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

Even as Maurice Paléologue was recalled to Paris, Lloyd George’s government in London had been debating the future of his equally respected colleague, Sir George Buchanan, and whether he might ‘no longer [be] the ideal British representative in Petrograd’, despite his equally exemplary track record. For Buchanan, like his French colleague, was now deemed too closely associated with the old tsarist regime to command the respect of the new breed of socialists in government. It was privately agreed that a new envoy should be sent, one more likely to have influence over the ‘democratic elements which now predominated in Russia to pursue the war with energy’.60

Labour MP and minister Arthur Henderson – a man who shared the socialist sympathies of the Soviet, but who in every other respect had no qualifications whatsoever for the task – was chosen by the British War Cabinet to replace Sir George, who would ostensibly be invited to come home on leave. When officials at the Petrograd embassy’s Chancery Office got wind of this they were horrified, and some threatened to resign if it happened. Word reached General Knox, who promptly sent a confidential telegram to Britain warning of the damage Buchanan’s recall would cause: ‘No British Ambassador at Petrograd has ever to an equal degree enjoyed the confidence of the Russians,’ he asserted. Was Sir George to receive the same treatment as the French ambassador – this a man who, like Paléologue, enjoyed the confidence of the moderates?61

A despondent Sir George discovered, on Arthur Henderson’s arrival on 20 May, that the newcomer had been given full powers to take over the running of the British embassy. Sir George entertained him to a strained dinner, at which Lady Buchanan could barely control her seething resentment. Buchanan himself did rather better at containing ‘a certain distaste and fastidious disapprobation’, heightened by the fact that Henderson had no French, or any other language in which to converse with the more distinguished polyglot diplomats and politicians seated around the table. Leaving Henderson to it and declining to offer him the comforts of the British embassy, a dignified Sir George went off for a rest in Finland.

Henderson soon discovered the full extent of his own inadequacies, encountering a decided hostility on the part of the embassy staff to his pompous, sententious manner.62 He was shocked by the anarchy he found in Petrograd and dismayed to find himself victim of the random room-sackings that went on in all Petrograd hotels; ‘his dinner jacket and evening trousers had mysteriously disappeared from his room’ and nobody had shown the least interest in helping him find them. Forced to admit that he was ill-equipped to deal with the wily Russians, let alone build a dialogue with them, he informed Lloyd George that ‘he had come to the conclusion that no good purpose would be served by the removal of a man who understood Russia’ as well as Sir George Buchanan.63 Henderson had shown little real interest, and even less perceptiveness, during his visit, and the Russian socialists who entertained him remained equally unimpressed: ‘Your Henderson is bourgeois to his finger-tips,’ one of them told an embassy official. ‘He is like all the rest of you. He will take his wife to church at eleven o’clock every Sunday morning.’64

The day after the departure of Maurice Paléologue another crisis in the government had filled the whole of the diplomatic corps with renewed gloom. On 3 May, Milyukov, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Guchkov, Minister of War – their positions now untenable, as a result of the ‘April Days’ protests – had resigned. Their departure marked an end to any liberal influence in the Provisional Government. The Soviet, with its crucial control of the army, was too powerful to disregard; it was clear that this disjointed and ill-matched dual government of socialist Soviet and bourgeois Provisional Government was not working. The only solution was the formation of a new Coalition Provisional Government on 5 May, once again under the token premiership of Prince Lvov and this time with the inclusion of six socialists – three of whom, Irakli Tsereteli, Viktor Chernov and Matvey Skobelev, were members of the Petrograd Soviet.65 Alexander Kerensky – now firmly in the ascendant as Minister of War – was charged with the urgent task of galvanising the Russian offensive on the Eastern Front.

Violence and anarchy, meanwhile, were spreading across the city. ‘Anarchy raises her finger higher and higher,’ wrote Edward Heald, for it was ‘too attractive to the Russian character’.66 An eight-hour working day was proclaimed in early May but, despite this, production in the factories was in crisis, with dwindling supplies of coal and raw materials forcing many to close. The internal labour situation was made worse by continuing strikes, especially in Russia’s crucial coalfields. There was a growing air of public disenchantment as the initial revolutionary euphoria receded; everyone was tired of parades and demonstrations, of talk and endless queues; the streets were ‘full of beggars and newsboys and cheap prostitutes’.67 Pauline Crosley, newly arrived wife of a US naval attaché, was having to employ four maids because of the time they needed to spend standing in line daily ‘for bread, meat, fish, milk, butter, eggs, kerosene, candles’. Wood was very hard to get and there were interminable queues also for clothes and cigarettes. ‘“I never imagined I would see so many idle men!’ she wrote home at the end of May. ‘Thousands of men in uniform doing nothing but sit on benches in the few parks and eat sunflower seeds!’ Everywhere she went she heard talk of how Russia could be ‘saved’. ‘Why don’t the Allies save Russia? Why doesn’t the United States do something to save Russia?’ – she was asked over and over again.68

By the end of May there had been many departures and several new arrivals in the expatriate community of Petrograd. James Stinton Jones had been sent back to London, where his account of the February Revolution had been splashed across the pages of the Daily Mail, ‘with the whole front page covered with my photographs and the reverse side full of the story as I had told it’. In July he published his experiences in book form, as Russia in Revolution, Being the Experiences of an Englishman in Petrograd during the Upheaval – one of the first eyewitness accounts by a non-Russian to reach the West.69 Isaac Marcosson had also left, sailing to Aberdeen and then travelling to London, where he installed himself in the Savoy Hotel to write his Rebirth of Russia, published in August. He had not been sorry to see the end of the perennial accommodation problems that he had endured: ‘Like most Petrograd hotels during that hectic period,’ he later recalled, it had been ‘a sort of madhouse sheltering a strange jumble of nationalities, who went elevatorless, sugarless, bathless and almost breadless. The only thing we had in abundance was odour, which is an essential part of Petrograd “atmosphere”.’ He was glad to enjoy the comforts once more of a real, functioning bathroom.70

Several foreign journalists had also left after the excitement of February 1917, because they now found things too quiet in reporting terms. ‘Many did not seek to hide their disappointment; they had hoped to find in the Revolution a unique opportunity for obtaining good copy, and instead they were asking themselves every evening how to put together a hundred lines to send to their paper,’ recalled one observer:

In short, the streets, apart from the red flags, the excessive dirt, and the trams laden with soldiers, had their usual aspect. Ministerial crises were neither more nor less frequent than in Paris. The very number of public meetings made them insipid in the end. On the surface Russian life seemed much the same as it had been before the Revolution: the staffs in the ministries were still at their posts, and in this country, free henceforward in a sense that no other country in the world has ever been, we were reminded by the doorkeepers when we visited the Hermitage Museum that we must remove our hats.71

By mid-May – and after almost four years away from home, reporting from Russia and the Eastern Front – Arthur Ransome was weary and desperate to leave. ‘There’s no getting away from politics and it’s my job to watch them as closely as I can and to guess what is happening and what is going to happen,’ he wrote to his mother, informing her of his hopes of returning home for a month, ‘but … you can’t imagine how sick I am of it all. At the same time things here keep happening so fast that I am equally pulled towards not risking being away … I daren’t leave Petrograd for more than twenty four hours because of the chance of some new political crisis or rather a new manifestation of the almost permanent crisis.’ The endless privations endured by many of the foreign correspondents over the last few months had worn them all down, he continued: ‘We aren’t human beings any more but bits in a machine, and we have to spin round exactly as we must and not occupy ourselves with the landscape for the sake of the rest of the machine.’ His colleague Harold Williams of the Daily Chronicle had had a nervous breakdown and had gone to the Caucasus for a rest. ‘I’d give my eyes … to get out of Petrograd,’ Ransome wrote. ‘Petrograd politics with good intervals of the front are all right. But Petrograd undiluted would turn the sanest man crazy.’72

On 24 May the intrepid Florence Harper had left her colleague Donald Thompson behind in Petrograd, to volunteer as a nurse with a US flying hospital on the Eastern Front at Dvinsk.* As she left, another took her place as the sole American female reporter in Petrograd. New Yorker Rheta Childe Dorr was a seasoned left-wing journalist, a champion of women’s suffrage and labour reform, sent on behalf of New York’s Evening Mail. Before she left, her managing editor had called her into his office. ‘For heaven’s sake, Mrs Dorr,’ he admonished her, ‘don’t send us any essays on the Russian soul. Everybody else has done that. Go to Russia and do a job of reporting.’73 Dorr’s determination to do just that would be abundantly demonstrated in the following three months. She would also find herself crossing paths in Petrograd with an old suffragist friend, Emmeline Pankhurst – founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) – with whom she had spent time in Paris during the winter of 1912–13 when ghosting Pankhurst’s autobiography, My Own Story.

With Allied confidence in Russia’s war effort crumbling, the indomitable Pankhurst – no longer the bête noire of the British government, having put her suffrage campaign on hold for the duration of the war – had set out for Russia’s turbulent capital on her own one-woman mission to galvanise the Russian people. The channel for her pro-war propaganda drive was not, however, the army. It was those the army had left behind: the women of Petrograd.

* Before the word ‘Bolshevik’ gained currency, many foreign observers referred to Lenin as a ‘Maximalist’, which was in fact a term for a member of the extreme wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

* Trotsky travelled on the same Norwegian ship – the Kristianiafjod – as William G. Shepherd and the celebrated muck-raking journalist Lincoln Steffens, both of whom had been commissioned by Everybody’s Magazine to go to Petrograd to cover events.

* The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1918.

* In the very different social climate of 1931, long before the days of political correctness, Fleurot had no qualms about representing Jordan’s speech as he heard it. For an unedited version of Jordan’s letters that retains his idiosyncratic punctuation and spelling, see Mrs Clinton A. Bliss.

* Donald Thompson joined her there a couple of weeks later.

PART 2

THE JULY DAYS

10

‘The Greatest Thing in History since Joan of Arc’

Emmeline Pankhurst arrived in Petrograd in early June 1917 ‘with a prayer from the English nation to the Russian nation, that you may continue the war on which depends the face of civilization and freedom’. She truly believed, she insisted, in an address published in Novoe vremya (New Times), ‘in the kindness of heart and the soul of Russia’.1 She had travelled with one of her most dedicated associates, Jessie Kenney, a former Lancashire cotton-mill worker who, with her sister Annie, was a staunch WSPU activist. Kenney had been the society’s youngest national organiser and, now aged thirty, had become essential support to the tired and frail Pankhurst. It was not a good time for a fifty-nine-year-old woman in Pankhurst’s state of health to be in Petrograd, but she was determined, at a critical time in the war, ‘to do her darndest for Russia’.2

As a lifelong radical and political activist, Pankhurst had always been sympathetic to the revolutionary cause and in the 1890s had entertained prominent Russian political exiles to tea at her Russell Square home in London. On the outbreak of war in 1914 she had immediately abandoned her militant campaigning for votes for women, to support the national war effort, and had been touring Britain rallying women to the cause ever since. She had rejoiced at the overthrow of the old and oppressive tsarist order in February 1917, but by the early summer the Provisional Government in Russia seemed to its Western allies to be increasingly vulnerable. The possibility of Russia pulling out its troops greatly alarmed Pankhurst; it would ‘rob the Russian people of the freedom for which they have had their revolution, and would involve them in a far worse slavery than the old,’ she asserted. And so she volunteered to go to Russia along with Kenney as ‘patriotic British women, loyal to the national and Allied Cause’, in order to rally flagging public morale. It was a decision that had greatly dismayed her pacifist daughter Sylvia who, simultaneously, was privately campaigning to see both Britain and Russia out of the war.3

Pankhurst’s initiative was welcomed with open arms by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Although her self-created mission – largely funded by monies raised through the suffragette newspaper Britannia – was intended to appeal to all classes, her personal objective was ‘to help the women of Russia, to organize them, and to teach them how to use the vote’.4 She therefore went on the rather grand assumption that Russian working women had no comprehension of the meaning of the vote, or of the power it would invest in them, and she had come ‘to give them the benefit of her experience’.* It was, however, Russian women’s support for the war that was her immediate concern. They had, after all, played a key role in the February Revolution, their protests about bread shortages triggering the riots; they knew what they wanted ‘even better than the men did’.5

Prior to their departure, Jessie Kenney had travelled to Paris to consult with Christabel Pankhurst, co-founder with her mother of the WSPU: ‘my wardrobe was getting low, and although there would be no time for shopping, it was imperative that I should get the necessary outfit’.6 She had no suitable clothes for either the hot summer in Russia or the freezing winter, should they stay that long, and so Christabel sorted out some clothes from her own wardrobe to lend Jessie. She also told her to be sure to purchase a ‘big solid diary’ and keep daily notes. The most important thing she wanted to know was Jessie’s opinion of Kerensky, as ‘his character might affect the destiny of Russia’. In parting, Christabel also gave Jessie a little bag containing five pounds to keep round her neck: ‘money talks, even in Revolutions,’ she told her, ‘and should anything happen to separate you from Mother, you will get some kind of help.’7

Departing by ship from Aberdeen, the two women sailed on the only passenger boat plying regularly between the UK and Norway in wartime – thanks to protection by an Allied convoy. It was crowded with exiles returning to Russia, many of them women and children. From Kristiania they travelled by train into Petrograd on the same train as Lady Muriel Paget and a group of doctors and nurses returning to the Anglo-Russian Hospital. They arrived at 2.30 in the morning to a city that ‘seemed wrapped in silence’, made magical by ‘that mysterious light of the white nights of Russia’.8 After a few days at the Hotel Angleterre they moved next door to the Astoria, the rooms arranged for them by Czech envoy Thomas Masaryk, who immediately gave them ‘two special warnings’: one, ‘never to go out if there were the slightest chance of getting caught between the opposing mobs’, as the women ‘had no idea of what the force and violence of a Russian mob could be like’; and the other, to be prepared to go hungry or take the risk of food poisoning – the food in hotels now being ‘seriously contaminated’.9

Emmeline Pankhurst’s host in Russia was a leading feminist and medical practitioner, Anna Shabanova, founder of the Russian Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society – a moderate middle-class organisation that, unlike the WSPU, pursued social reform by strictly legal means.10 Pankhurst was also assigned three interpreters who went through the Russian papers daily for her. One of them was Edith Kerby, who had been working at the British embassy compiling similar reports on the daily press for the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau,* and who had asked Sir George Buchanan if she could be released for ten days to be their interpreter. Kerby found the legendary suffragette ‘old, quiet and very elegantly dressed, with lace and frills, hats and gloves and a fussy net over her crimped hair etc.’ – a whiff of old-style English gentility that seemed incongruous in revolutionary Petrograd.11

A few days before Pankhurst’s arrival a more prestigious American delegation – the nine-man Root Mission – had reached Petrograd from Vladivostok, on what had till recently been the imperial train, on a goodwill mission for President Wilson. To all intents and purposes, their task was to welcome Russia into the democratic community and gauge her continuing participation in the war, but the mission was conducted ‘amid a cloud of uncertainty and speculation’, according to Leighton Rogers, who met a few of the mission’s ‘supernumaries’ at the Hotel d’Europe. They didn’t have much idea of what they hoped to achieve, he concluded, but – unlike Pankhurst’s limited funding – they had ‘six hundred thousand dollars to spend and were going to carry out that assignment at least.’12 Not surprisingly, the leading delegates were accommodated in the luxurious Romanov suites at the Winter Palace and ‘fed better than any one in Russia’. They had white bread, and sugar and meat – and, more than that, ‘the entire wine cellar of the czar was placed at their disposal’. (Diplomat Norman Armour heard that, after rummaging around in the palace’s cellars, their Russian hosts found some rye whisky ‘that had been laid in for the visit of General Grant in 1878’).13†

Despite the lavish hospitality offered to them, by revolutionary Petrograd standards, the members of the Mission had no impact on the ordinary Russian, least of all the unknown Elihu Root, a Republican, corporate lawyer and former Secretary of State: ‘Who is Gospodin Root … was he one of your presidents?’ Russians asked Leighton Rogers. ‘As far as the Mission representing the real spirit of America goes, it might just as well have come from Abyssinia,’ Rogers thought. ‘There’s just one man in the United States who should have been leading this group, and that’s Teddy Roosevelt. He is known and admired over here.’14 The point of it all escaped Rogers, as it did the newly arrived Californian journalist Bessie Beatty, reporting for the San Francisco Bulletin. Root gave press conferences at which she noted the trotting out of ‘simple, pat, nut-shell comments’; he had made a couple of speeches in English, which few people had understood, and had shaken the hands of various Russian officials.15 But the tone of their exchanges had been one of ‘cordial reserve’, and the feeling remained that Root was a ‘capitalist’ and ‘a hide-bound reactionary’ and his mission an opportunistic attempt by a group of US businessmen ‘seeking information about Russia to aid in her exploitation’.16 Root had little grasp of Russia and admitted that it was all cosmetic, a ‘grand-stand play’. ‘We have here an infant class in the art of being free containing one hundred and seventy million people,’ he telegraphed President Wilson, ‘and they need to be supplied with kindergarten material.’ The Russians, he had concluded, were ‘sincere, kindly, good people but confused and dazed’.17

While the Root Mission progressed through a succession of hollow diplomatic formalities, it was Emmeline Pankhurst who took centre stage, holding court at the Astoria to a ‘representative gathering of the foreign colony of Petrograd as it existed at that time’. She and Kenney were utterly ‘tireless’ in taking on an exhausting round of receptions, committee meetings and interviews. ‘They seemed to me to work day and night,’ noted Florence Harper, now back in Petrograd from the flying hospital.18 Every day was filled with meeting various Russian women activists and reformers, members of the Provisional Government, officials from the Red Cross and YMCA. They also visited the Anglo-Russian Hospital, and Pankhurst gave numerous interviews to Russian and foreign journalists such as Robert Wilton of The Times, as well as catching up with her friend Rheta Childe Dorr, who was also staying at the Astoria. Acting as secretary and amanuensis, Jessie Kenney had a box of visitors’ cards that rapidly filled up with invitations to tea with the expatriate social set, so much so that Pankhurst could not cope with the numbers of people wanting to meet her. She and Kenney became increasingly exhausted, finding it difficult to sleep because of the white nights and ‘the singing and talking in the streets until the early hours’.19 They sensed an escalation of political unrest, too: ‘one hears rumours and news all through each day of revolutions, strikes and counter strikes taking place so quickly that we never know what will be happening from hour to hour,’ Jessie noted in her diary. They feared for the security of the Provisional Government, even though all the Russian women they had met had assured them of their support for it: ‘They do not want the Bolsheviks to win, nor anarchy, but want some kind of democratic government,’ she added.20

Emmeline Pankhurst had been keen to hold a whole series of mass outdoor meetings while in the city, but the Provisional Government was worried that she was too pro-war and that such meetings might be provocative to the Bolsheviks and their supporters. After decades of defying the British government she had no qualms about courting the risk of a hostile Russian reception to what she had to say, but the government flatly refused to grant her permission to address public meetings. This did not prevent her, however, speaking to small groups in private houses and at her hotel, and Kenney at least was allowed to speak to a large outdoor meeting of women factory workers, held ‘outside the Anarchist Headquarters under the black flag’ on a warm and sunny 18 June, with the assembled women and girls in ‘light cotton dresses, and, on their heads, little coloured kerchiefs’.21 Despite having to speak through an interpreter, Kenney felt she had their ‘complete attention’ and was ‘warmed by the many upturned, smiling faces’, as she spoke of the British campaign for female suffrage and her country’s support for the Russian government. ‘How I wished that Mrs Pankhurst and I could have seen more of the people of Russia,’ Kenney later wrote, ‘for we were getting to love them more and more.’22

Of all the women Emmeline Pankhurst and Jessie Kenney hoped to meet in Petrograd, at the head of their list was Maria Bochkareva – commander of the newly formed Women’s Death Battalion and probably the most talked-about woman in all Russia. A semi-literate peasant girl from the Volga, Bochkareva had, within the space of barely a year, risen from obscurity to the status of national heroine. Her drunken father had deserted the family when she was young and she was sent out to work as a nursemaid at the age of eight, to help her mother make ends meet. Married at fifteen, she quickly abandoned her brutish husband and followed her lover to Yakutsk in eastern Siberia when he was condemned to exile for robbery. But on the outbreak of war in 1914, and fired with patriotic zeal, she had travelled the three thousand miles to Tomsk, where the commander of the 25th Reserve Battalion was based, and had volunteered for the Russian army. He told her she could only go as a nurse; but Maria Bochkareva wanted to fight. Undeterred, she appealed directly to Nicholas II by telegraph, upon which he agreed to her request, which was ratified by General Brusilov, Commander-in-Chief of the army.23

As a fighting soldier, Bochkareva certainly had the right attributes, for she was naturally muscular, stocky and strong. She had had no compunction about cutting off her long brunette plaits on enlisting, and cropped her hair close to her head like any male recruit. Donning her soldier’s breeches and high black boots, and after training in marksmanship, she entered service at the front in the 28th Polotsk Infantry. She called herself ‘Yashka’ and her mannish persona fooled many: ‘The strength and breadth, and the deep, full-toned voice of a man, were hers. Passing her on the street, you had to look three times to make sure she was not a man,’ recalled Bessie Beatty when she met her in June. ‘After the first few days of grumbling protest, her comrades seldom remembered she was a woman.’24

During her service at the front in 1915–16 Bochkareva demonstrated great fortitude and courage in battle and was wounded four times, the last time being laid up in hospital for months, and was awarded two grades of the Cross of St George. A devout patriot, she had been an ardent supporter of the revolution when it broke in February, but by the spring of 1917 she was dismayed at how ill-prepared her people had been for freedom. What most alarmed her, however, was the consequent breakdown in discipline and order in the Russian army. By May it had been severely weakened by the war, with more than 5.5 million casualties. Morale was at an all-time low and the rate of desertion alarmingly high. The conscripts at the front didn’t want to fight the Germans any more; they just wanted to go home. But Bochkareva wanted to carry on fighting to the bitter end.

