CAUGHT IN THE REVOLUTION Petrograd, Russia, 1917— A World on the Edge

That night, after sharing out the few cigars and cigarettes they had left, they all bedded down as best they could under their heavy greatcoats. The incongruity of their sumptuous situation – sleeping on ornate gold couches under cut-glass chandeliers, in what had been the former Turkish embassy’s big Moorish reception room – was hardly conducive to a restful night.3* They would spend the whole of Monday there, too, living on black bread, cabbage soup and tea. Occasionally one or other of them would dash outside to see ‘if there was anything to be seen’ and, upon discovering that indeed there was – far too much for comfort, in fact – would dash back in again.4

During the weekend’s disturbances US ambassador David Francis had wisely taken note of official advice and stayed indoors. At his request, the embassy had been provided with an eighteen-man guard of soldiers, but he had been apprehensive that their ‘fidelity’ was of an ‘uncertain quality’.5 He was worried, too, about the risks being taken by his staff, some of whom had been hovering outside on the pavement rubber-necking what was going on. He ordered them to come inside and lock the gates.6 It was just as well, for events on what would become known as ‘Red Monday’ crowded thick and fast, in such a dislocated and unpredictable fashion that there was great danger of being caught in the crossfire.

It had been a huge shock to Meriel Buchanan, arriving back in Petrograd at eight o’clock that morning from a visit to friends in the country, to find there were no trams and no droshkies at the station to transport her and her luggage to the British embassy. She was forcibly struck by how Petrograd had been dramatically – irretrievably – transformed in her absence: ‘In the bleak, gray light of that early morning the town looked inexpressibly desolate and deserted, the bare, ugly street leading up from the station, with the dirty stucco houses on either side, seemed, after the snow-white peace of the country, somehow the very acme of dreariness.’7 But that wasn’t all: there was an air of dread and suspense about the city that made her anxious parents glad to have her back. She spent most of that morning shut up and ‘forbidden to go out … sitting on the big staircase of the Embassy gleaning what information [she] could from the various people who came and went’.

By 11.00 a.m. it was clear that the capital was in the thick of a revolution, for by then disturbances had assumed ‘formidable proportions’, shifting away from the Nevsky and focusing on the northern end of the Liteiny, around the District Court – one and a half blocks away from the US embassy on Furshtatskaya, and closer as well to the British embassy on the Palace Embankment.8 Although David Francis would be at his desk all day Monday, trying to make sense of the turbulent events of the last few days in a long despatch to Washington – and hampered by the loss of the phone line, which had been vandalised – Sir George Buchanan had insisted at 11.30 a.m. on taking his usual morning drive with his French colleague Paléologue to the Russian Foreign Ministry.9 Both men had been extremely blunt with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nikolay Pokrovsky, as Buchanan reported later in a ciphered telegram to London. It was an ‘act of madness to prorogue the Duma at a moment like the present’, Buchanan had told him, for doing so would make it impossible to contain the revolt. Pokrovsky’s assurance that a ‘military dictator’ would be appointed, and troops sent by Nicholas from the front to ‘quell the mutiny’, only alarmed the two ambassadors further. Yet again, they wearily concluded, Nicholas had failed to choose the path of conciliation and political concession. Such draconian, repressive policies – of which the reactionary Protopopov was the chief architect – would do nothing, Buchanan argued, but inflame the situation and bring Russia ‘face to face with revolution’ at what was now a decisive stage in the war.10 Paléologue shared Buchanan’s gloom, reflecting on his own country’s turbulent history: ‘In 1789, 1830 and 1848, three French dynasties were overthrown because they were too late in realizing the significance and strength of the movement against them.’11

Events had, in fact, taken a decisive turn in the early hours of Monday 27 February when the army, as many had predicted, began mutinying. At 3.00 a.m. in his room at the Hotel de France, Arno Dosch-Fleurot had heard ‘lively rifle fire’ nearby. He got dressed to go and investigate, but the roads were closed and he couldn’t get through. He could tell, however, that the firing was coming from the Volynsky Regiment’s barracks near the junction of the Moika River and Ekaterininsky Canal. Overnight, and following the example of the Pavlovskys, some of the Volynskys, who had been ordered to fire on the crowds on Sunday, had decided to mutiny.12 When the soldiers lined up for duty, some of them turned on their commanding officer and shot him dead. They were unable, however, to persuade the rest of the regiment to join them, and so they headed off to incite other regiments, picking up a rabble of civilian supporters along the way. Maurice Paléologue had been dressing when, at around 8.30, he had heard a ‘prolonged din’ coming from the direction of the Liteiny Bridge. He saw a regiment of men approaching a disorderly mob of people crossing from the Vyborg Side and anticipated a ‘violent collision’, but instead ‘the two bodies coalesced’. ‘The army was fraternizing with revolt.’13 Already a point had been reached that morning from which there would be no turning back.

The coming together of troops and revolutionists gathered rapid speed as the Volynsky mutineers headed to the depot battalion of the Preobrazhensky and Lithuanian Regiments, as well as the 6th Engineer Battalion – all located close to their own barracks, and most of whom soon joined them, the last-named even bringing their marching band. By the end of the day the commanders of a battalion of the Preobrazhensky and a battalion of the Volynsky had been killed by their men, as well as numerous other officers. The desertion of the Preobrazhenskys from their barracks near the Winter Palace was particularly damaging, for they were the finest of the old guards regiments, legendary as the ‘chief pride and protection of the Russian monarchy’ and, like the Cossacks, they had until now been a bulwark of imperial authority.14 Donald Thompson had got caught up among the triumphant mutinying troops as he crossed the Field of Mars on his way to the US embassy that morning: ‘Soldiers were firing volleys into the air with their rifles … Instead of treating me as an enemy, several of them threw their arms about me and kissed me.’ He had his camera and started taking photographs; they were all eager to pose for him, and nobody took any notice when he stopped to photograph the corpses of ‘twenty-two officers who had been killed’ in the mutiny earlier that morning.15*

In those first few hours most of the rebellious soldiers appeared disorientated and numbed by the momentous decision they had made, and for some time they had no sense of where to go and what to do, other than incite other regiments to join them. One group forced their way past a training detachment of the Moskovsky Regiment guarding the Liteiny Bridge and marched to the Moskovsky’s barracks on Sampsonievksy on the Vyborg Side. Here, a portion of the regiment was eventually persuaded to join them in the afternoon, accompanied by motor lorries full to the brim with looted rifles; meanwhile the better-disciplined Bicycle Battalion, the only armed unit in the city, resisted all inducements to join in.16 Elsewhere, such was the euphoria among the rebellious troops that many simply walked around shouting, cheering and arguing among themselves ‘like schoolboys broken out of school’. For a while leadership, as such, of the mobs of soldiers and civilians devolved to acts of spontaneous bravado or rabble-rousing on street corners. But one objective was clear: the mutineers had to arm themselves.

With that in mind, at around 10.00 a.m. a group descended on the Old Arsenal at the top of the Liteiny at the junction of Shpalernaya, which housed both the Artillery Department and a small-arms factory. This group smashed in the gates and killed the elderly colonel in charge.17 British military attaché Major-General Sir Alfred Knox had been in the building, conferring with Russian colleagues, when he had seen ‘a great disorderly mass of soldiery, stretching right across the wide street and both pavements’. They had no officer in charge, but were led instead by ‘a diminutive but immensely dignified student’.18 Knox and his colleagues crowded round the windows to watch what would happen. There was an ‘uncanny silence’; then the sound of the windows and door on the ground floor being smashed in. As firing broke out, the crowd surged through, killing and wounding several of those on duty. In a mad frenzy rifles, revolvers, swords, daggers, ammunition and machine guns – whatever came to hand – were eagerly looted by soldiers and civilians alike. Looking over the banisters, Knox could see them snatching the swords of Artillery Department officers as they left the building, while ‘a few hooligans were going through the pockets of coats left in the vestibule’. They even broke the glass of display cases to remove rifles – even though these were ‘specimens of the armament of other nations that were without ammunition and would be of no use to them’.19

Outside on the Liteiny, by around 11.00 a.m. others had turned their attention to the hated bastions of tsarism – the nearby District Court and Palace of Justice, together with an adjoining remand prison. The prison was quickly burst open; its mainly criminal inmates awaiting trial were set free and handed weapons as they left, and the prison was set on fire. The District Court was torched, too, thus destroying all the criminal records contained within – a symbolic act that was also clearly to the advantage of all those freed convicts.20 The ensuing conflagration, however, not only destroyed police records, but also valuable historical archives dating back to the reign of Catherine the Great; and when the fire-engine crews arrived, the mob prevented them from tackling the blaze. French newspaperman Claude Anet saw how ‘an elderly man, fastidiously dressed, was wringing his hands’ at the sight of the building now ‘vomiting flames’. ‘Don’t you realize that all the Court records, archives of value beyond price, are perishing in the flames?’ he cried, to which a rough voice from the crowd answered him: ‘Don’t worry! We shall be able to divide your houses and land among the people without the help of any of your precious archives!’ – a response that was greeted with ‘a roar of delight’.21

Over at the US embassy, where he was meeting Ambassador Francis (who seemed to him ‘very cool and collected’), Donald Thompson had got word that it was all happening down on the Liteiny. He hurried there with Boris and Florence Harper, to find ‘a mob of about a million people, it seemed to me; and this mob was out for blood’, armed ‘with every weapon you can think of’.22 He started taking surreptitious photographs with his small camera, nervous of being mistaken for a police spy, and noticed an English photographer for the Daily Mirror* and Claude Anet doing likewise. Anet had run back to his hotel room to get his camera and had been taking photographs from behind a car on the Liteiny, when he was spotted and quickly found himself pinned against a wall by three bayonets. As the soldiers harangued him, a young female student had joined them and ‘began to denounce me fiercely’. He told them he was a Frenchman, a journalist. Did they want to see his papers? ‘Take the films,’ he said to them ‘and leave me the camera. I am your ally.’ Things were getting extremely ugly when someone sprang forward, snatched the camera from Anet’s hands and made off with it. He was dismayed at having lost ‘a valuable Goerz lens’.23

Thompson did not fare well, either. He found himself virtually transfixed by the vortex of violence on the Liteiny, with people all around him running about screaming, ‘Kill the police!’ – when suddenly he himself was arrested and hauled off to the police station. He showed them his US press pass, but he and Boris were locked in a suffocating small cell with about twenty others, the sound of rifle-and machine-gun fire all around, shouts and screams and the ‘smashing of doors and the crashing of glass’ – ‘a roar such as I never heard before in my life,’ he recalled. And there they languished while Boris tried to convince the police that the ‘Amerikansky’ was genuine. It wasn’t long before the mob broke into the police station, smashed the lock to his cell and the next thing he and Boris knew, ‘people were throwing their arms around Boris and me and kissing us, saying that we were free’. In the front office, as he made his way out, he ‘found a sight beyond description’: ‘Women were down on their knees hacking the bodies of the police to pieces.’ He saw one woman ‘trying to tear somebody’s face with her bare fingers’.24

The Liteiny was by now a scene of ‘indescribable confusion’, ablaze from the fires at the District Court and Palace of Justice, the air thick with the crackle of random shooting. An abandoned, overturned tram was being used as a platform from which a succession of speakers attempted to harangue the mob, but Louis de Robien recalled how it was ‘impossible to make head or tail of the disorderly ebb and flow of all these panic-stricken people running in every direction’.25 After the stampede on the New Arsenal, three field guns – which no one knew how to operate – had been dragged out from the gun factory, along with trench mortars and a considerable stock of ammunition, and placed at a hastily made barricade of piles of crates, carts, tables and office furniture in front of the District Court, which commanded the whole length of the Liteiny down to the Nevsky. This was backed up by machine guns on the brow of the Liteiny Bridge behind them, in case any loyal tsarist troops should arrive from the northern side.26 When a group of still-loyal Semenovskys did arrive, there was a pitched battle between them and a company of Volynsky mutineers – watched by groups of civilians huddled into side passages and doorways, many of them women and children tempted out by the ‘spirit of curiosity’, and who then took enormous risks, ‘walking out calmly under a lively fire to drag back the wounded’.27 James Houghteling saw the wounded being carried off as fast as they fell, leaving behind ‘long trails of fresh blood’ in the snow. He was astonished to see how, in between bouts of fighting, civilians scuttled back and forth across the Liteiny, intent on carrying on shopping as normal, even lining up outside the bakeries and dispersing only when they heard machine-gun fire. To many of the bewildered civilian population, the events swirling around them were unreal, ‘as though they were watching some melodrama in one of their cinematographs’.28

Such was the abandon with which weapons looted from army barracks, the arsenal, prisons and police stations were handed out to all and sundry that crowds of civilians, workers and soldiers were soon parading round gleefully, brandishing them and firing off at random, as British mechanical engineer James Stinton Jones encountered:

Here would be a hooligan with an officer’s sword fastened over his overcoat, a rifle in one hand and a revolver in the other; there a small boy with a large butcher’s knife on his shoulder. Close by a workman would be seen awkwardly holding an officer’s sword in one hand and a bayonet in the other. One man had two revolvers, another a rifle in one hand and a tram-line cleaner in the other. A student with two rifles and a belt of machine-gun bullets round his waist was walking beside another with a bayonet tied to the end of a stick. A drunken soldier had only the barrel of a rifle remaining, the stock having been broken off in forcing an entry into some shop.29

Arthur Reinke of Westinghouse was alarmed by how freely weapons and ammunition were given to children: ‘It was an interesting … sight to see a young Russian boy of fifteen clumsily handling a gun and trying to fit a cartridge in place. Children walked about with huge cavalry sabers. Self-appointed student guards often were seen armed with Turkish sabers or Japanese swords with wonderfully carved handles.’ ‘Even street urchins seemed to have picked up revolvers, and were blazing away at stray pigeons,’ noted another.30

There was no safe haven for any officers seen walking the streets that day who did not immediately surrender their weapons, when challenged. Even women were on the attack; nurse Edith Hegan saw ‘one fierce officer, covered with decorations and looking very much annoyed, try to saunter down the Nevsky, pursued by a crowd of women who stripped him of his arms. His sword fell to a gray-haired woman who shrieked apparently uncomplimentary Russian epithets at him as she contemptuously bent the sword over her knee, broke it in two, and lightly tossed it into the canal.’31

By midday the rabble of weapon-toting civilians in and around the Liteiny had been joined by 25,000 soldiers from the Volynsky, Preobrazhensky, Litovsky, Keksgolmsky and Sapper Regiments. Arno Dosch-Fleurot recalled the dense crowd jamming the street for a quarter of a mile, ‘carried on by its own faith in itself’.32 Everywhere, amidst the mighty roar of revolutionary excitement, the singing and cheering and shouting, the fighting colour of scarlet was in evidence – in crude revolutionary banners, in rosettes and armbands and in red ribbons tied to the barrels of rifles.

Events gained even greater momentum when the revolution went mobile. The major Military Garage in Petrograd was broken into and all the motor cars and some armoured trucks were taken.33 Private garages of the wealthy everywhere across the city were forced open, and their motor cars and swanky limousines summarily confiscated. These vehicles were promptly draped in red banners and driven madly up and down the Liteiny and elsewhere – often by inexperienced drivers who were delirious with the thrill of speed – crammed with soldiers with bayoneted rifles thrust out of the windows. Some cars had machine guns poking out of their smashed rear windows; armed rebels even lay along the car bonnets; but the most familiar form of revolutionary joyriding – and one vividly remembered by many eyewitnesses – was that of men riding shotgun, lying along the wide running boards of motor cars, their rifles at the ready. They would become the poster-boys of the revolution as, in the hours to come, these armoured motor cars and trucks played an important role in disseminating news of events. ‘Thunder[ing] back and forth through doubtful streets … they carried conviction of force.’ It was the presence of these cars and trucks that accounted for the rapid control of the city,’ in the opinion of American journalist Isaac Marcosson, covering events for Everybody’s Magazine. ‘It could not have been done afoot.’34

The liberation of prisoners from the remand prison next to the District Court was but one of many assaults on the city’s jails that day. The prisons were, along with the police, the primary targets of popular fury against the old regime. At around midday Major-General Knox had seen ‘a stream of troops … crossing the bridge to liberate the prisoners in the Krestovsky prison’.35 Known as The Kresty (meaning ‘crosses’, from its layout), this prison of solitary confinement and its adjoining women’s prison had been built in 1893 on the northern bank of the Neva near the Finland Station to accommodate up to one thousand prisoners, but by 1917 was overcrowded, with more than double that number. It took surprisingly little effort for a small mob of fewer than one hundred to force its way in, shooting the commandant and liberating the inmates – political and criminal alike.

William J. Gibson, a Canadian who lived on the Vyborg Side, saw the first to be released: ‘Two men and a woman … walking towards me dazedly and holding hands as if blind. They wore coarse prison clothes, and the tears streamed down their cheeks. Although not old, all three were practically white-haired. They were political prisoners, and had been in close solitary confinement since 1905.’36 The trauma of such sudden and unexpected release, when all hope had long gone, was clear to see in the faces of many other ‘pale and trembling’ politicals, as they emerged from their long incarceration ‘looking very ill’. Having been confined in windowless cells, they were blinded by the daylight. Others were so weak they had to be carried outside, where they ‘grovelled on the ground and kissed the feet of their comrades who had liberated them’. A few were so overwhelmed that they simply sat down in the snow and wept. Perhaps the most emotive release came at the transportation prison behind the Nicholas Station on Znamensky Square, where, during tsarist rule, every Wednesday morning those condemned to Siberian exile – including the novelist Fyodor Dostoievsky in 1849 – were despatched by rail, chained together by the wrist in groups of 100–150.37

At the Krestovsky, as at the District Court, all the prison records were removed and burned in a huge bonfire in the prison yard and the building then set on fire. At the House of Preliminary Detention on Shpalernaya, 958 prisoners were set free; others from the Litovsky prison near the Mariinsky Theatre were liberated the following day. All of the political prisoners were cheered; those who had been imprisoned for a criminal offence in some cases ‘were thrashed and told they would forfeit their lives if they were caught again’.38 There were, however, some prisoners who could not be reached, as Bousfield Swan Lombard noted, ‘because in many cases the inmates of prisons were locked in underground cells and in the confusion the keys were lost’; with the prisons then being set on fire, ‘most of them were roasted alive before it was possible to liberate them’. Those who did emerge had ‘hardly anything on, in the way of clothes’. The crowd took pity on these ‘wrecks of humanity’ and they were ‘accommodated with the most amazing assortment of garments. Little men were dressed up in very long trousers and an enormous man might be seen struggling into a coat and waistcoat much too small.’39

Throughout that terrifying day in Petrograd many observers became alarmed by the increasing anarchy and violence of the mob. It might later be asserted – indeed, it became one of the abiding myths of events in February– that this was a ‘benign revolution’,* but that was not the impression of the many foreign nationals who witnessed it. ‘It was like watching some savage beast that had broken out of its cage,’ recalled Negley Farson; there would be a price to pay for the release of the more hardened criminals, bestialised by brutal prison conditions, who proceeded to incite the crowds to violence, arson and mass looting, creating an extremely volatile atmosphere.40 As of that Monday, it became dangerous for any foreign national to venture onto the street without wearing some token of sympathy with the revolution – a red ribbon or armband of some kind; James Stinton Jones took the precaution of wearing a small Union Jack in his buttonhole; another English couple sewed them to their coat sleeves.

