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

* Leighton Rogers did not think much of Reed, as he noted in his diary: ‘This young man … has been milling around Petrograd playing revolutionary. I’ve seen him riding in trucks tossing out Red handbills and posing conspicuously beside speakers at Bolshevik street corner meetings … It burns me up to see this arrogant poseur aiding the Bolsheviks on the grounds that the “American proletariat” is supporting them in their separate peace … When I think of the good young Americans who will have to bear the brunt of the massive German attack that is surely coming in France … of how many of them will be killed, my blood boils at the thought of John Reed.’

† In 1917 the exchange rate was about eleven rubles to the dollar.

* Ransome missed the October Revolution, arriving back in Petrograd on Christmas Day (NS; 12 December OS). Times correspondent Robert Wilton missed it too, leaving in mid-September. With Wilton’s departure there was no Times correspondent in Petrograd to cover events in October when they broke.

* One of the positives of the removal of the tsarist ban on public meetings was the revival in Russia of the Salvation Army, with proselytisers from Finland returning to the city after Easter 1917 and holding a series of large public meetings. But it didn’t last for long; the Soviet government banned the Salvation Army in 1923.

* One night John Reed was held up and robbed, but after managing to explain in a few Russian words that he was an ‘American and a socialist’, his possessions were ‘promptly returned, his hand cordially shaken and he was sent off rejoicing’.

* As John Reed had perceptively observed of Kerensky: ‘Life is hideously swift for compromisers here.’

14

‘We Woke Up to Find the Town in the Hands of the Bolsheviks’

‘The Bolsheviks have advertised trouble again, this time for the 21 or 22 of this month, Russian style,’ bank clerk John Louis Fuller wrote in his diary on 11 October, but – like his colleagues, Rogers, Sikes and Swinnerton – he didn’t take this latest announcement that seriously. They had heard it all before: ‘every time they have advertised their intentions so widely nothing ever happens.’ This time, however, there was, he admitted, an ominous atmosphere in the city, and the promise of a renewal of disturbances was reiterated a few days later. ‘Trouble is going to come sometime with very little noise,’ Fuller was convinced, ‘and then it will be real trouble.’1

They had all been working flat out at the National City Bank since the recent transfer of twelve of their staff to the Moscow branch, each of them doing the work of four. That Saturday evening, 21 October, had found Fuller working late, one of the last to leave the bank. It was pitch-dark except for his desk lamp: ‘If I didn’t know there were a couple of soldiers standing guard up in front I’d think I was the only living soul around.’2 They had run out of kerosene, which meant that during the day-long power cuts they had to struggle to see what they were doing, but once the light began fading, it was too difficult to continue working after 4.00 p.m. In the end, the 21st had passed quietly; Fuller had gone for his regular Russian lesson, and then in search of cherry jam to feed his insatiably sweet tooth; after much trudging around, he came home with seventeen pounds of it and some precious but horribly expensive English milk chocolate. But the jam would have to be eked out slowly, bearing in mind yet more imminent reductions in the bread and tea rations with which to enjoy it. They had all been trying to get hold of eggs, their ration cards entitling them to just one per week. Leighton Rogers had joked that such was the scarcity of eggs that even the hens had now gone on strike. ‘Soon we may learn the answer to the question that has puzzled philosophers for centuries: “Which came first, the hen or the egg?” – by learning which will come last.’3

Like everyone else at the bank, Rogers had been watching the streets for signs of trouble, but was hopeful that the Provisional Government was merely biding its time and would nip the Bolshevik threat in the bud. While his friend Fuller had been preoccupied by his search for jam that Saturday, Rogers had been out watching parades on the streets – a token show of strength, first by young military cadets from the officers’ training school, and then by one of the Petrograd Women’s Battalions: ‘In new, regulation Russian uniform, with long, belted coats, grey Astrakhan hats tilted at the proper angle and bayoneted rifles held at left shoulder arms, they moved up the street with the full arm swing of the Russian infantryman.’ Rogers was impressed, especially when the women started singing. They reminded him of the Valkyries.4

The following day, the city remained tense but quiet, although there had been a huge gathering of around 10,000 people at the Cirque Moderne, a huge concert hall north of the Neva that had become a popular venue for political rallies; and at the People’s House, another rallying point, Trotsky had given one of his usual lurid speeches, to a crowd who listened with almost religious fervour. The curious ventured out on the streets that Sunday to see what might happen, but the day passed off without disturbance, despite the presence on every corner, as Leighton Rogers noted, of political agitators who ‘spoke in frenzied haste and moved on’.5 Having postponed the move to their new flat for three days, in order for this latest promised explosion of revolutionary violence to be over and done with, he and Sikes had finally decided on a date: Wednesday 25 October. They were very soon rueing that decision.