To counter this loss of morale, special combat formations – known as ‘shock battalions’ – had been formed, their objective being to underline the nation’s savage determination to die, if necessary, in defence of Russia. It seemed to Bochkareva that the honour and even the very existence of her country were at stake, and she wanted Russia’s women to set an example. ‘They give men guns to fight death with,’ she complained, ‘but women simply sit and wait for death.’25 She insisted that she – and they – would rather die fighting. With this in mind, when Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko visited the front in May, Bochkareva asked him to support her request to Kerensky, as Minister of War, that she be allowed to form a women’s ‘death battalion’ – the first of its kind in the world. ‘We will go wherever men refuse to go,’ she declared. ‘We will fight when they run. The women will lead the men back to the trenches.’ Returning to Petrograd, Bochkareva held a mass rally in the plush surroundings of the Mariinsky Palace on 21 May, at which she exhorted:

Men and women-citizens! … Our mother is perishing. Our mother is Russia. I want to help save her. I want women whose hearts are pure crystal, whose souls are pure, whose impulses are lofty. With such women setting an example of self-sacrifice, you men will realize your duty in this grave hour.26

Fifteen hundred women answered Bochkareva’s call to arms that evening, their numbers bolstered by another five hundred who volunteered after seeing accounts in the newspapers the next day. They were accommodated in four large dormitories at the Kolomensky Women’s Institute on Torgovaya, which had been made available especially to Bochkareva as a base.27 Many were quickly rejected, their numbers being reduced to five hundred mainly eighteen-to twenty-five-year-olds by Bochkareva’s strict moral discipline (she abhorred ‘loose behaviour’, such as flirting with their male instructors); others were let go for failing to take her orders ‘in true military spirit’.28 Some of the more politicised women changed their minds when Bochkareva adamantly refused to allow them to set up Soviet-style soldiers’ committees. She was in sole charge, and that was that.

After confiscating all their personal property except their brassieres, Bochkareva marched her chosen recruits off en masse to four barbers’ shops to have their heads shaved; a crowd consisting mainly of soldiers waited outside, deriding the women as they emerged bald-headed. The volunteers were then thrown into a rigorous induction course, rising at 5.00 a.m. and spending ten hours a day on rifle practice and training, like any male recruits. Bochkareva oversaw it all closely, barking out orders like any sergeant major and slapping any insubordinate women on the cheek. Soon the battalion was pruned to 250–300, with many leaving voluntarily, unable to tolerate Bochkareva’s harsh regime.29 The only concession was the issue of the cavalry carbine, which was five pounds lighter than the standard-issue infantry rifle.

Those who survived the harsh selection process seemed, to one American reporter who observed them at drill, ‘as likely soldiers as any others I had seen … they took themselves and their work with the utmost seriousness and with the same lack of self-consciousness’.30 Once they had passed through training, the women donned their standard army-issue uniforms, the only distinguishing marks being special white epaulettes with a red-and-black stripe, and a red-and-black cloth arrowhead sewn to the sleeve – this insignia, also worn by similar male battalions, denoting that they had vowed to fight to the death for Holy Russia and for the Allies.31

The Petrograd Women’s Death Battalion contained an extraordinary cross-section of women. Some were former Red Cross nurses; the oldest among them was a forty-eight-year-old medical doctor. The rest were a mix of ‘stenographers and dressmakers … office girls, servants and factory hands, university students and peasants, and a few who in the days before the war had been merely parasites’, as Bessie Beatty noted.32 As a seasoned reporter currently writing a regular ‘Around the World in Wartime’ column for her paper, Beatty had arrived in Petrograd not long after Rheta Childe Dorr and, like her, made a beeline for Bochkareva, for the Women’s Death Battalion was a great news story and soon featured in the world’s press. Both reporters quickly discovered that the women who joined had different, and often dramatic, reasons for doing so.

One such was Bochkareva’s twenty-year-old ADC, Mariya Skrydlova. Tall and aristocratic, she was the daughter of an admiral who had distinguished himself in the Russo-Japanese War and was one of six Red Cross nurses who enlisted with the battalion. Convent-educated in Belgium, a talented musician and linguist, Skrydlova was later awarded the Cross of St George for her bravery, but subsequently suffered shell shock and walked with a limp. During the February Revolution, prior to joining the battalion, she had encountered the full force of grass-roots fury against the former aristocracy, when the mob had broken into the naval hospital where she had been nursing and murdered wounded officers in their beds. Other wounded men whom she had sat up nursing through the night, she told Florence Harper, had ‘turned on her now that Russia [was] free and cursed her as she never heard a person cursed before in all her life’.33 After seeing other nurses in the apartment block where she lived murdered, and young girls attacked and raped, she had ‘taken off her Red Cross uniform and vowed that she would not lift a hand while such people were in power’; instead, when she heard of the formation of Bochkareva’s battalion, she had gone straight off ‘without even putting her hat and coat on, running most of the way’ to volunteer. Like her commander, all she wanted to do was to serve Russia.

Despite the obvious dedication of the Women’s Death Battalion, not all Russians admired them; out on the streets when they marched along, the women were often greeted by hisses and boos from men. But they gave as good as they got: ‘Go back, you dirty cowards. Aren’t you ashamed to let women leave their homes and go to the front for holy Russia?’ they retorted. Bessie Beatty admired the ‘grim confidence’ with which they faced the prospect of death under their ‘Gospodin Nachalnik’ Maria Bochkareva. ‘What else is there for us to do?’ they told her. ‘The soul of the army is sick, and we must heal it.’34

During June, Emmeline Pankhurst and Jessie Kenney had regularly visited Bochkareva and her soldiers at their barracks and had had their photographs taken with her. Pankhurst had proudly inspected the women recruits and watched them drilling; she made a point of speaking individually, through her interpreter, to as many of the women as she could. She swelled with pride at the sight of the fearless Maria Bochkareva – ‘that wonderful, splendid woman’ – at their head. It was, she later said, ‘the greatest thing in history since Joan of Arc’. She and Bochkareva, as the commander later related, became ‘very much attached to each other’ and Pankhurst invited her to dine at the Astoria.35 In considerable physical decline, after years of repeated hunger strikes and forced-feeding in jail, which had wrecked her digestive system, Pankhurst had a figure that was in stark contrast to the robust frame of her new-found Russian friend, and she seemed prematurely aged. Nevertheless, she stood as erect as she could during inspections of the battalion, immaculate in her white linen suit with black bonnet and matching gloves, raising her right hand in a salute of womanly solidarity – an image captured by Donald Thompson, who took numerous photographs of the battalion that summer after he returned from a visit to the front.36*

At a speech that she was allowed to give at a fund-raising concert for the Women’s Death Battalion held in Petrograd’s Army and Navy Hall on 14 June, Emmeline Pankhurst made the most of the opportunity to praise them: ‘I honour these women who are setting such an example to their country. When I looked at their tender bodies I thought how terrible it was they should have to fight, besides bringing children into the world.’ ‘Men of Russia,’ she exhorted, ‘must the women fight, and are there men who will stay at home and let them fight alone?’37

On 21 June, at a ceremony held in the great square in front of St Isaac’s Cathedral and attended by Kerensky, Milyukov and Rodzianko, and other members of the government, Maria Bochkareva proudly received her gold-and-white standard emblazoned in black lettering with the words ‘1st Women’s Death Battalion of Maria Bochkareva’. That same day she was promoted to ensign, and General Kornilov presented her with an officer’s belt, a gold-handled revolver and a sabre as a token of the nation’s appreciation.38 Rheta Childe Dorr noticed, however, that her women’s khaki uniforms were ‘rather shabby’ and ‘about half the girls wore, instead of army boots, the women’s shoes in which they had enlisted’. (She later discovered that such was the shortage of army-issue boots that the women got theirs only a day or so before going into action.) Kenney and Pankhurst had also attended and been moved by the sights and sounds of the occasion, in particular the chanting of the priests: ‘How Ethel Smyth would love this music!’ Pankhurst had exclaimed to Kenney, thinking with fondness of her friend, the suffragist composer.39

Two days later, prior to their departure for the front, an open-air Te Deum was said for the Women’s Death Battalion before an altar erected on the steps of the Kazan Cathedral. Bochkareva and her battalion of women had kept everyone waiting, finally arriving after 5.00 p.m. ‘If they are due to attack, and wait an hour and a half to powder their noses, what will the Germans do to them?’ soldiers in the crowd jeered derisively.40 For the most part, though, the crowd was silent, ‘women with tears in their eyes, men who shuffled uneasily in a shamed discomfort’ greatly outnumbering the few soldiers, who were ‘sullen, churlish, defiant!’ Jessie Kenney was there (on behalf of an indisposed Pankhurst), as were Lady Georgina Buchanan and other distinguished residents and visitors, as well as foreign reporters. Florence Harper thought the women of the battalion looked faintly ludicrous in their ill-fitting khaki uniforms and oversized peaked caps, and heard someone describe them as looking like the ‘chorus of a third-rate burlesque’.41 Nevertheless they inspired admiration – and some pity – in most of those gathered there that day, as they proudly stood holding banners proclaiming, ‘Death is better than shame’ and ‘Women, do not give your hands to traitors’.42

It was said that thousands of people rushed across the city to pay their respects as the Women’s Death Battalion marched away to Petrograd’s Warsaw Station after this farewell ceremony, each woman loaded with two hundred rounds of ammunition, the pots and pans on their kitbags making ‘quite a racket’ as they went, according to Donald Thompson.43 Many had flowers thrust into their rifle butts by the crowd as they passed. ‘Such a number of keen, serious young faces, it made one cry to see them go past … in full soldiers’ kit, undaunted by the hardships and weight they had to carry or by all the ridicule they will have to face, ridicule from their countrymen which will probably be harder to face than the German bullets,’ wrote a nurse from the Anglo-Russian Hospital. ‘There they were going to do a man’s job and show the way to the waverers. As we walked with the crowd that accompanied them along the Nevsky, an old general stepped out in front of them and called out, “God bless you! You will all get there, you are not like those others!”’44

But pockets of ill feeling towards the women still prevailed. When the battalion marched into Izmailovsky Prospekt the band accompanying them suddenly stopped playing, their way barred by a group of men from the nearby Izmailovsky barracks. Drawing the sabre recently presented to her, Bochkareva stepped forward, ordering the band to strike up again and – head high, with her sabre proudly raised – she led her women on to enthusiastic applause from the crowd, as the soldiers pulled back.45

At the station Lenin’s Bolshevik supporters did everything they could to foment animosity towards the women as they fought their way through to the train, in which they were given the honour of second-class carriages rather than the uncomfortable third-class ones usually given to troops. Large groups of Russian soldiers stood and hissed and jeered: ‘Those women ought not to be allowed to go to war,’ reporter William G. Shepherd was told. ‘It is a blankety-blank insult to Russia and its men … Everybody knows they are not going to fight. They are only going to the front to insult Russian soldiers and for bad purposes.’46 Those ‘bad purposes’ were more clearly articulated by another soldier in the crowd: ‘They only enlisted for the purpose of prostitution,’ he shouted within earshot of Florence Harper, who had also made her way to the station. She saw how the man’s remark provoked a quick response; enraged women in the crowd ‘rushed at him, like terriers around a wild animal, scratching his face, hitting him and pulling his hair’. She was afraid the mob was going to beat him to death, and tried to block their path. Militia men fortunately soon arrived and hauled the man off to the police station, the mob trailing after them.47

From Petrograd, the Women’s Death Battalion’s train headed off to the front near Molodechno, where they were assigned to the Tenth Army. On 7 July they went over the top against the Germans, during a five-day battle at Smorgon (in present-day Belarus).48 By the end of the day fifty of Bochkareva’s women were dead or wounded. Shortly afterwards Bochkareva herself was knocked unconscious when a shell exploded near her and she was taken to a field hospital in the rear suffering from shell shock; she landed up in hospital back in Petrograd, promoted to second lieutenant and fiercely proud that not one of her women who went into battle had faltered. Emmeline Pankhurst was pleased and proud to telegraph home to England:

First Women’s Battalion number two hundred and fifty. Took place of retreating troops. In counter attack made one hundred prisoners including two officers. Only five weeks training. Their leader wounded. Have earned undying fame, moral effect great. More women soldiers training, also marines. Pankhurst.49

Before leaving for a visit to Moscow, Pankhurst and Kenney had continued to make the rounds of Petersburg society and the émigré community. Pankhurst had met up again with Lady Muriel Paget at the British Russian Luncheon Club – such fashionable watering holes still surviving the depredations of war and rationing. She also met the genial Prime Minister, Prince Lvov, and the now-notorious Felix Yusupov, whom she found altogether charming. Yusupov’s ‘exquisite courtesy and enunciation of the English language’ were greatly to Pankhurst’s taste, when he gave her and Kenney a conducted tour of his palace on the Moika, showing them the room where Rasputin was murdered and regaling them with the full grisly details of the story.50

Although Pankhurst was not allowed to meet the former Tsar and his wife Alexandra, now under house arrest at the Alexander Palace, she and Kenney did enjoy a private visit to Tsarskoe Selo, where Lenin’s erstwhile political colleague and a founder of the RSDLP, Georgiy Plekhanov, was now residing after thirty years in exile in Switzerland. Plekhanov seemed ‘pale and sickly’, but his manners were faultless when he entertained them to Russian high tea: a bubbling samovar and ‘delicious white bread, plenty of butter, and caviar and a few other dainties’ – all most welcome to Pankhurst, who was suffering agonies with her stomach. ‘What a joy to get some clean, nice, wholesome, digestible food,’ she remarked. Plekhanov was extremely courteous; ‘there was nothing of the demagogue about him,’ thought Kenney, ‘and although he had suffered far more greatly for his cause than Lenin, he had none of the latter’s hateful bitterness.’ He told Pankhurst of his admiration for Bochkareva; and of his concern that Russia be kept from falling into anarchy and remain true to the Allied cause. Kenney never forgot his sad, regretful parting words to them: ‘There are two things that people only appreciate when they have lost them,’ he told her, ‘and these are their health and their country.’51

Health was certainly something that Emmeline Pankhurst, like the frail Plekhanov (who died of tuberculosis the following May), had now lost. She was unable to digest the coarse black bread on offer at the hotel, and her Russian admirers – mainly nurses and teachers – took it in turns to queue for precious white bread for her.52 With the Astoria, like all Petrograd hotels, prey to endless strikes by waiters, chambermaids and cooks (such as that on 30 June), these female volunteers also came and cleaned and serviced her rooms and provided tea and other food. Through all the vagaries of life in revolutionary Petrograd, Pankhurst retained her inimitable regal manner, looking, as Florence Harper noted, ‘every inch the dowager queen of the militants’ at a meeting she held at the Astoria on ‘how best to reach the Russian working women and teach them the meaning of politics’.

Harper was no suffragist, although she could not help but admire Mrs Pankhurst’s indomitable resolve as well as her undoubtedly good intentions; but her mission, Harper felt sure, was doomed to failure. She had no understanding or experience of the lives and mentality of the Russian working classes, especially the women. ‘Here we have suffered for years things that Englishwomen have never even dreamed of,’ one of them told Harper. ‘What right has Mrs Pankhurst to think she can teach us? We accept and appreciate her sympathy, but that is all. Let her go home and go on with her war work.’53 Pankhurst’s remaining time in Petrograd was, inevitably, largely spent preaching to the converted few rather than rabble-rousing to the masses, as she had hoped.

