his Russian companion. Ah, but ‘God still loves the Tsar,’ he was told; ‘it would be a misfortune to revolt against a ruler who stood in well with God’. Hall was outraged:
The common people are hungry; they have been hungry too for a long while. Christ, why doesn’t the Tsar do something about it! What a chance for some wise American organizer! Think of it! All of Russia might go to pot for the want of a little wise management.45
As the crowds moved up and down the Nevsky all day, people living along it threw open their windows to watch and cheer. The British and Canadian staff at the Anglo-Russian Hospital, as well as their patients, had a ringside view of events from the second-floor windows of their wards. The nurses had been given orders on the 22nd ‘to remain indoors and not to go out on the streets, except to the hospital and back’.46 The ARH had been ‘full of soldiers ready for any emergency’ – thirty men from the Semenovsky Guards regiment had been deployed there to guard them, with three on the front door with fixed bayonets. The staff had been told to prepare to evacuate the premises at very short notice. But this rapidly proved impossible, because of the surge of people coming down the Nevsky.47 ‘They just hurled past,’ recalled Canadian nurse Dorothy Cotton, ‘and the Cossacks riding in the opposite direction to them rode right into them and scattered them.’ A few stray casualties were brought to the hospital for treatment – shot by policemen disguised as soldiers, so it was claimed.48
Florence Harper and Donald Thompson had been out on the streets since early that morning, ‘trail[ing] the mobs’, though for most of the time they were ‘pushed up and down the Nevsky’ willy-nilly, running, sliding in the snow and often hugging the sides of buildings so as not to get trampled.49 They ended up being virtually carried down to the Kazan Cathedral, a traditional rallying point, where many of the columns of demonstrators had already gathered in the square that fronted it. Some knelt down, bared their heads and prayed, and others gathered in small groups around speakers.50 The reticence of the Cossacks to break up the crowds persisted, so much so that ‘the Prefect of Police’ – so Lady Sybil Grey was told – had driven up to the cathedral in his motor car and had ‘ordered the officer commanding a patrol of Cossacks to charge the people with drawn swords’. The officer had refused: ‘Sir, I cannot give such an order, for the people are only asking for bread.’ On hearing this, the crowd had cheered loudly ‘and were cheered in return by the Cossacks’.51 Thompson and Harper noted this response, too. There was no violence, ‘it was a very good-natured mob’. Except in one respect: they had seen a secret policeman ‘trying to take a picture’ of someone addressing the crowd. He was quickly spotted and set upon, his camera smashed; they would have killed him, had he not been rescued by a mounted faraon. Thompson had been taking photographs himself, ‘using my small camera’, but was ‘careful not to attract attention’. He had noticed how ‘ugly’ some of the police were getting and that many of them were dressed as soldiers or Cossacks.52
At four in the afternoon Harper and Thompson nearly got themselves trampled outside the Anglo-Russian Hospital on their way back up the Nevsky. The Cossacks had come riding down, ‘laughing and chaffing with the mob’ and giving them ‘a poke with their lances’ if they did not move fast enough. They were riding abreast in tight formation, such that the two journalists couldn’t squeeze by and had to rush into the storm-door of the hospital, but Harper had still received ‘a most awful jab with the butt of a lance’ as a Cossack rode past. He was just a boy of about eighteen, she noticed; he told her to move on, but she refused and so he jabbed her again. ‘That was enough,’ she recalled; she ‘flew across the bridge and back down the Nevsky’, with Thompson in tow.53
By 8.00 p.m. on Friday most of the demonstrators in central Petrograd had gone home, vowing to return the following morning. This second day of mass demonstrations had seen more workers out on strike than at any other time during the war; and their activity was now becoming violent, turning in particular on the police and mounted faraony. In response, General Khabalov had ensured that many more machine-gun placements were set up in the attics of mansions, hotels, shops, clock and bell towers up and down the Nevsky, and on the roofs of railway stations. He also had infantry and machine gunners in reserve and a huge stockpile of rifles, revolvers and ammunition, which, although designated for the front, had been retained for use in Petrograd, should the need arise, and ‘stored in the various police stations’.54
The foreign news correspondents in Petrograd caught up in these events, and now realising their growing significance, were all frustratingly hampered by one thing: they could not get the truth of the situation out to their papers in the UK, the US and elsewhere, because of the strict tsarist censorship being applied to all telegraph messages sent from the city. Arno Dosch-Fleurot had written a daily cable about the ‘bread-riots’ and had ‘gone with it to the young officer in charge of the censorship’. And every day the response had been the same: the man had ‘offered me tea but no hope of getting the news out’. When he finally wrote a positive piece ‘about the enthusiasm of the populace for the Cossacks’, his despatch was allowed through.55 For some time Robert Wilton of The Times had been having similar difficulties, reduced to making only vague allusions to the growing discontent in the capital, ‘owing to the disorganization of the food supplies’. Today, Friday, he had written a despatch about the ‘prolonged debates’ going on in the Duma on how to combat the food crisis, confirming that meanwhile the behaviour of the demonstrators had on the whole been ‘devoid of a seditious or vindictive character’. ‘Bread supplies assured,’ he telegraphed, quoting General Khabalov – a positive spin on an escalating situation, written in order to get his report past the censors.56 The word ‘revolution’ was not mentioned.*
Throughout the night of the 24th there were occasional volleys of firing; and yet, astonishingly, the social life of the city continued. The Alexandrinsky Theatre was packed that evening for a performance of Gogol’s The Government Inspector. Indeed, the audience had been ‘in a lively humour at this satire on the political weaknesses of the mid-nineteenth century’. Few seemed willing to believe that a ‘greater drama was at that moment unfolding in real life throughout the capital’.57 Leighton Rogers and several colleagues from the National City Bank had headed out for supper at the Café de la Grave, located in the basement of a building on the Nevsky. En route they had their first experience of the Cossacks, a troop of whom came hurtling at them, ‘galloping at full tilt down the sidewalk … shouting like mad, carbines bouncing on their backs, sabres flopping at the horses’ sides, and mean looking steel lances flourishing’. Rogers and his party took one look and ran for their lives. After dining they headed home in the dark; the atmosphere of the city was ‘like a taut wire’. Troops of mounted Cossacks were still out in force, lined up all the way down the Nevsky, ‘compelling pedestrians to walk up the middle of the street between a double row of horses and steel points’. ‘It was hardly a pleasant sensation,’ Rogers recalled. ‘All the way I could feel myself wriggling on one of those lances like a worm on a hook.’ ‘I’ll never fish with live bait again,’ he resolved.58
In search of a story, Arno Dosch-Fleurot had made ‘a long tour’ that afternoon through the Vyborg Side and had found it ‘thickly policed by infantrymen’. There were a few trams still running, ‘but otherwise the district was ominously silent’. The only people on the streets had been those in the familiar bread lines and groups of workers on corners, whose ‘silent gravity’ struck Fleurot as ‘something to reckon with’. Thompson noticed them too when, after dinner at Donon’s, he ventured into the outlying areas until 3.00 a.m.59 Over at the French embassy, First Secretary Charles de Chambrun wrote to his wife, pondering the news he had just heard that a general strike had been declared for the following day. More marches, more protests were coming. But what could a mob ‘without alcohol, without a leader and without a clear objective achieve?’ he wondered. As night fell, Petrograd waited expectantly.60
* Sources conflict on the correct temperature, with many giving it as much lower than it really was. See endnote.