Stinton Jones also wisely tuned into the mood of whichever crowd he found himself in: ‘As I roamed about I would find myself in one mob shouting: “Long Live the Czar”, and then in another mob shouting: “Long Live the Revolution.” Whichever one I happened to be in I shouted with them.’41 Walking to the Duma, Isaac Marcosson encountered ‘trucks bristling with guns’. Despite the fact that he had deliberately put on an English trenchcoat and cap, ‘the number of young boys with revolvers who looked me over made me feel it was a very easy time in which to be killed’. He was quite sure that ‘my continued existence depended on the sanity of any one of thirty or forty very excited men and boys on each truck’.42 Soon permits would be required for everything. ‘I was given a sheaf of papers all covered with stamps and signatures,’ recalled one British officer, ‘permission to wear a sword – permission to carry a revolver and an identity card which said that I was heart and soul in favour of the new regime!’43

As Donald Thompson had already learned that morning, foreigners were constantly being stopped and challenged on the streets for being policemen or spies, and some were killed if they could not produce proof of identity quickly enough. ‘Walking from my house to the Embassy was no joke,’ recalled British embassy official Francis Lindley:

Seething crowds of youths brandishing knives and swords and letting off pistols in the air were not made more pleasant by the fact that I could talk very little of their language. Had one of them said I was a German, I should have been done for before I could explain. For it was rather surprising that in the first days of the Revolution anti-German feeling was vocal and several of my patriotic friends with German names were murdered.44

That day ‘anybody could have a gun for the asking’, and with so many untrained and inexperienced people now in possession of them and not ‘hav[ing] a care as to which way the gun was pointing when they tried it out for the first time’, such indiscriminate firing inevitably led to many innocent bystanders being killed and wounded.45 Some accidents were the result of sheer bravado: drunks and hooligans firing at random, others showing off to their girlfriends about how to load and fire their weapons. ‘Little boys also delighted in picking up dropped cartridges and throwing them into the fires which were burning outside the police-stations,’ recalled James Stinton Jones, the resulting explosions causing mayhem and injury. He witnessed one particularly chilling incident involving a boy of about twelve, who was brandishing an automatic pistol while warming himself by a brazier with a group of soldiers:

Suddenly he pulled the trigger and one of the soldiers fell dead. This so alarmed the boy, who had no idea of the mechanism of the deadly weapon he held, that he kept the trigger pulled back and the automatic pistol proceeded to empty itself. It contained seven bullets, and it was not until they were all discharged that the boy released his hold of the trigger. The result was that three soldiers were killed and four seriously injured.46

At 1.00 p.m. on Monday, nurse Dorothy Seymour noted in her diary that the men of the Semenovsky Regiment guarding the Anglo-Russian Hospital had ‘opened the door and walked out to join the revolutionists without a word to us’.47 Fighting had been going on all day around the hospital, recalled Edith Hegan, ‘machine guns very busy’ from nearby rooftops and ‘all kinds of unexpected places’, the bullets ‘throwing up a little shower of snow as they hit the pavement’. Bousfield Swan Lombard, who had made his way to the ARH to see how the staff were doing, found when he got there that ‘all the windows were shattered’. He was ‘most impressed and very proud to find the British nurses at their posts’. They had ensured that their patients were safely lying under their beds, ‘and there they stood, each by her bed, calmly accepting the broken windows and the howling mob outside as an everyday occurrence’.48

All day long, people had flocked into the hospital from the street, trying to escape the shooting, and a steady stream of mixed casualties of soldiers and civilians was taken in. Although Dorothy Seymour and four other nurses did manage to get back to the nurses’ home on Vladimirsky ‘under rather heavy fire from police in windows above armed with revolvers’, it was decided that no other nurses should risk it, and the rest had to bed down in the hospital. ‘Some slept in the bandage-rooms on tables and stretchers’, but they could only snatch brief periods of sleep, as ‘many wounded were constantly being brought in’.49 On several occasions that evening an angry crowd had burst into the hospital and demanded the building be searched for ‘hidden police and machine guns’ – but the hospital commandant, General Laiming, had assured them this was not so, inviting them to inspect the roof and reminding them that the palace’s owner, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, had been exiled for the murder of Rasputin (and was thus on their side).50 As they left, the crowd demanded that the hospital hang a Red Cross flag from its window confirming its neutrality. Lady Sybil Grey hurriedly organised this: ‘we made them out of old sheets and a Father Christmas coat, and also put a lantern with a red cross on it outside the door’.51 No sooner had they done this than the flags were pulled down and used to drape commandeered motor cars. Many of the nurses sat up by the windows, not wanting to ‘miss anything’. Those who had made it back to their dormitory – two blocks down the Nevsky on Vladimirsky, through what Dorothy Seymour described as a ‘shilling shocker’ night – were too anxious to sleep and ‘spent half the night standing at the window’, listening to the ‘terrible agitation’ on the street outside.52

On Monday morning French actress Paulette Pax had, much to her amazement, received a call from a friend in the city asking if there would be a performance at the Mikhailovsky Theatre that night; and, if so, could she get tickets? This had come just as Pax had been listening to the sound of the mob and gunfire in the streets near her apartment in the centre of Petrograd. Becoming increasingly fearful of looters, she had rushed to hide away her most precious possessions, with the help of her two Russian maids, had battened all the shutters and done her best to protect the doors and windows against possible attack with mattresses and piles of cushions, before taking refuge, terrified, in the kitchen. Outside in the courtyard she could hear a crowd approaching, shouting and jeering, and she prepared herself for the worst. But it was not her apartment they were heading for: the mob had come in search of two faraony up on the roof of her apartment building, who had been targeting the crowds below with a machine gun; and who were quickly overcome and dragged away.53

This incident was symptomatic of the manhunt now in progress. A long-overdue day of reckoning had arrived, as popular hatred was visited, with a savage vengeance, on the police. Their presence on the streets had almost totally evaporated and they were now being systematically ‘dug out like rats’ from their vantage points and hiding places.54 Many had gone into hiding in private houses or had disguised themselves. Mutinying soldiers were particularly enraged to discover that some police had been instructed to wear the uniforms of familiar regiments in order to convince the people that the army was loyal to the old government.55 All over the city, police stations and the homes of police and judges were attacked and sacked and their possessions thrown from the windows: ‘underclothes, ladies’ bonnets, chairs, books, flower-pots, pictures, and then all the records, white and yellow and pink paper, all fluttering in the sun like so many butterflies’.56 Other policemen barricaded themselves into their stations with supplies of food and ammunition, and held out until overcome by their attackers; a few were still manning machine guns on rooftops and in church belfries (which they knew the pious would be loath to attack). When the police were cornered, the mob were merciless: every building connected with them was attacked and sacked, in particular the large block of buildings at number 16 Fontanka, which housed the headquarters of the Okhrana – the tsarist secret police – ‘an object of almost fanatical hatred’, for its accumulation of information on not just political but even religious dissidents. Here, ‘every document, book and scrap of paper’ that could be found was brought outside and ceremonially piled onto huge bonfires in the streets.57 In all, around twelve police stations were set on fire that day – on the Petrograd and Vyborg Sides as well as in central Petrograd; the wisps of blackened pages bearing mug-shots, fingerprints and surveillance records, which had been the bedrock of official oppression for so long, now piles of ash settling in the snow or scattering in the wind.58

During the February Revolution there were far too many incidental acts of murder of policemen for any reliable record ever to have been taken of the numbers killed. A very few, when caught by more responsible sections of the mob, were taken to the jails – though the ‘crowds would sometimes break through en route and strike and kick them to death’.59 It became a common sight to see policemen being attacked and finished off out of hand – shot, bayoneted, clubbed to death – on the street, their dead bodies left untouched. ‘Food for the dogs,’ some Russians called it. ‘There was no hope for them unless they surrendered,’ recalled Dr Joseph Clare, ‘and even then not much hope, for I know a place where thirty or forty policemen were pushed through a hole in the ice without as much as a stunning tap on the head – drowned like rats.’60 Nobody in the city was immune to the experience of such savagery, as Meriel Buchanan recollected of that afternoon, when ‘a few English ladies, courageously facing the very real danger of the streets, came to the usual weekly sewing party’ at the British embassy. Together they had sat:

in the big red and white ballroom talking in hushed voices, listening to the distant sound of fighting still going on near the Liteynia and comparing notes of what they had seen on their way to the Embassy. One had met a mob of drunken soldiers and workmen who had trussed a policeman up in ropes and were dragging him along the frozen road, another had seen an officer shot down on the doorstep of a house, still another had passed a crowd gathered round a huge bonfire and had been told they were burning a sergeant of the Secret Police.61

Such scenes of mindless cruelty left an indelible impression on the seven-year-old mind of the future historian Isaiah Berlin, who vividly remembered a ‘horrifying spectacle’ when out walking with his parents later that day, as they saw one policeman, ‘evidently loyal to the tsarist government, who, it was said, had been sniping at the demonstrators from a rooftop, being dragged by a mob to some awful end: the man looked pale and terrified and was feebly struggling with his captors’. The image, Berlin recalled many years later, had ‘remained with me and infected me with a permanent horror of any kind of violence’.62

With so much rampant anarchy unleashed on the streets of Petrograd, Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko had sent an urgent telegram to the Tsar that morning, insisting that he return to the city and warning that ‘the last hour ha[d] come in which to decide the fate of the country and the dynasty’.63 Nicholas replied that he was coming back with a reserve of troops to quell the rioting. In the interim the Duma members were at a loss as to how to deal with events that had taken them totally by surprise. With Russia plunged into political uncertainty, the Duma at the Tauride Palace was a magnet for Petrograders all day. Arno Dosch-Fleurot made his way there on foot from the Hotel de France, following the crowds. En route he had noticed the road getting ‘thicker and thicker with automobiles and lorries filled with excited unarmed soldiers and serious civilians with rifles’.64 By about 1.00 p.m. the crowd of thousands massing outside the doors to the Duma was thick with ‘green-uniformed and green capped students; many waving red flags and red bunting and listening to revolutionary speeches’, all anxious to offer their support to the formation of a new government and seeking instructions on what they should do.65

Once the residence of Catherine the Great’s lover, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the Tauride Palace – a graceful Palladian building of white colonnades, grand reception rooms and columned galleries – had been home to the Imperial State Duma since 1906. But within hours of events on Monday it had been transformed into a rackety military-camp-cum-political-hustings, where urgent meetings were held to establish a provisional government to take charge of the extremely volatile situation. With difficulty Fleurot had made his way into the building and found it full of troops. ‘Everybody seemed to be hungry; bread, dried herrings, and tea’ were being endlessly handed around.66 If anything, ‘the mental confusion within was more bewildering than the revolution without’, for the whole place seethed with tension and excitement, as regiment after regiment arrived and was ‘drawn up in ranks, four deep, down the whole length of the Catherine Hall’ – the main lobby and promenade of the Duma – to swear its allegiance to the new government. Rodzianko addressed each of them in turn, urging them to ‘remain a disciplined force’, to stay faithful to their officers and return quietly to barracks and be ready when called.67

At around 2.30 p.m. in the semicircular main hall an enormous, mixed assembly of moderate and liberal members of the Duma met to organise themselves, under Rodzianko’s leadership, in hopes that a reformed, constitutional government could yet be salvaged from the wreckage. A twelve-man Provisional Executive Committee was eventually elected that evening to take control of the situation. One of its first acts was to order the arrest of the members of the Council of Ministers – the Upper House of the Duma, and guardians of the old regime – who met at the Mariinsky Palace. Some of them had already tendered their resignations, including the Prime Minister Nikolay Golitsyn; others had gone into hiding, and revolutionary patrols were now searching for them.

Even as the Duma members were establishing their own committee, elsewhere in the Tauride Palace a large group of soldiers and workers intent on nothing less than the declaration of a socialist republic and Russia’s withdrawal from the war were meeting with the more moderate Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (the left-wing Bolshevik presence was yet to make itself felt), with the objective of electing their own Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.68 Its most immediate call, made in a hastily produced leaflet, was not, however, a political one – rather, it was an appeal to citizens to help feed the hungry soldiers who had taken their side, until their revictualling could be properly organised. Petrograders quickly responded, welcoming men into their homes to warm themselves and be fed; restaurants offered free meals; old men were seen in the street ‘with large boxes of cigarettes, which they handed out to the soldiers’.69*

At about nine o’clock that evening an American resident† went out to have a look at what was going on and encountered ‘a very well dressed intelligent man, running breathlessly up the Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt’ on the Petrograd Side, ‘stopping a few moments every block to tell the great news: “The Duma has formed a temporary government.’” Such an event seemed unimaginable for a country so long under the heel of autocratic rule, he wrote, ‘astounding, colossal, not to be grasped at once or even half understood’. Later, at midnight, he went out again and found a ‘tremendous mass of people in the square on the Petrograd Side surrounding a truck packed with soldiers from which a 2nd lieutenant was telling the crowd the news: ‘Now it’s all right,’ the American heard him shout, ‘there’ll be a new government. Do you understand? A new government, and there’ll be bread for everybody.’ The American was as overwhelmed by this seismic change in Russian political life as were the Russians themselves:

I don’t think any man’s mind that night, except the very leaders in the Duma, could stretch fast enough and far enough to do more than struggle with the realization of the simplest and most elementary facts of the revolution – with the plain fact that there actually was a revolution.70

Throughout the afternoon David Francis had received reports from his staff of the dead and wounded on the Liteiny as clashes there continued; many of the newly armed mob were constantly prowling up and down Furshtatskaya outside the US embassy, some on foot and others in motor cars.71 One of Francis’s officials, returning to his apartment from the embassy that evening, had seen no sign of any remaining loyalty to the old regime, ‘but had passed a thousand or more cavalrymen riding quietly toward the Neva and abandoning the streets of the city to the mutineers and revolutionists’. By this time mutiny had spread to the south of the city and the Semenovsky and Izmailovsky Regiments had joined the revolution; by late evening 66,700 men of the imperial army in Petrograd had mutinied. The revolutionaries were now in control of the whole city, except for the Winter Palace, the Admiralty and the General Staff – still guarded by loyal troops, as were the telephone exchange and the telegraph office.72

By nightfall, the first account of the day’s events – as published in a crude news-sheet headed Izvestiya – had been haphazardly strewn onto the streets from the windows of motor cars. Copies were pounced upon, read and digested, shared and passed around as hungrily as the bread that the people all craved.73 The whole day had been ‘a Revolution carried on by chance’, in the opinion of aviator Bert Hall – ‘no organization, no particular leader, just a city full of hungry people who have stood enough and are ready to die if necessary before they will put up with any more Tsarism’. Only a week previously Hall had met the Tsar at Pskov and received a decoration for his work with the Russian air service. Today, watching ‘that mob of screaming people’, he had thought of the ‘tired, far-away look in the Tsar’s eyes’ when he met him. ‘He must have known that the dry rot had eaten the heart out of things.’74

Later analyses of events in February would often draw comparisons with the French Revolution of 1789 – the storming of the Kresty prison in particular seeming reminiscent of the fall of the Bastille. Returning late to his wife at their apartment on the Petrograd Side, Philip Chadbourn was reminded of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The whole of Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt – the main arterial road leading into the Petrograd Side from the Troitsky Bridge – was:

literally choked with a great surging mass of the revolutionists, who had tramped over here from the fighting zone, to proclaim victory and to draw all lukewarm persons to their flaming cause. It was an earnest, serious crowd, devoid of ranting or vandalism; its temper was that of Russian music – strength with pathos, optimism without joy. Gray army trucks throbbed in the midst of it, loaded with soldiers, women, and boys bearing crimson banners. Bayonets were decked with scraps of red bunting, and bonfires lit up pale faces and eager eyes. Now and again a touring car would thread its way nervously through the mob, stopping every hundred yards for a student to make a one-minute speech, or continuing to bore its way while Red Cross nurses threw out handfuls of bulletins. The Socialists got out literature so fast that it seemed as if the pent-up energy and stifled utterances of years were behind their presses; strange scraps of paper such as were never seen before in this city floated freely in the air with the headline, ‘We asked for bread, you gave us lead.’75

Eventually Chadbourn wormed his way through the crowd at the Troitsky Bridge and took in ‘the glory of the view that lay before [him]’. ‘Over my right shoulder the turrets and castellated walls of Peter and Paul, fortress and prison, threw their grim silhouette against the dying sun, a dynasty gone to rest. To the left the sky was all molten gold and forked with giant tongues of flame; the High Tribunal, Courts of Justice, and jails, instruments of injustice in the Old Order, were making room for the New.’ When he and his wife went to bed that night, ‘the sky from our windows was still bright from the fire. Rifles snapped fitfully, and the yelling of bands of hooligans reached our ears through double panes.’76

Chester Swinnerton and his colleagues also watched the fires across the river on the Petrograd and Vyborg Sides from their vantage point at the bank: ‘one great red glare on the horizon with a number of smaller ones, while a continuous intermittent popping of guns could be heard’. It reminded him of the Fourth of July back home; ‘people on the street seemed to be in a holiday mood’, but it was a ‘blessing’, he thought, that they had been unable to get hold of much liquor.77

Returning to his room at the Astoria Hotel, naval officer Oliver Locker Lampson had no doubts: ‘That night Revolution was King, and as no exact news was possible, and the wildest stories were circulated, I opened the double windows of my room and looked out. A rumour as of multitudes cheering arose in one huge roar from the city, and through it came the incessant rattle of shots and the sputtering of maxims. The sky in the east was quite bright and many buildings seemed on fire.’78

‘Petrograd was flaring like the set-piece of a colossal firework display,’ recalled William J. Gibson. But while the night sky was dramatic, and the atmosphere in the city exhilarating, others such as Major-General Knox were already looking beyond the intoxication of the moment: ‘The prisons were opened, the workmen were armed, the soldiers were without officers, a sovyet [Soviet, a workers’ council] was being set up in opposition to the Temporary Committee chosen from the elected representatives of the people.’ All this was a matter of serious political concern. To Knox’s mind, Petrograd ‘was already on the high road to anarchy’.79

* The former Turkish embassy had been housed, till the outbreak of war in 1914, in the Kantemirovsky Palace at number 8 Palace Embankment; the building was subsequently leased by the NCB for its Petrograd offices. The huge high-ceilinged rooms on the second floor were converted to bank facilities, fitted out with desks, typewriters and adding machines.

* Here, as in other instances where Thompson refers to specific photographs that he took at the time, the negatives – or even prints of them – do not seem to have survived. Nor were they included in Thompson’s book of photographs of Russia in 1917, BloodStained Russia.

* Probably George Mewes, one of the Mirror’s first war photographers and the only official British photographer assigned to the Russian army at the front.

* The term was probably first coined in Hamilton Fyfe’s report from Petrograd in the Daily Mail for 16 March 1917 (NS), which talked of it being a ‘benign revolution’ that would rid Russia of the ‘pro-German and reactionary elements’.

* This act of generosity, however, was not always well received, for the troops disliked finely made cigarettes, preferring the very strong, cheap Russian papirosy made from vile-smelling makhorka.

† Sadly it has not been possible to identify this eyewitness, who published his vivid and valuable account anonymously.