By the end of June, the summer heat had brought an overwhelming smell of uncleaned sewers to Petrograd, made worse by the malodorous stagnant waters of the canals. A plague of flies descended, bringing dysentery and cholera. Warnings were posted on all public buildings and at consulates and embassies advising people not to eat fresh fruit and vegetables unless thoroughly washed in sterilised water. It was more than Florence Harper could bear, to resist the lure of fresh strawberries; Emmeline Pankhurst and Jessie Kenney were horrified to see her eating them one day, but she stuck to her failsafe of copious doses of castor oil. ‘Everyone was suffering from stomach trouble of one kind or another,’ she recalled.54

Continuing food shortages were making it harder to find anything safe to eat, so she stuck to ‘hardtack, caviar, and sardines’ – expensive but necessary extravagances if she was to stay well. There was still food to be had in the provinces, and she managed to obtain honey and precious cheese smuggled in by an English friend. But at the Astoria most mornings Harper’s requests for bread, milk and butter would all be met by a surly ‘Nyet’. Black coffee was usually the only thing on offer, drunk with a lump of sugar from her precious supply: ‘I guarded it jealously, and hid it away carefully, in fact it was the only thing in my room that was always locked up.’ A friend arrived one evening with flour, sugar – and bacon, the one thing all Americans craved. ‘If he had brought a million rubles, he could not have been more welcome. The excitement of seeing real American bacon,’ she recalled, ‘was so great that then and there we arranged a luncheon-party simply for the purpose of eating it.’55

Dining out had also been greatly restricted by the food shortages; as what little food there was on offer in the restaurants got worse, so the prices rose. Even Donon’s – once the haunt of the old imperial elite, and of many in the expatriate community – could offer little more than cabbage soup these days, or ‘fish that was generally good, an infinitesimal piece of game or occasionally some meat, a salad of two leaves of lettuce (which no one ate because of fear of dysentery), and a water-ice’. Such a princely meal would set journalists like Harper back nine rubles – the equivalent of $27 at the current government rate. You could still order champagne there, but it would cost you 100 rubles ($300) a bottle.56

Everyone to whom Harper spoke was obsessed with food. For the beleaguered foreign residents, missing their favourite delicacies the longer they were stuck in Petrograd, the gift of some culinary treat was a major event. The only real chance of getting something decent to eat came when one of the embassies held a reception or party. During the visit of the Root Mission, Harper noticed how the ‘men of the American colony … would fish shamelessly for invitations to lunch or to dine with friends belonging to the Mission’. ‘I do not see what you fellows are grumbling about,’ one of its delegates remarked, ‘I haven’t had such good meals in years.’ Florence Harper recalled that the only time she saw good food during her nine months in Russia was when she was invited to a reception at the US embassy on Furshtatskaya, ‘when I had real white bread and real ice-cream’ – both, no doubt, obtained thanks to the persistence and scheming of the wily Phil Jordan. David Francis certainly did his best to provide rare treats for US nationals, but even he was writing to a diplomatic colleague in July, ‘if at any time you can find a man who will bring me fifty pounds of breakfast bacon I would appreciate it’.57

One or two small miracles did, however, persist amid all the longing for unobtainable foodstuffs. Each afternoon at the Astoria the pastry chef made French pastry – heaven knows where he got the flour from – and ‘each room was allowed two cakes at forty kopeks each’; if Harper bribed the waiter she could usually get more. It was also an open secret among the American colony that if you went to the Café Empire around four in the afternoon, you might be lucky enough to purchase freshly baked white rolls and coffee – with milk. It wasn’t a place where respectable women were seen, but Florence Harper went all the same, especially when, as often, she had had nothing to eat since the night before. On one occasion that summer she had gone for thirty hours without food.58

Many of the male American expats weren’t just missing their favourite food; they also missed their home-grown sports, so much so that the young clerks at the National City Bank asked headquarters in New York to send them out a ‘box of baseball equipment’. They staged an impromptu game in the side street between their bank and the Marble Palace, former home of Grand Duke Konstantin. The police soon saw them off, so they set up a pitch at the Field of Mars nearby. ‘Our gyrations drew a large crowd of soldiers and civilians,’ recalled Leighton Rogers. They ‘pressed in so closely upon us that they were in danger of being hit, but they didn’t know it until one youngster caught a foul ball right between the eyes’. Rogers was surprised to hear an American-sounding voice call out from the crowd ‘Say, where youse guys from?’ – it turned out to belong to a Russian who had lived in Boston for five years, where he had become ‘an ardent rooter for the Red Sox’.59

Officials at the US embassy, however, had little time for recreation. So busy were J. Butler Wright and Ambassador Francis that the only occasion they were able to discuss embassy matters was on the journey out to Murino and back to play the occasional game of golf.60 The embassy was overburdened with far more work than its staff could handle, as Wright recorded:

Commissioners, visitors, commerce publicity, railroads, extradition, land values, military preparation, naval statistics, finance, passports, prisoners’ relief, moving picture propaganda, capacity of printing presses, house furnishing and repairing, lost passports, censorship, mail inspection, wharf and port capacity and dues, relief ships, food supply, strikes, coal mining operations, couriers for mails, ocean cables, etc, etc, etc, make up the daily work of our embassy in these days.61

This was not to mention hosting a succession of luncheons, teas and dinners for visiting US officials, who continued to pour into Petrograd after the Stevens Railroad Commission and the Root Mission had distracted them from the realities of a city once more on the edge of a resumption of violence. ‘Even the most fanatical optimist could not help acknowledging that the Provisional Government was tottering,’ wrote Florence Harper in June. The Bolsheviks, although still in the minority and outgunned by the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, had recently been flexing their muscles at the 1st All Russian Congress of Soviets. During the congress Lenin had launched into a tirade against the war as nothing but ‘a continuation of bourgeois politics’ with its roots in imperialism.62 But his attempt to stymie Kerensky’s appeal for a mandate to launch a new Russian offensive had failed. In a last-ditch attempt to rally patriotic nationalism, Kerensky had set off on a tour of the south-western front in May, during which he exploited his gift for stump-oratory in numerous hortatory appeals to the troops. On 16 June he ordered a massive Russian artillery barrage of enemy lines and, two days later, a major assault in Galicia. With the so-called ‘Kerensky Offensive’, the Provisional Government had shot its last bolt.

Meanwhile in the capital there was a resurgence of massive street demonstrations against the war, fomented by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. At the end of June the members of the Root Mission were advised to relocate to Finland for their own safety. ‘The Allied colony of Petrograd was disappointed and disgusted,’ wrote Florence Harper. ‘They knew that if the Mission only waited a little while longer, they would see an exhibition of rioting that would convince its members how weak the Provisional Government actually was.’63

* Russian women would have the last laugh in this regard, for they were given the vote immediately after the October Revolution. In Britain only women over thirty were given the vote at war’s end in 1918, and all British women over twenty-one did not get the vote until 1928.

* A library-cum-information-centre on the Fontanka, where people could read the English newspapers; also a front for SIS undercover work in Petrograd.

† The American Civil War general and US President, Ulysses S. Grant, visited Russia during a tour of the Ottoman Empire in 1878. He met Alexander II while in St Petersburg that August.

* Many of these photographs were syndicated in the US press and can be seen in Thompson’s photographic album BloodStained Russia.

11

‘What Would the Colony Say if We Ran Away?’

During the February Revolution, Kronstadt, a grim island fortress and naval base at the mouth of the River Neva nineteen miles from Petrograd, had been the scene of some of the most savage violence when 30,000 sailors had run riot; the admiral and sixty-eight officers – the cream of the Imperial Navy – had been massacred in a brutal orgy of killing, seen as retaliation for the harsh discipline the men had endured under the tsarist system. Since then the area had become a hotbed of revolutionary militancy, stockpiled with weapons seized during the revolution and ripe for Bolshevik exploitation. In defiance of the authority of the Provisional Government, revolutionaries at Kronstadt had seized the ships in dock and the arsenal, and had voted in their own autonomous Bolshevik-dominated Soviet, which had operated as a virtual fiefdom until it finally came under the Petrograd Soviet’s control at the end of May.1 Kronstadt remained a dangerous, volatile place from which the Bolsheviks were planning to draw key support in the coming days; it was also a place that Florence Harper and Donald Thompson wanted to investigate.

At the end of June when they went out to this supposedly forbidding ‘fortress’, all they saw as they arrived ‘was an island of green and white’, with the beautiful dome of its cathedral rising above the other buildings. They had been warned that they wouldn’t be allowed to land, but ‘Thompson just grinned’ and marched onshore with his cameras. When stopped and asked why they had come, he explained that he wanted to ‘see the men who were making history in Kronstadt’.2 Together with Harper, he walked along the cobbled streets to the headquarters of the Soviet, where they met ‘Tovarishch Parchevsky’, the local Bolshevik police commissar. Flattered that Thompson wanted to ‘make cinema pictures’ of Kronstadt, he placed two cars at their disposal and took them, accompanied by several surly-looking Bolshevik minders, on a guided tour. ‘They all looked like cutthroats,’ thought Harper. ‘They were dirty, unshaven, and most of them were without collars.’ A collar, it appeared, was the mark of a bourgeois, ‘and in Kronstadt to be a bourgeois was to sign one’s death warrant’.3*

During the day they spent there, Thompson and Harper’s revolutionary minders ensured that they positioned themselves front of camera at every photo-opportunity. ‘Each house was pointed out with pride as the scene of another murder,’ Harper recalled, as the men told her sickening stories about the ‘glorious fight for freedom of the Kronstadt people’.4 She felt extremely uncomfortable in the company of the tovarishchi: ‘It isn’t pleasant to be an imperialist in a hot-bed of socialism.’

Thompson, however, remained undaunted by the experience, and a couple of days later went out to the Kschessinska Mansion to try and see Lenin. He waited for two hours and, when Lenin finally appeared, asked him to ‘pose for a picture’. When Boris the interpreter explained that Thompson was from America, Lenin told him ‘he would have nothing to do with me and that we had better leave Petrograd’.5 There was good reason to heed this warning; Boris had heard talk that the following day – 3 July – there was going to be ‘trouble with Lenine and his bunch of cutthroats’. Rumours of a second revolution or coup had been rife ever since the Bolshevik leader’s return from exile. ‘There is an undercurrent here, plainly evident, but not possible for a stranger to trace and impossible to describe, indicating that we may expect an upheaval before very long,’ wrote naval attaché’s wife Pauline Crosley. ‘I know of meetings, drilling, propaganda and accumulation of arms that can only mean one thing. When that thing will happen, no one not in the “meetings” can tell.’ But she expected that sooner or later Russians would start killing each other again.6

Sure enough, a renewal of violence came in early July when Lenin decided the time was ripe to exploit fatal weaknesses in the Provisional Government. Taking advantage of the recent collapse of the Russian offensive in Galicia, closely followed by catastrophic losses at the front, Lenin and the Bolsheviks set about further undermining public support for the Russian war effort. The offensive was launched on 18 June, with a mass demonstration supposedly calling for public unity: although peaceful, it was deliberately orchestrated into an anti-government protest. With further Bolshevik connivance, other marches and demonstrations that followed rapidly escalated into violence, which the government seemed powerless to control. By the beginning of July its position had been further undermined by the sudden resignation of four Kadet (Constitutional Democrat) ministers on the night of 2/3 July, in protest at the government’s capitulation to demands from Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary ministers for autonomy in Ukraine. This was a concession that the patriotic Kadets would not brook, fearing that it would encourage the separatist instincts of other nationalities and lead to the dismembering of Russia.

Bolsheviks and anarchists seized this undermining of the government’s authority by whipping up protests among their supporters in the Petrograd garrison, the navy at Kronstadt and militant workers in the factory districts. Word had also got out among the 10,000 men of the 1st Machine Gun Regiment based on the Vyborg Side that they were to be sent to the front, a move designed to rid the capital of the worst Bolshevik-led troublemakers in the garrison, upon whom Lenin was relying as the muscle of any future coup against the government. After two days of feverish meetings inflamed by speeches from Trotsky and others, the men voted to stage an armed demonstration on the streets of Petrograd, and were joined by others from the garrison, including the Pavlovsky Regiment.7 But the Bolshevik Central Committee underestimated how difficult it would be, once stirred, to bring this violent rabble under control. Like dry tinder, the protest quickly broke into crackling flame.

On 2 July, Rheta Childe Dorr had returned to Petrograd after two weeks away at the Eastern Front, to be told that the ‘bolsheviki were making trouble again’. The following morning she went out to buy newspapers and was strolling down the Nevsky when she suddenly heard rifle fire and then a machine gun – followed soon afterwards by a cavalcade of motor trucks full of armed men hurtling down the street. Donald Thompson had been out near the junction of the Nevsky and the Fontanka River when he had been caught in crossfire and had thrown himself flat on the ground. He had lain there for some time, along with many other civilians, and had finally made a run for it, fast as ‘a Kansas jack-rabbit’.8 Intermittent firing and an increasing presence of armed men in motor lorries on the streets had followed throughout the day but it wasn’t till the evening of the 3rd that the real signs of trouble began.

Meriel Buchanan had been dressing for dinner when she saw several motor lorries and cars full of armed soldiers waving red flags drive past the embassy. After dinner even more vehicles were thundering across the bridge into the city, followed by a huge crowd of Bolshevik-led demonstrators from the factory districts. Sir George and Lady Georgina had planned to take the evening air across the river in their open carriage, but hesitated: ‘Something is going to happen,’ Sir George warned.9 Nevertheless, true to their regular English habits, they left, only to be turned back by a jam of vehicles on the Troitsky Bridge. Back on the Embankment, they encountered dense crowds of workers on Suvorov Square opposite the embassy carrying a barrage of banners celebrating anarchy and condemning the war, the bourgeoisie and the upper classes, as more and more vehicles and people continued to cross from the Petrograd Side.

By now the trams had stopped running and all over the city armed soldiers were forcing private motor cars to stop, upon which they ‘turned the occupants out and swarmed into their places like so many insects’, dragging machine guns inside with them.10 Diplomats and foreign residents were not immune: Belgian ambassador Conrad de Buisseret’s Rolls-Royce was stopped in the street and confiscated by the Bolsheviks, as too was Donald Thompson’s hired car (his chauffeur was later killed).11 Nellie Thornton, wife of one of the mill-owning Thornton brothers, had a far more terrifying experience. She had set off into Petrograd for a trip to the cinema with three little girls, when the Rolls-Royce they were being driven in was cornered by ‘six lorries armed with Maxim Guns’. Four men jumped into the car with them and forced their driver to take them to a secluded yard, where they were surrounded by armed men. Nellie thought they were going to be raped or shot; she begged the men not to take the car and make her and the terrified children walk the twelve miles home. Eventually the soldiers allowed them to leave. Why had they done this, Nellie asked them? ‘To show you we have the power,’ they told her.12

That evening the streets of central Petrograd were swarming; many gathered outside the Tauride Palace, where British intelligence officer Denis Garstin, went out among them ‘wandering from group to group asking what they really wanted’; but he could get no clear answer from anyone, bar a lot of shouting of slogans. ‘No one knew. On the contrary they all wanted to know why they’d been called out with their arms and banners and vague complaints.’ Garstin noted anarchist agitators – ‘black hatted black-visaged men’ – among them, trying to incite people to violence and then disappearing.13 With 10,000 or more gathered on the Nevsky, firing inevitably broke out, followed by rioting and then looting, in the frenzied search for alcohol that was now gripping the city.14* Confusion reigned; the streets were ‘all effervescence’, crowded with people who had come out to see what was happening, only to find themselves caught up in indiscriminate firing from all sides. ‘Everybody was asking everybody else what was going on,’ recalled Bertie Stopford. ‘A feeling of panic was in the air,’ wrote US journalist Ernest Poole of the New Republic, who had just arrived, only to be caught up in the thick of what was going on.15

At their apartment on Kirochnaya, near the Tauride Palace, US naval attaché Walter Crosley and his wife Pauline had been sitting in their drawing room when the doorbell rang and a messenger arrived, telling them to ‘put your most valuable small things in a bag and be ready to leave for the Embassy in five minutes’. When Pauline asked why he told her to look out of the window: ‘There they were!!! Hundreds of the worst looking armed men I ever expect to see, coming up our street! The rumors were being confirmed and trouble was upon us.’ She rushed to pack, as the tramping feet of a mob of ‘Anarchists or Leninites’ (she wasn’t sure what they were) came ever closer – the corner on which their home was located had, she recalled, been ‘a very bloody spot’ during the February Revolution. As they hurried to leave by the front door, the street outside had become ‘filled with the dangerous looking creatures and we had to face them as we went out’. When the Crosleys reached the US embassy, members of staff were arriving with reports of fighting in many locations; embassy officials estimated that around 70,000 armed workmen and soldiers were ‘in charge of the city that night’, bolstered by intimidating armed joyriders on trucks and in hijacked private cars.16

Lady Muriel Paget of the Anglo-Russian Hospital had been dining at Prince Yusupov’s palace on the Moika that evening, when ‘suddenly we heard shooting and screaming, and riderless horses dashing by’. Some of the bullets had begun hitting the palace, and her host took his guests into the cellar dining room for safety. Someone from the ARH telephoned to warn Lady Muriel not to try to return there, but she insisted. Bertie Stopford, who had been dining with them, volunteered to accompany her, on condition that she ‘would remember the rules of Revolution – first, to lie on one’s face when shooting was going on, and second, to press against a wall when the mob surged in the streets’.17 As they ventured cautiously down the side streets, they saw crowds on the Nevsky ‘going down into the fire of the soldiers, stepping over the bodies of their dead comrades’. Lady Muriel turned a corner and found herself ‘looking into the mouth of a revolver with a fierce Russian behind it. I pushed the revolver away and laughed at the soldier, who let me pass.’

But soon afterwards they got caught up in the mob and were carried along with it for several blocks. They finally got to the hospital at 1.15 a.m., to find that a lot of the wounded from the fighting on the Nevsky had been brought in.18 On his way back up the Nevsky to his hotel, Stopford saw many more being carried away on stretchers. It was here that Arno Dosch-Fleurot had also found himself trapped in ‘the hottest firing that I ever expect to be exposed to’ and had flung himself into the gutter to take shelter. He found himself lying alongside a Russian officer. ‘I asked what was happening,’ he wrote in a despatch to the New York World three days later, to which the man replied: ‘The Russians, my countrymen, are idiots. This is a white night of madness.’19

Such indeed was the madness unleashed that day that by late evening the streets of Petrograd had become ‘a complete and unintelligible chaos’, in the words of New Zealand journalist Harold Williams. It was hot and muggy even this late, and the crowds wandered ‘aimlessly and excitedly’ as lorries and motor cars ‘buzzed about filled with yelling soldiers’.20 Crowds of people were still hanging around at the junction of the Liteiny and the Nevsky late into the night. Officials tried to disperse them: ‘Go home. Comrades go home. There have already been victims.’ But still the crowd lingered. ‘It was a strange sight,’ wrote Williams, ‘this great, silent moving mass in the dusk with the blur of guns, caps and bayonets of the men on lorries and the bent figures of soldiers on artillery horses, all silhouetted against the pale sky.’21

Ernest Poole also stayed out till late: ‘still the crowds, and still the speeches, still the low incessant roar and the trampling of countless feet’. But there was something different: ‘I felt no great mass power here,’ he recalled. It wasn’t the same atmosphere of excitement and cheering, with people singing and shaking hands, as in the February Revolution, a Russian told him. ‘Look at these crowds. They came out only to see what would happen. Now they are through and are going home.’22 As the Nevsky emptied, all that was left were the ambulances taking away the last of the dead and wounded, and a few soldiers loitering and drinking greedily from the water hydrants, ‘while others sat in long lines on the curbs, talking in low voices, most of them smoking cigarettes’.23

Tuesday 4 July dawned grey and heavy. As the morning went on, it became suffocatingly hot and oppressive, with people gathering once more for another ‘day of waiting’. The air of expectancy on the streets was ‘like the first days of the revolution’, recalled Louis de Robien.24 Bessie Beatty also sensed the dramatic change in atmosphere, on her return that morning from a trip to the front, when she emerged from the Nicholas Station ‘to find the mercury rising and the Nevsky of the hour strangely different from that with which I had parted’. ‘Turning into the Nevsky that morning was like opening a telegram,’ she remembered:

I could never be quite certain what I would find there, but the first glance always told the whole story. Nevsky was the revolutionary thermometer. When the City of Peter pursued the calm and normal way, the wood-paved avenue indicated the fact. When the hectic passions of revolt ran high, the temper of the populace was as plainly registered.25

The atmosphere was ominous. There wasn’t a tram in sight and hardly any izvozchiki and the shutters on the shops were fastened tight; ‘in front of the Gostinny Dvor [indoor market] men were out with hammers, nailing boards across the plate glass windows’, in which Beatty noticed fresh bullet-holes. There was no mistaking the signs: ‘The Bolsheviki were taking possession of the city.’26 Indeed, the ranks of the Bolshevik-led protesters were dramatically swelled that morning when several thousand ‘evil-looking’ sailors arrived from Kronstadt on a collection of barges, tugboats and steamers. The presence of the belligerent Kronstadters, armed to the teeth with every weapon they could lay hands on and with their cap ribbons bearing the names of their ships ‘turned inside out, so that they [could not] be identified’, ensured that that day’s street demonstrations became progressively more violent, with machine guns mounted on motor lorries firing indiscriminately into the crowds and people – who ‘shrank away’ in fear, at the sight of the sailors – rushing aimlessly in all directions.27*But the same lack of cohesion and leadership prevailed as the previous day: nobody seemed to know whose side anyone was on, ‘least of all the demonstrators themselves’, as Harold Williams noted.28 The violence was confused and elemental, with those among the disorganised mobs who were armed running around firing, often out of sheer fright, and then beating a retreat at the slightest retaliation.

By the afternoon the Liteiny had become ‘very agitated’, just as it had been ‘in the bad days’ of February, wrote Louis de Robien, the atmosphere made even worse by the influx of sailors from Kronstadt. ‘The road was littered with caps and sticks, lying among the debris of plaster knocked from the walls by the bullets,’ he recalled. Everywhere he walked that afternoon he saw groups of ‘surly unbuttoned men with their rifles slung across their backs, in their hands, or under their arms as though they were out shooting’. There was no organisation to this rabble; ‘they dragged their feet’ and were ‘all mixed up with the women’ and did not want to be regimented or to fight in any disciplined way.