‘They’ve begun it; they’re at it now as I write,’ Rogers scribbled excitedly in his journal for 25 October. ‘Machine-guns and rifles are snarling and barking all over the city. Sounds like a huge corn-popper. – And we picked this afternoon to move!’

Having left work early that morning to pack up the last of their things, the two colleagues had noticed ‘an electric feeling in the air, as if the nerves of a million and a half people were taut’. But after three days of false alarms they had ‘paid little attention to it’, until they went outside to try and find three droshkies to convey their belongings to their new address and found the streets full of people, hurrying, ‘almost running, towards the river and particularly towards the Palace Bridge’. They assumed this was because it was going to be raised, as it had been during the last few days, to keep pro-Bolshevik workers and soldiers on the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides out of the city centre. But they needed to cross that bridge to get to their new apartment, and by the time they had managed to corral three droshkies and haggle frantically with their drivers on an extortionate price of ten rubles each* to move their trunks, ‘the roadways were black with people swarming towards the Palace Bridge’.6 The droshkies were almost carried along by the mob as they set off in that direction. In the struggle to keep the three vehicles containing all their worldly possessions together (worsened by the fact that one of the drivers was dead-drunk), Rogers and Sikes didn’t make it to the bridge in time: guards deployed across the road clubbed at the horses with their guns and forced them back.7 The square in front of the bridge was now seething:

Men and women ran this way and that, shouting and gesticulating; crowds gathered at corners, on the steps of neighbouring buildings, pressed into windows and doorways, massed on the platform and behind the Stock Exchange pillars, strained against the walls of buildings, waiting with that fearful anticipation with which you might watch pressure being applied to a huge rubber band, wondering when it will snap and how painful will be its sting.8

Then someone opened fire and, in response, shots rang out on all sides. There was pandemonium – motor cars hooting, tram bells clanging – as the crowd panicked, and their three droshky drivers caught in the middle of it ‘sprang upright, yanked and sawed at the reins, howling; and with each howl demanded more and more roubles’.9 In desperation, Rogers and Sikes urged their drivers to head further along the embankment to the Troitsky Bridge opposite the British embassy, which had not yet been raised. At this point the drunken driver threatened to ditch their trunks in the street and run, ‘saying he was a Bolshevik and could do as he pleased’. In response, recalled Rogers, ‘Fred and I rose in wrath, brandished our fists in his face, said we ate Bolsheviks for breakfast and if he tried any monkey business we would beat the hell out of him.’ That seemed to do the trick – the three droshkies, ‘with one driver reasonable, another scared to death, and the third drunk’, managed to extricate themselves from the mob and headed for the Troitsky Bridge and across to the Petrograd Side; but not without stopping off at their bank, located right opposite the bridge, where Fred dashed in to get more money with which to pay their rapacious drivers. On arrival the men were well rewarded with twenty-five rubles each for their trouble, ‘influenced, I suppose, by the wave of religious feeling that had swept over us when the shooting started’. Rogers and Sikes had barely trundled their belongings upstairs to their swish new apartment when ‘civil warfare erupted in all parts of the city, machine-guns ripped, and they were at it again’.10

It was not till the following morning, however, when walking to work at the bank, that Leighton Rogers finally realised that the government had actually fallen, ‘and that my destiny in this country was to be guided from then on by a government of anarchists’.11 It was a reaction echoed by other foreign residents, who on 26 October discovered that a second revolution had taken place while they had been slumbering in their beds. It had all passed off with so little drama compared to February, noted British embassy counsellor Francis Lindley. ‘This morning we woke up to find the town in the hands of the B[olsheviks]’ and the takeover appeared to have been fairly low-key: ‘I am glad to say there is none of that infernal careering about and shooting in the air at present.’ The Provisional Government ‘seemed to have disappeared,’ he added. ‘We don’t know where.’12