5

Easy Access to Vodka ‘Would Have Precipitated a Reign of Terror’

Heavy firing could still be heard across Petrograd for most of Monday night; by Tuesday 28 February the revolutionaries had commandeered large numbers of machine guns and were using captured armoured cars ‘with considerable effect’.1 The many soldiers now aimlessly roaming the streets unsettled everyone. Meriel Buchanan watched from the British embassy as a group of them crossed the Neva from the Petrograd Side; they seemed already to have ‘lost their upright, well-drilled bearing, they looked slovenly and bedraggled, they held themselves badly, slouching along, their collars undone, their caps stuck on at any angle, an odd assortment of weapons tied on to them with bits of rope or string or scarlet tape.’ Some, incongruously, had officers’ swords buckled round their waists, while others had ‘two or three pistols stuck into their pockets or hung round their neck on a bit of string’.2

It was no wonder that over on the volatile Petrograd Side from which this rabble had come, Philip Chadbourn had become fearful for the safety of his wife and three-week-old baby son and had gratefully accepted an offer to stay with friends on the French Embankment. But there were no cabs to be had; Esther Chadbourn was still weak, and two friends had to assist her in walking into the city, with her husband leading the way with the baby in his arms. As they emerged into the street, his wife took one look at the crowds and the barricades and field artillery and her nerves totally gave way. ‘Each time a shot rang out,’ Philip remembered, ‘she would call ahead to me, “Don’t let them kill my baby, my baby!”, while passers-by stopped and stared at her, their eyes full of tears.’ Once safely installed in their friends’ house, the couple ‘watched the progress of the revolution from the front windows’ commanding the quayside, as one continual procession of motor cars roared past, loudly tooting their horns. On the streets it was the same jubilant crowds as the previous day, trashing the police stations and ‘throwing armfuls of records out of windows onto blazing street bonfires’ with a ‘righteous zest’.3

Stubborn to the last, Sir George Buchanan, impeccable as ever with his ‘high straight collar and his high straight face’, headed off on foot again that morning to the now effectively defunct Russian Foreign Ministry, intent on paying ‘a farewell visit to Monsieur Pokrovsky’, who had not yet been arrested.4 His staff begged him not to go: there was fighting going on between two rival factions of the Pavlovsky Regiment in the Millionnaya, the street immediately behind the British embassy. Lady Georgina found her husband putting on his overcoat in the hall, ‘rather like a naughty little boy caught in an act of disobedience’. She remonstrated with him to take the car, but Sir George was insistent: ‘I had much rather walk’; and with that he took up his gloves and stick, ‘with his fur cap set at the rakish angle he always affected’ and, in true British bulldog spirit, headed off. It was only later that his daughter Meriel discovered that as her father had crossed Suvorov Square and headed off down the Millionnaya, ‘word had gone round that the British Ambassador was coming down the street, and … with one accord, the soldiers put down their rifles and stood waiting respectfully till that tall grey-haired figure had passed, when they once more renewed their fusillade at each other with undiminished vigour’.5

Chester Swinnerton and his colleagues at the National City Bank had watched in disbelief as Sir George walked past the bank, ‘surrounded by an admiring throng of the populace, most of them armed to the teeth, and Sir George bowing and smiling as if he were at a court function’.6 Buchanan had found Pokrovsky alone at his ministry, without electricity and with no access to the telegraph. Walking back with Maurice Paléologue, who had also arrived, the two ambassadors had been cheered by a group of students on the Palace Embankment. They insisted on giving Paléologue a lift in an armoured car to the French embassy, during which journey he was harangued by a boisterous student: ‘Pay your respects to the Russian Revolution! The red flag is Russia’s now; do homage to it in the name of France!’7

Undeterred by his experience that morning, Sir George ventured forth again in the afternoon with the same unshakeable sangfroid, accompanied by his Head of Chancery, Henry James Bruce, to pay a visit to Russian diplomat Sergey Sazonov* at his hotel on the Nevsky, though he admitted in his later memoirs that ‘the rattle of machine guns overhead was not a pleasant accompaniment’. The experience had terrified Bruce, who, on their return to the embassy, reported how the ‘Old Man’ ‘had refused to turn back or take cover, and had remained perfectly calm, laughing and talking as if nothing had happened’.8

At the US embassy, David Francis, anxious for the safety of his staff, had ordered the Stars and Stripes to be raised over the building, due to the incessant firing all day and the frequent arrival of mobs asking what the building was and demanding to enter and search it. Other embassies raised their flags too, while down at the US consulate in the Singer Building on the Nevsky, things had become extremely precarious because of sniping from its roof, and the consul, North Winship, had prepared his most valuable archives for immediate evacuation. The consulate, he reported, was under constant threat of attack; indeed, it had ‘been under suspicion since the beginning of the war as being German, the masses believing the Singer Company to be a German corporation’. He had repeatedly had to defend the American eagle on the top of the building, which the mob wanted to tear down, thinking it a German eagle.9

That day several foreign nationals were caught up in the most dangerous debacle yet, which took place at the Astoria Hotel on St Isaac’s Square. For the last six months, since being commandeered ‘as a luxurious headquarters for the higher officers’, the Astoria, the second-biggest and most modern hotel in Petrograd, had been popularly referred to as the ‘Military Hotel’.10 Every room was crammed with either Allied officers – French, Romanian, Serbian, British and Italian – or Russian officers on leave from the front, many of whom had their wives, mothers and children with them. There were also a few resident foreign journalists, such as the Americans Harper and Thompson.11

For days everyone had feared an attack on the hotel. Naval attaché Oliver Locker Lampson had already urged that residents avoid the downstairs hall in case of any stray shots from the street, and ordered that Allied officers occupy the basement. He had heard reports that an agent of Protopopov’s had taken refuge in the hotel and that the revolutionaries would ‘inevitably come and search for him’. He was well aware, too, of the predicament of the Russian officers: ‘If the Government won and got here first they might be shot for not having helped: if the Revolutionaries were successful and reached us, then they would be shot for not joining in.’ Eventually it was decided to move all Allied officers upstairs and transfer the Russians below. As anticipated, at around 4.00 a.m. a deputation of soldiers and civilians had arrived, demanding that the Russians billeted there join the revolution. They had been persuaded to disperse on receiving assurance from those officers ‘that they were on leave, that the foreign nationals would observe neutrality and that no one would start shooting from the building’.12

But four hours later trouble ignited, when a regiment gathered for a parade in St Isaac’s Square. At 9.00 a.m. YMCA worker Edward Heald was heading to his office when, at the corner of Gogol, he saw ‘column after column of soldiers, in martial order, greeted with the shouts of the people assembled in the square’, red flags flying, a band playing and making ‘a brilliant spectacle’. The troops had lined up facing the Astoria Hotel when ‘suddenly there was a tremendous volley and the sidewalks and squares were emptied of people in the twinkling of an eye’ and Heald hurried to safety.13 In his nearby office building he watched from the sixth-floor window as some of the soldiers threw themselves down in front of the cathedral, firing at a machine-gun position on the roof of the Astoria. From inside the hotel, Locker Lampson saw the soldiers dive helplessly into the snow for cover, ‘first a man here and then one there would stop suddenly and remain, black against the white and stretched out quite flat, until soon the place seemed empty except for these dead bodies’.14

According to Donald Thompson, who was in the hotel at the time, some hothead or policeman hidden somewhere on the top floor of the Astoria had opened fire, enraging the crowd outside who had gathered to watch the parade. Woken from an exhausted sleep by the shooting, Thompson had grabbed his camera, broken out a windowpane and begun photographing the mob rushing across the square and stampeding the hotel. During the ensuing fusillade a Russian female guest ran into his room screaming that the police were firing from the roof. He warned her to keep away from the window, but ‘[i]nstead, she pulled aside the curtain to look out. She was shot through the throat.’ Thompson ‘carried her back to the bathroom where she died about fifteen minutes later’. He was furious: ‘I lost a lot of my film, thanks to this woman’s damn foolishness.’ Soon afterwards, hearing shots being fired inside the hotel, he hurriedly pinned an American flag to his door and hoped for the best.15

Locker Lampson, meanwhile, had identified where he thought the firing was coming from: ‘no sound came from the room, except the smack of striking bullets’. He rammed the door in and found two terrified women in their nightdresses – Princess Tumanova and her mother. There was blood everywhere and he got them out of the room to administer first aid.16 According to Canadian eyewitness George Bury, the revolutionaries had quickly ‘brought up a couple of armoured motors with three machine-guns apiece’ and had opened ‘a furious cannonade upon the position on the roof of the Astoria from where the shots had come’, the bullets instead ‘ripping into the suite of General Prince Tumanov located just below it’. One of the women had been wounded in the neck and was later taken to the Anglo-Russian Hospital.17

By now the hotel had been stormed by ‘a howling, raging mob, armed to the teeth’, which sacked the ground floor, ‘killed some Russian officers, and surged up the staircase, shooting up the lift and in every direction,’ as Sybil Grey recalled.18 Glass was showered everywhere as the hotel’s huge plate-glass windows were shattered by gunfire. Florence Harper was terrified as the mob ‘spread over the ground floor like rats’. ‘Everyone was panic-stricken’; the only ones who kept their heads, as she recalled, were the ‘British officers attached to the General Staff’. With smoke pouring out of the elevator-shaft and down the stairway, pandemonium reigned. ‘Terrified women were rushing around, some of them fully dressed, some only half dressed, begging to be saved.’ ‘The coolest woman in the hotel,’ she noted, ‘was an Englishwoman who was found sitting on her trunk, which was packed, smoking a cigarette … ready for any emergency that might take place.’19

Fearful for the safety of the women and children, the British officers ‘formed a guard in front of them’, calling on the mob to fall back or they ‘would protect them to the last man’.20 Two of them, General Poole and a Lieutenant Urmston who spoke good Russian, tried to hold the rabble back on the stairs and reason with them: ‘if they intended to kill everybody in [the hotel] at least they should allow the officers to remove the women and children first’. There was an ominous pause, recalled Harper, after which ‘a big, burly soldier reached down in his pocket, pulled out a package of the vilest kind of cigarettes’, handed one to General Poole and invited him to share a smoke. The lieutenant lit a match, ‘held it to the general’s cigarette, then to the soldier’s, and then blew it out, explaining to the soldier that it was bad luck to light three cigarettes with one match. That appealed to the soldier, who, like all Russians, was very superstitious’; the gesture seemed to defuse the situation.21 Times correspondent Robert Wilton was convinced that ‘the coolness and pluck of the British and French officers alone prevented the wholescale murder of Russian Generals, ladies, and children’ at the Astoria that day, and that the ‘Allied uniforms inspired sufficient respect to contain the violence’. On seeing the British uniforms in particular, Sybil Grey noticed, some of the crowd even ‘took off their hats and said, “English officers! Forgive us, we do not wish to bother you,” and passed on in the most courteous manner possible to do more destruction to the hotel and its inmates’.22

They remained intent, however, on laying hands on the Russian officers inside. ‘What are you going to do with them?’ called out the wife of one: ‘Shoot some of them outside and arrest the others,’ cried their spokesman laconically. ‘They asked for it.’ Some of the Russian officers resisted, including the old general in charge, and were shot on the spot; others came forward willingly, hands in the air, shouting, ‘We’re for you’, and were allowed to keep their swords and arms. Yet others were dragged to the square outside. James Stinton Jones saw some of them being summarily shot in the courtyard of the empty German embassy on the other side of St Isaac’s Square.23

After wrecking the foyer of the Astoria, the first place the mob headed for was the kitchen: ‘it was quite a sight to see a soldier with a huge officer’s sword cutting up a tub of butter and passing it out to the people,’ recalled the intrepid Chester Swinnerton, who could not resist leaving the safety of the bank to investigate. In the downstairs hall Leighton Rogers, who joined him, saw ‘a crowd of soldiers were stuffing themselves’ with ‘such food as they had never tasted before and shouting the Marseillaise … to the accompaniment of a piano’.24 Foreign residents were fearful for their personal possessions as the intruders, ‘scenting loot in the carpeted corridors and luxurious flats of the hotel’, mounted the stairs.25 One of the looters assured a British journalist who begged them not to loot their rooms, ‘You come up and show us which are the foreigners’ rooms and we won’t go in.’26 When a soldier arrived at the room of another lady resident, she ‘came to him with her hands full of money’. ‘What’s this for?’ he asked. ‘We’re on quite a different job here.’27

While there may have been a degree of honour among these thieves, ‘the hotel was at their mercy’ and it was decided that ‘the spectacle of a wounded woman might avoid trouble’. And so, as Locker Lampson recalled, ‘they laid the wounded Princess Toumanov on a mattress in the passage and surrounded her with pillows covered in blood’. Soon the crowd ‘came on in yelling parties, gesticulating and arguing, and reached the fourth floor to demand all our arms. The moment they saw the princess they calmed although one drunken civilian let his rifle off over her head.’ The British officers gave up their revolvers and swords and showed the revolutionaries where the telephones were, ‘which were all destroyed’. Once again the situation was contained and, although some small articles of value were taken from the rooms of residents, ‘on the whole the search was orderly’.28

Once the brief pitched battle on the ground floor of the hotel was over, every stick of furniture and every chandelier had been smashed and the Russian officers hauled off, the mob’s remaining objective was to seek out any alcohol. Having anticipated this, several British officers had gone down to the Astoria’s famous wine cellars to destroy the wine and spirits before the looters got to it. Although some bottles had already been eagerly carried away, the officers, led by Captain Scale and ‘with the help of students and some soldiers intelligent enough to realize the disastrous consequences’ if the mob got its hands on the alcohol, set about ‘smash[ing] bottles until their arms were so weary they could not lift them’, as Florence Harper witnessed. ‘They staved in all the casks of cognac and whiskey until they were literally knee deep in everything from champagne to vodka.’29

Outside on the square, the crowd knocked the necks off those bottles that they had managed to loot with the butt-ends of their rifles and began drinking the contents, as a constant flow of people continued ‘rushing in and out through the slippery bloodstained doors carrying great piles of paper and records’ to throw on a bonfire in the square.30 Some of the revolutionaries had attempted to remonstrate with their comrades at the sight of large piles of broken bottles and had grabbed what they could and poured it away, urging them not to ‘spoil our fight for freedom by drinking and looting’.31 This spirit of revolutionary purity continued to prevail when later that afternoon Florence Harper saw a man flourishing a bottle of wine outside the Astoria. As he raised it to his mouth, ‘a student came along, snatched it out of his hands, broke it, and said, “Don’t drink! If you do, all our work will be undone.”’ Such admonitions had little effect, however. James Stinton Jones witnessed the inventive ways used by some soldiers to carry away what they did not drink on the spot, outside the Astoria: they ‘poured wine into their top-boots and then wandered away to consume more elsewhere’.32 Everyone agreed it was a mercy that the mob had not been able to lay hands on more from the hotel cellars. ‘This was one time when prohibition was a blessing to Russia,’ wrote Edward Heald – the Astoria’s copious supply being, of course, for the benefit of guests only. Heald, like many other eyewitnesses, was convinced that ‘if vodka could have been found in plenty, the revolution could easily have had a terrible ending’. His compatriot James Houghteling agreed: easy access to vodka ‘unquestionably would have precipitated a reign of terror reminiscent of the French Revolution’.33

Back inside the wrecked foyer of the Astoria, in sight of the potted palms still standing, incongruously, in their brass pots, ‘the revolving doors were spinning round in a pool of blood’. The great plate-glass windows were ‘jaggedly shattered and gaping’, causing the expensive curtains to make ‘a torn and draggled track in the snow outside’. ‘The furniture was grotesquely dismembered and upset, papers, books and even stationery were strewn half-burnt everywhere.’ The hotel tea room and the big restaurant were also a scene of utter devastation. ‘Bodies were littered about, and the wounded crying piteously.’34 James Houghteling went with an American colleague to inspect the damage and was bemused to discover ‘in one room where the furniture was a pile of kindling wood and even the electric brackets had been torn away … large framed photographs of the Tsar, the Tsarina and the Tsarevich hanging on the walls perfectly undisturbed’.35

Upstairs, residents remained cowering and hungry all day in their barricaded rooms, until eventually the women and children were allowed to be taken away to safety in convoys of military and embassy cars. Some of them took refuge in the Italian embassy across St Isaac’s Square, others at the Hotel d’Angleterre next door. Florence Harper tried to get something to eat at the Angleterre, but found its dining room packed with people – Romanians, Russians, Serbs, French, English, Japanese – ‘every allied nation, every neutral nation’ – all ‘scrambling and fighting for food’. She went back to the Astoria to try her luck there, but found the same scene: hundreds of people waiting to get cabbage soup and some kind of game, which she labelled ‘roast crow’. It was unsafe to eat any vegetables, even when there were any, because of the danger of dysentery, so she stuck to tinned sardines and Dutch cheese. ‘Someone had found some ship’s biscuits’, which they shared, and had ‘bribed the waiter for some cocoa’.36

Later that evening any Allied officers who wished to leave the hotel were allowed to do so and were cheered by the lingering crowd as they departed. But many decided to stay – ‘not from choice, but from necessity, because all the Petrograd hotels were full’. Such in fact was the accommodation crisis that by nightfall some of the British officers came back: ‘I might just as well be blown up as freeze to death,’ one of them told Harper, for rumours had persisted all day that the Astoria would be destroyed – ‘they were going to blow it up with dynamite’.37

For hours after the attack on the Astoria ‘drunken soldiers littered the sidewalks’. Amid the huge piles of broken glass, furniture and books from the hotel, women ‘went around gathering bits of broken plates, or anything they could lay their hands on’. ‘The souvenir hunters were busy,’ noted Florence Harper, but through it all ‘the mob was the best natured mob I have ever seen’. However, for ‘days and days afterward there was a reek of wine’ in the locality of the hotel that she found ‘sickening’, and broken glass underfoot everywhere in the square. This, plus the burnt-out remains of the bonfires, transformed the once-beautiful St Isaac’s Square into ‘a desolate sight’.38 Shutters replaced the broken windows of the Astoria and, for its embattled guests, making do in rooms now riddled with bullets, there was no electric lighting and no heating, either. ‘It was rather like inhabiting a monastery in the war zone,’ recalled British intelligence officer Denis Garstin.39

Looting had in fact been in evidence all over the city that Tuesday, much of it the work of many of the eight thousand criminals liberated from the city’s jails. English governess Louisette Andrews recalled seeing people – predominantly soldiers and sailors – running down the streets with strings of looted sausages draped around their necks, or clutching legs of lamb and armfuls of fur coats. But the most sought-after looted items, she recalled, were expensive watches: ‘they were the one thing the mob all went for’, and soon there was ‘not a watch to be had in any jewellers’ shop’ in Petrograd.40

Burglary, sexual assault, mugging and acts of drunken violence were all on the increase. As nurse Edith Hegan wrote in her diary: ‘It seems to have been a terrible mistake to turn loose the convicted prisoners, for they have gone quite mad with blood lust and are leading the mob into all sorts of depredations.’ There was, she noted with alarm, a ‘deadly fixedness of purpose in the crowd to-day, as if it had crystallized its own desires’.41 What she and other foreigners witnessed was the ugly face of stikhiya – the elemental spontaneity of anarchy in its most destructive, primeval form. An impulse long latent beneath the surface of civilised Russian society, stikhiya had from time to time found its explosive expression among the peasantry as a ‘primitive force of the oppressed classes, to which any political articulation remained alien’; and now, in Petrograd, it was being unleashed on its age-old class enemies.42

This raggle-taggle army bent on retribution continued to patrol the streets, armed with every kind of imaginable weapon. There was still a great deal of random firing – into the air ‘or as best amuses them … shooting at every thing and every body’.43 And all this despite printed leaflets being distributed, exhorting people not to fire guns ‘promiscuously’ and to save their ammunition – ‘for the time is coming when it will be needed’.44 Self-appointed bands of vigilantes, some of them released criminals disguised as soldiers, now instituted random and often violent house-to-house searches: not just for police still evading capture, but also for any hidden supplies, especially of weapons, alcohol and food. Homes abandoned by their terrified owners – particularly members of the aristocracy – were a prime target, the mob helping themselves, with aimless compulsion, to the finest but most useless furniture and furnishings, china and glass. Nervous citizens barricaded themselves in their homes; any refusal to admit search teams led to doors being battered down and occupants who resisted being ruthlessly shot: young and old, women and children.