Harold Williams watched an ‘endless procession’ crossing the Troitsky Bridge. ‘I did not notice much enthusiasm,’ he recalled. ‘Most of the soldiers looked rather tired and bored and none could give any intelligible reason for their demonstration.’29 As this crowd marched past the British embassy, ‘rough looking men came up to the windows with rifles and ordered us to shut the windows,’ recalled Lady Georgina Buchanan; they were forced to ‘sit in closed rooms, dying of heat’ all day, her husband having declined the Provisional Government’s offer of a safe refuge.30 Her daughter Meriel saw ‘three thousand of the dreaded Kronstadt sailors’ pass by on their way to the Field of Mars and heading for the Nevsky. ‘Looking at them, one wondered what the fate of Petrograd would be if these ruffians with their unshaven faces, their slouching walk, their utter brutality were to have the town at their mercy.’31

At around two in the afternoon heavy fighting broke out on the Nevsky, when the sailors ‘took possession of some machine guns and swept the thoroughfare from end to end, killing and wounding over a hundred civilians and innocent people’. By now the Nevsky was ‘black with people, massed across from wall to wall’, the low incessant roar of thousands of tramping feet mingling with rifle and machine-gun fire.32 Bessie Beatty was there, watching in horror and wondering whether this was to be the culmination of the whispered prophecy she had heard over and over again since her arrival: ‘The streets of Petrograd will run rivers of blood.’33 By late afternoon the situation had become extremely dangerous. Up at the American embassy on Furshtatskaya, ‘as dangerous a mob as I ever hope to see – composed of half-drunken sailors, mutinous soldiers and armed civilians – paraded through our street, threatening people at the windows, and drinking openly from bottles,’ wrote J. Butler Wright in his diary.34

Leighton Rogers and his colleague, Princeton graduate Fred Sikes, had been working late at the National City Bank when they had heard thundering horses’ hooves outside and had ‘got to the balcony just in time to see a troop of some two hundred Cossacks and three light field guns gallop past, officers in the lead shouting and brandishing sabres’.35 It was a thrilling sight, but they knew that if the government had called in the Cossacks* the trouble was serious. They decided to head for home ‘while the going was good’. Dark thunderclouds were gathering overhead and a rainstorm was coming. They were worried about the precious five pounds of sugar they had just managed to obtain through their Russian cook at the bank; it was in a paper bag and would be ruined if it got wet. For safety’s sake they decided to head home across the open space of the Field of Mars, ‘where we could see what was coming’, but they had barely gone fifty yards when they heard the crack of rifles and a ‘few bullets went zing-g-g over our heads, then a flock of them ripped the air and spurted dust around us’.

There they were, clutching their precious bag of sugar, and the only possible shelter they could see was ‘behind the temporary fence around the huge grave of heroes of the Revolution’. Another volley sent them in a mad dash in that direction, ‘with Fred holding the bag of sugar out ahead as though we were trying to catch up with it’. ‘Crash! went one of the field guns beyond the Summer Garden, and we landed flat in the dust behind the fence, Fred guarding the sugar like a bag of diamonds.’ Eventually they emerged from their place of refuge near the grave as a huge clap of thunder broke overhead and the rain came down. They got home safely with their sugar, noticing how quickly the rain had chased the people from the streets. ‘I am wondering if a high pressure hose or two wouldn’t be more effective in these street brawls than streams of lead,’ pondered Rogers later in his diary.36

Over at the British embassy everyone had been at dinner when the doorman had rushed in to tell them that the Cossacks were charging across nearby Suvorov Square on the Palace Embankment. They had all rushed to the big windows in Sir George’s study overlooking it, to see a crowd of Kronstadt sailors pouring across the square and along the quay on either side and, ‘behind them, sweeping in a cloud of dust across the Champ de Mars, came the Cossacks, some of them standing up in their stirrups to fire at the fleeing figures, others brandishing swords, or bending low in the saddles with long lances held at a wicked slant’.37 As they disappeared from view a sharp volley of firing broke out, followed by the loud report of a field gun, and ‘a moment later three or four riderless horses dashed past’. Apparently the troop of Cossacks that Rogers and Sikes had seen riding along the embankment had been ambushed by demonstrators near the Liteiny Bridge and had ‘surged into Liteiny Street at the gallop’, where it was met by Bolsheviks on a makeshift barricade manned by machine guns, which had cut them to pieces. Bessie Beatty was there and watched in horror as the Cossacks ‘wheeled their horses about and fled but not before half a dozen of them had gone down before the guns’.38 Terrified, riderless horses careered off at a gallop down the side streets.

Phil Jordan had hurried over from nearby Furshtatskaya and had seen it all, too, and soon afterwards wrote excitedly to Mrs Francis in St Louis:

The Cossacks and Soldiers had a terrible fight just one block from the embassy. The Cossacks as you know always fight on horseback. They made a charge on the soldiers who was in the middle of the street with machine guns and cannons. My oh my what a slaughter. After 30 minutes of fighting [I] counted in a half a block 28 dead horses. When the Cossacks made their charge the soldiers began to pump the machine guns and you could see men and horses falling on all sides.39

Half an hour later, when US ambassador David Francis visited the scene in the pouring rain, ‘the street was literally and actually running with blood’ and ‘bodies were scattered for four blocks’. Louis de Robien also ventured out from his embassy later that evening to be greeted by ‘a heartrending sight’: ‘dead horses, their skins taut and shining from the shower that had just fallen, lay in the wet roadway between the pools of water, some of which were tinged with red’. De Robien counted twelve of them in the road between Shpalernaya and Sergievskaya, but there were other dead horses further down towards Nevsky. People had already gathered round them and were stealing their bridles and saddles.40 Around thirty horses were killed that day and ten Cossacks. But, as one gloomy Cossack told Leighton Rogers, ‘We can get more men … but such horses – no.’ Another reporter saw a big, burly cab driver weeping over the dead horses. ‘The loss of 12 good horses was too much for an izvoschik’s heart to bear.’41 As for the numbers killed and wounded during those days in July, official figures published by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets talked of four hundred, but the central first-aid services in Petrograd estimated in excess of seven hundred, and on 6 July Novoe vremya claimed that more than one thousand were killed during the riots of 2 and 3 July alone.42*

That evening ‘we went to bed wondering what would happen next,’ wrote Lady Georgina Buchanan to her family in England. ‘All night there was shooting so sleep was nearly impossible.’43 She was grateful to be safely tucked up in her bed, but over at the American embassy, when the guns and cannons had begun roaring again around midnight, the irrepressible Phil Jordan had ‘jumped out of bed and rushed to the Winter Palace Bridge’ [the Palace Bridge] to see what was going on:

The Bolscheviks had Started to come on this Side of the town and the Soldiers was waiting for them at the foot of the bridge. Just as they was about on the middle of the bridge the soldiers opened fire with machine Guns and cannons. it was one grand Sight. the Sky was full of the prettiest fire works you Ever saw. you know during a Revolution or any kind of fighting every body has to lay flat on your Stomach. I was laying flat behind the man that was pumping the machine Gun.44

Later, when Francis was dictating his own version of events in a letter to Jane, musing on when he might return home, he observed that Phil rather hoped they would not leave too soon, as he had told him, ‘we are having so many revolutions here now that it is too interesting for us to think of leaving’.45

Violent torrential rain all night kept most people off the streets and it persisted all through Wednesday 5 July. Shops were closed, no trams were running and only a few izvozchiki were in evidence. Bertie Stopford heard that all the bridges were to be raised to cut off the revolutionary strongholds in the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides. The Bolsheviks were to be ‘polished off’ tonight, he was reliably informed, for the government was determined to bring things under control, with the help of troops ordered back from the front by Kerensky, who was also returning to Petrograd.46 Everyone was now expecting him to single-handedly bring the city back from the brink of catastrophe. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks were in control of the Peter and Paul Fortress and were directing operations, in so far as there was any coherent plan, from their stronghold at the Kschessinska Mansion.

The square in front of the Winter Palace had now been turned into a military camp, with armoured cars, artillery and Red Cross ambulances drawn up in front of the War Department nearby; there were guards posted on every street corner, stopping cars and questioning their drivers. On Suvorov Square, Meriel Buchanan heard troops coming and going all day and machine guns being dragged into position. The Buchanans were still being prevailed upon to leave the capital for their own safety, ‘but naturally we could not and would not do so’, wrote Lady Georgina, as it would set a bad example; after all, ‘what would the colony say if we ran away?’47 But at 6.00 a.m. on the 6th they were woken and asked to move down to the coach house, just as they were, in their slippers and dressing gowns, and be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Government troops had been ordered to seize both the fortress and the Kschessinska Mansion directly across the river. The British embassy was in the direct line of fire and it was feared that the Bolsheviks would turn the big guns of the fortress straight at them. Sir George, however, was not to be hurried: ‘I wish,’ “the old Man” sighed wearily, ‘these people would put it off till a little latah’; and with that he ‘turned on to his other side and relapsed into sleep’.48

When Sir George did finally emerge from his bedroom, he refused to budge from the embassy: ‘Thanks very much, but my wife and daughter want to see it,’ he insisted. When an alarmed Bertie Stopford rushed to the embassy on hearing of the coming assault on the fortress, he found the ambassador ‘on the balcony surrounded by his secretaries – instead of sitting in the cellar, as they had been told to do – eagerly watching the troops advancing on their stomachs across the Troitzka Bridge’. Sir George later recorded that he had spent ‘an exciting morning’ watching, till around 1.00 p.m. From her vantage point in the corner drawing room, Lady Georgina had found it all rather thrilling: ‘One really almost felt one was in the front trenches.’49

Leighton Rogers had seen the first reinforcements arrive, ‘a regiment of soldiers on portable bicycles’ from the front at Dvinsk, who were to take part in the assault on the Peter and Paul. He noted this was a different breed from the ill-disciplined and slovenly troops in the city:

That they were seasoned fighters was obvious from their rugged bronzed faces, the worn look of their equipment, which was complete and ready down to camp-kitchens cooking mess and carts with hay for the horses pulling them. Slowly and keeping the front wheels of their cycles in perfect alignment they rolled along the Quay and turned onto the [Liteiny] bridge. And in a methodical, business-like manner they made ready for an assault. It was a strange scene: these men so calmly preparing for a killing, the brooding Fortress with its red rag of a flag barely stirring in the warm summer air, the ranks of guns pointed across the unruffled Neva.50

As things turned out, little was required beyond a show of government strength; by around 11.30 a.m. the Kschessinska Mansion had capitulated without a fight and about thirty of Lenin’s men were arrested (Lenin himself had been spirited away to a safe house); shortly after 1.00 p.m. the fortress, too, had surrendered. Donald Thompson was with the government forces when they entered the Kschessinska Mansion. They found it stashed with hardware: ‘seventy brand new machine-guns and a great quantity of provisions and arms, as well as numerous commandeered cars in the yard’. Later that day he was shown ‘a lot of what they said were important documents’, which ‘showed that Lenine was unquestionably connected with the Germans’.51 It was now that the Provisional Government pulled its only trump card. The documents found at Lenin’s headquarters showed that the Bolsheviks had been receiving funding from the German General Staff. Such evidence was political dynamite at a time of rampant public hatred of the German enemy. A statement was quickly published in the evening paper, Zhivoe slovo [The Living Word], and some of the details were also passed on to the mutinous regiments in the Petrograd garrison. This news turned the tide against the Bolsheviks and brought waverers over to the side of the government.

Throughout the ‘July Days’, as they became known, Donald Thompson had been out with his camera and tripod, sometimes on foot, but often racing up and down the streets in a hired car with the ‘camera sticking up in the tonneau’, looking ‘not unlike a new kind of gun’, as Florence Harper recalled. ‘In fact it looked so dangerous that it gave us a clear passage up the Nevsky.’ With reckless abandon, Thompson had set up his camera at every opportunity ‘and proceeded to crank’.* But late that afternoon he had witnessed a final, sickening demonstration of mob savagery reminiscent of the February days, which he did not record on film. Out at the Tauride Palace he had seen three revolutionists dressed as sailors fire from a motor car on a group of officers on the steps of the building, after which they had driven away at speed, only to be stopped soon afterwards by a motor truck that blocked the road. The men had been dragged from the car and promptly lynched by the crowd that had gathered. It was a new kind of savagery that he hadn’t seen before: ‘they stretched them up to the cross arm of a telegraph pole, and didn’t tie their hands. Then they drew them off the ground about three feet. All three of them as they were hanging tried to hold on to each other, but the mob knocked their hands away and they slowly strangled to death.’ Hardly the most comforting story with which to conclude a letter to his wife Dot, back home in Kansas.52

With the disturbances now subsiding, Arthur Ransome, in a telegraph to his newspaper that night, summarised the chaos and futility of recent events in curt and dramatic form:

Nothing could be sadder than events of these last few days stop soldiers brought out into streets by agitators on all kinds pretexts march along without slightest understanding what all trouble about stop … whole town including soldiers in state of excited nerves stop single shot anywhere starts fusillade in which suffer innocent persons who fall victims to panic of others stop … No visible object sought by demonstrators and none attained stop for twenty four hours town practically at their mercy and absolutely nothing done … big number people killed wounded and all for no purpose stop this becoming obvious to many demonstrators stop … none of enthusiasm of revolution stop instead puzzled simple folk moving this way and that stirred up by contradictory agitation.53

‘Petrograd is quiet now,’ wrote Harold Williams in his own despatch to the New York Times, ‘but there is a heavy and bitter feeling of humiliation and degradation in the air over this insane and preposterous adventure. Why was it allowed? Why was it not checked at the very outset?’ He was appalled at the unscrupulous and cowardly behaviour of ‘the Leninite plague’ that had stirred up violence in ‘these ignorant masses’ with their ‘criminal propaganda’.54

Kerensky was furious that the government had not been able to take control of the situation during his absence at the front. He was determined that its replacement, formed on 7 July, under his premiership and supplanting a demoralised Prince Lvov, would be allowed ‘dictatorial powers in order to bring the army back to discipline’, and he demanded new controls that did not kowtow to ‘any interference on the part of soldiers’ committees’.55 Retaining his role as Minister of War, Kerensky appointed as commander-in-chief of the army General Kornilov, whose immediate response was to call for the restoration of courts martial and capital punishment for desertion at the front. The mutinous troops of the Petrograd garrison were to be disbanded and punished by being sent to the front; the Kronstadt sailors were disarmed and sent back to their base, although the government sadly lacked the will or the muscle to punish them.

Petrograders awoke on the 7th to discover that ‘for a time, at least, the power of the Bolsheviki had been broken’.56 A warrant had now been issued for the arrest of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik ringleaders. Trotsky was quickly held, but Lenin eluded the round-up. After spending a few days hidden away in a safe house in Petrograd, he travelled north to Razliv, where he hid out in a hay barn before shaving off his beard and donning a wig and workmen’s clothes and escaping to the safety of Helsinki. ‘This Lenine, who escaped … and his confederate, Trotzky, who was a hash slinger* in New York a few months ago, have done more to ruin Russia than any two men I know of in history,’ Donald Thompson told his wife. ‘I think that Kerensky’s only solution is to catch these two and give them the limit. I know that if I had the chance I would take a good deal of pride in shooting both of them.’ Ambassador Francis, rarely so emphatically critical, had no doubts either about the government’s failure to seize the upper hand and arrest Lenin and Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders, try them for treason and execute them. Had they done so in July, he later wrote, ‘Russia probably would not have been compelled to go through another revolution.’57

Ten days after the fighting, a day of mourning was set aside for the lavish funeral rites of seven of the twenty Cossacks killed in the street fighting.58 In stark contrast to the secular funeral for the victims of the February Revolution, the ceremonial on 15 July was an intensely Orthodox one – designed, so one British observer was told, as a ‘rebuke’ to the socialist groups that had organised the Field of Mars burials without any religious ceremony. Apparently some of the relatives of victims buried there had subsequently paid for private services to be conducted over the graves. Kerensky, ever one for high drama and the exploitation of public sentiment, had wished to turn these obsequies into a moment of communal theatrics, thought Ernest Poole, proclaiming that the Cossack heroes should be ‘buried in the graveyard where the Russian grand dukes lay’.59

At five on the afternoon of the 14th, the dead were brought in coffins covered with silver cloth surrounded by a Cossack guard of honour carrying black pennants on their lances, to lie in state in St Isaac’s Cathedral. Heaped with flowers and surrounded by flaming candles, the coffins lay there overnight on catafalques raised high in a position of great honour before the ‘holy gate’ of the iconostasis and surrounded by the cathedral’s ‘towering columns of lapis lazuli and malachite’. An endless stream of mourners poured into the cathedral all night: ‘Cossacks, soldiers, sailors, Red Cross nurses, priests and Tartars, Georgians and Circassians, in costumes and uniforms of a hundred kinds and hues.’60 The cathedral was so dark inside ‘you could see only human shadows pressing close around you,’ recalled Ernest Poole, ‘but on the stone-paved floor you heard the slow shuffle of thousands of feet.’

The following day, after a long and elaborate funeral service featuring the full Russian Orthodox panoply of gleaming icons and crosses, incense and two hundred choirboys – a ‘triumphant symphony of grief’, as Rheta Childe Dorr remembered it – the funeral procession left the cathedral.61 Outside, the vast crowd that had gathered in the square and the surrounding streets awaited it, many weeping and carrying black mourning flags. For once there were no red revolutionary flags in sight. Great waves of music surged back and forth across the streets from numerous bands, as the coffins, ‘borne on ornate canopied hearses drawn by black horses’, passed rows of Cossacks, the horses ‘standing at perfect attention’, and were taken for burial at the Alexander Nevsky monastery at the far end of the Nevsky Prospekt.62

‘Well, at least these were not buried like dogs, as ours were,’ remarked a woman in the crowd, reflecting bitterly on the lack of religious ceremony for the victims of the February Revolution.63 Louis de Robien was moved to see the parents of some of the dead Cossacks – simple peasants from as far away as the Urals or the Caucasus – who had come all this way to follow their sons’ coffins. In Cossack tradition, the dead men’s riderless horses followed the cortège, with stirrups crossed over the empty saddles. One of the horses had been seriously injured, noted De Robien, ‘and was limping pitifully behind its master’s coffin’. On another horse ‘the dead man’s son, a little Cossack of about ten years old, had been put up into the saddle’.64

Never one to miss such a spectacle, Phil Jordan was as always close by, awestruck by the immensity of the occasion: ‘the press Said Over one million people … think of such a large crowd and all frightened half to death. every time the man would strike his base drum the crowd would Shiver,’ he told Jane Francis.65 Rheta Childe Dorr saw the occasion as ‘an hour of hope’ – a demonstration by Kerensky’s government designed to chasten the Soviet and serve as a warning to the extremists. ‘The casual observer in Petrograd would have said that revolutionary disturbances were a thing of the past,’ wrote Bessie Beatty after the Cossack funeral, ‘that order had come to stay. But the casual observer would have failed to understand the breadth and depth of the movements stirring beneath the surface.’ For thirty-year-old Beatty – a convinced socialist, who had covered miners’ strikes in Nevada – the July Days had been ‘only the beginning of the class struggle in Revolution’.66

The day of the Cossack funeral, in his first public appearance as Prime Minister, Alexander Kerensky, dressed in a plain khaki uniform and puttees, had swept up in a limousine as the last coffin was carried out of St Isaac’s, to be greeted by ‘a mighty cheer’ as people rushed forward shouting his name. He had made a short speech on the steps of the cathedral and then ‘waved the crowd to silence and bade them stand quietly back’, before walking on hatless and with bowed head behind the procession. ‘He would not have been human if he had not felt a thrill of triumph at this reception,’ remarked Rheta Childe Dorr. Ernest Poole noted Kerensky’s charismatic power: ‘On that day the government seemed embodied in this one man’, and in the first weeks after the July Days every foreign visitor to Petrograd had wanted to meet the new Prime Minister.67

But he was a difficult man to see, ‘as he allow[ed] himself to be got at by everybody’, noted Jessie Kenney, having been told that Kerensky’s ministers were trying to ‘guard him against dissipation of his energies’. On 21 July she and Emmeline Pankhurst were finally invited to the Winter Palace to meet him. ‘People say that he wants to be another Napoleon,’ Kenney had noted in her diary a few days before, and when they arrived that morning Kerensky seemed to be living up to the role, adopting the appropriate pose on cue and seated at a table formerly used by the Tsar, ‘with the thumb of one hand in his coat’. ‘I wondered at the time if this were the Napoleonic gesture.’68 He then ushered Pankhurst to a seat by the fireplace where they chatted in French, with an interpreter occasionally adding things in Russian at Kerensky’s behest. Kenney noted the animation with which he spoke, but:

I did not have the impression of a man dedicated to one end, in the way that Lenin was … or Plekhanov, or Mrs Pankhurst. He had been a fine lawyer, was an enthusiast, an orator of eloquence, but did not have the restraint over himself that the others possessed. There was vacillation here, a man open to his passion and his moods … Quite obviously he was no match for Lenin, who, relentless and dominating, would ride mercilessly over everything and everyone in his path.