After months of alarms and predictions, the expected Bolshevik coup in Petrograd, when it came, was not the heroic workers’ showdown of Soviet historiography, but more an exhausted capitulation of Kerensky’s moribund and virtually defenceless government. There is no doubt that by mid-October the Bolsheviks had gained the upper hand in Petrograd, with about 50,000 party members and control of the Petrograd Soviet. They were well armed, and the soldiers and sailors who had gone over to them were increasingly belligerent. For once, Bessie Beatty was finding the city she had grown to love ‘desolate, ugly, forbidding’. ‘Death was in the air’ and at times she tried to shut out her apprehension by curling up with a book of poetry at her hotel. For weeks people had been watching for signs of further turmoil: ‘Has it come?’ they constantly asked each other. ‘Every time the electric light failed, the water was turned off, or some one banged a door or dropped a block of wood, Petrograd jumped automatically to the same conclusion: it has come!’13

‘Day after day members of the British colony came to my father to ask what they should do,’ recalled Meriel Buchanan. ‘Was there any hope of the situation improving? Would it be safe for their wives and families if they remained?’ It was a huge burden of responsibility for Sir George, but he could ‘only advise them to cut their losses and leave’.14 The Buchanans themselves were packing, for Sir George was scheduled to travel to Paris with the Russian Foreign Minister, Mikhail Tereshchenko, to attend an Allied Conference, and Meriel and her mother were going to travel with him and spend six weeks in England.

The first intimations of ‘the approach of a storm’, as Sir George put it, came when the embassy was given an armed guard of military cadets on the afternoon of the 22nd, having been told that the Bolsheviks were supposed to be going ‘to do something’ that day.15 In response to increasing tension in the city, Kerensky had ordered the two leading Bolshevik newspapers, Soldat [Soldier] and Rabochi put [Workers’ Path], which were openly fomenting trouble, to be closed down; the Provisional Government also passed a resolution to have Trotsky and the members of his newly created Military Revolutionary Committee – who now controlled the army and garrison in Petrograd – arrested, along with the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet. But once again, not wishing to provoke the Bolsheviks into making the first move, Kerensky prevaricated.

Instead, a nominal guard of his government HQ at the Winter Palace was put in place, composed of young and inexperienced cadets, a bicycle squad, a couple of companies of Cossacks and a contingent of about 135 women from the Petrograd Women’s Battalion, whom Kerensky had reviewed only the previous day. In all there were about eight hundred troops guarding the palace,* along with six field guns, a few armoured cars and machine guns.16 The women – some of whom were veterans of Bochkareva’s original Death Battalion† – had been expecting to be sent to the front to fight the Germans and had no desire to defend Kerensky’s government. Countess Nostitz had seen them take up their position early in the day. Crossing Palace Square, she ‘looked curiously at these girl soldiers as they lounged round the Palace entrances, rifles in hand. They were a motley crowd. Strapping, healthy young peasants, factory workers, harlots recruited from the streets, with here and there slightly older women of another type – intellectuals, pale-faced, fanatical.’17 Some of the women were busy carting faggots of wood back and forth to build a barricade at the main gateway.

On the afternoon of the 24th Louise Bryant, John Reed and Albert Rhys Williams had had no trouble getting past the cadets on guard at the palace, by showing their American passports and telling them they were on ‘official business’. Inside they were greeted by the extraordinary anomaly of doormen still resplendent in their old imperial ‘brass-buttoned blue uniforms with the red-and-gold collars’, who ‘politely took our coats and hats’.18 They noted an air of nervous anticipation among the cadets, who had made up straw mattresses for themselves on the floor and were huddled up in blankets trying to get some rest; they looked at the Americans in astonishment. ‘They were all young and friendly and said they had no objection to our being in the battle; in fact, the idea rather amused them.’ Bryant felt sorry for them. They seemed so cultured; some even spoke French. But they had very little food and their ammunition supplies were low and they were already demoralised. With no sign, as yet, of any action at the Winter Palace, the Americans headed back to what, for them, was the real epicentre of the socialist revolution they had come to witness – the Smolny Institute.