General Count Gustave Stackelberg – a Russian-Estonian nobleman and former counsellor to Nicholas II – was shot and killed in front of his wife when his home on Millionnaya was stormed, but not before he had put up fierce resistance and killed several of his assailants with his revolver. Leighton Rogers and his colleagues at the National City Bank had seen Stackelberg (as they later discovered) come running outside onto the Palace Embankment, firing several shots before cowering behind a lamp post. He didn’t last long: ‘a bullet cleaned the top of his head right off,’ recalled Swinnerton.45 Yet in the midst of this, as Swinnerton noticed, ‘about a hundred yards away a soldier and his sweetheart were sitting on the parapet and chinning [chattering] away as if they hadn’t a care in the world’. Stackelberg’s body was left there in the middle of road, where it was trampled by passing mounted patrols. When Swinnerton and his colleagues returned home from work that night, it had been stripped of most of its uniform – ‘for souvenirs’, Rogers supposed. It was later tossed into the Neva, or rather onto it, for it landed on the river’s frozen surface and was left to languish there.46

With such rampant hatred of the old order being demonstrated on the streets, it was inevitable that some members of the Russian aristocracy would appeal to Sir George Buchanan and other ambassadors for sanctuary. This put Sir George in a difficult position, as he could only extend his protection to those who were British subjects.* When their home was looted and destroyed by the mob, the daughters of Count Vladimir Freedericksz, minister of the Imperial Court who was away with the Tsar at Stavka, had begged the British embassy to take them and their sick mother in. They were refused, supposedly due to ‘the social vanity’ of Lady Buchanan, who had complained, ‘I don’t know why I should take in the Countess Fredericks when she never once asked me to her house or to her box at the Opera.’47† In contrast, Ambassador Francis had sent out his Second Secretary Norman Armour ‘to brave the bullets’, specifically to invite the US national Countess Nostitz, who lived three blocks away, to ‘take up quarters at the Embassy that [she] might be under the protection of the American flag’. Nostitz was touched by his offer, but preferred to remain with her Russian husband and trust to her luck.48

Although entry into private homes by revolutionists was frequently violent and terrifying, it occasionally resulted in a more conciliatory turn of events, as Ella Woodhouse, daughter of the British consul, remembered of the moment when a group came to their apartment, demanding admission to search:

Father invited them into the dining room, where we were having tea by the light of one or two candles, the electricity was off. They all sat down. I do not remember whether they were actually offered tea, but I retain the picture of the tense circle, round the long table in the dark room, lit only by flickering candles, the boys sitting awkwardly as father began explaining very politely, that they were welcome to search the place, but that they would then be violating diplomatic immunity, which he was sure they must know was a serious offence in a civilized country. This approach led to a general discussion on the aims of the Great Revolution. Gradually they relaxed and all joined in. The discussion continued for quite a long time. Then, with expressions of mutual goodwill, they went away.49

But there was no such politesse for wine and provision shop owners. J. Butler Wright reported that they were ‘either forced to open their establishments, or the shops themselves were broken into’, although there was some attempt to keep control of the situation and ‘ensure that goods were distributed fairly and shop owners paid’. James Houghteling was delighted to learn that his cook had ‘bought from soldiers at ridiculously low prices all sorts of supplies, bolts of cloth, flour etc., which were taken from government stores that had been refusing them to the people for months’.50 Some of the premises that were searched revealed surprises: a cache of thousands of rifles and ammunition was found in a store in a butcher’s shop, probably hidden there by the police. When the crowd broke into the house of one police officer, ‘they found a whole shop-full of everything, flour (of which we have been able to get none), cognac, herrings,’ reported his English neighbour.51 A dyer’s and cleaner’s that had been boarded up for months contained piles of hams, long thought unobtainable. Endless hoards of flour and sugar (which the government had claimed were exhausted, but had been stockpiled for bribery) were unearthed, ‘for the most part in the private residences of police officers’ – so many, in fact, that this reinforced the widespread public conviction that the police had been ‘systematically using their opportunities to corner food-supplies in their districts’. Arthur Ransome reported that ‘some policemen had even been keeping live hens in their room’.52

The relentless search for policemen continued throughout Tuesday. In a last-ditch attempt to evade capture, some of them adopted an unconvincing disguise as women, as James Stinton Jones related. The bigger men ‘hardly did justice to the fair sex’ and their identity was ‘invariably betrayed by their general bearing and size’. He noticed one of them – ‘a man, standing fully six feet, and broad-shouldered, and his general bearing and walk was certainly anything but feminine’. He was quickly spotted by the crowd, who ‘stopped him and took off his hat, which came away with a long wig and the thick veil, leaving a very coarse-featured masculine face with a heavy moustache. He immediately fell on his knees and begged for mercy, but the crowd dispatched him without further ado.’ Down near the canal Amélie de Néry saw twelve bodies of policemen that had been stripped naked and left lying there.53 Not long afterwards she came upon another sinister sight:

a flat sledge on which a naked body had been thrown and covered with a white sheet, the legs hanging over the sides a little and the naked feet dragging along in the snow. A bulge in the sheet covering the chest suggested its head had been cut off. Patches of blood spattered this miserable bundle. It was probably the mortal remains of some policeman or other being taken off to a mortuary somewhere.54

James Stinton Jones saw the ‘horrible appearance of the snow’ after a policeman had literally been torn ‘limb from limb’ on the street by an enraged mob. He also was told of some police officers caught in their homes being tied to their divans or sofas, ‘covered with kerosene and then set alight’. Dorothy Seymour heard tell of a local police chief being tied up and thrown on the bonfire outside his police station. Leighton Rogers was shocked to discover that a policeman who had shot a soldier on the corner outside their apartment ‘was promptly bayoneted and beheaded, much to the horror of our little servant girl who chanced to be passing’. Once discovered, individual policemen manning guns on rooftops could never hold out for long, and ‘with an exultant shout, one by one, forced to the edge at bayonet point, they crashed to the street below to be spit upon and reviled by the gathering crowd’.55

* Sazonov had been appointed Russian Ambassador to Great Britain early in 1917, but the outbreak of the February Revolution had prevented him from taking up his post.

* Such as Victoria Melita, Grand Duchess Kirill – known as ‘Ducky’ in the royal family – who was a daughter of Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Alfred.

† In the end, Rev. Bousfield Swan Lombard at the British Chaplaincy gave refuge to Countess Freedericksz and her two daughters, under the alias of ‘Mrs Wilson’, Buchanan telling him, ‘you must do it off your own bat’ and that he could not officially sanction it. The women were taken into the British Colony’s Nursing Home. The countess was sworn to secrecy and certain preconditions by Bousfield Lombard, but she and her daughters soon broke all the rules and had to be moved.

6

‘Good to be Alive These Marvelous Days’

Reporting on events to the Foreign Office at the end of March 1917, Hugh Walpole concluded that ‘On the whole, it may be truthfully said that, so far as Petrograd was concerned, by the Tuesday evening the revolution was over.’1 The tsarist government was finished; the Arsenal – last rallying point of the old regime – had finally surrendered at 4.00 p.m. when the rebels had threatened to turn the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress onto it. The whole of the army in Petrograd had now thrown in its lot with the revolutionaries, including the elite naval unit – the Guard Equipage commanded by Grand Duke Kirill – the Cadet Corps and 350 officers of the General Staff College; finally even the garrison that had guarded the imperial family at Tsarskoe Selo had joined them.2

But ‘grave anxiety’ remained among the diplomatic community as to the future, with the struggle between the new Soviet and the Executive Committee of the Duma intensifying. ‘So successful, in fact, had everything been, so far beyond men’s wildest hopes,’ Walpole noted, ‘that no one could believe that a sharp reverse was not in store.’ Quite simply, ‘it was all too good to be true’. Times correspondent Robert Wilton had been convinced from the start that ‘the institution of the Soviet was tantamount to preparing beforehand the overthrow of any Coalition Government’, and he could see the ‘utter hopelessness’ of the efforts of the moderates in the Duma to institute some form of democratic government.3

Foreign observers all wanted to see how this new power struggle would pan out, and many made their way to the Tauride Palace on Tuesday 28 February to watch history in the making. Troops had been arriving there all day from outlying areas to pledge their allegiance to the revolution, accompanied by endless deputations of workers and civilians. The Shpalernaya was ‘a wild concourse of disorganized troops and populace, all happy and good-natured,’ recalled James Houghteling, ‘a kaleidoscope of soldiers, armed and unarmed, civilians, mounted Cossacks, automobiles full of red-cross nurses and of uniformed students, and trucks packed tight with humanity and bristling with bayonets and red flags’. Amélie de Néry was caught up in the crowd, too: ‘the Christlike heads with fair or auburn beards of muzhiks, clean-shaven faces of soldiers, grimy lambskin coats, fur dresscoats, long-haired hats or student caps – all undulating, swelling or pitching like a sea!’ Amidst these dense crowds were ‘motor-lorries loaded with as many as thirty excited soldiers, motor-cars, batteries of guns, on which children were disporting themselves, patrols of cavalry’.4 Some students were there on horseback; the people called them the ‘black hussars’. Yet more lorries full of joyriding soldiers were arriving every minute and ‘unloading great trucks of provisions into the main entrance of the Tauride Palace, as if the national assembly expected to be besieged’.5

For young New Yorker Leighton Rogers, it was ‘a spectacle never to be forgotten’: ‘a shifting, wavering sea of faces now parting and billowing up against the walls as a new arrest borne in an open truck picked its way to the gates, now washing over the swathe again in eager restlessness. Now silent when some important personage mounted the gate to give instructions, now bursting into a mighty roar as some popular hero sifted through on his way to the halls.’6 James Houghteling saw some captured policemen brought in. ‘It seemed rather decent to give these hated enemies even a drumhead court-martial,’ he thought. Some of them were still wearing their black uniforms, a few were disguised as soldiers and others were dressed as dvorniki (doormen), who had a reputation for being police spies. But ‘the great bulk were broad-shouldered thugs only to be identified as policemen out of uniform’. ‘Some were heavily bandaged and had to be dragged along,’ Houghteling noticed. ‘A few fidgeted nervously and hung back, but most were surprisingly stolid.’ He expected to hear the inevitable volley of shots, but no, these policemen were not summarily shot, but were apparently taken off to ‘some extemporised prison’.7

Visitors accessing the Duma were now expected to produce ‘curious scraps of various paper which served as passes’, as George Bury recalled, and ‘which were inspected by volunteer students and schoolboys’. ‘Inside the courtyard the masses of soldiery and people were more tightly wedged than ever’: it took twenty minutes for him to cross some thirty yards of courtyard and mount the few entrance steps to the Duma portico. There was such a crush at the door that he had difficulty making his way through. By dint of a lot of polite pushing and shoving (‘May I pass, allies?’, ‘Let me through, little brothers’), Bury made his way through to the vast white-pillared Catherine Hall, ‘like a cathedral nave a hundred yards in length’, which was filled with ‘the same mob listening to impassioned speeches delivered from tables and chairs or the steps and balcony leading to the door for the higher tiers of seats in the legislative chamber’. A pitched battle for precedence was taking place; a cacophony of shouting by would-be speakers vying to be heard above the din: ‘soldiers, young officers, frenzied political orators, even an occasional deputy were busy tasting the sweets of “freedom of speech” for the first time for a dozen years past’. Bury sensed the release of long-held feelings repressed since the 1905 Revolution: ‘a little bit of Hyde Park on a Sunday morning in the forgotten days before the war’.8

The beautiful Tauride Palace had by now been transformed into one great warehouse. ‘Half the great rotunda, which serves as first antechamber, was filled with machine-guns and belts, ammunition boxes, and the like in great piles as if flung in anyhow, together with hundreds of rolls of soldiers’ cloth, and a heap of boots, all in the utmost disorder, balanced on the opposite side by a rampart ten feet high of sacks of flour,’ reported George Bury.9 The Circular Hall was equally piled high with provisions of all kinds, its fine parquet floor ‘strewn with cigarette ends and empty tins and papers and bags and cardboard boxes and even broken bottles’. Hugh Walpole despaired at the ‘dirt and desolation’ he saw, in the midst of which ‘a huge mass of men stirred and coiled and uncoiled like some huge ant-heap’, joined by yet more soldiers ‘tumbling in like puppies or babies with pieces of red cloth tied to their rifles, some singing, some laughing, some dumb with amazement’.10

Within the Tauride Palace the chaotic idealism of the first couple of days of revolution was now giving way to hard bargaining over the form of Russia’s future government. The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies had held its first plenary session that day, in an atmosphere that had been a far cry from the bourgeois restraint of the Duma’s former occupants. Instead, a motley crowd of vociferous factory workers and peasant soldiers, resembling ‘a giant village assembly’, had crammed into a densely packed, hot and smelly room, its tables littered with bread and herring, all of the attendees eager for debate.11 General Knox observed Duma chairman Mikhail Rodzianko in the Catherine Hall urging the mass of soldiers gathered there to ‘go back to their barracks and maintain order, as otherwise they would degenerate into a useless mob’. But Knox noted little sign of organisation or of people working. ‘Soldiers lounged everywhere’; in one room he saw Duma member, Boris Engelhardt, ‘trying to function as Military Commandant’, sitting at a table ‘on which was a huge loaf of half-gnawed black bread’ and trying in vain to ‘make himself heard above the noise of a rabble of soldiers, all spitting and smoking and asking questions’.12

It was already abundantly clear that any power-sharing between two such diametrically opposed groups as the Executive Committee of the Duma and the new Soviet would be extremely fraught. For the members of the Soviet, the former Duma members of the Executive Committee represented the enemy: the old order of capitalists, the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. It was clear to George Bury that the Soviet was rapidly becoming ‘the real master of the situation’; its members had the rifles and the brute force. But for now it was the old guard of the Duma that possessed ‘the self-assurance and the technique of governing’, even as a procession of former tsarist ministers arrived under arrest throughout the day.13

Come the afternoon, a cowed and cadaverous-looking Boris Stürmer, former President of the Council of State, was brought in, his teeth chattering with fear. Alongside Stürmer was Pitirim, the Metropolitan of Petrograd. Claude Anet saw Stürmer arrive, surrounded by soldiers bristling with revolvers – ‘an old man, his cap in his hand, enveloped in a big fur-collared Nicholas cloak reaching to his feet. His face was as white as his long beard; his pale blue eyes were expressionless; he appeared to notice nothing, to have fallen into his second childhood, and advanced, seemingly unconscious of his surroundings, with tottering steps.’14 Metropolitan Pitirim – a close associate of Rasputin’s, who had been found hiding at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery – was still wearing his black gown and gold episcopal cross and seemed ‘prey to the most abject fear’. With his mouth half-open and terrified eyes, he looked like a condemned criminal being led to the scaffold.15 Then former Prime Minister Ivan Goremykin arrived, ‘a Carnival figure’ with his great flamboyant whiskers, and wearing his tsarist order of St Andrew defiantly pinned to his coat like some kind of protective talisman.16 Ivan Shcheglovitov, President of the Imperial Council and former Minister of Justice and a bastion of the old reactionary order, was brought in under arrest at 5.00 p.m., his hands bound.

But the man all the revolutionaries had been searching for – the notorious Minister of the Interior, Alexander Protopopov, roundly despised as the Empress’s puppet – was not found at his empty apartment, which had earlier been ransacked and relieved of a considerable stash of champagne. Finally, at 11.15 p.m. he shuffled into the Tauride Palace in a shabby fur coat and gave himself up. After two days ‘wandering about the streets, seeking refuge with his friends and being refused by all’, he capitulated, claiming he ‘desired the welfare of [the] country’.17 Having, so it was said, handed over a large map of Petrograd with all the police hiding places marked on it, he was taken off ‘pale and tottering’ to a prison cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress, to join many other representatives of the old regime.18*

Chaos continued to prevail all Tuesday at the Tauride, which was now ‘a complete babel of agitations, ambitions, disputes and alliances’, as every kind of committee was created to satisfy the political demands of the many competing factions: ‘committees for provisions, committees for passports, committees for journalists, committees for students, committees for women helpers … for social right, for a just Peace, for Women’s Suffrage, for Finnish Independence, for literature and the arts, for the better treatment of prostitutes, for education, for the just division of the land’. The atmosphere in the Catherine Hall became increasingly disorderly in the crush, with many delegates standing and craning to see the presidium, where speakers stood on the table to be seen and heard. ‘The noise grew more and more deafening, the dust floated in hazy clouds. The men had their kettles and they boiled tea, squatting down there, and the shouting and screaming rose and rose like a flood.’19 And throughout the palace, in every room and every committee, over and over again, one heard loud and repeated exhortations to the tovarishchi – the ‘comrades’.20

In this new-found atmosphere of hectic but comradely solidarity, where all were basking in a strange and uneasy new equality and accepting orders from no one, frequent attempts were made by Alexander Kerensky, a prominent member of the Provisional Executive Committee, to appeal to the soldiers and workers gathered there to revert to some kind of military discipline. According to Ambassador Paléologue, the Duma members had been ‘utterly taken aback by the anarchical behaviour of the army’.21 ‘They never imagined a revolution like this,’ he reported, ‘they hoped to direct it and keep it within bounds through the army’, but this was clearly impossible. As Paléologue wrote in his diary that day, ‘The troops recognize no leader now and are spreading terror throughout the city.’ Reluctant to return to their barracks and to their old commanders, many of them had ‘given up their arms to the crowd and were drifting listlessly about the streets watching the progress of the fight’.22

By the end of that day there was even less likelihood of the Executive Committee regaining control of the obstreperous remnants of the army; for in a clear bid for primacy, the Petrograd Soviet had issued Order No. 1 tackling some of the soldiers’ long-standing grievances against the imperial government. All army titles were now abolished, it announced; no officers were to be saluted, and the rank and file were to be addressed by the formal vy and not the informal (and, to them, demeaning) ty. From now on, Russia’s military would take its orders from a plethora of soldiers’ and sailors’ committees reporting to the Soviet – not to the Duma.23

Intense cold descended during the night of 28 February/1 March, with the temperature plummeting to –26 degrees Centigrade, accompanied by a heavy fall of four to six inches of snow. The following morning a grey and gloomy sky cast a pall over the city as snow fell all day, muffling the sporadic sound of shouts and gunfire. The low temperatures transformed the blackened shells of burnt-out buildings with ‘long icicles hanging from the eaves’. Everywhere the smell of burning lingered and ‘paper ash still floated in the air’.24

Florence Harper and Donald Thompson walked up to the American embassy from the Astoria to survey the scene. ‘Except for smashed windows and dead horses lying around the streets, there were no signs of the recent disturbance,’ Harper noted.25 Indeed, anyone who had risen early enough would have been greeted by a ‘soft, immaculate whiteness’ covering the streets and temporarily concealing the debris, spent bullets and bloodstains of five days of violence. Leighton Rogers also went out to take a look:

Shattered glass is greenish on the snow and where not smashed, windows are pierced with neat holes. Doors are splintered and spotted with lead. Buildings have smallpox – wherever a bullet strikes these brick and stucco structures out comes a chunk as big as a plate. The huge clock on the end of the Singer Building – the only modern office building in Petrograd – though still brightly lighted, stopped running a day or so ago in deference to three punctures in its vitals. Here and there lies a horse or an abandoned motor car put out of commission by flying bullets or a collision.26

Overnight, proclamations had been posted exhorting everyone, as ‘citizens’, to play their part in restoring order. Chester Swinnerton was impressed by the extraordinary sangfroid of Russians as they attempted to get back to normal. He and his bank colleagues ‘wandered out to take some pictures’. Up on the Liteiny – the scene of such violence two days before – ‘it was just like a Sunday School Picnic’. But they had barely walked a hundred feet along it when there was ‘a b-rrrrrrrrr – put put put put put – and a machine gun began to rattle from the corner house. We, in company with all those within twenty five yards, ducked into a nearby courtyard.’ Their female Russian companions ‘had a death grip on my arms’, but within a minute were ‘peeking out again’. ‘You absolutely cannot beat the Russian curiosity,’ Swinnerton wrote later, ‘[they] exhibit the most wonderful nonchalance and casualness. Little children will walk calmly thru the firing, laughing and playing as usual.’ He had asked two little boys if it was safe to go on to the Nevsky:

‘Yes. Perfectly safe.’

‘Aren’t they shooting there?’

‘Oh yes, some shooting.’

‘Anybody being killed?’