All in all, Kenney found Kerensky rather overbearing and noted an antipathy towards Pankhurst; perhaps, she wondered, he was jealous that so many people had asked to meet her. Before they left he made a point of indicating the ornate silver inkstand and quill pen placed on his desk: ‘The Czar used to sign his documents with this pen,’ he told them portentously.69

Kenney concluded that here was a man trapped between too many conflicting forces and the task was simply too much for him. He certainly did not lack the magnetism required for the role of Prime Minister, thought Rheta Childe Dorr, but even Kerensky could not ‘take that huge, disorganized, uneducated, restless, yearning Russian mob by the scruff of the neck and compel it to listen to reason’.70 Dorr’s compatriot, Princess Cantacuzène-Speransky, had a similar view. Kerensky ‘seemed to lose his grip on things’ after the July Days – whether from ill health or the strain of his overwhelming responsibilities. She noticed that the ‘man of the people’ image of the early days of the revolution – a man whom people trusted for his honesty and patriotism – had receded; and now that he was living at the Winter Palace in rooms formerly occupied by Alexander III, ‘sleeping in the emperor’s bed, using his desk and his motors, giving audiences with much form and ceremony’, he seemed to have lost that common touch and become ever more grandiloquent. Like Kenney, she saw a ‘man struggling to maintain his personal popularity by being forced into uneasy compromises’.71

Kerensky ‘dashes busily around, from rear to front and from one front to another, making impassioned speeches, but disintegration goes on’, wrote Pauline Crosley on 13 July. She too remained unconvinced of his ability to pull things together: ‘My Russian friends assure me matters will become “normal” (normally unsettled) for a time – that the anarchists will not make another serious attempt until they have completed their organization, that they now know how easy it is to take the city and the next time they capture it they will keep it.’72

In this continuing state of unease, Petrograd at the end of July 1917 remained a city in flux resembling an armed camp. It was also a city (half the size of New York) which the collapse of the old regime in February had left without any effective, organised police protection, bar a hastily created Militia.73* Although the unrest had been quelled for now, it did not feel any more secure than previously, and the rumours of further trouble continued to be ‘large and varied’. ‘A curious state of mind came over the Russian public,’ recalled Willem Oudendijk of that late summer. ‘Nothing good was expected any more, no hope filled anybody’s heart, a dull sense of acquiescence in whatever further misfortune the day might bring pervaded everywhere.’ Government, such as it was, wrote Rheta Childe Dorr, continued to exist ‘only at the will of the mob’.74

But the Bolshevik leadership, too, was in disarray, having proved unable to respond to the fast-moving demonstrations in July. Lenin had prevaricated on whether or not to steer the unrest towards a second revolution and in the end had opted for ‘wait and see’ tactics, as too had the Central Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. The truth was that the revolutionary vanguard in Petrograd had been as uncertain of the direction the demonstrations would take – proletarian revolution or coup d’état? – as anyone else. And with the Bolsheviks suffering the body blow of the damaging revelations about their links to German money, they had been forced into retreat. But for how long?

The crisis in the war had also escalated that month, with continuing Russian military disasters, including the surrender of two Army Corps and a major defeat at Tarnopol; extensive territories in Galicia and Bukovina had also been lost. By 22 July one million Russian troops were in retreat; many thousands had been captured and even more had deserted. There was now real fear of a German advance on the capital. Arthur Ransome was desperate to leave. He had had yet another bout of dysentery (his fourth that year) and was weak and hungry and longing for home. He could not expect his family – even living under wartime rationing in England – to have any comprehension of how difficult things currently were in Russia:

You do not see the bones sticking through the skin of the horses in the street. You do not have your porter’s wife beg for a share in your bread allowance because she cannot get enough to feed her children. You do not go to a tearoom to have tea without cakes, without bread, without butter, without milk, without sugar, because there are none of these things. You do not pay seven shillings and ninepence a pound for very second-rate meat. You do not pay forty-eight shillings a pound for tobacco.*

‘If ever I do get home,’ he concluded, ‘my sole interest will be gluttony.’75

Donald Thompson was equally despondent. He, too, had been losing a lot of weight. ‘My stomach has the right to have a personal grudge against me,’ he told his wife, ‘for it is so seldom that I give it even a taste of proper food.’ So hungry and exhausted was he that he now promised her this would be his last foreign assignment. ‘Today [8 July] I feel as you always want me to feel – sick and tired of being a war photographer.’76 On the 15th he started making plans to travel home; but he would not leave without first getting a permit, personally signed by Kerensky, to take his precious film footage and photographic images out of the country. On 1 August he finally caught the Trans-Siberian express to Vladivostok. From there he picked up a steamer to Japan and on across the Pacific to California.

Thompson had no regrets to be leaving at last. Five months previously he had seen the people of Petrograd march with a clearness of intent – for the idealistic revolutionary concepts of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity; but now he could find no more words of hope. ‘I see Russia going to hell, as a country never went before.’77

* Arthur Ransome wrote similarly of the baiting of the bourgeoisie: ‘everyone who wears a collar will be counted an enemy of mankind’.

* One French resident heard that tobacconists’ shops were a popular target, as too were pharmacies and perfumeries – for their cologne and alcohol, on which the looters got drunk.

* There are no precise figures on how many sailors from Kronstadt headed into Petrograd that day. Some say a couple of thousand, while other sources estimate up to 20,000.

* These were eight squadrons of Don Cossacks – the only totally loyal troops on whom the government could still depend.

* Much like February 1917, the casualty figures cited were entirely arbitrary. Nobody had any idea of the numbers killed on those days and they ranged between four and five hundred, but are likely to have been much higher.

* One fellow newspaper correspondent apparently even claimed excitedly to Ambassador Francis that Thompson was ‘taking pictures of the fight on the Nevsky with a gun in each hand and loaded down with ammunition’.

* A waiter in a cheap diner.

* In parallel with the duality of the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government both vying for political control, the Militia that replaced the old Tsarist police force was composed of two rival bodies: the city militia controlled by the Petrograd City Duma, established to serve everyone along democratic principles; and the autonomous workers’ militia, formed to serve only the interests of the working classes and the objectives of the revolution.

* Around £20 ($29) and £120 ($172) respectively in today’s money.

12

‘This Pest-Hole of a Capital’

In the early hours of Tuesday 1 August, Nicholas Alexandrovich – formerly Tsar of All the Russias, but now just plain Colonel Romanov – was sent away from Tsarskoe Selo with his family, by rail to Western Siberia. They would be left to languish at the Governor’s House in Tobolsk for the next nine months while the government debated what best to do with them.* Their former home, the Alexander Palace, was left empty; and the Tsar’s private railway line that had linked Tsarskoe Selo to the capital was torn up, its rails and sleepers sent for reuse elsewhere. Few foreign observers in Petrograd had had much to say about the demise of the Romanov dynasty after more than three hundred years; the Tsar’s removal – the details of which were not revealed, or his destination, either – left most of them indifferent, as people in the capital continued to struggle with desperate food shortages, unstable government and civil unrest. Tsarist Russia already seemed a long way in the past.

A few chosen members of the forty-strong US Red Cross Mission that had arrived in town on 25 July were, however, allowed sight of the interior of the deserted palace not long after the imperial family was taken away, prior to the palace’s opening to the curious as a museum. They noticed many touching reminders of the Tsar’s family: books open on tables, sheet music still propped up on the piano: ‘Evidently it had been left in a great hurry, things lying around, toys of the children on the floor, an unfinished letter on the Empress’s desk,’ commented George Chandler Whipple.1 ‘Here and there on a table or mantelpiece lay a number of Kodak snapshots taken evidently by the children,’ recalled his colleague, Orrin Sage Wightman. Perhaps most poignant of all was the sight of one of the Tsarevich Alexey’s abandoned French exercise books, in which he had written his name at the top of the page ‘and in his childish writing was inscribed in French, “The French lesson is very hard today.”’ This brief, private glimpse of a now-vanished era had been quite ‘overwhelming’, wrote Wightman. ‘To get into the life of a deposed Czar, not long after the nation had fixed it up as a museum, but when the marks of his living presence were still fresh, was indeed a privilege the memory of which will never leave me.’2

The members of the Red Cross Mission had travelled to Petrograd from Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railway, in the imperial train in which Nicholas II had signed the abdication. Accommodated in its nine sumptuous carriages, they had enjoyed the comforts of ‘nickle-silver toilets, beautiful Russian leather seats, silk covered cushions’ and had slept in ‘beds of damask linen with pillow cases of silk and all marked with the double eagle and crest’.3 Bessie Beatty was at the Nicholas Station to witness their arrival, which was greeted by Ambassador Francis and his staff. While she admired the group’s demonstrable ‘wealth of human sympathy’, the expertise of its team of doctors and sanitary engineers, and the seventy tons of much-needed surgical supplies it had brought with it, she wondered ‘what sort of a dent’ it could possibly make in Russia at this late stage.4*

No sooner had the mission emerged from the station than Orrin Sage Wightman noticed how ‘shot up’ Petrograd’s crowded, dusty streets looked. There was no sign of any police; no regulation of traffic, and you took your life in your hands trying to cross the street.5 All the buildings were ‘dingy and shabby and plastered over with bills and posters relating to the revolution’. They covered ‘the stores, the churches, the palaces, the bases of statues, the telegraph poles, the fences. Wherever a poster would stick, there it was pasted. This gave the city a very unkempt appearance.’ All sign of imperial splendour had been defaced or stripped away and there were red flags everywhere, including one ‘placed in the hands of the bronze statue of Catherine the Great in the park on the Nevsky’. The only respite came when for three days small gala booths decorated with flowers, branches of yew and evergreens and bunting sprung up across the city, selling bonds for the government’s recently launched Liberty Loan.6*

Some of the members of the mission were accommodated at the Hotel de France on Morskaya. ‘A wretched place, but the best now available,’ recalled civil engineer and pioneer of public health reform, George Chandler Whipple. The rooms were ‘none too clean’; breakfast was chewy black bread and weak tea, reinforcing the realisation that ‘we were in a war held city’. Indeed, such were the drastic food shortages that the hotel manager had warned them ‘that sometimes he could give us a good meal and sometimes he could not’.7 Whipple and some of his colleagues soon transferred from the dirty and vile-smelling ‘Buggery’, as they had nicknamed the infested Hotel de France, to the distinctly cleaner and more cheerful Hotel d’Europe, where they were thrilled to get coffee with boiled milk at breakfast. It did not take many days of Petrograd rations for the group to fall upon the hospitality offered at a reception in their honour at the American embassy, during which J. Butler Wright noted how the Red Cross Mission ‘consumed tea, sugar, and white bread in an alarming manner’.8

Over at the Astoria – or the ‘War Hotel’ as she called it, and appropriately so, as its exterior was still battle-scarred – Bessie Beatty was pleased to note a distinct improvement in conditions, thanks to recent repairs and renovations. ‘After living for a whole summer each unto himself alone, breakfasting, lunching, teaing, and dining in our own rooms, we suddenly came out of hiding and looked one another over’:

The bloodstains of the Revolution had been scoured from the rose-colored carpet in the drawing-room. The boards had come down from the broken windows, and new glass and gorgeous crushed mulberry curtains had taken their place. The dining-room, a few weeks ago the repository of armless chairs and legless tables, dumb victims of the vengeance of an angry mob, now fronted the world arrayed in white napery.9

The casual observer might have imagined that residents at the Astoria were living in the lap of luxury, ‘but there was none’. The food was as dire as ever: at lunch the first course was ‘chopped meat and kasha stuffed into cabbage leaves, and the second the same chopped meat and kasha inadequately hidden by the half of a cucumber’.10

Once the Red Cross Mission had unloaded and stored its precious medicines and food supplies under government protection, it had begun to evaluate their supply and distribution across Russia, and the setting up of mobile disinfection stations to counter the alarming spread of typhus. George Chandler Whipple had felt that it would have an uphill struggle: ‘there will be no use to talk cleanliness to people who are threatened with starvation,’ he noted in his diary.11 The bread queues were alarming and he was struck by how the crude methods used for cutting and weighing the bread rations slowed things down, making the wait even more interminable for those who had already been queuing for hours. It was clear to him that the food crisis had been ‘made doubly severe by the influx of soldiers, refugees and others’, for war had brought an increase of the city’s population from two to three million. ‘The authorities fully expect a famine in Petrograd this winter, with the starvation of several hundred thousand perhaps, unless some drastic steps are taken.’ Whipple noticed how huge stockpiles of wood were appearing everywhere, brought in to the quaysides by great flat-sided barges. Petrograd was a wood-burning city where little or no coal was available, and the price of wood was rocketing. There was nothing to buy in the shops and no shoes to be had anywhere – clothing, too, would become scarce in the coming winter, he noted. People might still be broiling in the heat of August, but come September when the rain set in, things would change dramatically.12

Fellow Americans whom Whipple met, and who had been working on welfare projects in the city, seemed beaten down by the losing battle. Franklin Gaylord, who had lived in Petrograd for eighteen years and had devoted himself to working with the Mayak (Lighthouse) – the Russian affiliate of the YMCA – had come to the grim conclusion that Petrograd was ‘the worst, the rottenest, the stinkingest city in Europe, the streets are bad, labor is hopeless, there is no sanitation, we can’t drink the water, we can’t get food, the rooms are full of bedbugs, we don’t see the sun all winter, it is cold and gloomy and the air isn’t fit to breathe’.13 It was a discouraging start, but the Red Cross Mission duly went about its fact-finding duties, visiting food shops, the Red Cross and other welfare storehouses, travelling to hospitals and nursing communities in and around the city, inspecting waterworks and sewage plants. Typhus, TB and scurvy were the mission’s major medical concerns, and its members found working with the Russians a challenge. Dr Orrin Sage Wightman thought them ‘like a lot of children, who, after a long period of oppression have suddenly acquired a liberty which has been turned to license’. He was shocked by the ‘laziness and indifference’ he saw everywhere: the ‘supreme idea of the people’ of Petrograd appeared to be to do nothing. ‘The spirit of indolence, which they interpret as freedom, has so abased them that nothing short of intense suffering can bring them to their senses.’14

‘All here is chaos!’ wrote Raymond Robins, the most high-profile member of the mission and a distinguished economist and progressive politician back home.* As an evangelical Christian, he had travelled to Petrograd with a crusading attitude to the challenges facing them. But he had to admit that life in the capital was ‘a day to day affair … Uncertainty is everywhere … the outlook is stormy in the extreme’.15 This sense of uncertainty was further underlined in his mind when he met Kerensky on 1 August and found him utterly worn out, ‘so busy with the mere task of keeping things together from day to day that we can see him for only formal moments. He seems so high strung and overworked as to make one wonder whether he can hold the line for the next six months’ – that is, until a government could be formed by an elected Constituent Assembly.

Like his colleagues Robins saw the future of Russia hanging on the economic situation and the perilous food shortages. He was deeply concerned about the long lines for bread, meat, milk and sugar: ‘As go these lines, so goes the Provisional Government. If they shorten, the Government lives; if they lengthen, it will die.’16 But the Provisional Government seemed to him to be ‘men who are dreamers with responsibility and no capacity to bring their dream into being now that they have the power’. Far too much, in his opinion, depended on one man – Kerensky – ‘the only possibility of control this side of reaction or a military dictator’. But for now, at least, Robins was still clinging to a stubborn romantic idealism about Russia’s future; ‘the Russian will hold fast to a spiritual content and will bring back worship and reverence to the life of man,’ he wrote hopefully to his wife Margaret on 6 August. ‘He will found the great social democracy and give to the race the best chance for the equality of opportunity, freedom and brotherhood.’17

On 21 August another blow to Russia’s war effort came with news that the strategically important Baltic port of Riga, 350 miles to the south-west, had fallen to the Germans – or, rather, its Russian defenders had simply abandoned it to them without a fight. Despite this, a state of denial about the Russian army’s disintegration persisted in the capital. Willem Oudendijk had gone to the opera that evening with his wife to hear Chaliapin sing in Rimsky Korsakov’s Rusalka: the audience had been wildly enthusiastic, rushing forward from their seats and ‘recalling Chaliapin before the footlights over and over again at the end of every Act. There seemed no thought of revolution, or the Germans, or war that evening. Petrograd was now in the war zone; but what did it matter? Here was Chaliapin singing! Cheer! And applaud! Bravo, Chaliapin!’18

The fall of Riga had come soon after a last-ditch attempt had been made at a conference held in Moscow to bridge the gap between the warring bourgeois and socialist political groups and unite them behind Kerensky’s government. He himself had appeared there in military tunic, flanked by two adjutants and adopting his distinctive Napoleonic pose – which had now earned him the sobriquet ‘Napoleonchik’ – and had made one of his familiar emotional bids for support. But even Kerensky’s ‘brilliant but fiery improvisation’, as Louis de Robien observed, no longer sufficed. Russians might traditionally ‘get even more drunk than the French themselves on eloquence and empty phrases’, but mere words were no longer ‘enough to feed the people or put a stop to anarchy’.19 Onstage Kerensky had been challenged by the commander-in-chief he had appointed in July – General Lavr Kornilov – who had given an uncompromising speech in which he laid out the draconian measures he deemed necessary to bring Russia back from the brink of defeat by the Germans; it had brought the conference to its feet.20

During her weeks in Petrograd, Bessie Beatty had observed how Kerensky had struggled to ‘follow a middle course’ that would satisfy both the reactionary right and the Bolshevik left, and how he had resisted calls to resort to force, as Kornilov would have wished. She felt that he had been right to do so and that ‘the masses would regard any attempt to install a dictator as an attack on their Revolution and would desert the man responsible for it’. Emmeline Pankhurst had laughed at her when she had ventured this opinion at dinner. Russia must have a strong hand, she asserted, and Kerensky was a weakling. The only man who could ‘save the situation’ was Kornilov, who would ‘rule with an iron hand’.21 The appointment of the right-wing Kornilov after the disruption of the July Days, despite opposition from Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries within the government, had been seen as a toughening up by Kerensky, an attempt to shore up the floundering fortunes of his government in the face of mounting Bolshevik opposition. Kornilov, from a humble Cossack background, was a self-taught career soldier, a patriot and, in the eyes of his men, ‘a natural chieftain’.22 But he was no conciliator; and no politician, either. He was, in the opinion of General Knox, who had observed him at close hand at the front, a ‘hard-headed soldier of strong will and great courage’ who had won respect by deeds and not words.23 Violently opposed to the Soviets and their soldiers’ committees, Kornilov was now demanding absolute control over the army, at the front and in the rear.

Sir George Buchanan could see that Kerensky had lost ground since the July Days and that Kornilov, ‘were he to assert his influence over the army and were the latter to become a strong fighting force … would be master of the situation’. But for now the two men needed each other: ‘Kerensky cannot hope to retrieve the military situation without Korniloff, who is the only man capable of controlling the army; while Korniloff cannot dispense with Kerensky, who, in spite of his waning popularity, is the man best fitted to appeal to the masses and to secure their acceptance of the drastic measures which must be taken in the rear if the army is to face a fourth winter campaign.’24

The Moscow conference, which had ended in stalemate, had shown that there was clearly an irreconcilable level of antagonism between the two men. Frustrated by Kerensky’s reluctance to accord him the dictatorial powers he needed to wrest back control over the army, Kornilov sent Kerensky an ultimatum on 27 August: that he should resign as Prime Minister and cede him full military control. To back up his claim, he began moving troops on Petrograd from the north-western front under General Alexander Krymov, intent on arresting anarchist and Bolshevik troublemakers, bringing the Petrograd garrison to heel and forestalling the Bolshevik coup against the Provisional Government that he knew would come sooner or later. ‘It is time to hang the Germans’ supporters and spies led by Lenin,’ Kornilov had said. ‘And we must destroy the Soviets so that they can never assemble again.’25 This was the only way the army could be saved from dissolution, and the country from chaos.