* The munitions workers were well paid and, as they were key workers, they were also receiving larger bread rations, so they were therefore more reluctant to come out on strike.
* Nor was it till after the Tsar’s abdication on 3 March, when the tsarist censorship collapsed and proper reporting could begin, meaning that the earliest reports out of Russia were not published in the West until around 16 March (NS).
3
‘Like a Bank Holiday with Thunder in the Air’
‘Oh this interminable Russian winter with its white roofs for so many long months and its slippery roads,’ French resident Louise Patouillet wrote ruefully in her diary, by now long accustomed to the kind of low grey sky that greeted the city with a new fall of snow on Saturday 25 February.1 Leighton Rogers, in contrast, struck an excited note in his own journal: ‘What a day! The general strike is on, all right, and trouble has begun.’ That morning, on their way to the bank, he and his colleagues had ‘found the streets thick with police, both a-foot and mounted; no factories working, and the Nevsky a long line of closed shops, with here and there a boarded up door or window.’ He had heard rumours that the first person had been killed the previous night when trying to break into a bread shop; the people on the streets seemed on the lookout for excitement, ‘like a crowd at a great country fair’, but Rogers ‘hated to think of what one shot would do.’2
Had he known the extent to which the strikers were now arming themselves for an inevitable street fight with the police, Rogers might have been even more alarmed. Across the city, embassies and legations were being warned by telephone not to allow their staff to go out. Yet that day the somewhat foolhardy Rogers had set off from the National City Bank with ‘nine million roubles worth of short term Treasury Notes’ to get them ‘stowed away’ in a safe-deposit vault at the Volga-Kama Bank ahead of Sunday closing. He put the notes – the equivalent of $3 million – in his jacket pocket and headed off from the bank, which was housed in the former Turkish embassy on Palace Embankment. But the streets were so choked with crowds that he had been forced to go the long way round. Outside the Mikhailovsky Theatre he stopped for a while to study the poster for the latest French season; the next thing he knew, a colleague from the bank came running after him shouting, ‘Where the hell have you been?? … We’ve been phoning all over the city for you!’ When they had called the Volga-Kama Bank they had discovered Rogers hadn’t yet arrived; they were worried that something had happened to him, for they had been tipped off ‘that a revolution ha[d] started’.3
Violent protest was certainly the intention of the workers over in the factory districts that morning, as they gathered for a huge march on the city. This time they had ensured that they wore plenty of padding under their thick coats, in order to ward off blows from the lead-tipped nagaiki used by the faraony. Some even crafted metal plates to wear under their hats, to protect them from blows, and filled their pockets with whatever metal projectiles and weapons they could lay hands on in their factories.4 At noon the crowds began their descent on the Nevsky, but the faraony were ready for them at the Liteiny Bridge. As the crowd surged forward to try and cross it, the faraony charged them; but though the crowd parted to let them through, it quickly closed once again in a pincer movement around the commanding officer, pulling him from his horse. Someone grabbed the officer’s revolver and shot him dead, while another beat at him in a rage with a piece of wood.5 It was the first defining act of violence against the police that day.
On the south side of Petrograd the powerful Putilov workforce had joined the strike and, as the day went on, the strike spread inexorably across the city, bringing out everyone, from shop workers to waitresses, to cooks and maids and cab drivers; key workers in the supply of the city’s electricity, gas and water and the tram drivers were also out in force. A few bread shops had been open, but by early afternoon were forced to close, and striking postal workers and printers had ensured that there were no mail deliveries and no newspapers. The strikers’ numbers were swelled by at least 15,000 striking students, as fifteen different columns of marchers converged on the Nevsky. But no one knows exactly how many strikers surged through the streets of Petrograd that day – official figures vary from 240,000 to 305,000.6
The impromptu bread protests of two days ago had now expanded into a political movement, coloured by more and more acts of violence and looting. On the Liteiny, Amélie de Néry saw a young boy who had helped to loot a small Jewish shop stand there offering six dozen stolen mother-of-pearl buttons for a ruble. An insignificant act of theft, perhaps, but for de Néry it signalled a worrying change in public attitudes brought on by the protests – a lack of distinction between ‘yours’ and ‘mine’. Perhaps tomorrow, she wondered, ‘a more serious collapse in moral values would be unleashed’.7 For the time being, though, there was still no outward sign of a systematic organised revolt; the movement remained inchoate, leaderless. ‘Is it a riot? Is it a revolution?’ asked Claude Anet, Petrograd correspondent of Le Petit Parisien, who – like the other foreign journalists in town – had had no luck in telegraphing the news back to his paper in Paris.8
Bitter cold prevailed once more, but with all the trams stopped and many shops closed there was little traffic on the streets, enabling the crowds to mill on the Nevsky, ‘eddying up and down in anxious curiosity’ and gathering in knots on street corners. Leighton Rogers recalled a ‘curious, smiling, determined crowd’, but he also sensed something else: that it was ‘dangerous’.9 Troops were out in force at the natural gathering points at major intersections along the two-mile stretch of the Nevsky, from the Winter Palace at its northern end, down past the Kazan Cathedral to Znamensky Square and, on its south side, the Nicholas Station. Like the Cossacks, the troops seemed unwilling to exert force, and the crowds appeared hopeful that they had won them over.