‘Oh, yes, a few have been killed, but it’s perfectly all right there.’27

Late in the evening and into the night of 1–2 March, Florence Harper could still hear a machine gun firing from St Isaac’s Cathedral. It had been going on for the last couple of days, but that night a group of Cossacks stormed the cathedral and found forty police holed up in the basement. Exhausted from days without sleep and being hunted from one house to another, the police made their last stand. The Cossacks killed them then and there, and found six of their machine guns on the roof along with enough ammunition ‘for a month’.28

The revolution was now firmly in the hands of the people, and by Thursday order was at last being restored. Students were enrolled into an ad hoc militia to help keep the peace and patrolled the streets wearing special armbands, accompanied by three or four soldiers under their command. The fires were out; some of the worst criminals who had been set free had been recaptured and secured in prison again. The militia had disarmed many gun-toting civilians during the day, by order of the Duma committee. Drunks were being arrested and numerous signs were posted ‘asking all the comrades to refrain from liquor’.29 Officers who had gone over to the revolution were given back their arms and returned to their regiments to restore discipline. Controls were brought in over armed motor vehicles careering dangerously round the streets. Cars were stopped by rows of militia barricading the road and allowed to pass only if they had official documents – otherwise they were summarily confiscated.30

People were going back to work, huddled into their greatcoats against the cold. Shops had reopened and housewives were out searching for food, their shopping bags over their arms. Milkmen were out pulling their sledges loaded with large pots of milk. Most important of all, with a resumption of rail deliveries of flour, limited supplies of freshly baked bread were available once more. Telegraph and telephone lines were restored and the post was being delivered. Workers began to clear the snow, and the streets started to take on their old aspect. Even the boats out of Petrograd were back to their old running order. Everything seemed to indicate an unexpectedly rapid return to normality.

Looking back on events of the past five days, David Francis was impressed, informing the US State Department that it had been ‘the best managed revolution that has ever taken place, for its magnitude’.31 English medical orderly Elsie Bowerman, who had been stranded in the city on her way home from the Eastern Front, remarked in her diary that ‘Revolutions carried out in such a peaceful manner really deserve to succeed.* Today weapons only seem to be in the hands of responsible people.’ ‘Politics have begun this morning again,’ reported an American resident, ‘and we seem to have emerged from a sort of hermetic isolation, when the other side of the river seemed very far away and we only knew of what was happening at the other end of the Petrograd side by hearsay.’32 Out on the Nevsky, Edward Heald followed a great parade of people with banners, who seemed to him ‘joyously, freely, intensely, spiritually happy’. Seeing events unfold in Petrograd at street level, as he had done, had been ‘thrilling and indescribable’, he wrote in his diary. ‘It has been good to be alive these marvellous days.’33 The air of celebration was bolstered by news from Moscow that the struggle there had been brief and ‘an easy victory for the revolutionists’. ‘Normal life was scarcely interrupted for more than one day’ in Russia’s second city, noted one observer, ‘and even less in other cities.’34

Several, like Elsie Bowerman, glossed over the horrors and looked for the positives: during the revolution, she recalled, foreign nationals such as herself had ‘met with the utmost politeness and consideration from everyone’. Oliver Locker Lampson concurred, his view – like Bowerman’s – limited by a narrow perspective on the true brutality that had taken place. ‘This tremendous change has been wrought without excess, without insult to women, without any cruelty,’ he thought. Indeed, he had seen so little of the terrible bloodshed that he professed that ‘the crowds are not nearly as noisy as those in an English election’. All in all, it had been ‘the Revolution of a noble, generous-hearted people’.35 Captain Osborn Springfield of the Royal Artillery was of the same mind. His preconception that ‘Revolution meant mass executions and thousands of casualties’ had received a ‘rude shock’ in Petrograd. ‘It had all seemed so comparatively peaceful. After the first natural excitement – normality had returned so quickly.’ ‘But were things normal?’ he added. Like other foreign observers, he would later find such rose-tinted optimism had been premature. The wishful thinking that this had been a relatively bloodless, peaceful revolution – a revolution filled with hope of a new beginning for Russia – was soon shattered. As Springfield himself soon admitted, ‘I was to find that much worse was to come.’36

Many of those recording their response to the February Revolution were inevitably drawn to comparisons with Paris 1789. For one American observer the enduring image of 28 February – a day of great transition – had come with ‘the only romantic sight’ he had seen: of ‘a figure straight from the old engravings of the French Revolution’ moving against the crowd:

It was a young girl in a thin, shabby overcoat, with light clipped hair, on which perched a khaki soldier’s cap with a big bunch of red ribbon in front. Strapped around her waist was an enormous curved gendarme’s sword. She was trotting towards the firing, stopping every few steps to peer ahead, shading her eyes against the setting sun.37

Such an image – reminiscent of Marianne, allegorical figure of the French Revolution – was indeed evocative; as, too, for French witness Amélie de Néry, was the use of the word ‘citizen’. It was the first time she had heard it on the streets of Petrograd. French ambassador Paléologue, however, thought the spirit of the French and Russian revolutions ‘quite dissimilar’. What had happened in Petrograd, he wrote, was ‘by its origins, principles and social, rather than political, character’ far more reminiscent of revolutionary events in Paris in 1848. The overnight blossoming of such romantic idealism had about it a sense of unreality that was hard for many to absorb, but de Néry best summed it up:

‘You had to have lived here, you had to have seen the constraint impinging on all public life, the strict supervision by the police, their lack of goodwill, the spying, the informing and everything feeling false and underhand hanging in the air, slavery masquerading as liberty, in order to understand the joy which radiates in everyone’s expression now. At last, this great people can breathe, they have cast off their chains, along with the weight that has been oppressing them for centuries. Everyone is cheerful, smiling.’38

Chester Swinnerton had similar sentiments: ‘The present movement is the fall of the Bastille. Next should come the march to Versailles.’ He hoped ‘that is as far as the parallel will continue’.39 But, as things turned out, Versailles would not come to Petrograd. The last act of old imperial Russia was even now reaching its sad conclusion three hundred miles away from the capital, in a railway siding at Pskov.

* Sybil Grey heard that proof was found in Protopopov’s apartment of ‘plans to open the wine-shops in order to provide an excuse for firing on the people when they were drunk’.

* In 1912, then aged twenty-two, Bowerman had been a survivor of the Titanic disaster.

7

‘People Still Blinking in the Light of the Sudden Deliverance’

On the morning of Wednesday 1 March, Philip Chadbourn visited the ‘charred and smoking shell’ of the Courts of Justice on the Liteiny and found its courtyard full of people ‘delving for souvenirs of that which was already a thing of yesteryear’.1 The grand staircase had been entirely destroyed, ‘only the lower third of a marble empress remained on her pedestal. The blackened torso lay at my feet, the imperial head, orb, scepter, crown, among the debris.’ At the end of a long dark corridor he reached one of the inner courts and shuddered when he found himself ‘inside this great human cage where everything was steel and stone, clanked, and was cold’. In some of the cells he could see the remains of a final meal of black bread, abandoned ‘when the last call to freedom had come’. In the wrecked commandant’s office he ‘walked off with an oil portrait of the Emperor under [his] arm’. Inside the chapel, its Byzantine fittings were ‘in wildest disarray; books, vestments, and robes were strewn about the floor. The marble altar was damaged and the crowd was curiously handling the ceremonial vessels.’ Suddenly a young soldier ‘snatched up a richly embroidered robe and flung it over his shoulders; next, he put on a long embellished collar; and last of all, he jammed a battered mitre on the side of his head. Then he opened the Testament and began to intone in a comic bass voice.’ Chadbourn could not help thinking that, only a week previously, such irreverent behaviour would have been ‘unthinkable’. But here was ‘a whole world gone topsy turvy’: ‘the incredible is becoming a common sight, the commonplace has quite disappeared’.2

Caught in the middle of it all, foreign residents remained confused and fearful – hiding in their apartments, ‘nervous, uneasy, troubled, starting at the least sound,’ as Claude Anet reported. ‘Whither were we drifting? What would happen on the morrow … Would a government nominated at Petrograd be accepted by Russia? Would it be able to re-establish order?’ they asked each other. At the homes of fellow French residents, Anet noted a mounting concern about the situation beyond Russia: ‘The great question, the terrible question, was this: “What of the War?”’3 For the time being the revolution had obliterated all thought of it, in the minds of ordinary Petrograders. They had even forgotten about the Tsar, whose imminent return had been expected for days.

It wasn’t until three in the morning of 28 February that Nicholas II had finally left Stavka at Mogilev on the imperial train, only to be turned back six hours from Petrograd, at Bologoe, by striking railway workers who had torn up the railway lines. Instead Nicholas had headed for Pskov, where he arrived early in the morning of 1 March, having telegraphed Rodzianko in Petrograd and reluctantly agreed to political concessions. But it was too late. Rodzianko’s response had been blunt: ‘It is now time to abdicate.’4

A weary and depressed Nicholas, preoccupied with being reunited with his wife and sick children and concerned about the fate of the Russian army at the front, talked things over with General Ruzsky at his HQ at Pskov. Ruzsky also advised abdication. Thereafter Nicholas offered little resistance to further pressure placed on him to capitulate, by special envoys and Duma deputies Alexander Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin after they arrived by train from Petrograd. His act of abdication was, Nicholas asserted, for the sake of the country; in making his decision, he took no account of political demands. His duty, first and foremost, was ‘to God and Russia’.5 But he also took the decision to abdicate on behalf of his haemophiliac son, Alexey, dreading the inevitable separation and exile from him that Alexey’s succession under a regency would have prompted. On the afternoon of 2 March the Tsar agreed the draft of his abdication manifesto and signed it shortly before midnight, designating his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, his successor. Barely a day later Mikhail declined the throne, unless offered to him by a Constituent Assembly elected by all the Russian people. But the creation of such a body was, as Mikhail well knew, still a pipedream.

At 1.00 a.m. on 3 March, Nicholas’s train headed back to Mogilev and from there on to Tsarskoe Selo. Notices in the Petrograd papers of 5 March reported that the ex-Tsar had ‘gone to take a badly earned holiday in Livadia in the Crimea’. However, on 9 March a pale and exhausted Nicholas, in the uniform of a colonel of the Cossacks of the Guard, finally rejoined his family, who had already been placed under house arrest at the Alexander Palace.6 While Nicholas had indeed expressed a wish to be allowed to go and live in Crimea, this had been summarily refused. There were hopes that King George and the British government might be prevailed upon to take them in, but tentative discussions soon came to nothing. As Nicholas and his family awaited news of their fate, he was treated like any other Russian and referred to as ‘Citizen Romanov’ or, as many came to refer to him, just plain ‘Nikolay’. As for the Tsaritsa, the newspapers had reverted to her former name, Alix of Hesse.

Maurice Paléologue was shocked at the speed with which the Tsar had capitulated: it had all ‘taken place in such casual, commonplace and prosaic fashion, and above all with such indifference and self-effacement on the part of the principal hero,’ he thought. ‘The Czar of all the Russias has been dethroned as easily as a recalcitrant schoolboy is made to stay in after school,’ wrote Edith Hegan, on hearing the news. ‘The dynasty of the Romanoffs had disappeared in the storm,’ observed Claude Anet. ‘It had found no one to defend it; it had crumbled away as if all life were extinct in it.’ ‘Nikolai has abdicated. Everybody is relieved. There will be no Vendée,’* wrote another (American) observer.7 Most of the Americans in Petrograd were equally enthusiastic, but Donald Thompson couldn’t help wishing that if the Tsar had returned to the city sooner, and if he had driven straight away down the Nevsky Prospekt ‘and stood up in the back of his automobile with his hat off and talked, as Teddy Roosevelt would have done, he would still be Czar of Russia’. It seemed simple enough to him: give the people bread, and agree to a new government. Thompson felt sorry for the Tsar: ‘at heart he was a real Russian and even now I believe if he were asked, he would go to the front and fight for Russia’. As for the ‘brilliant future’ that everyone tried to convince him was coming, now the Tsar had gone, Thompson didn’t think it ‘very promising’.8

Over at the Tauride Palace, with the grudging agreement of the rival power base of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and in a continuing atmosphere of ‘fierce excitement’, a twelve-man Provisional Government had been formed on the evening of 2 March, drawn from members of the Duma.9 ‘Solidly respectable’ and ‘eminently bourgeois’ in composition, and in contrast to the Soviet, which opposed the war, it confirmed its loyalty to the Allies and its hopes of instituting a constitutional government. Prince Georgiy Lvov, a mild-mannered liberal and landowner, with long years of experience as an administrator in local government, was called in from Moscow and nominated prime minister. He would, however, soon be eclipsed by the more domineering and competing voices of Alexander Kerensky, promoted to Minister of Justice, and the energetic liberal monarchist Pavel Milyukov, as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Taking over as Minister of War was the wealthy merchant and newspaper owner Alexander Guchkov, who had just played a key role in the Tsar’s abdication. Rodzianko, the Duma president, remained in office at the head of a body that continued to function until September, but was now effectively sidelined by the more forceful figures in the new Provisional Government.10

All of the members of the Provisional Government, bar the socialist Kerensky, were of the old industrialist or landowning class, a fact to which Kerensky had found it hard to reconcile his political principles. It soon became apparent that because of his leftist leanings, Kerensky was the only member of the new government likely to carry any real weight with the Soviet (of which he was also appointed Vice Chairman of its Executive Committee). Indeed, Kerensky – who had joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1905 and had been elected to the Duma in 1912 – worked hard to keep a foot in both camps.

He cultivated the Soviet’s approval through a combination of his personal magnetism and a clever eloquence born of a career as a defence lawyer working with imprisoned political activists. It would, however, take all his considerable skills to handle this increasingly obstructionist and truculent body – the Soviet’s rank of deputies having already rapidly swelled to an unmanageable three thousand. Intoxicated with their new-found liberty, the Soviet’s politically naive membership of inexperienced workers and soldiers were having radical Marxist theories pressed upon them by militant socialists in their midst, and were absorbing these like blotting paper. Such theories ran counter to the Provisional Government’s objective of maintaining a democratic form of government until a Constituent Assembly could be properly elected by the Russian people, by means of a universal, direct and secret ballot.11 But this would not take place until after the war was over. The prospect of how a largely illiterate peasant population would respond to the previously unimaginable freedom of such a plebiscite was summed up by a comment repeated time and time again, in variant forms, on the streets of Russia: ‘A republic! Of course we must have a republic, but we must have a good Czar to look after it.’12

It took a raft of major political concessions for the Petrograd Soviet to agree to the creation of the Provisional Government, including an ‘immediate amnesty in all political and religious affairs, including those convicted of terroristic attempts, military insurrection, and agrarian crimes … Liberty of word, press, assembly, unions and strikes … Abolition of all class, religious and national limitations and the … substitution of national militia in place of the police, with elected leaders and subject to the local administrations.’13 As for the thorny but increasingly pressing issue of votes for women, Kerensky told Claude Anet that this, too, would be postponed until after the inauguration of a Constituent Assembly: ‘They had neither the time nor the means to organize so vast a change in so limited a period.’14 For now, Kerensky’s first task as Minister of Justice was to oversee the amnesty for all political prisoners, which followed on 6 March; on the 12th the death-penalty was abolished.

Although the Provisional Government had professed itself loyal to Russia’s continuing war effort, Allied military attachés in Petrograd were already expressing grave misgivings about the state of the Russian army and its continued participation. Many, like General Knox, were fearful that it was on the brink of capitulation and that the Germans would take Petrograd. Knox had personally considered the Soviet’s controversial Order No. 1, instructing soldiers and sailors to obey orders from the Provisional Government only if sanctioned by the Soviet – ‘a deathblow to the Russian army’. In Knox’s view, the Petrograd garrison had degenerated into an armed mob and there was no enthusiasm for the war in the rank and file. At a meeting at the US embassy a very pessimistic view also prevailed; the revolution, it was agreed, would ‘take all the starch out of the troops at the front’ and Russia could no longer figure ‘as a factor in the war’. Troops at the front were deeply demoralised and deserting in droves. ‘If peace does not come soon they will lay down their arms.’15 Ambassador Paléologue had received assurances from Milyukov that his government intended to continue ‘ruthlessly prosecuting the war to victory’, but admitted that ‘the direction of Russian affairs is now at the mercy of new forces’ – which Paléologue put down to ‘extremist proletarian doctrine’ – of the kind now being propounded by the Soviet.16

Russia’s effectiveness in the war had been further undermined by violent acts of rebellion in the Baltic fleet at Kronstadt, the naval fortress nineteen miles to the west of Petrograd that protected the city’s sea approaches. All sense of discipline in the army seemed to have evaporated. Instead, a new breed of soldier-citizens were gaining ground who considered they had no need to obey orders, having instead, as Arno Dosch-Fleurot put it, merely ‘a vast, vague, contagious conception of liberty’.17 Claude Anet noticed the loss of bearing in the soldiers he saw parading on the streets, ‘slouched now in a slovenly and careless manner, in bad order, without keeping the time which had been taught them so carefully’.18 The punctilious Sir George Buchanan was horrified at the levels of disrespect now being shown by the rank and file on railway trains, where he saw them ‘crowd into first class carriages and eat in Restaurant cars while officers wait’. Officers were humiliated at every opportunity: ‘I saw venerable generals,’ recalled Isaac Marcosson, ‘with the wound and service stripes of two wars on their sleeves, hanging by the strap of the tramcars while every seat was occupied by a grinning and sometimes jeering common soldier.’

Such a breakdown in respect was also galling to military men like US aviator Bert Hall. On the afternoon of 3 March he saw an old general in a railway station trying to get something to eat. Some soldiers nearby began hurling offensive remarks at him and, when the general sent for an armed guard to arrest the offending soldiers, the guard turned on him and arrested the general instead. ‘They took the old man outside and a crowd gathered around,’ recalled Hall. Then someone said, ‘What shall we do with him?’ ‘Let’s hang him; he was once on the side of the Tsar!’ And they lynched him there and then.’ Hall knew him: ‘He was a good old man and one of the few artillery experts in all Russia.’19

With the Tsar’s abdication, a new form of public recreation rapidly took hold across the city: the systematic tearing down and destruction of all imperial insignia and other visible trappings of the old regime.20 All along the Nevsky and other major thoroughfares gangs of soldiers appeared and began removing the double-headed eagles and Romanov arms from store-fronts that had supplied the Imperial Court, as well as from their favourite clubs and watering holes, such as the Imperial Yacht Club. Nicholas’s name, Romanov crests and insignia, photographs and paintings of the imperial family – all were ruthlessly eradicated. There was even talk of melting down Falconet’s fine statue of Peter the Great, erected by Catherine the Great in Senate Square. The word ‘Imperial’ was defaced on signboards and brass plates everywhere it was found. They even tore down the imperial eagle on the front of the Anglo-Russian Hospital: ‘Our Palace Eagle met its end, a heap of plaster on the road it had proudly gazed on for many years,’ noted Dr Geoffrey Jefferson. The staff were also ordered to take down the Russian flag above the front door: ‘this is not the flag of our nation,’ they were told.21

Ladders were brought from all directions by citizens eager to remove the old imperial blight on the face of the new socialist Russia. When there were no ladders to be had, people shinned up buildings and onto roofs to do the job. Once thrown down into the street, the insignia were stamped on, burned on huge bonfires or simply flung into the canals. A few people – some of them foreign residents – were eager to get their pickings: ‘We wanted souvenirs,’ wrote James Houghteling, ‘but everything we saw was too big.’22 Unfortunately, in their eagerness to do away with all trace of the Romanovs, the self-appointed iconoclasts roaming the streets in search of targets failed to distinguish between the Russian imperial eagle – symbol of oppression – and the American eagle, symbol of freedom. Several of the latter were destroyed, although the Americans managed to save the huge iron eagle atop the Singer Building on the Nevsky, by ‘drap[ing] the proud bird in the Stars and Stripes until only the beak protruded from the red, white, and blue folds’.23

One of the most obvious targets for the destruction of emblems of tsarism was the Winter Palace. One fanatic, so Associated Press correspondent Robert Crozier Long heard, had even demanded ‘the complete razing of the Winter Palace, declaring that “the debris might be left – a heap of shapeless stones and rotting wood – as a finer monument to the fall of the Romanoffs than the handsomest monument to Liberty reared anywhere else on earth”’.24 Meanwhile, the red flag had already gone up over the palace itself, replacing the yellow imperial flag, and the Romanov coats of arms and eagles on its historic wrought-iron gates were either removed or covered up with red cloth. Such became the demand for red fabric for this, and for the masses of ribbons, brassards and flags in evidence all over the city, that in the end people resorted to simply cutting the blue and white strips away from the now-rejected Russian national flag and displaying the remaining red strip.25

As this frenzy of destruction continued, the imperial insignia and aristocratic coronets were even wrenched off the bonnets of commandeered motor cars, and electric street signs forming the large letter ‘N’ with a crown were also dismantled and destroyed. It was now considered treasonous to buy or display a portrait of the Tsar. ‘Where portraits of the Emperor could not be removed – such as those in the Chamber of the Council of Empire – they were covered with white crepe.’26 Even at the Academy of Art ‘the placards attached to the various paintings stating that they were the gift or loan of members of the royal family had all such references cut out.’ Church services, too, felt the immediate impact of the change of regime and became considerably shorter, with all the prayers for the imperial family being removed from the liturgy and replaced with a prayer for the ‘Divine Protection of the Fatherland’.27

The most potent signifier of change for Meriel Buchanan came at a concert at the Mariinsky Theatre, where she was sad to see that the imperial arms and big golden eagles had been torn down in the auditorium, ‘leaving gaping holes’. The handsome imperial blue drop-curtain had also gone – replaced by ‘an odd red-and-gold one’.28 All the old tsarist splendour had vanished: the formerly well-dressed ushers in their gold-braided court uniforms now wore ‘plain grey jackets which made them look indescribably shabby and dingy’. The clientele of this new egalitarian theatre was also, for her, decidedly downmarket: ‘soldiers in mud-stained khaki lolled everywhere, smoking evil-smelling cigarettes, spitting all over the place and eating the inevitable sunflower seeds out of paper bags’. Elsewhere, a motley crowd of unwashed proletarians sat in their day-clothes – leather jackets replacing the usual evening dress – with their ‘muddy boots on the brocade sofas’. For Buchanan, the new socialist ‘doctrine of Liberty’ was one that ‘preached a contempt for beauty’. Even the corps de ballet seemed ‘less in harmony, slow to obey the conductor’s baton, whispering in corners, slack and inattentive in their movements’. This once-beautiful theatre had been transformed into a meeting place, an office. It was all too much for the European old guard and bluebloods of the foreign diplomatic service, such as the Buchanans. This was no brave new world, but one of ‘dilapidation, of demoralization and decay’.29

The night of Thursday 2 March saw such an intense blizzard that the following morning it was impossible to go out on the streets. Winter was hanging on with a vengeance, the temperature sticking at freezing. With the snow piling up against shop fronts and buildings to a height of about fifteen to twenty feet, the weather certainly ‘cooled revolutionary ardour’ and, as David Francis noted, ‘had the effect of keeping even the rampant socialists within doors’.30 It didn’t last long: on 5 March newspapers finally reappeared, after a week’s silence, and vendors were ‘almost overwhelmed by the news-hungry populace’ venturing out in the cold to read up on the dramatic events of the last few days. For journalist Arthur Ransome, this was an especially heartening sight: ‘their tone and even form are so joyful that it is hard to recognize them. They are so different from the censor-ridden mutes and unhappy things of a week ago. Every paper seems to be executing a wardance of joy … it is as if all Russia had spat out the gags forced in mouths by the old regime of oppression.’