Kornilov’s challenge had ‘thrown Petrograd into an uproar’. Everyone dreaded the city once more becoming a battleground.26 The loss of Riga had already created panic, with people besieging the railway stations for any train out to the safety of the countryside. ‘In the War Hotel, storm center of the storm center,’ wrote Bessie Beatty, ‘we sat and awaited the inevitable.’ Arno Dosch-Fleurot advised her to get out before the trouble started: ‘The hotel may still be here in the morning, but it may not, and there is no use in taking chances,’ he told her. Military men to whom Beatty talked at the Astoria agreed that both Kornilov and Kerensky were determined characters, ‘so it will be a fight to the finish’. Most of them were eagerly awaiting the arrival of Kornilov: ‘For them it was all settled. Kerensky would be overthrown – Korniloff would capture the city. The death-penalty would be restored; the leaders of the Soviet would be hanged. Russia’s troubles would be over.’27

Sunday 27 August dawned warm, cloudless and sunny; the Nevsky ‘was crowded with the usual shifting masses of pedestrians, peopled impelled this way, drawn that, hurrying, loafing, hating, loving, living in spite of war and revolution,’ recalled Leighton Rogers.28 Sir George Buchanan had headed out to the golf course at Murino and it wasn’t until his return in the evening that he was informed, when summoned to the Russian Foreign Office with the new French ambassador Joseph Noulens, that Kornilov was marching on Petrograd and Kerensky had declared him a traitor. Frantic preparations were now being made across the city to resist this advance. But to achieve this, Kerensky had been forced into the necessary compromise of appealing to the Bolsheviks of the Petrograd Soviet for support. Lenin was in hiding in Finland; from jail Trotsky advocated supporting Kerensky for now, in order to defuse the Kornilov threat. At their stronghold at the Smolny Institute, where they had been transferred from the Tauride Palace in July, the Petrograd Soviet marshalled the leaders of the garrison and the new workers’ voluntary militia – the Red Guards, formed after the February Revolution – to organise workers, sailors from Kronstadt and ordinary civilians in the defence of the city.

Thousands of workers were given back weapons that had been confiscated from them after the July Days and, in what seemed an act of madness, supplied with additional guns and ammunition. All over the streets of Petrograd groups of militia began drilling. Bessie Beatty witnessed workers from the munitions factories, assisted by engineers and sappers, digging trenches and building barricades, in a dash to ‘throw a trench around the city’. Phil Jordan described seeing ‘thousands and thousands of Soldiers’ at the Nicholas Station just arrived from the front, who were marched straight to the Nevsky to dig trenches. ‘Just think of diging trenches in the heart of the city,’ he crowed, as he anticipated yet more violence on the streets.29

The following day, word was out that General Krymov’s ‘Savage Division’ was only two days away. Meriel Buchanan recalled people being as fearful of this – Kornilov’s advance guard of four thousand largely Muslim Caucasian cavalry, legendary for its ferocity – as they were of the Kronstadt sailors.30 Members of the diplomatic corps were advised to leave for Moscow or Finland, but once again Sir George Buchanan refused to leave the British colony without diplomatic protection, and his wife and daughter would not countenance evacuation, either. Instead, Lady Georgina’s British Colony Hospital, which had recently closed down, was made ready to offer refuge to women and children from the community, should the need arise. Although US ambassador David Francis felt in no way threatened or worried about his personal safety, he acknowledged that many of his fellow nationals were, and in response he instructed J. Butler Wright to charter a small steamboat, ‘upon which Americans who so desire can take refuge in the event disturbances should occur’. Meanwhile, as Wright noted in his diary, the diplomatic corps had found itself ‘in the unacceptable situation of having to go through the motions of agreeing with and supporting the government while it secretly wish[ed] fervently that Kornilov might win’.31

Petrograd was now under martial law: ‘The air is full of rumours,’ wrote Raymond Robins, ‘it is a wild time.’32 At around five that morning Florence Harper had been woken by the sound of firing in the square outside the Astoria and heard a surge of people coming into the lobby below. Peeping out of her room, she saw sailors banging on the doors of several rooms and marching Russian officers away under guard. Bessie Beatty was disturbed by the noise, too, and when she ventured out of her room found a ‘sea of cutlasses’ in the hall outside. It was ‘filled with Russian sailors, perhaps a couple hundred of them, husky chaps with rifles in their hands, and every rifle topped with the most bloodthirsty-looking blade I had ever seen’. ‘Life holds no further terrors for the man or woman who has faced two hundred such weapons all gathered in one spot,’ she observed. In comparison, ‘an Atlantic Ocean submarine would seem like a friendly neighbor come to call’.33

At first she thought the men were Kronstadters; they had taken possession of the hotel and were now examining passports and searching rooms. It turned out they were from the Soviet and ‘had decided to take things into their own hands and arrest all officers whom they suspected of counter-revolutionary tendencies’ and who might side with Kornilov. In the process they had terrorised the female residents of the hotel, who were huddled in groups on the landings. Some of the men forced their way into Harper’s room, searched it and walked away with her camera. At lunch she found everyone buzzing with a mix of excitement and fear. Forty Russian officers had been arrested and taken away from the hotel; seven more were arrested later. All were hauled off to the Peter and Paul Fortress on a charge of ‘plotting against the revolution’.34

And then, as suddenly as the Kornilov threat had manifested itself, it evaporated. On Wednesday the 30th the papers published a note from Kerensky’s government saying that the ‘revolt’ – if that indeed had been what it was – had failed. Kornilov’s march on Petrograd was beaten before it even got started; beaten not by any military action to repel it, but by the pro-Bolshevik railway workers, who had refused to move his troop trains and had also sabotaged the rail network needed to get the trains to Petrograd, by jamming signal points, damaging bridges and tearing up or blocking the lines.* Troop trains full of Krymov’s men had been left at a standstill. And when his advance guard did encounter opposition troops, they had refused to act against Kerensky and the Petrograd Soviet; indeed, they had openly fraternised with these troops and were persuaded by them to stand down.35

Kerensky now put out an order for Kornilov’s arrest. His position throughout this debacle had been highly ambivalent. British embassy counsellor Francis Lindley felt that Kerensky – ‘torn between his fear of aiding a counter-revolutionary movement and his honest desire to assert the authority of the Government’ – had made the wrong decision. ‘Like all socialists in a similar position he preferred his party loyalty to the good of his country. It was the end of him.’36 Whether or not Kerensky had genuinely believed that Kornilov was intending a coup against him, rather than the suppression of the Bolshevik-led Soviet, remains unclear. Willem Oudendijk certainly felt that Kerensky’s ‘nervous fear of being replaced by Kornilov made him act with reckless and fateful impulsiveness’.37

US resident Pauline Crosley reported widespread rumours in diplomatic circles that it had been ‘fully understood’ that Kornilov had intended to establish a Military Government – ‘with Kerensky’s knowledge and approval’ – to protect Russia from a Bolshevik coup; that a dramatic and triumphant entry into Petrograd had been planned for Kornilov’s troops, but that ‘during the night … some one or some thought suggested to Kerensky that he would lose power and prestige as Korniloff’s increased’. Her conclusion was that Kerensky’s ambition ‘could not stand that pressure’ and that he had ‘foiled an honest attempt to save Russia’, as a result of which Russia was ‘worse off than ever before’.38

Either way, the Kornilov affair prompted an inevitable upsurge in support for the Bolsheviks, who quickly recovered the ground they had lost after the debacle of the July Days. On 1 September Kornilov was arrested and taken to jail. On 4 September, Trotsky and many of the Bolshevik leaders were released from prison on Kerensky’s orders. Kerensky had now proclaimed Russia a republic, but nobody in the Soviet or the former government wanted to work with him in yet another doomed coalition. As a last desperate measure, and one guaranteed to further alienate public opinion, Kerensky assumed command of the army and imposed his own temporary French revolutionary-style Directorate of five, with himself as virtual dictator.

Florence Harper bumped into Arno Dosch-Fleurot in the lobby of the Astoria after news came of Kornilov’s arrest. ‘We both used language not exactly polite,’ she recalled. ‘I was filled with blind rage. We all knew it was the last chance. The Bolsheviki were armed; the Red Guard was formed. The split was definite; Kerensky was doomed.’39 Everyone in diplomatic circles agreed that his government had been fatally weakened. David Francis’s sympathies were with Kornilov, although he was obliged to preserve an impartial stance in public. Kornilov was ‘a brave soldier and patriot whose mistake was making demands before public sentiment was sufficiently strong in their favor to force their acceptance.’40 He felt that the Provisional Government could only save the situation if it took ‘prompt and decisive steps to restore the discipline of the army and navy’. But within the US embassy he was the only person with any remaining hope that this might happen. ‘Everyone, with only the exception of D.R.F., believes that a clash – and a serious one – is bound to occur soon,’ wrote J. Butler Wright. He and his colleagues were deeply despondent, having seen Kornilov as Russia’s last hope. And they were beginning to doubt the sixty-seven-year-old ambassador’s grip on the situation; he seemed tired, old and out of touch.41

The failure of the Kornilov march on Petrograd at the end of August did much to accelerate the departure, which had already begun after the July Days, of foreign nationals from Petrograd. All remaining embassies in the city now began making contingency plans for the evacuation of their staff and their colonies of expatriates. ‘All those whose duties permit them to go are being sent away,’ Pauline Crosley told her family. ‘All Embassies are planning for the escape of those who must remain. There is no fear of the Germans coming soon, but a serious Bolshevik uprising is anticipated, and its success means Anarchy.’42 At the end of August, J. Butler Wright was sent by David Francis to ‘spy out a possible exit from this pest-hole of a capital in case the government blows up or we are forced to evacuate suddenly’.43 Deciding he would take no chances, on 9 September Wright put his wife and son on a train to Moscow, further away from the German front, and where the internal situation was less fraught.

Naval attaché Walter Crosley, on Francis’s instructions, had meanwhile chartered ‘a steamer large enough to accommodate the entire American Colony’, which had been anchored on the Neva. Plans were in place by 3 September for the evacuation of 266 people: the entire US colony, embassy and consulate staff and members of the Red Cross Mission; but this was a last resort, if their safe and orderly evacuation to Moscow by rail should prove impossible. The US consulate had also already evacuated a large amount of its archives to its counterpart in Moscow by special courier, and other important documents were sent out from the embassy with the Red Cross Mission when it left for there.44

The British had been making similar contingency plans, even discussing the possibility of mooring ‘two of our submarines’ in the Neva opposite the embassy for an emergency evacuation. British consul Arthur Woodhouse observed in a letter that ‘you can size up the situation by the number of Britishers leaving the country. In a word, it is not a fit place for English ladies and children.’ But his duty ‘plainly requires my presence here,’ he told his wife in response to her pleas that he should leave. ‘I must stay on to the end … The office is practically a tourist bureau now-a-days. Ordinary consular work is a thing of the past.’45

Some of the British families who had lived in Petrograd for generations and who had built homes and established businesses there were already preparing to return to England, forced to abandon their businesses and leave many of their treasured possessions behind and travel with only what they stood up in. ‘I was wearing all my clothes, I couldn’t bend my arms at all, and I had gold sovereigns stitched into my coat lining. Mother carried her precious silver-wedding teapot,’ recalled Dorothy Shaw, who was thirteen at the time and whose father was a manager at Thornton’s woollen mill in Petrograd; they were one of thirty-six English families who worked there and had settled in the vicinity of the mill. She and her mother made their way to Bergen where, after a three-week wait, they got on HMS Vulture, a British official despatch boat operating between England and Norway, escorted by two torpedo boats, which brought them and other British refugees back across a North Sea bristling with German U-boats.46

It had been a deeply dispiriting time for British families such as this, having to watch helplessly as their factories fell idle, irreparably damaged by punitive strikes or forced to close with the onslaught of impossible wage demands. Throughout 1917 British nationals saw the fortunes their ancestors had built up in imperial St Petersburg – some since the eighteenth century – haemorrhage away in the chaos of revolutionary Petrograd. ‘Every Sunday the English Church along the quay grew emptier,’ recalled Edward Stebbing. ‘Familiar faces were missing from the weekly working parties in the Embassy, there was sadness, separation, dispersal everywhere.’ The strain of holding things together was also telling on Sir George Buchanan. Stebbing was shocked to see ‘how really ill he looked’. With the threat of another revolution growing, Sir George sent out a request to all British subjects to notify the consulate of their address, telephone number and full details of all family members. He wanted to ensure that British nationals should leave in safety, and with dignity, if and when the time came.47

Members of the Russian aristocracy, fearful of the virulent antipathy they now encountered, were also selling up and leaving Russia. ‘Everyone would like to emigrate, but it is difficult because of the impossibility of taking money out, or of being sent sums of money from Russia,’ noted Louis de Robien; his embassy was being besieged daily by Russians wanting to go to France.48 Even Elizaveta Naryshkina, the Empress’s former Mistress of the Robes and the most senior lady at court, was now selling off her valuables. She had a Sèvres porcelain bust of Marie-Antoinette, given by the Queen herself to her grandfather, which she was desperate for the Louvre to buy, in order that she might survive.49 This option seemed infinitely preferable to the bust ‘one day grac[ing] the parlour of a Transatlantic pork merchant’. Out on the streets, members of the old imperial aristocracy were increasingly required to run the gauntlet of public hostility. They tried not to look conspicuous, for fear of drawing attention to themselves, for a good deal of animosity was now directed against anyone – be they Russian or a foreigner – perceived as being representative of the bourgeoisie. ‘Everyone who was well dressed looked anxious,’ noted Princess Cantacuzène-Speransky; ‘no one wore elegant clothes.’ ‘I discreetly cover any article of dress that might rouse their ire with something almost shabby when I go on the street,’ wrote Pauline Crosley.50

French actress Paulette Pax made sure to turn in her fur collar so that it did not show, whenever she went out, and asked her maid to lend her back the worn-out boots she had given her some time previously.51 Phil Jordan constantly worried when the ambassador went out on one of his grand walks through Petrograd: ‘Boss, you’ve got to stop struttin’ around in that fur hat, that fur collar on your coat, and those spats and cane,’ he admonished him. He was right to do so, for foreigners were bawled out for even the most modest manifestation of smart dress.52 Claude Anet was reprimanded for being a bourgeois on the Nevsky: ‘You don’t belong to us,’ he was told. ‘You are wearing gloves.’ Ella Woodhouse recalled being out wearing her ordinary overcoat and matching hat, when she boarded a crowded tram. ‘The tram jolted, I was pushed against some strap-hanger, who turned on me angrily, and I heard another woman passenger say: “Doloi shlyapku!’” – ‘Down with the hat!’– it being perceived as the insignia of a bourgeoise. ‘Need I add,’ she continued, ‘that I got off at the next stop. After that, I went about in an old coat with a prominent button missing, and a shawl over my head.’53 ‘Think of a country, a Capital, in which it is unwise to appear on the street “well dressed”!’ summed up an exasperated Pauline Crosley. She was dismayed that she had not seen a single man ‘wearing a silk hat’ in ‘this large Capital of a large country’ in all the time she had been there.54

With panic spreading about a possible German advance, many of the civilian population of Petrograd were also now trying to leave the city. Thousands, ‘driven by irrational fear’ of impending disaster, were desperate to get back to their villages where they thought all would be well. Pauline Crosley could not see the sense in this mass exodus, ‘for we hear of nothing but disorders all over Russia, and I can learn of no locality that is really safe’.55 Louis de Robien saw the long queues of people waiting for train tickets, often for as long as two days. At Petrograd’s Nicholas Station, ‘the booking-hall, the platforms and the lines were full of people camping in the midst of their luggage, waiting to leave by any available train’:

Soldiers, Tovariches, and women with their children were either squatting on the platforms or sitting on their bundles, surrounded by bags, bursting packing-cases tied up with ropes, wooden trunks painted in bright colours, nondescript suitcases, Samovars, rolled-up mattresses, household utensils and gramophone horns.56

When a train finally did come in – often after another two days or more of waiting – the crowd stormed it and clawed their way on board; those with money offered huge bribes for a precious seat. But many of the desperate were trampled and injured as they struggled to get on board.

For those foreigners remaining in the city, life was becoming increasingly unstable by September, with belligerent crowds out protesting once more on the streets. From her bedroom window at the Astoria, Emmeline Pankhurst could see armed Bolsheviks marching up and down brandishing weapons.57 Concerned for her safety, a group of Russian officers at the hotel had offered to act as her armed bodyguard when she needed to go out, but she had refused; nor would she and Jessie Kenney capitulate to suggestions that they disguise themselves as proletarians, in order to avoid the threat of attack on the streets as despised members of the bourgeoisie. A few precious gifts of English food had arrived for them, care of the British embassy, which they gratefully enjoyed; but while they had been away on a visit to Moscow in August many of the things they had left behind at the hotel were stolen. ‘The sleepless nights and bad food, the emotional strain’ – all were taking their toll, wrote Kenney, and the service at the hotel was getting worse and worse.58

The truth was, that despite the best of intentions and her energetic commitment, Emmeline Pankhurst’s mission to Russia had been a failure. She had had little or no comprehension of Russia’s women, and many of those with whom she had sought to engage had found her manner patronising. Why should she – an Englishwoman from a position of relative comfort and privilege – preach to women such as they, who had spent their entire lives struggling to survive against political and social oppression of a kind that was way beyond her understanding or experience? When it came down to it, as Florence Harper observed, ‘the women of Russia were too busy revolutionising to bother about being organised’.59 For her own part, Jessie Kenney liked to think that, if nothing else, ‘we did foster hope, and we did all we could to maintain courage and faith’.60 What is more, Pankhurst had done so through considerable physical pain and exhaustion. ‘She was now looking more aged and worn with one struggle after another, and the continual gastric trouble was wearing her down,’ recalled Kenney, and they decided to head back to England. But Emmeline Pankhurst would leave with powerful memories of Petrograd, and especially of Maria Bochkareva, and she would take with her a warning that the situation in Russia was ‘as bad as it can be’. The challenge traditional government in Russia was now having to face from revolutionary politics – which Pankhurst found arbitrary and brutal – offered in her view ‘an object lesson for the democracies of the world’; and a ‘very terrible object lesson’ it was.61

Ahead of her departure from Petrograd with Pankhurst, Jessie Kenney arranged to have her diary of their visit smuggled out of Russia, having been advised that all uncensored reading matter was routinely confiscated at the border with Sweden at Torneo. On their way out through Finland and Sweden to the boat at Bergen, they once more shared the same train as Lady Muriel Paget.* Florence Harper was on board too, by now ‘so fed up with Russia and black bread and machine-guns and riots and murder and discord’ that she had ‘shaken the mud of Petrograd from her shoes with more pleasure than [she] realized’. On arrival in London, Harper headed straight for her first decent breakfast in seven months: ‘porridge, sole, kippers, bacon and eggs, toast, marmalade and tea’; but that night there was a German air raid.62 She might have escaped revolutionary Petrograd, but she was still in the war zone.

A few dogged foreign journalists did, however, remain in the city, hanging on for the anticipated big news story of a Bolshevik takeover, holed up in the city’s increasingly rundown hotels. At the Hotel de France, Americans Ernest Poole, William G. Shepherd and Arno Dosch-Fleurot had learned to fend for themselves. The hotel had been hostage to repeated strikes by waiters, cooks and chambermaids; there was refuse, dirt and dust everywhere; the sheets went unwashed and their beds unmade. One day, desperate for something to eat, they found their way down to the hotel’s huge pantry, ‘where from floor to ceiling were piled dirty cups and plates and coffee pots’. They picked out some crockery, washed it and went to the kitchen, where ‘one old cook, who had not gone on strike with the rest, gave us vile black coffee and big chunks of soggy rye bread’, which they carried back to their room.63 Such was the life of the foreign correspondent, they agreed with grim humour. Most couldn’t wait to get out, but others were still arriving, even now.