But everything changed in the afternoon when the troops and faraony were ordered to clear the crowds. The whole of the Nevsky was one seething mass of people as the police pushed at them, striking with sabres, while the Cossacks charged and swashbuckled. Inevitably people fell and in the melee were trampled by horses or by each other, as the crowd swelled and surged, all the way down to the popular meeting point at Znamensky Square. Here Donald Thompson had seen police mounting a machine gun on the balcony of a house at eleven that morning; a confrontation was clearly brewing.10 After lunch he and Harper had walked back down there to observe the enormous gathering of workers, strikers, students and even some middle-class and professional people pressing together in front of the ugly equestrian statue of Alexander III. Many had taken their hats off and were shouting, ‘Give us bread and we will go back and work.’ As elsewhere, the troops hung back, and the Cossacks seemed to be taking an interest in the speeches. The women in the crowd were as bold as the previous day, approaching them and placing ‘coaxing hands’ on their rifles. ‘Put them down!’ they pleaded. ‘Think of your own mothers and sweethearts and wives!’ Others fell on their knees: ‘We are your sisters, workers like yourselves. Do you mean to bayonet us?’11
One speaker after another leaped up on the statue’s plinth to harangue the crowd, which became uglier as time went on. Around 2.00 p.m. Thompson saw a well-dressed man in furs enter the square in a sleigh, shouting at the crowd to let him through, only to be ‘dragged out of his sleigh and beaten’. Thompson saw him run to take refuge in an abandoned tram nearby – but a group of workers followed him and one of them, armed with a ‘small iron bar’, proceeded in an outburst of rage to beat the man’s head ‘to a pulp’. This ‘seemed to give the mob a taste for blood’, for as they surged forward some of them started smashing the windows of those shops not already protected with iron shutters. Some of these protesters, however, were actually police in disguise. Thompson recognised one of them: a member of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, who lived at his hotel, now dressed as a workman and pushing soldiers off the pavement as though he were ‘an anarchist of the worst type’. Boris, his interpreter, assured him this was so: the Okhrana were known to be ‘mingling with the mob’ and trying to incite them into attacking the soldiers’.12
By late afternoon Harper – having already walked the best part of ten miles around the city that day – announced that she was exhausted and was going back to the hotel. Thompson, however, persuaded her to stay a little longer. They hung back in a side street and watched. Every now and again the Cossacks galloped through the square to clear the crowds, but it was futile: ‘they would re-form again, like water after the passage of a boat’.13 Harper and Thompson were both watching – she back in the direction of the Nevsky, he in the square – when at about 4.00 p.m. Thompson heard a loud explosion. Someone had thrown a grenade or bomb from the roof of the Nicholas Station; Thompson saw the crowd instinctively raise their hands in the air, indicating that they were unarmed. Shortly afterwards another explosion followed as the Cossacks struggled to control the crowd.
Then Harper saw them – a platoon of faraony came galloping into the square, ‘slashing at every side with their sabers’, until suddenly a Cossack leaped forward and ran the officer leading the faraony through with his lance* and he fell dead from his horse. After this ‘the Cossacks yelled and charged the faraony, hacking and swinging with their whips’ until they ‘broke and fled’ in terror.14 ‘You should have seen the crowd,’ wrote another American eyewitness: ‘People kissed and hugged the Cossacks, climbing up on the horses to reach them. Others kissed and embraced the horses, the Cossacks’ boots, stirrups, saddles. They were given cigarettes, money, cigar cases, gloves, anything, everything.’ Thompson’s interpreter, Boris, seemed greatly moved by this moment. The ‘day of days’ had come, he told Thompson: ‘The Cossacks are with the People.’ It was the ‘first time in the history of Russia that a Cossack had disobeyed orders’.15
According to Harper, about five hundred or so of the mob then detached themselves and started back up the Nevsky ‘carrying a red flag that was bigger than anything we had seen’.16 She and Thompson trailed them back up the street, during which time the crowd was charged three times by the police and they ‘had to turn and run’. Harper was terrified that she might be tripped by the running crowd and get trampled underfoot, but it was the sabres of the police that scared her most. She decided to head back to the Astoria, but as she and Thompson were approaching the Singer Building, they decided they might first take refuge for a while in the US consulate there. A block before, they could see that a crowd had gathered round the window of Pekar’s patisserie – a franchise at the Hotel d’Europe boasting a window of luxury cakes and confectionery (which even Leighton Rogers thought ‘a rash display for these hard times’). The crowd were eyeing the food ‘they couldn’t have’, when suddenly a workman smashed the plate-glass window and grabbed a box of biscuits.17 The noise drew even more people, closely followed by the police, who opened fire.