In addition to the newspapers, ‘every conceivable kind of incendiary pamphlet was sold on the sidewalk and without restraint’ and walls everywhere were ‘literally plastered with proclamations, posters and propaganda bulletins’.31 Returning to Russia for his second term as Dutch ambassador, Willem Oudendijk* was forcibly struck by the freedom of speech that prevailed. On the train in from Finland he had found himself surrounded by ‘revolutionary emigrants’ on their way back to Russia, who ‘talked and talked without ceasing’. ‘Everybody thought himself an apostle of a new salvation,’ he noted, ‘and propounded his views with great vehemence to anybody who cared to listen.’32 ‘Walking the city one could stop and hear opinions freely expressed on any street corner,’ Ambassador Paléologue also noted. Impromptu open-air meetinki (the English word was rapidly adopted) could be seen ‘in progress everywhere’. Groups of twenty or thirty would spontaneously gather, and then ‘one of the company mounts a stone, or a bench, or a heap of snow and talks his head off, gesticulating wildly. The audience gazes fixedly at the orator and listens in a kind of rapt absorption. As soon as he stops another takes his place and immediately gets the same fervent silence and concentrated attention.’ Paléologue found it an ‘artless and affecting sight’, particularly when one remembered ‘that the Russian nation ha[d] been waiting centuries for the right of speech’.33

James Stinton Jones wondered whether the Russians were ready, or able, to deal with such a sudden abundance of liberty. In his view, they were too new to it ‘to understand its uses and to know how to avoid its abuses … The poorer classes of Russia have never been accustomed to having an opinion of their own … Now they find themselves a political factor, they are hopelessly at sea, the prey of the last unscrupulous demagogue they have heard.’ ‘It will take time for Russia to realize what she wants,’ he added. ‘There is no cohesion, no common ideal to inspire her people. She is conscious of having killed a dragon; that is all.’34

Not long after the newspapers began printing again, the trams reappeared; only now they were draped in red flags and banners bearing inscriptions such as ‘Long Live the Republic’. James Houghteling saw the first one arrive across the Troitsky Bridge from the Petrograd Side, ‘with a band playing and a great red banner spread aloft: “Land and the Will of the People”.’35 Everybody in Petrograd was glad to get mobile again, and the familiar trams seemed the final affirmation that life had returned to normal at last. This had not, however, been achieved without some difficulty: the Petrograd Soviet had been obliged to issue a notice ‘drawing attention to the … removal of the operating-handles from cars at the beginning of the revolution and ask[ing] that any patriot having a handle in his possession return it to the Municipal Office’. Having daily had to walk back and forth on foot following the unravelling story, journalist Claude Anet was relieved – he had been covering twelve to seventeen miles a day. ‘If the Revolution continued, I should have the legs of a country postman.’36

While most expatriates welcomed with a degree of wry cynicism the gradual and spasmodic restoration of services in the city, there were some who remained incorrigibly, hopelessly optimistic about this wonderful new dawn in Russia. Harold Williams of the Daily Chronicle, a committed pacifist and socialist from a Methodist background, shared Arthur Ransome’s effusive response to events, talking excitedly of a ‘flow of brotherly feeling’ in the streets and of how the ‘strong sense of common responsibility for order has united all classes in one great army of freedom’. Life in Russia, he insisted, was ‘flowing in a healing, purifying torrent. Never was any country in the world so interesting as Russia is now. Old men are saying “Nunc Dimittis”,* young men singing in the dawn, and I have met many men and women who seem walking in a hushed sense of benediction.’37

There was so much dramatic change for new arrivals in the city to take in. Anglo-Irish journalist Robert Crozier Long was taken aback, upon arriving on 7 March, by the ‘unexampled reversal of ranks and conditions which in a week the Revolution had brought about in the most despotic and class-crystallized country of Europe.’38 ‘I found the capital delirious with freedom,’ recalled American journalist Isaac Marcosson, who had previously been covering the Western Front, ‘the people still blinking in the light of the sudden deliverance’.39 For Marcosson, the persisting, unreal state of euphoria at recent events was like ‘New York City on the night of a presidential election, but with this difference: the returns were piling in all the time and the whole world seemed to be elected’.

Sooner or later the celebrating had to stop and reality must set in. Petrograders were, however, in a strange state of denial, having assumed that ‘the revolution meant a free and continuous meal ticket and a four-hour working day’.40 Russia had to get back to work, but the new-found equality – a world where everybody called each other tovarishch and brotherly love reigned – had, like strong drink, gone to people’s heads. Puffed up with impossible expectations, and dreaming irrational dreams of vastly reduced working days and greatly improved salaries, many workers – from the highest-paid munitions worker to the lowliest housemaid – were making impossible demands for 50–100 per cent and even 150 per cent wage increases, alongside a dramatic reduction in their working hours.41 The Putilov works were still idle, with 35,000 men on the streets, and there was a desperate need for munitions at the front.42 ‘I have been told, difficult as it is to credit it,’ remarked visiting English forestry expert, Edward Stebbing:

that a bricklayer earns at the rate of 30,000 roubles a year, a hotel waiter 80 roubles a day, a hotel boy 50 roubles, and so on – such wages as no country in the world could afford to pay, and doing only about four to six hours’ work for it, and that work so badly performed as to be absolutely harmful. Witness the state of the rolling stock on the railways and the accidents now so numerous. Factory owners, and in fact employers of labour of all kinds, are at their wits’ end to get work carried out and keep their businesses going.43

This was confirmed by Negley Farson – at that time engaged to Vera Thornton, daughter of one of the Thornton brothers, who owned the biggest mill in Petrograd and who, like other expat factory owners and managers, were fighting a losing battle to keep their Petrograd plants going. ‘The workers were like sheep who had been let out of their pen, and the English managers could not get them back,’ wrote Farson. ‘They had no idea what freedom meant, but most of them took it as an invitation not to work. There was a daily drama in every mill yard as managers tried to reason with workers demanding ridiculously high wages.’

Donald Thompson and Florence Harper had noted a distinct change in the attitude of the staff at the Astoria. ‘The servants are beginning to get stuck up with this new-born freedom,’ wrote Thompson; his room servant had told him that from now on he would have to shine his own shoes. ‘You have to call them ‘comrade’ or ‘friend’, he told his wife – rather than addressing them as chelovek (‘man’); and, like the rank and file in the army, they insisted on the use of vy instead of the informal ty.44 A British resident noticed how every evening his two housemaids would ‘spend hours standing at street corners along the Nevski Prospekt, listening to orators preaching about equality and justice’. After one such outing, they returned and told him and his wife that ‘they were in future going to the cinema every night’ and intended to work no more than ‘eight hours a day’.45 Sometimes such high-handedness backfired. A Russian housemaid working for a prominent American resident ‘served notice on her master that she wanted an increase of fifty per cent in wages and an eight-hour day’. ‘What do you mean by an eight-hour day?’ asked her employer. ‘I am only going to work from eight until eight’ was the reply. Her demand was ‘speedily granted’.46

The arbitrary enforcement of equal rights and a share of control also manifested itself in a new form of overbearing management-by-committee, which percolated down into every aspect of Russian society (and which would, in the future Soviet Union, evolve into an art form). One day in early March, Claude Anet wanted to make a telephone call at the Duma:

Three women guarded the approach to it.

‘You cannot telephone,’ they said.

‘And why?’ I asked.

‘We are reserving the telephone for public affairs.’

‘But who are you?’

‘The Telephone Committee.’

‘And who appointed you?’

‘We appointed ourselves.’

Upon which, putting them gently aside, I passed through and telephoned.47

There was also a far more worrying aspect to this unbridled, self-righteous sense of equality – and that came in the summary infliction of rough justice. British lithographer Henry Keeling was alarmed to see how ‘In Russia where few expected justice and where the police had such wide powers, the abolition of the death-penalty seemed to mean an end of all the checks on social crimes’ – especially theft. People acted as self-appointed vigilantes, defending the good name of revolution by summarily punishing those who committed crimes, as Keeling witnessed soon after the revolution:

A lady in a crowded tramcar in Petrograd … cried out suddenly that she had had her purse stolen. She said that it contained fifty roubles and accused a well-dressed young man who happened to be standing behind her of the theft. The latter most earnestly protested his innocence and declared that rather than be called a thief he would give the woman fifty roubles out of his own pocket. Nothing availed him; perhaps they thought he protested too much. He was taken outside and promptly shot. The body of the poor fellow was searched, but no purse was found. The upholders of the integrity of the Russian Republic returned to the tramcar and told the woman that she had better make a more careful search. She did so and discovered that the missing purse had slipped down through a hole in the pocket into the lining. Nothing could be done for the unfortunate victim of ‘justice’ so they took the only course which seemed to them to meet the case and leading the woman out, shot her also.48

On Saturday 4 March, James Houghteling and some of his colleagues at the US embassy decided the time had come for them to see the new politics in action and headed for the Tauride Palace. They had no difficulty getting in, for they were mistaken for an official US delegation – come, hopefully, to recognise the new government. Ushered through into the anteroom of the Duma president, they were greeted by Guchkov, who was a little crestfallen when they admitted the mistake.49 It was clear that the Provisional Government was anxious for official validation by foreign powers, and the men went straight to the embassy to tell the ambassador.

Whatever might be the vagaries of the improvised form of government now being enacted at the Tauride Palace, in the greater scheme of things David Francis saw its inception as a golden opportunity. He was determined that republican America should make the grand, defining gesture and ‘be the first to recognize Republican Russia’.50 On the afternoon of 5 March he composed a telegram to Robert Lansing, US Secretary of State: ‘This revolution is the practical realization of that principle of government which we have championed and advocated, I mean government by consent of the governed,’ he argued. ‘Our recognition will have a stupendous moral effect, especially if given first.’51 What is more, by taking this pre-emptive step – ahead of the Allied governments of France, Britain and Italy – Francis hoped the US would thereby increase its trade with Russia and supplant the influence of the British. Expecting the USA soon to enter the war, he also believed this was in America’s interests strategically. Having surprised, if not mortified, his staff by composing his telegram without consulting with any of them, Francis asked Phil Jordan to bring his coat, hat and galoshes and, without more ado, he set off in his sleigh to see Foreign minister Milyukov, who ensured that the telegram was safely transmitted to the USA. Less than two days later Francis received Lansing’s approval. He was overjoyed. ‘It is a great coup to get in ahead of Russia’s allies,’ he told James Houghteling, ‘and it puts the United States in the position of the new government’s best friend.’52

To mark the occasion, Francis and his ‘entire official staff, ten secretaries of embassy and attachés’, drove up the Nevsky on 9 March to the Palace of the Imperial Council at the Mariinsky Palace, with the horses of the ambassadorial sleigh sporting flags stuck in the bridle over their outer ear (Norman Armour said it felt like riding ‘in a merry-go-round’).53 Francis was in ‘full dress evening clothes like a head waiter’ – not having any official diplomatic uniform. The entire Provisional Government was waiting for them, though they had had no time to dress for the occasion. They had ‘all come directly from their offices and wore sack-suits [lounge suits]’. James Houghteling thought they ‘appeared careworn but much elated at having won a place among the nations after so few days in office’.54 The brief ceremony that followed was ‘impressive’, as J. Butler Wright noted in his diary, but it was no ‘flummy-doodle’. And it was a feather in the cap for the Americans, whose embassy in the eyes of ‘certain of our diplomatic colleagues’, as Wright knew, ‘did not count for much’.55

Two days later, Sir George Buchanan, who had only just recovered from illness, made the same trip to the palace with the ambassadors of France and Italy to pass on their official recognition of the Provisional Government. But unlike the enthusiastic Americans, they were dismayed to be received in ‘a room with a dirty floor and broken windows’. Maurice Paléologue was appalled by the changes to the palace: the great marble staircases had not been swept since the revolution, he noted, and there were bullet marks everywhere in the plasterwork. General Knox recorded a ‘general atmosphere of depression’ among the diplomats gathered there that afternoon, all of them fearful that the revolution would make it harder for the Allies to win the war.56 Sir George, having no Russian, made a brief speech in fluent French – the former language of diplomacy in imperial Russia – which was ‘very severe, but much to the point’, in which he ‘made an inspiriting appeal for the re-establishment of discipline in the army and the energetic prosecution of the war’.57 While Milyukov responded with a speech of thanks, Paléologue examined the members of the Provisional Government gathered around him: ‘Patriotism, intelligence and honesty could be read on every face; but they seemed utterly worn out with physical fatigue and anxiety. The task they have undertaken is patently beyond their powers. Heaven grant that they do not collapse under it too soon!’

One person alone among them struck Paléologue as ‘a man of action’ – Alexander Kerensky. But he was an elusive figure who kept himself apart and, when seen, appeared waxen and sickly (he was suffering from TB of the kidneys). Paléologue had no doubt, however, that here was ‘the most original figure of the Provisional Government’. Kerensky was a man who seemed ‘bound to become its main spring’.58

* An allusion to the conservative, royalist counter-revolution staged in the rural western French province of the Vendée in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789.

* A long-serving and accomplished diplomat like Buchanan, Oudendijk had served in Persia and China and was a gifted polyglot. He had previously been Dutch Ambassador to Petrograd during 1907–8.

* A canticle from the Gospel of St Luke, the opening words meaning ‘Now let thy servant depart in peace’.

8

The Field of Mars

Although life in Petrograd appeared to be getting back to normal, its population had yet to count the true cost of the revolution – the dead. During the disturbances they had been carried off in haste in all directions and for days now their frozen (and in many cases unidentified) corpses had lingered as mute witnesses, stacked up like so many piles of wood in the city’s hospitals and makeshift mortuaries awaiting burial, while distraught relatives were still out searching for them.

Wishing to cover such a powerful human-interest story, Florence Harper sought out the hospitals where the dead had been taken. She went first to the one nearest her hotel, a big city hospital on the Fontanka. Not knowing where to find the mortuary, she followed two weeping women across a courtyard ‘to a group of isolated buildings that were nothing but shacks’. From the cross on its door, she assumed this was the place. ‘There was a stream of people going into it’ and she followed. Inside, ‘as high as they could be piled, the chapel was full of coffins, some of them painted white and some of them unpainted pine’. She did not try to count them all: ‘It was too harrowing.’ But looking through the window of an adjoining shack she saw far worse: ‘right against the pane, on the other side, was something that made me jump back’. It was the body of a peasant fully clothed, ‘but his whole chest had been torn open’. His hands were raised ‘as if he were defending himself’ and his corpse was soaked in blood from the neck to the waist. His body had not been washed and was ‘lying there as he had been picked up, frozen’.1

Luckily the cold had preserved the many un-coffined bodies she saw, but it had also left them in grotesque, contorted positions. Along three sides of the shack, Harper saw piles of rigid, muddy and blood-soaked bodies that had been thrown in ‘as they had been picked up’, some doubled up, others outstretched – men, women and children. Next to that shack was another, and then another with even more. In a big shed opposite she found another 150 bodies piled up. People were pulling at them, searching for loved ones, trying to identify them. ‘One in the uniform of the police was beyond recognition,’ she noted, ‘he had literally been beaten to a pulp.’ Very few of the corpses had any boots on – for these were a valuable commodity in wartime and were the first things to be stolen from the dead. With so many to be buried, coffins were scarce and so, once people identified their dead, they would pin a note on them, giving the name and asking for money to help bury them. People visiting these makeshift morgues would throw a few kopeks on the corpses. It was only later, visiting another hospital morgue where the bodies had been properly washed and laid out like wax figures, that Harper finally took in the grim horror of so many deaths.2

A big public funeral for the victims of the revolution – or, rather, those among them whose bodies had not already been taken away and buried separately by relatives – was planned but postponed three times because, with no police force to marshal such a huge occasion, the Provisional Government and the Soviet feared it might spark anti-revolution demonstrations.3 They expected one million or more people to flood the streets, and that they might provoke a riot, given the ‘inflamed state of mind’ in which the crowds remained.4 Eventually a date was set for Thursday 23 March. Some had wanted the dead to be buried in front of the Winter Palace, but instead a site was chosen in the centre of the historic old parade ground known as the Field of Mars, bounded on one side by the massive-columned Pavlovsky Barracks, with the British embassy and the Marble Palace at the top end and the Summer Garden along the other side.5

Such had been the intense cold that it had proved impossible to dig the trench required manually, and dynamite had to be used to create a sufficiently large grave in the transverse axis of the parade ground. Claude Anet visited the gravesite as it was being constructed.6 Opposite stood the trees of the Summer Garden, with their ‘black and lank branches’; overhead, a grey sky, full of clouds heavy with rain. In the middle was ‘a great yellow stain’ – the earth that had been removed for the graves. ‘Black and white flags, on the top of masts, were waving in the wind around the grave, some of them festooned with green garlands and flowers. Great red placards with inscriptions decorated the circumference of the reserved space.’ At its centre a platform draped in red cloth had been built as a vantage point for the members of the government and distinguished guests to watch the ceremony.7