A gracious Palladian building fronted by columns and a grand portico, the Smolny was located on the eastern edge of Petrograd and was approached by a broad driveway surrounded, at this time of year, by snow-covered lawns. The original group of five delicate blue cupolas was part of a convent that had been built by Empress Elizabeth in the mid-eighteenth century. Not far from this, a rather more austere three-storey, 600-foot-long structure had been added in the early 1800s as a finishing school for the daughters of the Russian nobility. It was here that the Petrograd Soviet had decamped after its members had succeeded in trashing their base at the Tauride Palace, which was now being redecorated. The arrival of hundreds of political activists and their dirty boots, along with the aroma of unwashed bodies and the stale reek of cigarettes, had soon transformed the Smolny into much the same kind of noisy, overcrowded transit camp, ‘thick with the dirt of revolution’, as the Tauride had been.19 By the morning of 24 October the Smolny was the unofficial ‘General Staff’ of the Bolsheviks – its approach, by necessity, heavily guarded by double rows of sentries at its outer gates and great barricades of firewood. Two naval cannons and a couple of dozen machine guns were also positioned outside, with soldiers with fixed bayonets standing guard in the doorway.

Inside, with its one hundred rooms still bearing the signs of their previous life as classrooms, the Smolny had been hastily adapted to suit the needs of political agitators. Classrooms where daintily dressed girls once studied French and literature and learned needlework and the piano, as well as the dormitories where they had slept in neat rows of beds, were all now turned over to every kind of political committee. Upstairs in the elegant, pillared ballroom with its ornate crystal chandeliers, where until only recently the genteel young Smolny girls in their crisp white pinafores had learned to dance, the Petrograd Soviet was in constant, belligerent session.

For John Reed, Smolny was the place to be, the heartbeat of revolution: it was dynamic, visceral, exciting, invigorating and ‘hummed like a gigantic hive’.20 Albert Rhys Williams’s vision was even more utopian; he saw it as a haven, the bastion of a brave new world. ‘By night, glowing with a hundred lamp-lit windows, it looms up like a great temple – a temple of Revolution,’ he wrote, fancifully seeing the two braziers by the front porticos as flaming ‘like altar-fires’. This great new forum, ‘roaring like a gigantic smithy with orators calling to arms’, would be the place where all the ‘issues of life and death’ in the new Soviet Russia would be resolved by a superhuman breed of workers – ‘dynamos of energy; sleepless, tireless, nerveless miracles of men, facing momentous questions’.21

These ‘dynamos of energy’ were arriving day and night with lorries full of supplies of food, arms and ammunition. Swarms of soldiers and workers trudged in and out of the building, fetching and carrying the huge batches of posters and propaganda being churned out for distribution across the city, and piling it high on trestle tables along the institute’s long white corridors, which already languished unswept and littered with cigarette butts and other refuse. There was no formality, no organisation and no sense of precedence to the way the space was utilised; names of committees, scribbled out by hand on a slip of paper, were hastily tacked to walls and doors; meetings were ad hoc, loud, confused, combative and often exhaustingly protracted, as the quartet of American observers soon discovered. As work gathered to fever pitch, exhausted volunteers lay down and slept wherever they could, or grabbed what food was available – cabbage soup, a hunk of black bread, a bowl of kasha (porridge) or perhaps some meat of dubious provenance – in the huge refectory in the basement, before heading off for their next meeting.22

During the night of 24–5 October, with Smolny welcoming the hundreds of delegates for the 2nd All Russian Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks quietly – and almost unnoticed – seized the initiative. Lenin had finally re-emerged from hiding and appeared at the Smolny still wearing his disguise, and with the addition of a bandage round his face to look like someone with toothache. Here he closeted himself in a back room, where he took control, insisting that the Bolsheviks must make a move the following day, the 25th – the day the congress was due to open – ‘so that we may say to it: “Here is the power! What are you going to do with it?”’23 With their ranks bolstered by the defection to them on the Monday of the eight thousand troops of the Petrograd garrison, and with key government buildings lacking any effectual guards, that night Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee sent armed detachments of Red Guards, soldiers and sailors to set up roadblocks with armoured cars and occupy the Central Telegraph Office, the Post Office and the Telephone Exchange. The Mariinsky Palace was surrounded; the State Bank and the Nicholas and Baltic railway stations were soon under Bolshevik control and the major electric power station also fell to them.24 Finally, at 3.30 in the morning of the 25th, the naval cruiser Aurora, accompanied by three destroyers, steamed in from Kronstadt and dropped anchor broadside-on to the Winter Palace. It was clear that the endgame had come for this, the last symbolic bastion of old imperial Russia.