Arthur Reinke, an American telephone engineer with Westinghouse, which had offices in the Singer Building, had watched from his balcony in horror as the faraony had ridden into the crowd that had gathered, ‘beating the people down with their nagaikas’, and at how, in response, ‘the people had roared and hooted and threw stones and bottles at the police’. He had wanted to get back to the Hotel d’Europe where he was staying, but the mob outside Pekar’s ‘simply filled the Nevsky from edge to edge … tearing down the street towards me, while bayonets were blinking in the distance and bullets flying’. Taking a deep breath, he made a run for it and reckoned, in so doing, that he ‘establish[ed] the engineering department’s record for the hundred-yard dash, making that hotel corner before the mob cut me off’ – only to find the hotel doors bolted. After he had pounded with sufficient force, a porter finally let him in.18 Claude Anet had had the same problem when he got caught in the mob at the Europe: he had found ‘all the doors, carriage-entrances’ and other means of escape nearby firmly closed, ‘as though by a miracle’. With great difficulty he had made his way against the current of people to the safety of a house near the Anichkov Bridge.19
Boris had not been surprised at the attack on Pekar’s: the café, he told Thompson, was rumoured to be ‘full of German agents and food controllers who met there and decided each day what they would charge for food’, which is why the mob had wreaked vengeance upon it.20 The place was completely wrecked and five people sitting inside had been killed, as well as the workman who had broken the window. The bodies of the dead were quickly carried off; the shop window was boarded up and the ‘clotted snow’ carefully swept away, but the story spread down the Nevsky like ‘quick-silver’ until it reached the Nicholas Station, where the police had again used a concealed machine gun to disperse the angry crowd.21
The disturbances outside Pekar’s had taken place only a short distance from the Anglo-Russian Hospital, from where the nurses had seen the mob coming down the Nevsky from the Singer Building. The nurses had all been snatching time whenever they could that day to watch the crowds and help deal with some of the wounded who were carried in from the street. Canadian VAD Edith Hegan was struck by the strangeness of the situation: usually at the front their first sight of the wounded had been after the battles, when they were brought to the field hospitals, but here in Petrograd ‘we have only to look from our second-story window to see riots continually in progress and wounded and dying falling everywhere as the police charge the streets from time to time’. She and three of her compatriots went down to the Anichkov Bridge that afternoon to take a closer look, but were severely reprimanded for doing so. Returning to their window seats, they could hear the ‘click of the machine guns which the police had hidden in the houses’.22 Their Russian patients begged them to come away from the windows, as bullets were already hitting the hospital.
Disturbances continued up and down the Nevsky until early evening. At around 6.00 p.m. Arno Dosch-Fleurot had been out near the Singer Building with a British military adviser, when they had both had to dive for cover as a squad of faraony, their sabres drawn, came charging round the corner into the Nevsky on the pavement, striking at the mob with the edge of their blades in an attempt to drive them off the street.23 But all their efforts failed: there were now two or three thousand people on the Nevsky – a ‘running mob’ – and Fleurot saw the faraony bayonet several demonstrators. From the window of his room in the Hotel d’Europe as he dressed for a concert, British socialite Bertie Stopford* had seen ‘all the well-dressed Nevski crowd running for their lives down the Michail Street [Mikhailovskaya], and a stampede of motor-cars and sledges – to escape from the machine-guns which never stopped firing’.24 He saw ‘a well-dressed lady run over by an automobile, a sledge turn over and the driver thrown into the air and killed. The poorer-looking people crouched against the walls; many others, principally men, lay flat in the snow. Lots of children were trampled on, and people knocked down by the sledges or by the rush of the crowd.’
Thompson, Harper and Boris, too, were still out on the streets and constantly having to dive for cover.25 Boris was sure that some of the rounds the troops had fired had been blanks or that they had fired into the air – otherwise there would have been far more people killed. It was the police manning machine guns on the roofs of buildings who had done most of the killing.26 The demonstrators had responded with every kind of weapon they could lay their hands on: revolvers, home-made bombs or missiles – bottles, rocks, metal, even lumps of snow. Some had hand-grenades that had found their way back from the Eastern Front. And all day long they had continued to urge the troops to come over to their side.27
At Russian-army HQ (Stavka) at Mogilev nearly five hundred miles away, Nicholas II had received news of the violent turn of events in Petrograd, although Protopopov had failed to transmit the true gravity of the situation to him. Thinking firmer measures by police and troops were all that were needed, Nicholas had therefore not seen the necessity of returning to Petrograd, instead telegraphing Khabalov and ordering him to ‘quell by tomorrow the disturbances in the capital which are inexcusable in view of the difficulties of the war with Germany and Austria’. His wife had written, dismissing the day’s events as no more than the workers blowing off steam, ‘a hooligan movement’, ‘young boys and girls running about and screaming that they have no bread, only to excite’. Had it been very cold, she felt, ‘they would probably stay indoors’.28 Besides, Alexandra had far more serious things to think about: three of her five children, Alexey, Tatiana and Olga, were down with the measles.