Shortly before the funeral took place there was a sudden spring thaw and the streets of Petrograd became a sea of mud and slush; by the preceding day part of the Nevsky was a ‘lake of water’. The 23rd, which had been declared a national holiday – ‘the first independence day of Russia’ – dawned, bleak and wretched.8 A damp, icy wind blew, with more snow threatened from the heavy lowering sky, as six separate, slow-moving processions set off from different parts of the city at around 10.00 a.m., eventually to converge at the burial site on the Field of Mars. But such were the huge crowds who had turned out to watch, and the ponderousness of the ceremonial, that the groups of marchers bearing the coffins sometimes had to stop for hours to let other processions move on.9 Traffic was at a standstill and the whole of the Nevsky was ‘jammed with spectators from one end to the other’, with a forest of flags and black-and-red banners reading, ‘Eternal Memory to Our Fallen Brothers’, ‘Heroes Who for Freedom Fell’, ‘Hail to the Democratic Republic’. Everyone marching in the funeral processions had been provided with a special ticket to do so and to admit them to the burial site on the Field of Mars. They were divided into rows eight deep, sixteen abreast, led by students carrying white sticks who raised and lowered them to indicate the need to halt or move forward. ‘It was exactly like the order and discipline of troops on the march, and trained soldiers could not have marched better,’ noted a French eyewitness.10 The sense of occasion was intense: a ‘soul-stirring emotion seemed to possess these long lines of mourners,’ wrote an English resident; the city that day seemed ‘transformed into a vast cathedral’.11

Hugh Walpole noticed large numbers of peasants in the watching crowds: ‘They had stood there, I was told, in pools of frozen water for hours, and were perfectly ready to stand thus for many hours more if they were ordered to do so.’ Edward Heald estimated seeing ‘a hundred and fifty thousand people at one time on the Nevsky’ – and this was ‘probably no more than a fifth of the total number of marchers in sight at any one moment’. ‘There must have been half a million marchers in line,’ he estimated. ‘And what an impression it made; faces and forms that showed a lifetime of suffering and for whom a “Free Russia” had real meaning.’12

American Frank Golder watched the pall-bearers, wearing red sashes across their shoulders and red armbands, processing down the Nevsky. The coffins of the dead were covered in red cloth and were followed by ‘a fairly well trained crowd of singers who sang the funeral service’. Behind them came ‘numerous organisations with banners and mottoes, some singing church music, others revolutionary and “svoboda” [freedom] songs’.13 Many bands accompanied the processions, alternating a long slow rendition of the Marseillaise – now unofficially adopted as a national anthem – with the wearisome monotony of Chopin’s Funeral March. Every once in a while, noticed Edward Heald, the mourners ‘would break out in church music or a prayer or chant and then the spectators would join in with bowed heads and doffed hats’. But although ‘Eternal Memory’, the Russian Orthodox prayer for the dead, was on the lips of many that day, no official church presence was allowed to conduct the ceremony. No priests, no incense, no crosses, no obsequies at the graveside and no icons, either – the only other accompaniment to this mournful spectacle were the cannons of the Peter and Paul fortress, which fired a salute for each coffin placed in the grave.14

All day long and well into the night the processions continued to file along the main routes of the city, linking arms, ‘a mighty wave of humanity – old women, children, laborers, servants, soldiers, sailors, priests, people from every walk of life,’ recalled Leighton Rogers. ‘So constant was the movement and so solid the ranks that non-marchers found it impossible to cross the Nevsky.’15 Late that night the grave on the Field of Mars remained illuminated ‘under the glare of huge military searchlights whose rays, sweeping over the heads of the marchers, caught on the waving banners as they came into the field, their bearers singing a mournful dirge, quite oblivious of mud and slush, to plod on out of the light and disappear into the darkness’. It was, Rogers wrote, ‘something never to be forgotten’.16 Many of the foreign eyewitnesses concurred on the extraordinary calm and discipline with which the huge crowd had marked the occasion, and without the need for any police presence. One million had ‘marched and wept’ that day. ‘A community, once police-ridden, and still quivering with rage at incessant wrongs, kept the peace almost without sign of authority,’ observed Isaac Marcosson.17 ‘The threatened Commune became a Public Confessional of serene sorrow. Petrograd was safe as a Sunday School Convention.’

The whole of the solemn, protracted ceremonial of 23 March had, in essence, been a symbolic gesture. Many of the victims had already been buried elsewhere by their relatives, and the coffins did not, of course, include the bodies of any of the numberless dead policemen; Meriel Buchanan heard that some of them even contained stones.* Bertie Stopford noticed that during the ceremony ‘sometimes a simple plank of wood was carried alongside of the coffins to represent another victim who had already been buried’. He had counted around 150, but had heard there were 168 in all. Claude Anet was told that the authorities had prepared space for 160 coffins. Charles de Chambrun heard rumours that they had bolstered the number of dead for the procession by adding some Chinese who had died of influenza.18

One thing is certain: no one who reported on or witnessed the February Revolution of 1917 came away with an accurate figure for the numbers killed and wounded.19 The official figures published in Pravda at the time, and perpetuated in traditional Soviet historiography, were 1,382 killed and wounded*. Many more estimates were circulated at the time, but they ranged wildly. Claude Anet was reliably informed by someone close to Prince Lvov that the ‘total of the victims of the Revolution … amounted to 7,000 for Petrograd – including all the wounded attended in hospitals and ambulances and the dead. To this must be added 1,000 wounded attended in private houses.’ He himself estimated around 1,500 dead.20 French resident Louise Patouillet heard talk of ‘7000 killed’; but many of the bodies buried that day had not been those of people who had ‘died for liberty’, for these victims had already been piously interred ‘without fuss’ in the city cemeteries, in preference to the ‘ostentatious obsequies’ of the Field of Mars.21

Hugh Walpole reported to the British government a consensus that ‘the deaths in all amounted to about 4,000’. Arthur Reinke of Westinghouse wrote that the best estimate he had obtained ‘placed the number of killed at 3,000 to 5,000; the number of wounded ran into the ten thousands’. The ‘most conservative figure’ offered to Isaac Marcosson was five hundred dead civilians – but this was not counting the soldiers and policemen who had died. James Houghteling was told that ‘there were probably about 1,000 deaths’, but that ‘in a city of 2 million inhabitants a thousand single deaths were quite possible in such a revolution’. Florence Harper – who had, with Donald Thompson, been close to a lot of the violence at street level – reported that the lowest estimate of dead was two thousand; the highest ten thousand; Thompson placed the loss of life at ‘5,000 or a little more’.22 In general, the most commonly quoted number of dead was around four thousand, as British eyewitness James Pollock summarised: ‘The truth probably lies between four and five thousand killed. In the two days before the revolution broke out, some five hundred were killed in the centre of the city; during the three days of fighting many more, and this takes no account of the casualties beyond the river on the Petrograd and Viborg Sides.’ Of one thing Pollock had no doubt: ‘the agreeable statements made as to the bloodlessness are much exaggerated’.23

For the dead of the February Revolution there would be only a collective, secular memorial. ‘Since the archaic age of Saint Olga and Saint Vladimir, and indeed since the Russian people first appeared in the light of history, it is the first time that a great national act has been performed without the help of the church,’ Ambassador Paléologue wrote in his diary.24 He was forcibly struck by the contrast: ‘Only a few days ago, all the thousands of soldiers and workmen whom I saw marching past me could not see the smallest ikon in the street without stopping, lifting their caps and crossing themselves fervently.’

It was gone 10.00 p.m. when the last of the parade laid down their coffins that day. With darkness having descended over the vast open grave, the crowds finally began dispersing into the freezing night. The following day workmen began filling the grave with concrete. The Field of Mars took on a ‘desolate and sinister’ aspect, as Maurice Paléologue pondered the ramifications of this momentous day in Russian history:

As I returned to the Embassy by the solitary paths of the Summer Garden, I reflected that I had perhaps witnessed one of the most considerable events in modern history. For what has been buried in the red coffins is the Byzantine and Muscovite tradition of the Russian people, nay the whole past of orthodox Holy Russia.25

What he had witnessed was, in effect, the first major public act of what would become a new, official atheism.26* Thursday 23 March 1917 was an enormous religious and cultural watershed, from which Russia would not look back for seventy-three years.

* Louise Patouillet was told that a poor woman concierge who had not had the money to bury her recently deceased husband had been delighted to be offered 100 rubles for his corpse to be elevated to that of hero of the revolution in the procession.

* The official figures gave only sixty-one police killed and wounded, an extremely low estimate.

* Paleologue noted that the Cossacks had refused to take part in the mass funeral because ‘the figure of Christ was not displayed’, while others complained that the painting red of the coffins was ‘impious’. In order to mollify criticism, the Provisional Government later sent some priests to say prayers over the graves.

9

Bolsheviki! It Sounds ‘Like All that the World Fears’

‘I say! There’s an amazing fellow over there on the other side of the Troitsky Bridge,’ an excited English resident told Negley Farson one day in early April:

‘He’s talking rank anarchy! Immediate peace, no annexations, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, world revolution! Never heard anything like it in my life! … Advocates the soldiers coming back from the front and the overthrow of the Provisional Government … now! ‘Doesn’t he know there’s a war on?’1

In the weeks following the announcement of a political amnesty on 6 March, thousands of Russian émigrés had begun returning to Petrograd after long years of exile – some from Europe, others from Siberia. In a few cases the government funded their return; others made their way back thanks to popular subscriptions raised to help them. Those from Siberia were arriving daily into the Nicholas Station, from which many of them had initially been transported. On 15 March alone, J. Butler Wright noted that five trainloads had arrived there.2 But on 3 April (the Russian Orthodox Easter Monday) attention was focused elsewhere – on the Finland Station – where the most important figure in the revolutionary movement in exile was about to make his long-anticipated return.

Rumours had been circulating for days about the return to Petrograd of a leading ‘socialist fanatic’; Isaac Marcosson had found excited crowds in the streets near the station and, when he asked what it was all about, he was told: ‘Lenin is coming today.’3 Few among the Russian population at large knew Lenin’s name or exactly what he represented, but there was no doubt about the inflammatory message this revolutionary leader brought with him, after sixteen long, hard years of exile in Europe.

His real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the ‘Lenin’ sobriquet being the last of a string of pseudonyms and aliases that he had adopted during his years of political propagandising from a succession of boltholes across Europe. As a Marxist theorist and head of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP), Lenin had been sowing the seeds of discontent from a distance, via a network of underground activists across Russia, who illegally circulated his seditious political pamphlets, including the now-notorious ‘What Is to Be Done?’ and his underground newspaper Iskra (The Spark), both of which called for a people’s revolution led by a dedicated intellectual elite.4

The foreign community of Petrograd had had little exposure to Lenin’s ideas and was equally uncomprehending of his true political colours as a Bolshevik. Indeed, such was the general confusion about him that he was often described by foreign residents and journalists alike as an ‘anarchist’, a term they applied willy-nilly to a wide range of political activists.* For Sir George Buchanan, Lenin was but one of yet another ‘fresh batch of anarchists from abroad’ to have arrived recently in the city. Many suspected an affiliation with the Germans: ‘That horrible German agent Lenin’ was back in the city, working ‘day and night to make trouble’, Lady Georgina wrote home, convinced that Lenin brought with him the danger of ‘German intrigues’.5 The Americans weren’t sure what to make of him, either: ‘An ultra-Socialist named Lenin has been doing a great deal of foolish talking and has advised his hearers to kill all people who have property and refuse to divide,’ noted Ambassador Francis, who was already worrying that Kerensky did not have the muscle to deal with him. ‘We are living somewhat in suspense,’ he added in a letter to his son Perry. ‘Lenin’s followers are an unknown quantity.’6

From the moment he arrived, Lenin was clearly bent on undermining and ousting the Provisional Government. One American who had been on the same train that had brought him into Petrograd from the border at Torneo told YMCA worker Edward Heald that Lenin’s first words as he got off the train had been, ‘Hail to the Civil War.’ ‘God knows what a task the Provisional Government has on hand without adding to the trouble that such a firebrand can create,’ Heald wrote in his diary.7 The accusations of being in the pay of the Germans would certainly stick, for Lenin’s return with a dedicated circle of followers had been facilitated by the Germans on a special ‘sealed’ train that was allowed through wartime Germany to the coast at Sassnitz, from where the group had crossed by boat to Trelleborg and then travelled by train through Sweden and Finland to Petrograd’s Finland Station.8 With word out about Lenin’s imminent arrival on the evening of the 3rd, a considerable crowd of supporters, factory workers and the curious had gathered to meet him. Arno Dosch-Fleurot went along, in the company of ‘an old revolutionary pamphlet-writer’ who had been filling him in on the role of the absent Lenin in the revolutionary movement for the last sixteen years, and on his long-standing grass-roots support in the Vyborg factory quarter, where he had been a political agitator before his arrest in 1898.

When the passengers descended from the special train, Fleurot had searched for this almost mythical figure – a man not seen in the city since his brief reappearance there in 1905–6, and then only by his closest colleagues in the party. But all Fleurot caught sight of was ‘a small man with Asiatic features’, who had the ‘short, unimpressive figure of a Tartar of the Volga, but with the heavy cheek-bones and more decided slant to the eye common among the Mongols’.9

Lenin’s personal magnetism was, however, undeniable. The shrill, hectoring voice and those inscrutable Kalmyk eyes clearly stirred the crowd of well-wishers and the official party from the Petrograd Soviet that had greeted him, at a Finland Station festooned with garlands and red banners. Even bigger crowds stood waiting in the darkness outside, with bands playing the Marseillaise and the Internationale, the scene ‘stabbed by piercing beams from the searchlights of the armoured cars’.10 From there, Lenin had been escorted to his new political base in the city – a mansion belonging to Nicholas II’s former lover.

Across the Troitsky Bridge opposite the British embassy, and within sight of the blue minarets of the city’s only mosque, stood the stylish Style Moderne home of Mathilde Kschessinska, prima ballerina of the Imperial Ballet, for whom the mansion had been specially built in 1904–6. Shortly before the February Revolution, warned that she was in danger, she had abandoned it and fled to France.11 On 4 April, when she looked out of her window on the other side of the river, Meriel Buchanan saw ‘an enormous scarlet flag fluttering above the walls’. The house, she discovered, had ‘been taken over by a group of political exiles who had just arrived from Switzerland’. Shortly after his arrival there, Lenin had emerged onto the balcony to address the waiting crowd. Soon he was making ‘the most incendiary harangues in public’, hurling invective at the Provisional Government while bandying his mantra – ‘Peace, Bread, Land’ – in his new political organ, the newspaper Pravda, which had also established a base at the mansion.12

Negley Farson contemplated the short distance from there, back across the Neva, to the British embassy, where ‘the best diplomatic corps in Russia was guessing which way the cat was going to jump’, now that Lenin had arrived to stir up the hornets’ nest of political rivalry. Beyond, on Furshtatskaya, the Americans ‘were doing likewise’, ‘and further on the Italians and the French; and further out the whole world – all guessing’.13 At first Lenin seemed like any other political fanatic, and there were plenty of them populating the streets of Petrograd, haranguing people from every corner. But Sir George Buchanan was seriously concerned: the Provisional Government needed to act swiftly and stop Lenin ‘inciting soldiers to desert, to seize the land, and to murder’. That was the simple, brutal message that Lenin had brought with him, as part of his campaign to bring about what Sir George saw as a ‘demoralisation’ in government and Russia’s exit from the war.14

‘He is the reddest of the red,’ wrote Claude Anet. ‘This Lenin is what one calls, in the horrible Socialist jargon, a “Defeatist”, that is to say, one of those who prefer defeat to the War.’ Negley Farson was not taken in by assertions of the new arrival’s mythical ‘greatness’. ‘He was not “great” to any but a few people at that time. He was just this undersized new agitator in an old double-breasted blue suit, his hands in his pockets, speaking with an entire absence of that hysterical arm-waving that so characterized all his fellow countrymen.’15 Arthur Ransome thought even less of what he deemed Lenin’s risible methods of political agitation from the Kschessinska Mansion: ‘his proceedings are so exaggerated that they have the air of being comic opera’.

But his seditious influence was soon felt, as Edward Heald noted, when shortly afterwards he saw a street parade organised by Lenin condemning the war and the government: ‘There is the poison that will destroy the democratic revolution,’ he noted presciently.16 Incitement to violence and anarchy was heard everywhere in the city. ‘You want to get rich: there is money in the banks,’ Louis de Robien heard Lenin exhorting the mob. ‘You want palaces, go where you please … You don’t want to walk in the mud: stop those cars! … All this belongs to you – it’s your turn – you are the power now.’ De Robien encountered the impact of Lenin’s rabble-rousing in an enormous women’s demonstration on the Nevsky, when he heard them singing ‘bloodthirsty lyrics to the tune of a hymn’: ‘We will pillage! We will cut throats! We will disembowel them!’17

With the arrival of Lenin, the world beyond Russia finally began to take notice of this new and threatening breed of Bolsheviki – the name had rapidly been gaining currency and it sounded, to journalist William G. Shepherd of Everybody’s Magazine, ‘like all that the world fears’. ‘Bolsheviki! … Can’t you see it in the headlines?’ he asked his American readers. ‘It will stick. It will crackle in everybody’s mouth, ear, and brain. Bolsheviki!’18

Once Lenin was installed, the Kschessinska Mansion, with its team of bullying, incendiary Bolshevist agitators, became a hive of propagandist activity. ‘Hundreds of typewriters and duplicators worked night and day, and before long printing presses were also installed’, running off anti-government proclamations by the thousand. Lenin was far too busy with meetings and politicising to take time out to address the huge crowds that now began gathering daily beneath the balcony on Kronversky Prospekt, hoping to ‘hear the lion roar’.19 Unlike the flamboyant orator Leon Trotsky,* who returned from exile in New York the following month, Lenin was not one for the limelight. He ‘hid himself and allowed his lieutenants to do the work’ and only occasionally deigned to show himself. Nor did he waste time trying to win over those who were hostile to him.20

At this time Associated Press correspondent Robert Crozier Long was one of the few to be allowed access to the Kschessinska Mansion – a building now approached with some trepidation by terrified local residents, having a reputation as it did for being stashed with machine guns and home to a bomb-making factory. The interior, in line with the depressing ‘democratisation’ – or rather degradation – of the Tauride Palace, was a sorry sight:

In a handsome white vestibule, with marble statues, were dirty, spitting soldiers who lounged over desks collating reports … the fine winter-garden had become headquarters of the propaganda league, and was packed from ceiling to floor with pamphlets; Kshesinskaya’s bedroom, of the oriental luxury of which Petrograd talked, was littered with copies of the incendiary newspaper Pravda; and – worst shame of all – her marble and tile Roman bath, the size of a small room, was half full of cigarette ends, dirty papers and rags.21

In this former late-imperial splendour Lenin was gathering around him ‘all the hotheads of the revolution’, Maurice Paléologue noted in his diary. In his view, the Bolshevik leader was a combination of ‘utopian dreamer and fanatic, prophet and metaphysician, blind to any idea of the impossible or the absurd, a stranger to all feelings of justice or mercy, violent, Machiavellian and crazy with vanity’. Paléologue thought him ‘all the more dangerous because he is said to be pure-minded, temperate and ascetic. Such as I see him in my mind’s eye, he is a compound of Savanorola and Marat, Blanqui and Bakunin.’ Donald Thompson shared this alarmist view of Lenin and saw only one logical solution. ‘The best thing for Russia to do,’ he wrote to his wife ‘is to kill Lenine’ or at least ‘arrest him and put him in prison’. ‘If they don’t I expect to write you a letter, some day, that this cur is in control of things here.’