Locked in session with his ministers in the Winter Palace, Kerensky was well aware that he was losing control of the situation. The remaining loyal Cossacks on whom he depended for the defence of the city had refused to do so alone, still resenting his perceived betrayal of their leader, Kornilov, in July. There was no choice but to make a dash to the front for reinforcements. But when Kerensky came to leave, it was discovered that all the government cars parked at the General Staff had been sabotaged – the magnetos controlling their ignition systems had been removed. In desperation he was forced to abandon his ministers at the Winter Palace and commandeer a chauffeur-driven Renault from the American embassy, accompanied by a second car bearing the US flag, to take him to Pskov to rally what loyal troops he had left.25 With the Provisional Government in disarray, Lenin could wait no longer to announce the triumph of the Bolshevik takeover.

At 10.00 a.m., without the backing of either the Military Revolutionary Committee or – as originally planned – the ratification of the 2nd Congress of Soviets, which would convene that evening, Lenin issued a press release. ‘The Provisional Government has been deposed,’ it declared; ‘Government authority has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet.’26 By the time the delegates from all over Russia had finally gathered in the former ballroom of the Smolny that afternoon, a cordon of Bolshevik soldiers and Red Guards were in position surrounding the Winter Palace and manning barricades on the Moika River and the Ekaterininsky Canal approaching it. The telephone wires to the palace were cut (although one direct line was overlooked) and at 6.30 p.m. the Bolsheviks demanded the unconditional surrender of the Provisional Government. This ultimatum expired at 7.10 p.m., but as yet all remained quiet. Voices in the crowd grumbled, ‘Why wait? Why not attack now?’ Albert Rhys Williams heard the response of a bearded Red Guard: ‘No,’ he said, the cadets would only ‘hide behind the women’s skirts … Then the press would say we fired on women. Besides, tovarish, we are under discipline; no one acts without orders from the committee.’27

Even at this dramatic turning point, decision-by-committee prevailed and, leaving them to their discussion, the four Americans went back down to the Nevsky, which seemed curiously relaxed. People were out strolling, some clearly en route for the theatre, which is where the four of them should have been heading, for they had tickets for the ballet at the Mariinsky that evening. ‘The whole town is out tonight,’ remarked Reed – ‘all but the prostitutes’ – who seemed to have gauged the danger in the air. Eschewing a night at the ballet, the quartet decided to head back to the Smolny for the opening session of the 2nd Congress. ‘A strange quiet, an easy quiet, almost a serenity seemed to have descended on the old gray city along with the fog,’ noted Rhys Williams. He was taken with how ‘orderly, and even rather gentle’ this revolution seemed.28

Back at the Smolny, the great hall upstairs was crowded to capacity and seething with activity; there was no heating, bar ‘the heat of unwashed human bodies’, and despite frequent exhortations for the comrades to desist, the air was thick with the fug of cigarette smoke.29 An interminable wait then ensued for the congress to begin. Eventually a delegate from the Menshevik group informed the delegates ‘that his party was still in caucus, unable to come to an agreement’. ‘Nerves were at trigger-tension,’ recalled Beatty, and the audience grew angry and restive. And then, forty minutes later, ‘Suddenly through the windows opening on the Neva came a steady boom! boom! boom!’ It was the guns of the Aurora firing on the Winter Palace.30*

Everyone at the Smolny heard the reverberations and thereafter the opening session of the congress descended into chaos, with the more moderate Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks (who had three colleagues serving as ministers in the Provisional Government trapped inside the palace) demanding that the congress’s priority should be the urgent resolution of the current governmental crisis, which had brought the country to the brink of civil war. Two hours later, with the ‘methodical boom’ of the cannons of the Peter and Paul fortress joining in the bombardment of the Winter Palace with live shells and rattling the windows, the delegates were now ‘screaming at each other’ in discord.31 In protest, a hundred or more of them walked out to head for the palace to try and secure the safe release of their colleagues. Beatty, Bryant, Reed and Rhys Williams followed. But first they each had to procure an all-important flimsy piece of paper from the office of the Military Revolutionary Committee allowing them ‘free passage all over the city’. ‘That scrap of paper,’ with its blue seal, Beatty recalled, was to ‘prove the open sesame to many closed doors before the gray dawn of morning’.32