Seeking some light relief from the day’s traumatic events, Florence Harper and Donald Thompson went that evening to the Mikhailovsky premiere of a French farce, L’Idée de Françoise, accompanied by the US vice consul. Thompson found it a bore and left early with Boris, to walk the streets of the factory districts, where he ‘found things more exciting’.29 French embassy attaché Louis de Robien was also at the premiere, but the imperial boxes were empty and the grand dukes absent. One of the company, actress Paulette Pax,* had found the whole performance unnerving – particularly the audience, with its ‘profusion of jewels and sumptuous outfits’ – bearing in mind what had been going on outside all day. She felt that none of them had taken much notice of the play: their minds were elsewhere, their applause half-hearted. ‘What we were doing was ridiculous,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘performing a comedy at such a time made no sense.’30
Arthur Ransome had not, however, considered the situation so serious when he wrote his despatch that night, noting how most of the crowd (‘including many women’) had been out simply to watch other people make trouble. The ‘general feeling’ had been one of ‘rather precarious excitement like a bank holiday with thunder in the air’, he suggested, emphasising the ‘extremely good relations between crowd and Cossacks’. The objective of the disturbances had been ‘vague’. Arthur Reinke thought much the same: that night he had found the highways jammed with people who, in the face of extreme provocation by the police, had remained ‘merely curious’.31 But the imposition of a curfew saw them all hurrying to their homes by 11.00 p.m., leaving ‘long rows of ugly-looking Cossacks on their ponies drawn at intervals across the street’ and large splotches of blood visible on the white snow, bearing ‘mute witness’ to what had happened that day.32 J. Butler Wright never forgot ‘the pervading smell’ on the Nevsky late that afternoon; it came from ‘the disinfectants and first-aid remedies administered to those who had been shot down’.33
Out on the Petrograd Side, a restless Donald Thompson was still in search of a story with Boris at 2.00 a.m., when he finally came face-to-face with the first hideous manifestation of mob violence. Marching towards them came a rowdy group of about sixty people, ‘who had taken two heads and jammed them on poles and were carrying them down the middle of the street’. They were the heads of policemen, so Boris said. Thompson had seen enough red for one day: red flags, red blotches on the snow; and now severed heads. They saw more bodies on their way back to the Astoria, and Thompson later discovered that ‘a great many policemen were killed or seriously wounded’ by mobs in the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides.34 All through Saturday night there was a great deal of screaming and yelling and incessant firing in those districts, as the violent scenario continued to unravel. For Philip Chadbourn, that day had been a point of significant and perhaps optimistic transition – ‘the blank between the reels’ – separating ‘the black misery and injustice of the first reel’ and the ‘red revolt and bright heroics of the second’.35
There was an ominous stillness in the city on the beautiful, cloudless sunny Sunday morning that followed; but overnight General Khabalov had resolved that draconian measures would have to be taken to keep the situation under control. New placards posted across the city announced that all workers would have to return to work by Tuesday 28th or those who had applied for deferments of their military service would be sent straight to the front. All street gatherings of more than three people were forbidden. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers that had gone on from midnight till 5.00 a.m., Khabalov had given assurances that 30,000 soldiers, backed up by artillery and armoured cars, would be on the streets, with orders to take decisive action against the demonstrators.36
Overnight the drawbridges across the Neva had all been raised and the remaining fixed bridges were heavily guarded by armoured cars and machine guns. Though the crowds took to the ice once more, there were now so many that it took a long time for them to cross. There were fewer Cossacks about that morning, but a lot more police on patrol, and troops were manning all the bridges intersecting the Nevsky with the Ekaterininsky Canal and the Moika and Fontanka Rivers, and also on guard outside the railway stations. By late morning many of these positions were being reinforced with machine-gun posts. The Red Cross was in evidence, too, positioning horse-drawn ambulances in side streets in anticipation of the inevitable resumption of violence.37 This time Khabalov was taking no chances and had ensured that most of the troops on the Nevsky were training detachments from the guards regiments, brought in from the military academies. They were all heavily armed with rifles and bayonets – the authorities assuming that, as NCOs, these men would be less reluctant to shoot, if ordered to do so.38
It seemed as though the whole city was out of doors that morning, and on foot – for there were no trams or cabs. People seemed determined to get to church as usual or simply enjoy the fine weather for a promenade along the Nevsky. Couples were pushing their babies in prams, just like any ordinary Sunday; children were skating on the ice rink in the Admiralty Gardens. It seemed to Donald Thompson, as he left the Astoria with Florence Harper, ‘that all the children in Petrograd were out’.39
Most of the shops and cafés facing the Nevsky were closed, however, and a lot of them had their shutters down or had been hastily boarded up.40 The city seemed ‘violated’, thought Louise Patouillet, who was unnerved by the changes that the disturbances had already wrought. Overnight, and despite the families out walking in such a seemingly carefree manner, the atmosphere had crystallised into something darker, edgier. Revolution was ‘in the air you breathed’, noted an English visitor. What organisation there was remained impromptu, of a ‘hand-to-mouth character’.41 The Russian government had warned foreign nationals not to go out, but Thompson and Harper were unable to resist the temptation to mingle with the crowds on the Nevsky once more with Boris, although, as Harper recalled, ‘neither of us liked the look of the situation’. People were desperate for news, and groups formed round anyone who had any to tell.42 The one predominating topic of conversation – aside from debate about how many had already been killed or injured, heard time and time again by foreign eyewitnesses during the revolution – was that much of the firing on civilians had been done by faraony disguised as soldiers or even as Cossacks. People were sure of this because the faraony rode ‘large, fine animals’, and the Cossacks’ horses were ‘very small and shaggy and generally unkempt looking’. They could tell the difference.43
By midday the approaches to the Nevsky had become blocked with dense crowds flooding in from all sides of the city and attempting to converge there. Thompson and Harper headed for the Medved (‘The Bear’) – a popular French restaurant on Bolshaya Konyushennaya near the Singer Building – for a midday lunch before the restaurant’s limited supply of bread ran out. Thompson was well prepared for possible action and had his ‘gyroscopic camera’ concealed in a bag so that he could take photographs.44 After leaving the restaurant and walking back down to the Nevsky they could see a mob, waving red flags and singing the Marseillaise, gathering lower down near the Anichkov Bridge. ‘Those poor devils are going to get it,’ Thompson warned, and as they turned to take shelter they heard a roar and saw ‘fifty mounted police dressed as soldiers’ charge the mob and drive them down the side street.