In the last week of August, after taking the long sea journey from San Francisco to Yokohama, followed by an eleven-day rail journey from Vladivostok, an English writer slipped into Petrograd on an ambitious – and secret – mission. He had been sent, by the Secret Intelligence Service (now MI6), ‘to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution’, as he later rather grandly put it, ‘and to keep Russia in the war’. It seemed a tall order for one solitary, tubercular, inexperienced British spy, recruited because he knew a bit of Russian from reading Chekhov stories and happened to be related by marriage to Sir William Wiseman, the SIS’s man in New York. His code name was Somerville, and his cover that of a journalist reporting on the situation in Russia for the British press. His real name was Somerset Maugham.

He had already worked undercover as a British agent in Switzerland in 1915–16 and had been living in New York, when Wiseman recruited him to go to Petrograd to subvert German propagandising for Russia’s withdrawal from the war and to offer support to Kerensky. Maugham arrived in Petrograd on 19 August with a generous $21,000 to cover his expenses for this purpose, and expected to be ‘occupied there presumably till the end of the war’.64 As an aesthete and member of the English literary set, his first view of the Nevsky – after having enjoyed the ‘flamboyance’ of the rue de la Paix and the ‘splendour’ of Fifth Avenue – was a depressing one. He found it ‘dingy and sordid and dilapidated’ and the displays in the shop windows ‘vulgar’, but the diversity of its dense crowds was quite new to him and he found it enthralling: ‘walking along the Nevsky,’ he recalled, ‘you saw the whole gallery of the characters of the great Russian novels so that you could put a name to one after the other’.65

A personal introduction to Kerensky soon followed, thanks to Maugham’s friendship with Alexandra Kropotkin, daughter of the legendary revolutionary, Prince Peter Kropotkin. ‘I think Kerensky must have supposed that I was more important than I really was,’ Maugham later wrote, ‘for he came to Sasha’s apartment on several occasions and, walking up and down the room, harangued me as though I were at a public meeting for two hours at a time.’66 Maugham quickly installed himself on the expatriate social circuit, meeting Hugh Walpole of the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau and dining with him and other friends – and Kerensky as well – on caviar and vodka, ‘at the expense of two governments’, at the popular Medved restaurant.67 ‘I don’t think that Maugham knew very much about Russia,’ Walpole recalled of him in a later memoir, ‘but his refusal to be hurried into sentimental assumptions, his cynical pretence that “all was anyway for the worst” (he did not himself believe that for a single moment) gave him a poise and calm that some others of us badly needed’.

There was a quality about Maugham, the literary man and gentleman spy, that professional spies did not have: ‘He watched Russia as we would watch a play, finding the theme, and then intent on observing how the master artist would develop it,’ added Walpole.68 He took time to soak up the culture – attending the ballet and theatre – and catching up on his reading of the Russian classics. He also made sure he mixed with the Allied agents staying at the Europa and the Astoria, returning to his hotel room in the evenings to carefully encrypt messages to his controller, Wiseman, in New York, in which Kerensky was ‘Lane’, Lenin ‘Davis’ and Trotsky ‘Cole’ and the British government took the sobriquet of ‘Eyre & Co.’69*

Eighteen days after Maugham had installed himself discreetly in Petrograd’s Hotel d’Europe, a new pair of American reporters arrived in town. Unlike their pragmatic, experienced compatriots Florence Harper and Donald Thompson, who had arrived without fanfare in February, the charismatic socialist and professional rebel John Reed and his wife, the feminist journalist Louise Bryant, arrived in Petrograd with a reputation for leftist sentiment and brimming with high-minded socialist ideals that were guaranteed to attract attention.

Thirty-year-old Reed, from a well-to-do conventional Portland (Oregon) family, had been something of a playboy and a joker during his years at Harvard. Moving to Greenwich Village, he became a key figure in the bohemian avant-garde, working as a reporter for the radical New York magazine The Masses, where he had earned a reputation for his uncompromising political beliefs, tackling social issues and championing the working-class underdog, as a vigorous supporter of the militant Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World). In 1913, during the Mexican Revolution, he had installed himself with rebel Pancho Villa’s forces, from where his vivid reporting had further built his reputation. Reed’s work for the liberal Metropolitan Magazine had sent him to Europe in 1914. He had wanted to report on the Eastern Front, but although in the summer of 1915 he had managed to get to Petrograd, where he was briefly detained by the authorities, he had been refused permission to operate in the Russian military zone. Back in New York, he continued to produce inflammatory articles criticising the war and America’s involvement in it.70

In December 1915 in Portland, Reed had met Louise Bryant – an attractive, auburn-haired social reporter and fashion illustrator from Nevada, who was active in the women’s suffrage movement. Soon afterwards she had left her dentist husband and followed Reed to New York, where they had married, after her divorce, the following November. After the February Revolution broke, Reed had been eager to go to Russia and see things for himself, but it was not till August that he had managed to raise the money for his trip, reporting for The Masses and another socialist weekly, the New York Call. Bryant travelled with him, Reed having wangled her accreditation to write for the Metropolitan Magazine and the Bell syndicate. In 1917 the mainstream press still did not acknowledge women war correspondents, and Bryant’s function was therefore, nominally, to report on Russia ‘from a woman’s point of view’.71

Because of their tight budget, the Reeds found the Petrograd hotels were more than they could afford, so they set themselves up at a freezing cold rented apartment at 23 Troitskaya (where they slept in their overcoats). They were eager to meet Arno Dosch-Fleurot, whose reports from Petrograd they had been following since 1916, and soon hooked up with him and fellow American socialists and journalists Bessie Beatty and Albert Rhys Williams (a former Congregational minister whom Reed had known in Greenwich Village) – both of whom had been in the city since June and who provided valuable introductions, along with the shared services of an interpreter, Alexander Gumberg.

John Reed’s defining account of the October Revolution would later become the gold standard of eyewitness reporting on revolutionary Russia, but in September 1917 he had arrived in this political cauldron with no knowledge of the language or experience of its culture and politics, and no personal contacts in government, society or the revolutionary movement. To compensate, he had all the brashness, drive and charisma, the literary powers and journalistic flair for taking on such a big, dramatic news story; and he sensed that the story now brewing would be the making of his career. Together, the like-minded Reed, Bryant, Beatty and Rhys Williams joined forces to tell Russia’s story from their own committed socialist perspective, as partisans and tovarishchi, determined to ‘feel its strength – unshackled’ and, hopefully, bear witness to ‘the dawn of a new world’.72

* At the end of April 1918 they were transferred 365 miles south-west to a house in Ekaterinburg, where, on the night of 16–17 July, the entire family was brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks.

* The Mission also brought its own official film cameraman, Lieutenant Norton C.Travis, an experienced freelancer for Pathé, Fox and Universal. Like Donald Thompson, he was out filming in the thick of it: ‘I could have ground all day at scenes of the populace looting stores, factories and residences. Freedom simply meant helping themselves to everything they wanted,’ he later wrote. Like Thompson, Travis also filmed the Women’s Death Battalion at the front, and spent most of his time in Russia filming near Minsk.

* The bonds sold were for small amounts of twenty rubles ($4). Around four billion rubles ($1 billion) were raised.

* Robins’s sister Elizabeth was well known in Britain as an actress notable for playing Ibsen, a writer and an ardent suffragette. She was also closely acquainted with Emmeline Pankhurst and Jessie Kenney.

* Kornilov admitted this was what had stymied his march on Petrograd, to US diplomat De Whitt Clinton Poole when he met him in southern Russia in 1918.

* On their return, Pankhurst and Kenney spoke about their ‘Russian Mission’ at two big meetings held at London’s Queen’s Hall on 7 and 14 November.

* Maugham’s impressions of Petrograd in 1917 would later be immortalised in his 1928 collection of stories Ashenden, which include a withering portrait of the frigidly correct Sir George Buchanan, as Sir Herbert Witherspoon.

PART 3

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

13

‘For Color and Terror and Grandeur This Makes Mexico Look Pale’

Thanks to delays of a week at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in Stockholm, John Reed and Louise Bryant had been travelling for almost a month when they finally arrived, bedraggled and exhausted in Petrograd. They had sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey, on 17 August 1917 (NS), to Kristiania in Norway on a Danish steamer, the United States. Most of the people on board were Scandinavians, but there were a few American businessmen, as well as a contingent of Jewish exiles returning to Russia to live – so they hoped – in freedom at last. From her first-class deck Louise could hear their voices singing revolutionary songs carried up from the steerage deck below.1

Among the American passengers there was a party of seven young college graduates, who had recently been recruited by the National City Bank to join Leighton Rogers, Chester Swinnerton and others at the Petrograd branch, so that some staff could be transferred to Moscow. Twenty-three-year-old trainee John Louis Fuller of Indianapolis was one of them. He had never been abroad before and had enjoyed the entertaining company of Reed and Bryant on the train from Kristiania to Petrograd, during which he had a ‘good many’ political arguments with them.2 They had all been alarmed by the vigorous pilfering of their luggage when soldiers ordered them off the train at Beloostrov, the last stop before Petrograd’s Finland Station, when everyone had rued the loss of ‘toilet articles, shirts, socks, collars, razors’ that were confiscated as supposed ‘contraband’. Worse, ‘The John Reeds had lost most of their things including their letter of credit’ that had been in Reed’s wallet, which had been stolen too, and Louise had been humiliated by being ‘compelled to strip when they searched her’.3

US ambassador David Francis was wary of the Reeds when they first presented themselves at his embassy. They had arrived with a letter of introduction from a federal official in New York, requesting that Francis offer any help he could in their assignment to study social conditions in Petrograd. Francis might well have had sight of the contents of Reed’s stolen wallet, which was miraculously ‘returned’ to the US consulate (though minus the 500 rubles in cash it contained) soon afterwards, possibly having been pickpocketed to order, so that Reed’s credentials could be checked.4 Either way, once he had ascertained that Reed had been ‘cordially welcomed by the Bolsheviks whom he apparently advised of his coming’, Francis was on his guard. ‘I naturally regarded Mr Reed as a suspicious character and had him watched and his record and acts investigated,’ he recalled. These suspicions seemed to be confirmed when a few days later Reed turned up at a mass meeting to protest at the arrest in the USA, and the forthcoming trial on a conspiracy charge, of a Russo-American anarchist named Alexander Berkman.5 Leighton Rogers had seen the posters plastered on billboards around the city announcing meetings to protest at this punishment of ‘Brother Berkman in the Capitalistic Oligarchy of the United States’; such violent sloganeering, and the fact that Reed supported it, was more than enough to alarm Francis and his staff.6

Not long after his arrival, Reed wrote to an old friend that he had ‘more stuff than I can write’. ‘We are in the middle of things, and believe me it’s thrilling. There is so much dramatic to write that I don’t know where to begin.’ Petrograd had already seized his imagination, Reed told him: ‘For color and terror and grandeur this makes Mexico look pale.’ He was full of questions and restless to ‘see everything at once’, as his friend Albert Rhys Williams recalled, but was hampered by having only the barest smattering of Russian. It did not take him long to overcome this; with the help of his interpreter, Alexander Gumberg, he had soon mastered enough of the language to be able to work out the essentials.7 Rhys Williams helped Reed get to know the city and introduced him and Bryant to his many Russian contacts – taking them on a walking tour of all the major places linked to recent events, describing to them the demonstrations and riots he had witnessed earlier in the year and together discussing what path the endgame of revolution might take from here.

Reed wanted to know who was the most impressive speaker: Lenin or Trotsky? Even as a committed and well-informed socialist, he had been in ignorance of the elusive Bolshevik leader until the US press had finally begun picking up on Lenin after the July Days, and he was eager to see him.8 Rhys Williams was sure that revolutionary Russia would be Reed’s coming of age, just as it had been his own: ‘The Revolution was not something you could play around with. You could not take it up and then drop it. It was something that seized hold of you, shook you, and possessed you.’ The Bolsheviks were working for the kind of social justice that both men believed in, and they wanted it ‘more passionately than any other group’. They saw the coming battle as a straightforward class war: ‘No one shall eat cake until everyone has bread,’ urged Rhys Williams. Such lofty ideals were wonderful in principle, from a safe distance, but as they would soon discover, revolutionary practice in Petrograd was quite another matter.9

Interception of inflammatory remarks by Reed, suggesting that if the Bolsheviks gained control the ‘very first thing they would do would be to kick out all the Embassies and all those connected with them’, suggested to Ambassador Francis that Reed openly supported the overthrow of Kerensky’s government.10 Reed and Bryant had already been predicting ‘trouble in a couple of weeks when the combined soviets hold their meeting here’, as John Louis Fuller noted. On the journey from America, Fuller had ‘heard them prophesying many things that haven’t come true so perhaps this is another of their false alarms’.11 To most of the Americans who encountered him in Petrograd, the headstrong and outspoken Reed appeared provocative, but also politically blinkered – foolish even.12* His seemed a very limited and politically naive view of Petrograd to those expatriates who had lived there for many years. Russia, for the impressionable Reed and Bryant, was very much a political adventure, a chance to witness a socialist experiment in the making, but having arrived ‘on the crest of a counter-revolution’, at the tail end of the Kornilov affair, they soon were experiencing the full impact of a city under political and economic siege.13

Louise Bryant was shocked by the long lines of ‘scantily clad people standing in the bitter cold’ and by how ‘pitifully empty’ the shops were; to her horror, a small five-cent bar of American chocolate currently cost seven rubles – or about seventy-five cents.† She was struck by the absurd anomaly that although she was told the city had barely enough food to last three days and there were no warm clothes to be bought anywhere, she passed ‘window after window full of flowers, corsets, dog-collars and false hair’.14 Even more absurd was the fact that the corsets were of the ‘most expensive, out-of-date, wasp-waist variety’ and the women of the old aristocracy who might wear them had ‘largely disappeared from the capital’. But ‘Red Petrograd’ itself impressed her, with its tremendous solidity and presence, ‘as if it were built by a giant who had no regard for human life’. It had retained the ‘rugged strength’ of Peter the Great, who had built it two hundred years previously with such despotic determination; and all the depredations of war heaped upon it still had not altogether stifled its spirit or its cultural life.

‘The Nevsky after midnight was as amusing and interesting as Fifth Avenue in the afternoon,’ Bryant remarked; ‘the cafes had nothing to serve but weak tea and sandwiches but they were always full’. ‘Champagne still sparkled in cabarets and nightclubs by candlelight, long after the electric supply was cut off.’15 The Cinematograph, where you could see the latest American movies featuring the likes of Chaplin, Fairbanks and Pickford, were ‘ablaze with lights till nightfall, and crowded to the doors’. You could still go to the opera at the Mariinsky – to see Prince Igor or Boris Godunov – and hear Chaliapin sing, or join the sell-out audiences watching the exquisite Karsavina dancing Paquita.16 After an absence of several months, the French troupe had returned to the Mikhailovsky with a repertoire of light-hearted French comedies to counter the dramatic gloom of Meyerhold’s production of Alexey Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan the Terrible, which was running at the Alexandrinsky.17 ‘The only difference was the clientele’, which was now ‘a motley crowd smelling of boot-leather and perspiration’ and had probably ‘gone without bread to buy the cheap little tickets’.18

John Reed was similarly taken by surprise to see that ‘gambling clubs functioned hectically from dusk to dawn, with champagne flowing and stakes of twenty thousand roubles. In the centre of the city at night prostitutes in jewels and expensive furs walked up and down, crowding the cafes’.19 ‘Like Pompeii of old, the city feasted and made merry’ while the volcano rumbled, noted one eyewitness.20 There was, nevertheless, considerable nervousness generated by rumours of a German advance, and the threat of Zeppelin and even aeroplane raids continued. Frequent drills were carried out ‘in case of an attack, with the sounding of sirens, the mobilization of firemen, and the putting out of lights’, but these seemed futile in a city where few buildings had cellars in which people could take refuge. Such was the current air of desperation that some people openly expressed the wish ‘that the German armies might come and take possession – the sooner the better – in order that the distress might be ended, even by the occupation of a foreign power’.21 Anything was better than this perpetual state of uncertainty. ‘Each day Russian morale sinks lower, and soon it may settle to a point where Germany can do with it as she wills,’ wrote Leighton Rogers. ‘It seems to me that a few million dollars’ worth of vigorous Allied propaganda, conducted by men who understand the situation, would be able to counter the Germans and save this great, generous people to us. But we have no such propaganda and are losing by default.’22

As the fractured political life of the city juddered on from one crisis to the next, a nine-day Democratic Congress opened on 14 September at Petrograd’s Alexandrinsky Theatre, attended by around 1,600 delegates, at which the national leadership was to introduce a programme of revolutionary democracy for the new government to be voted in by the Constituent Assembly. Much as the Moscow Congress in August had been, it was a last-ditch attempt to build some kind of unity between the right-wing establishment, the liberal Kadets and the socialist left, in the midst of the continuing political chaos. But few held out any hope of success. ‘The Democratic Conference is like a rough and hastily constructed lean-to, full of gaps and crevices,’ wrote Harold Williams. ‘People have crowded into it for warmth and shelter from the cold and bitter winds that are blowing over Russia in this autumn of the Revolution, but there is little comfort to be found.’23 The American quartet of Beatty, Bryant, Reed and Rhys Williams were all there, as too were a few other foreign reporters and Allied diplomats, allowed in to observe the proceedings from the former imperial boxes, whose Romanov insignia had been hacked off and replaced with red flags and revolutionary banners.

For the sophisticated socialite Somerset Maugham, the experience of a volatile and combative socialist congress populated by plebeians of the kind with whom he would never normally associate was quite an eye-opener. He scanned the ‘peasant’ types in the audience with considerable disdain, his overall impression being of a ‘backward, loutish people’ with ‘ignorant faces and a vacuous look’. Despite their lack of education, this assembly seemed happy to be subjected to lengthy speeches given with ‘great fluency, but with a monotonous fervour’ by orators who were the kind of men, Maugham thought, whom you might see ‘addressing the meeting of the Radical candidate for a constituency in the South of London’. He found them, for all their fluency and table-thumping, mediocre; and thought it ‘amazing’ that such people should ‘be in control of this vast empire’.24

Arthur Ransome was there too – on one of his last assignments before returning to England – and noted that ‘the only real enthusiasm aroused in the meeting was by Kerensky’, who took to the rostrum dressed in plain soldier’s khaki. Maugham was struck by Kerensky’s lack of physical strength. He seemed to be ‘green in the face with fright’ and to have ‘a strangely hunted look’ as he gave an intense, impassioned speech for over an hour without notes, in which he asked for a vote of confidence, insisting that only a coalition government could save the country.25 Ransome, who was ‘within a yard’ of Kerensky, noticed that he seemed to be in an extremely stressed state. ‘I saw the sweat come out on his forehead, I watched his mouth change as he faced now one, now another group of his opponents,’ he wrote in his despatch to the Daily News, impressed by the ‘tremendous effort’ Kerensky made to deal with the ‘constant interruption from the Left’.26

Reporting for the Daily Chronicle, Harold Williams could not warm to Kerensky’s rasping declamatory style, always delivered at the same relentless pitch, and he winced at the contrived moments of ‘painful emotionalism’. But he had to admit that ‘whether Kerensky [was] a great or a small man’, there was ‘no other man in Russia’ at that time who could take his place; certainly not his sneering Bolshevik detractors.27 Ransome was dismayed by their behaviour: ‘They alone at a moment of terrible difficulty brought to the assembly the irresponsible nonchalance of a debating society,’ as they sat there ‘smiling, indifferent to words that to their speakers represented blood and tears’.28

During his speech Kerensky had ‘stood practically among the audience as though he sought to appeal to each man personally’; Somerset Maugham could see that his appeal ‘was to the heart and not to the mind’. For him it was a ‘facile expression of feeling’ that he, as a reserved Englishman, found ‘a little embarrassing’, but which Kerensky manipulated so skilfully, and which clearly had an ‘overwhelming effect’ on the more openly susceptible Russians, who seemed easily won over by the power of words. At the end of his speech Kerensky received an ovation, but it would be his last. ‘The final impression I had,’ recalled Maugham ‘was of a man exhausted.’29 Kerensky’s exhaustion proved symptomatic of a congress that had been ever more fraught with disunity, marred by a shambolic voting system and by endless, excruciating delays in proceedings. An extremely hostile Bolshevik response to all conciliatory gestures had prevailed, culminating in a mass walkout, allowing a resolution for Kerensky to form a pre-parliament prior to the election of a Constituent Assembly to be passed by a small majority.30