It was now past midnight and the palace was two miles away; there were no trams running and no izvozchiki to be seen. Luckily, in the forecourt of the Smolny the group managed to clamber onto a motor truck full of soldiers and sailors who were about to leave for the Nevsky to distribute leaflets. They ‘warned us gaily that we’d probably all get killed and they told me to take off a yellow hatband, as there might be sniping,’ recalled Bryant.33 As the truck rattled along at speed, with Bryant and Beatty ordered to lie on the floor and hold on tight, the men hurled sheaves of white leaflets out of the back into the dark and seemingly deserted streets, upon which ‘people came darting mysteriously from doorways and courtyards to grasp them and read their dramatic announcement: “Citizens! The Provisional Government is deposed. State Power has passed into the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies”.’34

When the truck turned up into the Nevsky, it headed for the palace, but at the Ekaterininsky Canal the group was allowed no further and had to get off; there was firing going on up ahead and they were refused entry by armed sailors guarding a barricade under a huge arc-light.35 After some persuasion and the production of their blue passes, they eventually found a Red Guard who allowed them through and up, past a cordon of sailors, to the Red Arch leading into Palace Square, from where all they could hear was the ‘crunching of broken glass spread like a carpet over the cobblestones’, from the many smashed windows of the Winter Palace.’36

It was then, at around 2.45 a.m., that a sailor suddenly emerged out of the darkness. ‘It’s all over,’ he shouted. ‘They have surrendered.’ Ahead, the Winter Palace – despite the damage to its windows – was lit up ‘as if for a fete’ and the Americans could see people moving about inside. The four of them ‘clambered over the barricades’ behind the guards and sailors and followed them towards the great palace, now ‘streaming with light’, and entered the building through whatever doorway or window they could find.37* The remaining terrified young cadets on guard inside were quickly disarmed and seemed grateful to be allowed to leave unscathed. Waving their blue-sealed passes, the Americans entered and watched groups of sailors mount the stairs and begin a room-by-room search for the members of the Provisional Government, who were soon found in the Malachite Hall upstairs, and were led out under arrest.38 ‘Some of them walked with defiant step and heads held high,’ recalled Beatty. ‘Some were pale, worn, and anxious. One or two seemed utterly crushed and broken.’ The Americans watched in silence as the men were marched away; they were taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress on the opposite side of the Neva. After this the Americans were allowed to go upstairs and take a look for themselves at the council chamber and the ‘shattered rooms’ scarred with bullets, where the silk curtains ‘hung in shreds’.39 Further on they were stopped by a group of suspicious soldiers muttering accusations that they were despised members of the ‘bourgeoisie’. Once again the blue passes saved the day, but not before the men had duly conferred and taken a comradely vote on whether to let them pass.

As the group made its way through the upstairs rooms, it was clear that some of the insurgents had succumbed to the inevitable urge to go on the rampage and had started battering open the piles of packing cases filled with precious artefacts being readied for evacuation; others wreaked their fury by shattering mirrors, kicking in wall panels, rifling drawers – plundering and breaking whatever they did not loot. Offices were wrecked, their cabinets ransacked and papers scattered everywhere. Rhys Williams and Bryant both noted a concerted effort to stop the looting and saw soldiers exhorting the looters, ‘Comrades, this is the people’s palace. This is our palace. Do not steal from the people.’ Upon which, a few were shamed into giving up their pathetic loot: ‘a blanket, a worn sofa cushion of leather, a wax candle, a coat hanger, the broken handle of a Chinese sword’.40