But no sooner had this crowd been moved on than another one gathered on the bridge. A student clambered up on one of the equestrian statues and started waving a red flag and making a speech; Thompson stopped to get a picture and watched as the mob moved off and straight into the ‘snarl of a deadly machine gun and the spit of rifles’. He had seen the police pulling a machine gun into the middle of the tram-tracks. ‘Volley after volley rang out,’ recalled Harper. ‘The dead were thick; the wounded were screaming as they were trampled down.’ Soon everyone was prostrate, hugging the pavement or lying in the snow – Thompson and Harper included. It felt as though ‘hell itself had broken loose on the Nevsky’, for they were under fire ‘from every point’, bar the shops behind them. Bullets were also coming at them from machine guns on the roofs of buildings and ‘sweeping all around’.45
Thompson managed to take a few photographs before he and Harper got up and made a run for it. They smashed their way through the window of a glove shop to take cover, closely followed by about ten or fifteen others, many of them bleeding. Right in front of their eyes they had seen a little girl hit in the throat by gunfire, and a well-dressed woman standing near them had collapsed with a scream as her knee was shattered by a bullet. After crawling back out into the street, Thompson and Harper were once more thrown to the ground by rifle fire coming from the police on the Anichkov Bridge. All around people lay dead and dying in the snow – Thompson counted twelve dead soldiers, Harper noted far more women and children than men: thirty dead in all. The two reporters lay there in the snow for more than an hour, numb with cold, but too frightened to move. Harper ‘had a vague idea that I was freezing to death’; she wanted to cry. And then the ambulances appeared and started collecting the dead and wounded and they decided this was fortuitous: they could pretend they were wounded and be picked up and taken to safety.46
The nurses at the Anglo-Russian Hospital had also seen the fighting in which Thompson and Harper had been caught up, a short distance from the Anichkov Bridge. VAD Dorothy Cotton had been reliably informed that there would be a renewal of disturbances by 3.00 p.m. and, just as predicted, at around 2.45 they were all watching from the windows when a company of Pavlovsky guards, lined up at the major junction of Sadovaya with the Nevsky (just west of the Anichkov Bridge), were ordered to clear the street. Lady Sybil Grey had seen how they ‘lay down in the snow and fired a volley into the people’, who all fell onto their faces.47 Then a machine gun opened fire from a rooftop and ‘swept the street in every direction’, as people tried to crawl away on their stomachs. Others ‘rushed where they could. They darted into side streets, pressed against the walls of houses, hid prone behind heaps of snow or behind streetcar posts.’ It had all been ‘a case of quite unnecessary provocation on the part of the police’, she recalled.
Many people had taken refuge in the doorway of the hospital, noticed Edith Hegan.48 She could not help being impressed by the Cossacks, galloping up and down the Nevsky like ‘a tawny streak’ trying to clear the crowds. She saw one of them charge at a man who seemed to be leading the crowd, and how he ‘described an arc in the air with his sword. I saw the sword descend, and while I held my breath in horror it neatly sliced off the top of the man’s hat.’ The man had not seemed to be ‘in the least frightened’ and had ‘walked calmly on, while the crowd cheered them both impartially’. Not so long ago, she added, ‘that Cossack would have sliced off the man’s head’.49
When things quietened down, people rushed to help the wounded. Philip Chadbourn saw ‘two young workmen in high boots and black reefers’ who were ‘lying on their backs, with blood running from their mouths’. ‘As I stood over them and looked into their unseeing eyes, a woman stooped, peered into their faces, shuddered and said, “What a shame! Boys, only boys!”’50 Nearby, ‘six men wearing green students’ caps’ passed, who were ‘bearing over their heads in the street a corpse on a signboard’. Others stopped a passing limousine; they made the two occupants get out, placed wounded civilians inside and ordered the chauffeur to take them to the hospital. Chadbourn saw the same thing happen ‘with two private sleighs’. Elsewhere, the wounded and dead were carried away by the crowd; others were left lying in huddles until horse-drawn and motor ambulances came along and picked them up.
With its 180 beds full of wounded from the front, the ARH could offer little other than first aid to a dozen or so victims who were brought in rapidly, many of them dying almost as soon as they arrived, as Edith Hegan recalled.51 She and her fellow nurses did what they could for the wounded, ‘but at night the authorities took them away, except two or three who were too near death to be moved’. Eighteen more wounded were carried into the city Duma a short way down the Nevsky from the ARH, which students had helped turn into a makeshift Red Cross station. All afternoon Lady Sybil Grey saw the motor ambulances pass by unceasingly up and down the street. In a single hospital three hundred wounded were taken in. There were another sixty at the Mariinsky Hospital on the Liteiny and more than one hundred at the Obukhov Hospital on the Fontanka.52
In the early evening the ‘most sanguinary episode in the Revolution’, as Robert Wilton later described it, had occurred at Znamensky Square, where a dense mass of people from the Nevsky had converged with another crowd coming up Ligovskaya, the major thoroughfare to the south of the square.53 ‘Local police leaders on horseback rode among the crowd ordering them home,’ recalled Dr Joseph Clare, pastor of the American Church,* who witnessed the scene. ‘The people knew the soldiers were on their side and refused to move.’ Lined up in front of a hotel facing the square were men from the 1st and 2nd training detachments of the Volynsky Regiment. When their commander ordered them to disperse the crowd, the soldiers begged the crowds to move on, so they would not have to use their weapons, but the people refused to budge. Angrily the officer had one of the reluctant soldiers arrested for insubordination and again ordered his men to fire. ‘They shot in the air, and the officer got mad, making each individual fire into the mob,’ recalled Clare. Finally he raised his own pistol and started firing into the crowd. Then ‘suddenly came the rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun. The people could hardly believe their ears, but there was no doubting the evidence of eyes as they saw people falling.’54 Robert Wilton saw it, too: the Maxim gun placed on the roof of a nearby building – probably the one Donald Thompson had seen the previous day – had opened fire on the crowd. But this time something extraordinary happened: the troop of Cossacks positioned in the square had turned and fired at the gunners on the house tops. ‘It was a veritable pandemonium,’ Wilton recalled, as ‘with a great howl of rage’ the crowd scattered behind buildings and into courtyards, from where some of them began firing at the military and police. Forty or so were killed and hundreds wounded.55
The ‘fratricidal roar’ of fighting continued to echo across the Nevsky until dark, with small, independent groups of people constantly looking for trouble, some of them armed; the mob was ‘on the qui vive with excitement’, Philip Chadbourn recalled, but with the city such a sprawl and the streets so wide, incidents often took place disconnected from each other and it took time before word was transmitted in respect of what was going on where.56 As one American noticed, it was the ‘queerest sensation’ that day ‘to find it so quiet in certain sections, and the next minute to round a corner and find an ambulance picking up the dead and wounded’.57 Arthur Ransome had telegraphed that he had ‘scuttled’ round a street corner to get out of the way of machine-gun fire, only to find ‘four men peacefully scraping ice from pavements with hoes’.58 The truth was that, with so much random firing, no one knew who was friend or foe and it was a difficult and dangerous news story for any journalist to follow.