The ‘innocent boy’ from Kansas had it in one.22

In early April the celebration of the Russian Orthodox Easter had, all too briefly, shut out the seditious new language of revolution and brought a transitory return to the old days of imperial Russia, the churches conducting mass with all the usual opulent Orthodox splendour and ceremony. Across the city on the Saturday night the bells had begun ringing at midnight, and churches had been packed for the vigil lasting until till 3.30 a.m. on Easter Sunday. Great torches could be seen burning on the four corners of the roof of St Isaac’s Cathedral and the whole city was lit up for miles. Louis de Robien noted how ‘the great onion domes of the Church of the Resurrection, all gold in the reflection of the light from the stained-glass windows below, glowed in the sky … All the bells were ringing. The cannon of the Fortress were firing salvos.’ For a short while, it seemed as though the events of the last few weeks had been ‘like a bad dream’. It was, he wrote, ‘the Russia of old, rising again with Christ’.23

The worshippers in church seemed as devout as ever; Edward Heald thought there was ‘a new spirit abroad of released hope and a touching show of brotherhood’.24 At the Kazan Cathedral, Maurice Paléologue had seen ‘the same scenes as in the days of tsarism, the same majesty and magnificence, the same display of liturgical pomp’. If anything, the levels of piety were even more intense – expressed in a huge wave of emotion when the priest announced ‘Khristos Voskres!’ – Christ is Risen!25 The arrival of spring soon afterwards added to this feeling of renewal. With the chestnut trees in bloom, the ice floes on the Neva beginning to break up, the gold cupolas gleaming in the spring sunshine, and people and street traders out enjoying the thaw, there came a resurgence of hope. There also came most welcome news from America.

It took J. Butler Wright and his colleagues at the US embassy two hours working with four code books to decipher the formal statement telegraphed to them from Washington that President Wilson had declared war on Germany on 6 April (24 March OS; the embassy received the news two days later). The embassy staff had been receiving anxious calls meanwhile from reporters, members of the Allied mission and ‘news-hungry Americans’, before it finally summoned them to the embassy to hear the ambassador formally announce just after midnight that America had entered the war. Everyone in the embassy was enormously relieved; the last few days had been a terrible strain. The response in the Russian press was, as Wright recalled, ‘positively inspiring’.26 Several American naval and military officers based in Petrograd immediately came to the embassy and asked to be allowed to go home and enlist. And there was a ready supply of former Russian officers who had lost their posts – some of whom had been in hiding since the revolution – and who now ‘haunted’ the office of military attaché William J. Judson, ‘wishing to go to America’. ‘Theirs was an awful lot,’ Judson admitted, for ‘if their own men or the Bolsheviks did not end up killing them’, and America did not offer sanctuary, ‘suicide seem[ed] their only recourse’.27

The pressures on the US government and its Petrograd embassy to wave a magic wand over the Russian war effort were, inevitably, enormous: ‘all look to us to lend money, muzzle the socialists, straighten out the Trans-Siberian, and generally “buck up” this government – which is going to be a colossal job,’ wrote Wright in his diary.28 The logistical problems alone were legion, notably on the Trans-Siberian Railway, where a chaotic congestion of cars, rolling stock and food and military supplies stranded at Vladivostok was urgently in need of resolution in order to get the system running. A contingent of American and Canadian railroad men were now en route to Russia, headed by John F. Stevens, one of the builders of the Panama Canal, to attempt to bring order to the chaos.

Other foreign visitors, in the main British and French socialists and labour leaders, had been arriving since mid-March to see the changes that revolution had wrought on Russia. British Labour Party representatives James O’Grady and Will Thorne were among the first. They were ‘honest decent working men,’ admitted embassy official Francis Lindley, but ‘they had nothing in common with the intellectual theorists with whom they argued hour after hour. After one of these bouts they would come into my room and refresh themselves with whisky and soda – giving vent to the most abusive description of their opposite numbers. “A lot of b-dy s-ds my dear chap”,’ said Thorne, of their revolutionary hosts. Meanwhile the Russian socialist press condemned the British delegates as ‘hirelings of an Imperialist Government and not representing Labour at all’.29

The most prominent Western socialist – and a member of the French War Cabinet – was Albert Thomas, who arrived on 9 April on the same train as a group of exiles returning from France, England and Switzerland. A large crowd had turned out to greet him, headed by the meticulous Paléologue in ambassador’s tailcoat and top hat (eclipsing a rather shabby revolutionary guard of honour). ‘Now we see the revolution in all its grandeur and beauty!’ an enthusiastic Thomas exclaimed to Paléologue as he stepped from the train.30 The jovial Frenchman – more ‘commercial traveller’ than sophisticated politician, in both appearance and manner – was accommodated at the Hotel d’Europe, where he ‘trie[d] in vain to act the fierce socialist by eating his wing of pullet from the end of his knife’, while Paléologue rued the fact that he was obliged to entertain him at the French embassy with one of his last good bottles of burgundy. Despite Thomas’s open endorsement of the revolution, the Russians remained unimpressed by him; as far as they were concerned, he too was a phoney – a ‘Socialist traitor’, a ‘bourgeois’ come to represent ‘pro-war capitalism’.31

For his own part, Thomas confided to his old friend Julia Grant (now married to a Russian prince and known as Princess Cantacuzène-Speransky) that the Russian socialists were ‘not socialists at all, but what we call in France Anarchists and Communards’.32 But there was also another purpose to his mission, and it was one that Paléologue had been expecting. Thomas brought with him a letter from the French government relieving him of his post as ambassador and recalling him to Paris, because ‘your position of favour with the Emperor would make it more difficult for you to carry on your duties under the present government,’ Thomas explained.33 Paléologue took the news with his characteristic equanimity, although he resented it coming from the upstart Thomas. He was profoundly concerned about Russia’s continuing participation in the war, convinced that it was essential to bolster support for Milyukov and the moderates in the Provisional Government. Thomas, however, supported Kerensky as the only man ‘capable of establishing, with the aid of the Soviet, a government worthy of our [i. e. Allied] confidence’. Knowing full well that the Soviet was campaigning for a Russian withdrawal, Paléologue telegraphed Paris warning that it was more than likely that she would soon defect from the war.34

Until now, Ambassador Francis and his aide J. Butler Wright had remained relatively optimistic about Russia’s post-revolutionary political future, but an incident on the night of 9 April had confirmed how volatile the Petrograd mobs still were. Francis had been entertaining guests that Sunday evening when Phil Jordan hurried in with a message warning that a mob waving black anarchist flags was on its way to attack the ‘American imperialists’ at the embassy. They had apparently been incited to do so in protest at the recent conviction and sentence to death of the American trade-union organiser and political activist Thomas J. Mooney, after a rigged trial in which he had been accused of involvement in a bomb plot during a San Francisco labour rally.* Preparing for his own dramatic Last Stand, Francis immediately instructed Jordan to load his revolver and bring it to him as he waited for a detachment of government militia to come and defend them. Francis vowed to shoot anyone who tried to get inside his embassy, but as things turned out, the mob never got that far and was dispersed soon after setting off. (Exaggerated stories were later circulated that Francis had single-handedly seen them off, which amused him greatly: ‘Everyone seemed to prefer the more sensational story, so I suppose I shall have to resign myself to this heroic role,’ he later wrote.) Phil was intensely relieved: the ambassador ‘had never fired a gun in his life, so far as I know, and I knew if he fired at that crowd, it would probably be the end of both of us’.35

Arno Dosch-Fleurot had seen the mob being incited to storm the US embassy by a political agitator down at the Kazan Cathedral: ‘Come with me and we’ll take the American Ambassador prisoner until they set Mooney free,’ he had shouted. Fleurot had hurried to the embassy, to be met by an excitable Phil Jordan: ‘Lord a-lucky,’ Phil told him:

ebery night the ambassador takes a walk with only me, I tol’ him he oughtn’t t’ do it. Tonight we had some guests still here when de militia telephone. Jes’ think if we’d been a-walkin’ and dose fellers wid de black flag had a come along. Ambassador Francis only knows two words in Russian ‘Amerikanski Posol’ (American Ambassador). If dose fellers as’ed him anything he’d a said ‘Amerikanski posol’. Wouldn’t they ’a’ rubbed their han’s an’ said, Look wa’at de good Lord has gone an brought us.36

Inevitably, in both Francis’s subsequent memoirs and other retellings of the incident, Jordan’s vivid vernacular was sanitised.* The protest itself turned into a damp squib. Blame for inciting it was soon laid at Lenin’s door, but privately it had unnerved Francis and worried embassy officials about the safety of their mission and US nationals in the city in this new escalating climate of anarchy.37

On 18 April (OS; 1 May NS) the Petrograd Soviet decided to observe European May Day according to the Western calendar, ‘so as to fall in time with the proletariats of all countries and illustrate the international solidarity of the working classes, in spite of the war and the illusions of the bourgeoisie’. If the Field of Mars burials had been the first public act of mourning of the revolution, the ‘colossal demonstration’ planned for May Day at the same location was to be its first public holiday.38 Guests at the city’s hotels were warned they would have to fend for themselves; staff were taking the day off, and no rooms would be serviced or meals served. All restaurants, businesses, offices and shops would be closed. Nor would there be any trams or izvozchiki. ‘No one did a thing all day,’ Leighton Rogers later recalled, ‘except parade and rant.’39

From 5.00 a.m. people began congregating in central Petrograd. Donald Thompson, making the best he could of the chaos still prevailing in the Astoria, jumped out of bed in his bullet-riddled room when he heard bands playing outside his window and saw thousands marching past the Astoria towards the Nevsky. All the bridges were thick with crowds thronging in from the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides carrying red banners. It was sunny, but there was a cold and biting wind and the thawing ice on the Neva had refrozen into great jagged floes. The huge and orderly march-past of celebrants lasted the whole day and was carried off to great theatrical effect – several foreign observers later recalled it as being, for them, the high point of the public celebration of the revolution. For visiting British Labour MP Morgan Philips Price, it seemed like the dawning of the Red Day of Socialism. ‘I do not think I ever saw a more impressive spectacle,’ he later wrote:

It was not merely a labour demonstration, although every socialist party and workmen’s union in Russia was represented there, from anarcho-syndicalists to the most moderate of the middle-class democrats. It was not merely an international demonstration, although every nationality of what had been the Russian Empire was represented there … [it was] really a great religious festival, in which the whole human race was invited to commemorate the brotherhood of man.40

This vast parade was, he asserted, revolutionary Russia’s ‘message to the world’, reflected in ‘a steady stream of oratory’ that ‘flowed from hundreds of speaker’s booths that covered every available free spot in the parks and squares of the city’.41 Edward Heald was there to see it; in the square in front of the Astoria they had erected so many platforms for speakers that he and his YMCA colleagues ‘could stand in one spot and hear six different orators going at once from as many platforms’. ‘Unhesitatingly, soulfully, forcefully, the stream of eloquence flowed hour after hour. As soon as one speaker would tire, after about half an hour, another speaker would be rushed to the platform, hoisted up, and carry on without a second’s interruption.’ It was the same at the square in front of a Winter Palace decorated with a very long banner proclaiming ‘Long Live the Internationale’, where a seemingly endless succession of speakers – both for and against the government – took it in turns, ‘all of them getting rousing cheers’.42

Claude Anet was at the Winter Palace as well, covering the story for Le Petit Parisien. ‘The huge square was like a human ocean in which the swaying of the crowd resembled the motion of waves,’ he recalled, with ‘thousands of red flags with gold-lettered inscriptions fluttering in the wind’. Everyone seemed tolerant and good-natured. ‘I took photographs; I was dressed as a bourgeois; obviously I was not one of the people’, but the crowd ‘stepped back so as not to inconvenience me, and watched me working with interest’. He noticed how carefully and respectfully people listened to the speakers, and how they had an ability to ‘endure without end interminable garrulity’.43 A huge cross-section of Russian workers was present: ‘post office and telegraph clerks, students, marines, soldiers, workmen and working women, with bright scarves round their heads … school-children, urchins of eight to ten years old, girls and boys holding each other by the hand, domestic servants, with a banner proclaiming the emancipation of the waiting-maid, the cook and the footman, waiters from restaurants’.44 There were dozens of military orchestras, too, playing the obligatory Marseillaise and popular tunes from Russian opera and dance; and banners everywhere calling for ‘land, liberty, peace, down with the war’.

Maurice Paléologue had gone to witness the ‘splendid spectacle’ at the Field of Mars on the eve of his departure from Russia. After three years as French ambassador, it was a time for painful reflection and a deep sense of loss: for him, May Day 1917 marked ‘the end of a social order and the collapse of a world’. His years in Russia had left him with little to be optimistic about: the Russian Revolution was ‘composed of elements too discordant, illogical, subconscious and ignorant for anyone to judge at the present time what its historical significance may be or its power of self-diffusion’.45

Having already had a difficult time of it in Petrograd for the last six months, Leighton Rogers was totally disenchanted. So hungry had he been that day, and so desperate to escape his cold, damp apartment, that he had spent his time wandering round the Hermitage Museum, contemplating Old Master still-lifes of food – ‘plucked geese, freshly caught fish, vegetables and fruit’ – in preference to admiring the museum’s exceptional collection of Rembrandts. Later he had gone in search of supper with a colleague, but everywhere was closed and after several hours they had capitulated and returned to their apartment, where they made do with tea and black bread – ‘all there was left in the larder’ – and got into bed to keep warm. Rogers had had enough of it: ‘Parades, parades, parades. When this is over I shall never want to see another. The streets are blocked with them every afternoon, work seems to have been abandoned and parading adopted as a business.’46

Two days after the great wave of optimism of the May Day celebrations the first serious rumblings of conflict in the government broke out, related to the details of Russia’s war aims, as laid out in 1914. America’s recent entry into the war had indirectly been the cause of what would be a major clash between Milyukov’s government and the Soviet. Eager to celebrate the announcement of US entry, Milyukov had given a press interview on the Provisional Government’s war aims, in which he had reiterated undertakings made by the tsarist government on the outbreak of war in 1914 to fight for a decisive victory and support post-war annexations by the Allies – notably that of Constantinople by Russia – and the imposition of punitive war reparations on Germany. Milyukov’s ‘Note’, as it became called, had immediately antagonised the pro-peace Petrograd Soviet, which was pushing for Russia’s unconditional withdrawal from the war, without strings.

Four days later the government was forced to issue a disclaimer, but it was too late to prevent a surge of violent protest from revolutionaries denouncing Milyukov, insisting that the objectives of the war must hold to democratic ideals, and demanding the abrogation of all treaties with the Allies.47 Lenin and his followers seized on this conflict of objectives as a trigger for a pitched battle with the Provisional Government, inciting workers and soldiers to protest, in order to compel the government to capitulate or resign. At the Mariinsky Palace on the afternoon of 20 April – where the Provisional Government was in urgent talks with the Executive Committee of the Soviet –25,000 to 30,000 soldiers of the Pavlovsky, 180th, Finnish and Moscow Regiments, as well as some sailors, gathered outside with fixed bayonets, but were eventually persuaded to disperse by General Lavr Kornilov, now commander-in-chief of the Petrograd garrison.48

Down on the Nevsky, Donald Thompson saw two mobs – one anarchist, the other pro-Provisional Government – come marching down from the Morskaya and the Sadovaya. ‘Someone let fly with a gun and for a few minutes it was simply hell on that corner, with everyone lying down flat on the pavement,’ he recalled. Fifteen minutes of pandemonium left six people dead and twelve to fifteen wounded. There was more shooting later, in front of the Kazan Cathedral and near the US consulate, at the Singer Building opposite it. ‘A constant uproar prevailed on the Nevsky, till around 10.30 that evening,’ Thompson told his wife. ‘Thousands were marching for and against the government until finally it reached the point where you didn’t know what was what. Boris and I decided to take off our hats and cheer every mob that passed.’ But after they got caught up in a group of menacing armed anarchists waving black flags, they ended once again face-down on the pavement, fearing for their lives as firing broke out.49

Thompson was anxious to be ‘on the ground early’ the following morning to catch events as they unfolded. He saw that there were notices up everywhere ‘asking the people not to meet on the street any more’.50 Meetings were now only allowed ‘in halls, theatres or public buildings’ – a futile attempt to prevent further incitement to trouble. Over the next couple of days random skirmishes and relentless speechifying dominated on the streets of Petrograd. Arno Dosch-Fleurot witnessed a positive ‘storm of oratory’, as ‘people gathered by the tens of thousands to applaud the demands for a peace – without contribution or annexation’. He noted with amusement that this latter phrase had spread like wildfire, with the Russian words kontributsiya and anneksiya being adopted from English for the purpose (there being no Russian equivalent to express the precise meaning). Unfortunately, some speakers ‘believed these words to be the names of towns and proceeded to exhort their listeners ‘not to permit Russia to take Constantinople, Annexia or Contributia’. Ella Woodhouse recalled her maid telling her all about it excitedly: ‘We want peace. We don’t need those two Rumanian towns, Annexiya and Contributsiya. We are sick of war!’51

As a result of these violent disturbances, the Provisional Government was compelled to revise its position in a new note to the Allies, opposing any war contributions or annexations as part of a future peace treaty with Germany. All but the Bolshevik members of the Executive Committee of the Soviet accepted this climbdown, and the protesting troops were ordered back to their barracks. The situation had, for now, been defused, but ‘the days of Miliukov, Gutchkov and Prince Lvov are numbered,’ noted Maurice Paléologue.52 Prince Lvov looked tired and wan; he was exhausted by overwork and had aged terribly since the revolution, thought diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart when he arrived from Moscow to visit the prince, noting regretfully that ‘he was not the stuff of which revolutionary Prime Ministers are made’. Lockhart sensed the ‘same helplessness, the same apprehensions’ in other members of the government. The revolution had destroyed all Lvov’s old Liberal friends. The only man with any power was Kerensky, because he alone had the support of the Soviets.53

‘Now you’re seeing what we saw in the Seven Days,’ one visitor was told by American residents, at the end of what had been ‘the most intense and exciting week in the capital since the revolution’.54 The black flags of the anarchists marching on the Nevsky during the three days of protests had sent chills down Edward Heald’s spine; they were out to ‘plunge everything into disorder’. Russia, he told J. Butler Wright, was ‘on the lid of a powder can’. Negley Farson noted the deep atmosphere of uncertainty. Everyone was absorbed in the problem of self-preservation, for life in Petrograd ‘had become a great gamble’.55 Out on the Nevsky with US consul North Winship, he had run into a huge parade of chanting people demanding ‘Land and Freedom’. But he sensed something new, and deeply sinister, this time:

A bevy of factory girls marching arm in arm; their shawl-enveloped heads tilted skywards; their placid Slav faces lighted with a look of perfect ecstasy, and they sang as if inspired the Hymn of the Revolution … And then I saw it … a huge black banner, with a white skull and crossbones, which seemed to be grinning over the words: ‘Welcome Anarchy!’ … There was something loathsome about it, as if it were a flaunting invitation to indulge in all sorts of beastliness.56

It was clear that, after the latest debacle, ‘Lenin was getting results,’ thought Arno Dosch-Fleurot. ‘He had hardly been back three weeks and the effect of his activities was to be seen on every side … he supplied a head and a directive to the more violent revolutionists who wanted to seize the power themselves.’ Lenin had brought with him the one thing that until now the revolution had lacked: he had ‘provided violence with a doctrine’.57

Shortly before leaving Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue confided that, in his view, Russia was ‘entering upon a very long period of disorder, misery and ruin’. As he set off for the railway station, he pondered the ‘final bankruptcy of Russian liberalism, and the approaching triumph of the Soviet. ‘Weep, my holy Russia, weep!’ he wrote, recalling the words of the village idiot in the opera Boris Godunov. ‘For thou art entering into darkness.’ ‘They are recalling Paléologue at the very moment when his “strong manner” could produce results,’ wrote his colleague de Robien with considerable regret.58 As the ambassador’s train steamed out of the Finland Station under a great plume of smoke, Charles de Chambrun pondered a great diplomatic era now, with Paléologue’s departure, gone for ever:

Farewell, all that panache, the glitter of gold decorations, the wiles of diplomacy, the lavish dishes, the tricolour livery, the powdered footmen and their white stockings! Farewell belles lettres, those ‘clever’ dispatches and pompous, melodious phrases! It’s back to simplicity for us! We’ll never again see the ambassador’s car pulling up outside the residence of the charming Princess Paley, as, in times gone by, people used to see M. de Chateaubriand’s coachman dozing on his seat outside Mme Récamier’s door. We would never ever forget that we were all there, eyewitnesses to the greatest upheaval in history!59