For those less close to the action, which essentially had been concentrated up at the Winter Palace, 25 October had passed much like any other day. John Louis Fuller had been at his desk at the National City Bank and had noticed little change, beyond a constant toing and froing of men and motor trucks at the barracks nearby – ‘Just like a ward head quarters in America at election time’.41 True, there had been sporadic bursts of gunfire and skirmishes and a renewed presence of armoured cars on the streets, but everyone had become inured to that. ‘No one stays at home simply because there is street fighting,’ noted Pauline Crosley in a letter that day, and everyone had learned to dodge those parts of the city where they heard shooting. She had held another large dinner party during disturbances only the other evening. But she did admit that things outside were now hotting up: ‘there is some excitement, and as I write the atmosphere is punctuated by all kinds of shots – rifle, pistol, machine guns, field pieces and large guns aboard ship!’42 She had seen and heard the flashes of the field guns from the Peter and Paul Fortress, booming out with live shells, but remained unperturbed. Up at her apartment on the French Embankment she was actually more worried about her precious store of ‘canned fruit, vegetables, condensed milk, cocoa, etc.’, which she had recently received from the States. ‘Nothing really worse than what has happened since we have been here can happen,’ she added confidently.43

That evening the head of the British Chancery, Henry James Bruce, had closed the office early to go to the ballet to see The Nutcracker and had arrived there ‘peacefully by tram’, even though he had heard earlier that afternoon that ‘the whole town was in the hands of the Bolsheviks’. Walking back from the theatre, he had thought the streets seemed quiet, until he and his lady companion encountered ‘the Lord’s own holy racket going on round the Winter Palace, where the government were putting up a last stand’. In the midst of this he had spotted the Chancery porter, Mr Havery, who was diligently walking his usual two miles to the Central Post Office, being stopped by a soldier, and heard him respond ‘in his peerless Cockney Russian that he couldn’t help him (the soldier’s) troubles; he had some letters to post, battle or no battle’. Altogether, Bruce’s walk home that evening was ‘a very jumpy business’, he admitted, but he had succeeded in escorting ‘Madame B’ to safety on foot ‘to a machine-gun obligato’.44

The firing at the Winter Palace had in fact ceased at around 2.30 a.m. and the casualties were very few. Only seven had been killed – two cadets, four sailors and one female soldier; fifty had been wounded. ‘I have never before seen a revolution in which the government put out of office has been defended by armed women and children alone,’ remarked Walter Crosley in disbelief.45 In fact many of the hungry and dispirited cadets and Cossacks inside the palace had abandoned their posts well before the insurgents had even arrived, and most of the Women’s Battalion, terrified by the bombardment, had taken cover in a back room. Stories later circulated about their maltreatment after they surrendered. Countess Nostitz saw them being manhandled out of the palace. ‘Their screams echoed through the square as they fought and struggled in vain. The soldiers shouted with laughter at their efforts to escape, silenced them with the butt of a rifle when they grew too troublesome’, as the women were taken across the river to the Grenadersky Barracks on the Petrograd Side, where they were subjected to ‘a barrage of verbal abuse’ and some were beaten up. Nostitz was right to fear the worst and rang the British embassy, entreating them to ‘send someone to make an official protest against the rape of those unfortunate girls’.46*

A sense of unreality about what had happened in Petrograd persisted on the 26th. Looking out of the British embassy windows, Meriel Buchanan wondered ‘if the thunder of the guns, which had kept us awake, had been for real, for everything looked much as usual. Crowded trams came across the bridge, the pigeons sheltered from the wind on the balustrades of the Marble Palace, and the lovely slender spire of St Peter and St Paul still shone as brightly as ever in a fitful gleam of sunshine.’47 The streets were full of armed workmen and soldiers, but despite a feeling of unrest and uncertainty, ‘the normal life of the town continued as if nothing had happened’. ‘The city itself seems to regard the whole event in the light of a pleasant excitement,’ remarked a Danish Red Cross worker.48

Curious crowds were gathering outside the Winter Palace simply to stand and stare at its smashed plate-glass windows and its walls pockmarked by machine-gun and rifle fire – ‘like a case of the measles’. Foreign residents noted how relatively minor the damage was, all things considered. ‘We walked around the Winter Palace and saw the marks of the fray,’ wrote Pauline Crosley, ‘but in spite of all the firing we heard and the flashes of the guns we saw, as well as the short distances concerned, we could only see two places where anything larger than a rifle bullet had hit that perfectly enormous building.’ A friend had seen the Bolsheviks open fire on the palace with a field gun – and miss several times.49 In fact, although there were many bullet gouges in the green stucco façade and white columns on the south side facing Palace Square, the palace had only been hit by artillery in about three places on the north side facing the Neva. It turned out that the firing from the Peter and Paul Fortress about four hundred yards directly across the river had been inaccurate; according to French diplomat Louis de Robien, the gunners had managed to miss their target ‘with almost every shot, sending their shrapnel either into the water, at their feet, or else to the devil’.50