Exhausted though she was, Florence Harper’s professional instincts had kept her out until early evening: ‘It was too exciting in the streets.’ Back at the Astoria, she had overheard a fat Chicago shoe salesman bewailing the fact that he would never ‘have his wild tales of running six blocks from the mobs and the fighting’ believed, when he ‘sat over a stein of beer, surrounded by a few congenial souls in his favourite café in Chicago’. ‘They will just call me a liar!’ he wailed. He found himself stranded at the Astoria, it being too dangerous to go back to his hotel at the Nicholas Station, and he would spend the next three days there repeating his tale of miraculous survival. ‘I hope his friends in Chicago did believe him,’ Harper later wrote, because – like herself and Thompson and many other foreign observers that day – ‘he was there and in it all.’59
None of them, however, knew exactly how many had been killed on Sunday: Robert Wilton thought two hundred at least; others, like Harper and Thompson, had noted the dead and wounded at particular points of conflict – some the victims of machine guns and crossfire in and around the Nevsky and Znamensky Square, others ridden down by the faraony or killed from falling under the horses of the Cossacks. But the casualties had been carried off in all directions: to hospitals, to temporary dressing points, to the morgues or simply back home by friends and relatives. Nobody was counting. However many died, the evidence of the day’s violence was everywhere to be seen, as Robert Wilton noted: ‘I saw hundreds of empty cartridge cases littering the snow, which was deluged in blood.’60
After dark, when the crowds had cleared from the Nevsky, the soldiers involved in the shootings at Znamensky Square and on the Nevsky had returned to their barracks, angry and upset that they had been forced to fire on the crowds. Robert Wilton had walked to the British embassy to call on a shocked Sir George Buchanan, who had just managed to get the last train back to Petrograd from his brief holiday in Finland, to find himself in the midst of a revolution. ‘I was walking through the Summer Garden when the bullets began to whiz over my head,’ Wilton remembered.61 One hundred of the Pavlovsky guards in their nearby barracks on the Field of Mars, hearing how earlier in the day members of the 4th Company had been ordered to open fire on crowds near the junction of the Sadovaya and the Nevsky, had decided to take action. The police, they were convinced, had been ‘provoking bloodshed’.62 These men had set out for the Nevsky with a few rifles and ammunition, intent on dissuading their comrades from shooting on demonstrators, when they were confronted by mounted faraony. Firing broke out, but the soldiers had soon run out of ammunition and were forced back to their barracks, where they gave themselves up. The nineteen ringleaders were arrested and were incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress; the rest were confined to barracks. There was an immediate clampdown on news of the mutiny, but soon word was out.63
That evening, actress Paulette Pax headed back to the Mikhailovsky Theatre, wondering if the scheduled performance of L’Idée de Françoise would go ahead. When she arrived she found her fellow actors all extremely upset and full of stories of the day’s atrocities. They had no stomach for farce that evening, and the auditorium was practically empty. But the rule was that a performance would only be cancelled if the audience numbered fewer than seven. Pax groaned when the box office rose above that low bar; but, to their credit, the actors took to the stage and performed the play ‘as though to a full house’.64
Two members of that small audience were British embassy official Hugh Walpole and Arno Dosch-Fleurot, who thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Stella Arbenina, an Englishwoman married to Baron Meyendorff, was there, too. Everything had been ‘perfectly quiet’ on the streets when she had arrived, and she had sent her coachman and horses home, not wanting to keep them waiting in the cold for two hours. On entering the theatre, she had been dismayed to find that although the French plays usually filled the auditorium to capacity, there were only about fifty people present and all of them ‘looking as out of place and apologetic as ourselves’. Quite the worst moment, though, came during the interval, when any Russian officers present in the audience were obliged, by tradition, to stand and face the imperial box, an ‘act of empty homage’ to an absent tsar.65
At the Mariinsky Theatre – a venue usually filled to bursting – a performance of the ballet La Source had also played to a half-empty auditorium. Down on the Fontanka, the much-anticipated party at Princess Radziwill’s palace went ahead as planned, although the carriages bringing guests had been refused entry to the Nevsky and had had to go the long way round. Charles de Chambrun and Claude Anet were there and noted how preoccupied the guests were, though everybody ‘tr[ied] to dance in spite of it’. Anet watched as Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich took to the dance floor; was he witnessing this scion of the Russian aristocracy dancing ‘his last tango’, he wondered? Bertie Stopford was also present, soaking up one last gasp of old-style imperial decadence; he stuck it out till 4.00 a.m., when Prince Radziwill sent him home to his hotel in his own car, as ‘occasional bullets still whistled up and down’.66
Maurice Paléologue was exhausted, having spent the whole day ‘literally besieged by anxious members of the French colony’ wanting to get out of Petrograd. He went out to dinner with a friend that evening rather than attend the Radziwill party. But on his way home he passed the palace and saw a long line of cars and carriages waiting outside. The party was still in full swing, but he was not tempted to join it. As he noted in his diary that night, Sénac de Meilhan, historian of the French Revolution, had written that there had also been ‘plenty of gaiety in Paris on the night of the 5th October, 1789!’67
As late-night partygoers made their way home there was a terrible eeriness about the city. Stella Arbenina had noticed it after leaving the Mikhailovsky Theatre. Normally the square outside would be full of activity – coaches, sledges and motor cars waiting to take theatregoers home, and a ‘gay crowd of people wrapped in furs’. But that night the square had been ‘completely empty’; there was not a taxi or sledge to be had, and she had been obliged to walk home in the moonlight and the intense cold. ‘Every now and then we heard a distant shot far away, but the streets we walked through were completely deserted.’ The silence was ominous and made the ‘creaking of the snow under our feet seem disproportionately loud’. Petrograd seemed like a dead city.