Arthur Ransome headed home by sea on 26 September with a very clear sense of approaching danger; what he had seen at the congress had convinced him that the Bolsheviks were preparing the ground to seize power. He hoped, however, that a brief respite in England, for much-needed rest and a spot of fishing, would allow him time to recoup his energies before returning to Petrograd for the final showdown. But he was wrong: events would not wait for him.* His friend and fellow journalist Harold Williams stayed in Petrograd to await the inevitable, feeling ever more gloomy about what was to come: ‘It matters little what resolutions are passed,’ he wrote soon after the congress. ‘The fate of Russia is not to be decided here. Other forces are at work, real, stern, inexorable, which are guiding Russia, to what destinies who in this bitter and tragical time can foresee or foretell?’31 Sir George Buchanan, who had also observed some of the sessions, was emphatic about their impact: writing to the Foreign Office, he declared that ‘the only result has been to split up the democracy into an infinite number of small groups, and to undermine the authority of its recognized leaders’. And he went on to issue a warning:

The Bolsheviks, who form a compact minority, have alone a definite political programme. They are more active and better organized than any other group, and until they and the ideas which they represent are finally squashed, the country will remain a prey to anarchy and disorder … If the Government are not strong enough to put down the Bolsheviks by force, at the risk of breaking altogether with the Soviet, the only alternative will be a Bolshevik Government.32

In contrast to so much gloom and despondency, the energetic US Red Cross envoy Raymond Robins had remained defiantly optimistic. He had attended every session of the congress, even though it had proved to be ‘a continuous performance of the most exacting nature’, with sessions lasting till four in the morning on two occasions. He had been excited by this, the ‘first Social-Democratic Conference in which the power of government was represented under socialist leadership in the history of the world’.33 But while he noted Kerensky’s undoubted gifts as a speaker, Robins had observed the charismatic Trotsky marshalling his Bolshevik supporters during the conference, and came away feeling that ‘the most skillful and dangerous leader of the extreme left was Trotsky’ – moreover, that the congress had brought nearer an inevitable clash between the Bolsheviks (the ‘party of destructionist separate peace tendencies’) and the moderates. Many people had already left Petrograd, ‘believing that the commune and civil war with murder and looting are just a day or two ahead,’ Robins told his wife on 24 September, but he remained convinced that the new Coalition Government would ‘yet master the situation’. Despite all the uncertainties, he was bullish about the success of his mission: ‘The fact that we live on the edge of a volcano and that we may be overwhelmed any day simply adds to the zest of the service … I am satisfied that the Revolution will never turn backward, and that Russia will achieve a great realization of liberty and social progress.’34

The weary Sir George Buchanan, after many years in Russia, had no such optimism. Shortly after the Democratic Congress he called on his French, Italian and American colleagues to make a collective approach to Kerensky’s government ‘on the subject of both the military and internal situations’.35 David Francis had declined to take part, a fact on which his aide J. Butler Wright commented with dismay: ‘Everyone, with only the exception of [Francis], believes that a clash – and a serious one – is bound to occur soon. We fervently wish that it would come and get it over with.’36 On 25 September, Buchanan and his other colleagues met Kerensky to urge the government to ‘concentrate all its energies on the prosecution of the war’ and restore internal order, increase factory output and re-establish discipline in the army. But when Sir George read out their moderately stated joint declaration, Kerensky cut short their interview with ‘a wave of his hand’ and ‘walked out exclaiming: “You forget that Russia is a great power!’” Sir George found such a petulant ‘Napoleonic touch’ unworthy of him. As fellow diplomat Louis de Robien neatly observed: ‘The Tsar also refused to listen to Sir George in similar circumstances: a few weeks later he lost the crown!’37

As September turned to October, Petrograd life continued to be measured by the same, tedious factional infighting and sloganeering, by stultifying meetings, wildcat strikes, rumour and counter-rumour. ‘The endless talk when action was needed, the vacillations, the apathy when apathy could only result in destruction, the high-flown protestations, the insincerity and half-heartedness that I found everywhere sickened me,’ wrote Somerset Maugham wearily.38 ‘The agitators are persistently at it,’ noted Leighton Rogers. ‘Meetings are held every day in various sections of the city protesting against this and that, anything as long as it is a protest … Just as you bolster up a little hope some disheartening rumor comes along and knocks it down. The level of spirit in the city is sinking slowly but inevitably.’* ‘Always the same chaos, the same uncertainty,’ wrote French resident Louise Patouillet. ‘This revolution truly is the road to Calvary.’39

A distinct whiff of approaching winter now filled the air, as the starving city once more became a place of dank mists, bone-chilling winds, little or no sun and persistent rain. The streets were a sorry sight, with pavement blocks taken up and gaping holes left in their place. Grass was growing between the cobblestones on the once imposing square in front of the Winter Palace. Petrograd’s crowded thoroughfares in autumn, with their drab people drained of the colour of summer, gave out ‘an intense impression of dirt and din and chaotic movement’.40 Under rain-filled, leaden skies the city seemed ever more melancholy. ‘Poverty and filth. These are my impressions on arrival here,’ wrote the disconsolate new Belgian ambassador, Jules Destrée, when he got off the train in mid-October 1917:

In this late-autumn time, Petrograd is a revolting cesspool. Liquid, sticky mud covers the carriage-way and the causeways. It has splashed up onto the windows of the lower stories of buildings and spreads over the ruts in the road, squirting treacherously underfoot, making stepping onto loose cobblestones risky. I’ve never seen anything as horrible, except in certain muddy streets in Constantinople. The locals smile at my squeamishness as they flounder around in this quagmire with their customary resignation. It’s one of the evils of the war – there are others, much worse. In days of old, the roadways were fine and well maintained, but the army has commandeered all manpower and filth has got the better of the defenceless capital.41

It was the faces of the starving, shabby population standing in line that most distressed Destrée, as they did all new visitors to the city: they seemed ‘docile, submissive and, without any prompting by the police, they just fall in line, one behind the other … they just wait in the rain and the icy blast, shivering’. He concluded that they had ‘the mindset of fatalistic slaves’ and it mattered not which kind of government ruled over them.42

As Petrograd languished in an apathy induced by hunger and exhaustion, a new danger haunted the streets. With the domestic electricity supply reduced to the hours between 6.00 p.m. and midnight and the street lights not lit for fear of Zeppelin raids, there had recently been a dramatic rise in robbery, rape and murder at night. Very few people ventured out after 11.00 p.m.; those foreigners who did so kept to the middle of the street, away from dark recesses and corners and, if they had one, carried a revolver in their pocket.43* Arthur Reinke noted that his friends were buying revolvers to protect themselves – paying $125 apiece. ‘I find it desirable at night to carry 30 roubles,’ he added, ‘ready to hand out to a hold-up man in order to avoid a painful and messy interview.’ The dangers on the streets for foreign residents at that time were legion:

Women had their shoes taken from their feet; men had their clothes removed in the street. Three men entered a fur store opposite the hotel; one began to pack up some valuable furs he had not paid for; the owner called for help, which brought an angry mob; the three men were quickly surrounded by the mob and beaten to death; it afterwards developed that two were innocent customers. A friend of mine had his necktie pin removed on the Nevsky in broad daylight by a soldier … His mother had her leather bag taken from her lap while seated in a street car by a soldier; the latter turned at the door playfully threatening her with his finger, as one might a child, and jumped off … a guest from our hotel disappeared and his body was found a week later in the river – minus a large sum of money he was known to have carried.44

People were frequently stabbed and killed simply because they did not hand over their valuables quickly enough when confronted, and Reinke recalled that the thieves always wore soldiers’ uniform and carried a rifle, stopping pedestrians on the pretext of asking to see their papers, upon which they would ‘clean out the pockets’ of their victims. Many items, meanwhile, ended up in the centre of the city at a ‘Soldiers’ Market’, where hundreds of soldiers could be seen ‘selling the spoils of their thieving’: ‘almost every conceivable article, including their uniforms, boots, weapons, jewelry, paintings, statuary and other things obviously stolen by them’.45 Thieving was endemic, and not just in Petrograd. Supplies from the food-growing districts were constantly being disrupted because the trains carrying them to Petrograd were attacked and plundered long before they even reached the city. Such violence was symptomatic of what was now going on in the Russian countryside, where the long-suppressed genie of anarchy had finally been let loose with a terrifying, brutal vengeance. The peasants, particularly in southern Russia, were running riot on country estates, killing their landlords, sacking and vandalising their manor houses and setting them on fire, slaughtering livestock and burning the grain in their barns.

In the continuing absence of ‘the arch-revolutionist Lenin’, who was still lying low in Finland, the most compelling figure on the political stage in Petrograd in the autumn of 1917 was undoubtedly Leon Trotsky.46 Although originally a Menshevik, and for a while something of a political dilettante, his organisation of strikes and rallies in the wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905 had marked the beginning of his political ascendancy. Escaping Siberian exile in 1907, he had spent time in France and Spain, before being deported and settling in New York. When the February Revolution broke, he hastily left his apartment in the Bronx to return to Russia, finally throwing in his lot with the Bolsheviks. With the neurotic Lenin still fearful of showing himself, Trotsky was becoming the public face of the Bolshevik leadership. Louise Bryant had found him ‘Marat-like’ when she saw him speak at the Democratic Congress. His fire-and-brimstone manner had been ‘vehement, serpent-like’ and he had ‘swayed the assembly as a strong wind stirs the long grass’. No other speaker had created ‘such an uproar’ as Trotsky, or provoked ‘such hatred at the slightest utterance’ with his violent, ‘stinging words’, while retaining a cool head.47

On 25 September, Trotsky had underlined his ascendancy when he was elected chair of the Petrograd Soviet, in which the Bolsheviks now had a majority. Arno Dosch-Fleurot had been at the Smolny Institute to witness the meeting, which was held in the large lecture hall of this former girls’ school:

Except for a small group of workers, the floor was thick with soldiers – big, bearded, blond peasant-soldiers from the north of Russia, who had deserted the Riga front. On the stage were a dozen dark men with keen faces, most of them dressed in black leather breeches and jackets, such as worn by the motor cyclist couriers of the army. Seen over thousands of straw-blond heads, their black hair and black suits were in conspicuous contrast.48

Black leather had by now become the ubiquitous uniform of the Bolsheviks, Fleurot noted. Trotsky wore it, too – and it would henceforth be his trademark. Like Bryant, Fleurot had witnessed the violence of his invective, when Trotsky told his audience at the Smolny that the Russian Revolution was reaching the point where the French Revolution was ‘when the Jacobins set up the guillotine’. Seeing Trotsky elected that day, Fleurot remembered it as being the moment when he was ‘sure there would be a successful Bolshevik revolution’.49 Leighton Rogers had also noted the power of Trotsky’s rhetoric: ‘This man Trotzky is the king of agitators; he could stir up trouble in a cemetery,’ he wrote, having heard him speak outside the Kschessinska Mansion, where he was alarmed by the ‘wild look in his eyes of a cat with fits’. Trotsky had spoken with ‘the enthusiasm and verbiage of a fanatic unable to keep up with the flight of his ideas and without regard for accuracy’.50 Rogers’s Russian was pretty good and he had no difficulty getting the gist of the familiar, overblown Bolshevik rhetoric spouted by Trotsky. As far as Rogers was concerned, it boiled down to the same strident, rabble-rousing components, which he playfully paraphrased in his diary:

Comrades, in a few weeks, a week, a few days, we are going to rise from our slavery to the capitalistic Kerensky government, the tool of British and French Imperialists, and tear the power from his hands. We shall do this for you, so that you may be free men as the Revolution meant you to be. You must support the Soviet because we shall give you: first, peace; second, bread; third, land. Yes, we shall take all land from the rich and divide it among the peasants; and we shall reduce the hours of work, my comrades of the factories, to four, at double the wages you now receive. And you will see the criminal of the old regime and of the autocratic Kerensky government punished, along with the property-owning capitalists who have enslaved you and the peasants. So support us, comrades, and add your voices to our war cry of ‘Long Live the international proletariat and the Russian Revolution!’ Workers of the world, unite; you have only your chains to lose!

Rogers knew it was ‘bunk’, and admitted in his diary that ‘something in the man stirred me to uneasiness’. ‘He has a large following and is dangerous. These people are easily mesmerized by talk.’ Trotsky was spreading his inflammatory message all over Petrograd, arguing that the Russian people could not save the revolution all the time they were still fighting in the war. They needed peace in order to be free to ‘make war on the bourgeoisie’.51

In contrast to Trotsky’s vigour, Kerensky was a very sick man. He had for some time been suffering from stomach, lung and kidney trouble and had become increasingly dependent on morphine and brandy to curb not just the physical pain, but also his profound tiredness.52 When Louise Bryant and John Reed finally got a meeting with him at the Winter Palace, he seemed broken. They found him in Nicholas II’s private library, ‘[lying] on a couch with his face buried in his arms, as if he had been suddenly taken ill, or was completely exhausted’. Bryant put much of this weariness down to the fact that Kerensky saw the ‘approaching class struggle’ as a long one, for which he perhaps did not have the stomach or the energy. ‘Remember, this is not a political revolution,’ he told her. ‘It is not like the French revolution. It is an economic revolution.’ It would require a ‘profound revaluation of classes’ and a realignment of Russia’s many different nationalities. ‘Remember, that the French revolution took five years and that France was inhabited by one people,’ he told her, adding that ‘France is the size of one of our provincial districts. No, the Russian revolution is not over – it is just beginning.’53

Unable to hold out any longer, Kerensky turned, in desperation, to British agent Somerset Maugham, summoning him to the Winter Palace. Maugham had by now sent a coded message to his controller Wiseman in New York that Kerensky’s popularity was plummeting. In his view, the British government would be better advised to support the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks, and invest money in a programme of espionage and propaganda to this end, conducted by Czech secret agents whom he knew in the city. At their meeting at the Winter Palace, Kerensky asked Maugham to memorise a secret message to the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and take it to England, requesting that he urgently send arms and ammunition and that he remove from his post Sir George Buchanan, whom Kerensky disliked. ‘I don’t see how we can go on,’ he had told Maugham. He had to have something positive to tell the army, to keep it in the fight.54

Maugham left Petrograd that same evening on a British destroyer heading for Oslo. Kerensky’s requests, when he presented them, were summarily rejected by Lloyd George, but Maugham was never able to return to Petrograd to pass on the message. Meanwhile Sir George Buchanan, still doggedly lobbying Kerensky to take an active stand and eradicate Bolshevism before it was too late, had once more been rebuffed. He couldn’t clamp down on the Bolsheviks, Kerensky told him, ‘unless they themselves provoked an armed uprising’, for to do so might spark a counter-revolution.55 Somerset Maugham had understood this crippling inability to take positive action – Kerensky was ‘more afraid of doing the wrong thing than anxious to do the right one,’ he wrote in his later memoirs, ‘and so he did nothing until he was forced into action by others.’56* For Kerensky the appeaser, a reactive response to the coming Bolshevik coup was the only option left to him. Even at this late stage he still believed he could gain the upper hand: ‘I only wish that they would come out,’ he told Sir George, ‘and I will then put them down.’57

By mid-October there were renewed reports of an increasing hostility towards foreigners in Petrograd. Rumours had been circulating since the beginning of the month of Bolshevik plans to ‘slaughter Americans’ or even initiate ‘a general massacre of the foreigners’ at any time.58 ‘There must be something in the threats,’ Leighton Rogers wrote in his diary, ‘because the Embassy has quietly informed all Americans that there is to be a riverboat at the Quay above the Liteiny Bridge ready to take them aboard in case an outbreak should come … prepared to navigate up the river to Lake Ladoga and a shore town on the Murmansk Railway, where passengers can transfer to trains.’ The steamer commandeered by Walter Crosley was ready and waiting and provided with navigation maps; in addition, two volunteer guards from the American colony were on board at all times.59 Leighton Rogers and his colleague Fred Sikes had recently taken their turn on duty, bringing with them ‘a can of beans, my alcohol stove, and a thermos bottle of coffee’. Supplied with one ancient Colt .38 with which to defend themselves, they had noted the sheet of instructions telling them to ‘shoot to kill’, should the need arise. They were appalled to find that the good ship ‘Getaway’ – so named by their bank colleague, John Louis Fuller – was not large enough ‘to accommodate half the Americans in Petrograd’ and had no supplies whatsoever of food. At best it might have squeezed 150–200 people on board. Yet, in the dark not far away, Rogers and Sikes could make out ‘one of the largest and most luxurious river steamers, with adequate cabin space for hundreds in an emergency’; it turned out that it had been ‘chartered to the French Embassy’.60

‘Things are coming to a pretty pass here,’ British consul Arthur Woodhouse wrote home on 11 October, when he heard that the Bolsheviks had announced they would soon start ‘suppressing’ the bourgeoisie. ‘I confess I should like to be out of it, but this is not the time to show the white feather. I could not ask for leave now, no matter how imminent the danger. There are over 1,000 Britishers here still, and I and my staff may be of use and assistance to them in an emergency. Certain it is, judging by the numbers that still come to the Consulate, we are required here now.’61 David Francis had heard the same rumours that ‘the Bolsheviks had made a list of people whom they intended to kill, and that, while the British Ambassador heads the list, I am not many removes from the top’. ‘I do not believe this,’ he reassured his son back home, ‘and consequently I am not regulating my actions or movement accordingly.’62 The pragmatic Phil was, however, preparing himself for trouble:

Some days and nights you will See on the Nevsky Prospect ten or twenty thousand marching with black flags and banners reading we are on our way to kill all Americans and all rich people – that includes me and [whoever] has on a White shirt. I will tell the Gov. that they are on the way again to kill us. The Gov will Say all right are you ready. I will say yes I am all ready so the Gov will tell me to load the Pistol and see if She is in working order. he Says that he will get to or three before he goes.63

Despite so much gathering uncertainty, on 19 October Leighton Rogers and his colleague Fred Sikes were excited at the prospect of moving from their present cold and draughty accommodation to a swanky new flat that was being loaned to them rent-free for the next six months, by an American couple connected to the American International Corporation while they went back to the States. It was beautifully fitted out with ‘fine rugs, handsome furniture, and tapestries and paintings that [were] a delight to the eye’. And there were books, too, and a ‘full-sized Victrola [phonograph] with an extensive library of Gold Seal records’, not to mention a modern bathroom and a cook and two maids to keep the whole thing running. It would be good to escape their present noisy accommodation: ‘no more shall we hear the girl upstairs play “Get Out and Get Under” twenty times in succession, while members of the All-Siberian Salt Miners or whoever the heavy-footed guests are, dance till the ceiling plaster dusts our carpets.’ They had set a date to move in on Sunday 22 October.64

Rogers did not of course know that about twelve days previously Lenin had crept back into Petrograd, clean-shaven and disguised in a wig and spectacles, and was now holed up in a flat on the Vyborg Side, plotting the final downfall of Kerensky’s government. On the night of 10 October an enervating ten-hour meeting of the twelve members of the Bolshevik Central Committee had been held at which a vote had been carried, by 10–2 (with moderates Kamenev and Zinoviev voting against) for an immediate armed uprising. Lenin was incandescent with impatience; he had been insisting for weeks that the takeover must happen now, but several in the leadership were reluctant to strike too early. The people were worn out; would they respond to yet more upheaval, when simply surviving from day to day was arduous enough? The consensus, upheld by Trotsky who had come to dominate the planning of the uprising in Lenin’s absence, was that they should exercise caution and wait until the 2nd All Russian Congress of Soviets, due to open on 25 October, which would give the coup greater legitimacy.

This decision was an open secret, and many in the city wished the Bolshevik seizure of power over and done with, ‘to relieve this extraordinary situation’.65 Not least among them was John Reed, who, with Albert Rhys Williams, had resumed his ‘restless search’ for a story after the Democratic Congress, ‘going from the Winter Palace to [the] Smolny, from the US Embassy to Viborg, trying to be everywhere at once, seeking out translators to read the papers, sorting over wildly contradictory statements’. They were, Rhys Williams remembered, ‘like the rest of the capital, wearily, doggedly waiting for something to happen. The suspense was like a fever.’66