Claude Anet noticed the same false air of ‘tranquillity’. Petrograd was ‘deserted, lugubrious, hardly lighted at all’. Cordons of troops were still out, guarding the Nevsky at barricades at every intersection. Here and there groups of Cossacks could be seen patrolling in the snow, enveloped by white steam rising from their horses’ backs. It was like passing through one great military camp, recalled Anet.68 Norman Armour, who had stayed late at the Radziwill party, noticed it too as he walked back to his apartment overlooking the Neva: ‘I felt I might have been back in the days of the Crimean War,’ he recalled. It was bitterly cold and ‘the sentries in the streets had built fires and had stacked their guns near them, just as you see in old paintings in the Hermitage’.69 The only illumination came from the powerful beam of a searchlight mounted on the spire of the Admiralty tower, raking up and down the deserted Nevsky, which ‘stretched ahead a broad streak of ghastly white’ under its glare.70
Over at the state Duma in the Tauride Palace, frantic meetings had been taking place all day. Frustrated at the continuing lack of a response from the Tsar, Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko had seized the initiative and telegraphed him at Stavka about the gravity of the situation, warning that anarchy reigned in the capital, that food, fuel and transport supplies were in chaos and – in an attempt to galvanise him – asserting that the government was ‘paralyzed’. It was perhaps an overstatement and it ran counter to General Khabalov’s messages to Nicholas, which had sought to assure the Tsar that everything was under control. Rodzianko was insistent, however, that in order to defuse the dangerous situation it was essential that a new government in which the people had confidence be formed immediately. Fearful of a coup within the Duma, Prime Minister Golitsyn had stepped in and pre-empted Rodzianko by proroguing it, instead of the Duma waiting for Nicholas’s reply. (Nicholas, as it turned out, had decided no answer was necessary.) Rodzianko was outraged: the Duma was the constituted authority of Russia, he insisted; its prorogation was a violation of Russian law. He urged his colleagues to rally round and defend it, and a temporary committee was hurriedly organised.71
Revolution had now been articulated politically: in the seat of government, by some of the guards regiments, and by the once fiercely loyal Cossacks. The workers, outraged at the indiscriminate firing on the crowds that weekend, had formed their own militias and spent that Sunday night plotting not only to continue the strike and demonstrations, but also to seize weapons and turn the protest movement into nothing less than an armed uprising. ‘Since one o’clock today it has been a bloody Sunday for Russia,’ Donald Thompson wrote to his wife when he was finally back at the Astoria that evening. He had been out walking the freezing cold streets till 3.30 a.m., flashing his US passport to get through the barricades and returning at regular intervals to warm up, before he finally sat down. Wherever he had gone that evening he had encountered ‘ugly looking mobs’. He had heard the rumours of mutiny among some of the troops. ‘If this spreads to other regiments, Russia will be a republic in a few more hours,’ he told her.72 Everything now depended on how the disaffected troops – in particular the Pavlovsky, Volynsky and Preobrazhensky Regiments – would respond on Monday. ‘I wish you would send me some sugar,’ he added. ‘I also need some quinine and aspirin tablets.’ He wasn’t feeling well. But, as things turned out, he wouldn’t have a chance to write again for the next three days.
* Accounts vary considerably – some say one of the Cossacks fired, but Thompson, who was at the scene, is very clear that it was a sabre blow.
* Stopford’s credentials remain mysterious. He went to Petrograd in August 1916, ostensibly to sell a wireless installation for aeroplanes to the Russian government, but soon ingratiated himself into the top drawer of the Russian aristocracy and the Petrograd social circuit, from which position he passed on insider information to Sir George Buchanan.
* In Paris in 1912 Pax had briefly been mistress to the British secret agent Sidney Reilly.
* The Congregational Church in Petrograd had become known as the ‘American Church’ because the previous American ambassador and many of his suite had worshipped there.
4
‘A Revolution Carried on by Chance’
All through Sunday, Leighton Rogers and his colleagues from the National City Bank had been stranded at their office on Palace Embankment, it being too dangerous for them to leave the building and go back to their various lodgings. They had sat there all afternoon and evening, ‘listening to the crackling rifles, the ripping machine-guns, and wondering what it all meant.’ To them ‘it sounded worse than it really was’, Rogers concluded; but they took no risks and kept the lights off. When it got so dark that they couldn’t see, they had to stop reading and writing letters, by which time it had all got too much for Chester Swinnerton. Known to his colleagues as the ‘Count’, for the flamboyant twirly moustache that matched his bravado, Harvard graduate Swinnerton got to his feet and proclaimed with a theatrical gesture that they were ‘a great bunch of Americans’ and shouldn’t be afraid of a ‘little shooting’. ‘What’s the use of sitting here all night?’ he asked, ‘a bullet can come through the window and pick you off as well as it can in the street. I’m not going to stay; I’m going to walk home, the firing be damned, and sleep in a good bed. Good night.’1
With that, Swinnerton donned his hat, coat and galoshes and slammed the door. He hadn’t gone far when he encountered a ‘little insignificant cuss’, holding in his hand ‘a pistol big enough for a real man. It wasn’t one of our nice little snub nose revolvers, but a real pistol, and in his hands it didn’t appeal to me in the least’. Realising he had encountered the new revolutionary everyman, of whom there were many now prowling the streets with weapons they hardly knew how to handle – and seeing a mob of fifty more or so in the distance, firing at random – Swinnerton decided to ‘beat it back to the bank’. His colleagues heard a burst of rifle and machine-gun fire as Swinnerton came rushing back in through the door. ‘Well, I guess I won’t go home after all,’ he said sheepishly. ‘It’s cold there and warm here.’2
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