Inside the Winter Palace it was a different story: damage from the occupation by the cadets and Women’s Battalion and the subsequent takeover by the Bolsheviks was visible everywhere. Hundreds of muddy footprints had soiled the elegant parquet floors; silk hangings had been torn down and were now being used as bedding. But strangely enough, recalled Julia Cantacuzène-Speransky, ‘the rabble had passed by furniture, paintings, porcelains, and bronzes of great value, and had even looked uncomprehendingly at a vitrine full of ancient Greek jewelry wrought in pure gold’, although they ‘hustled one another to cut leather coverings off seats of modern chairs in anterooms and in the emperor’s sitting room’ to make and patch boots, and to ‘knock down gilded plaster from the walls, sure it must be real gold’. The great Malachite Hall was ‘smashed beyond repair, and infinite damage was done to some of the apartments of ceremony.’51

On the afternoon of the 26th two anxious-looking officers who had been acting as instructors to the Women’s Battalion arrived at the British embassy, begging Lady Georgina Buchanan to ‘intervene on their behalf,’ fearing, as Countess Nostitz had, that they were ‘completely at the mercy of the Red Guards and the Kronstadt sailors’.52 At Lady Georgina’s request, Colonel Knox immediately headed over to the Smolny, where he spoke to ‘one or two truculent Commissars and finally persuaded them that their inhuman treatment of these women soldiers would be condemned by England and France’. Shortly afterwards the women were released and escorted to the Finland Station, from where they travelled by train to rejoin their battalion at Levashovo. Before leaving, four of them came to the embassy to thank Knox and asked if they could be transferred to the British army.53 The women were somewhat contemptuous of their assailants at the Winter Palace. ‘As if the Red Guards are soldiers! They do not know how to hold a rifle; they can’t even handle a machine gun’ – a fact they felt was borne out by the number of shots that had gone wide of the palace.54

On 26 October, Lenin issued a proclamation announcing the creation of a new government. In the spirit of the commissaires of the French Directory, it was named the Council of People’s Commissars, with Lenin as President and Trotsky as Commissar for Foreign Affairs. But this new government did not have the consent of the moderate Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the Petrograd Soviet or the ratification of a Constituent Assembly; until then the government of Russia would devolve to a succession of ad hoc committees with no political legitimacy. Nevertheless, at the congress at the Smolny that evening, Lenin – having spent the entire revolution in a back room, rather than leading from the barricades – finally emerged triumphant.

‘My eyes were riveted on the short stocky figure in the thick worn suit, a sheaf of papers in one hand, who walked quickly to the podium and swept the spacious hall with his rather small, penetrating, but merry eyes,’ recalled Albert Rhys Williams. ‘What was the secret of this man who was so hated and loved in equal measure?’ he wondered. Lenin did not have the magnetism or commanding presence of Trotsky.55 In comparison he seemed rather ‘pedestrian’ in his manner on the rostrum; even John Reed thought he looked faintly absurd, in trousers that were much too long for him. Yet here he was, ‘the idol of the mob … a strange, popular leader, a leader purely by virtue of intellect’, whereas the mercurial Trotsky was a leader by oratory.56 For Rhys Williams, Lenin’s first appearance on the podium that evening had ‘no more aplomb than a seasoned professor who has appeared daily before his class for months’; he heard a nearby reporter remark that if Lenin ‘were spruced up a bit you would take him for a bourgeois mayor or banker of a small French city’.57 But Lenin’s speech, given in a hoarse voice, in which he called for peace without annexations and reparations and proposed a three-month armistice with Germany, received an ecstatic response and shouts of ‘Long Live Lenin’. The social revolution begun in Russia, Lenin insisted, would soon break out across France, Germany and England. Let the Russian Revolution mark the end of the war! To which voices broke out in a rousing rendition of the Internationale.

Over-excited by the day’s events, the quartet of Americans did not sleep all night. They sat talking and warming their hands at a bonfire in the courtyard outside; it was 7.00 a.m. before they finally got the tram home. In contrast, the more seasoned foreign residents of Petrograd found it hard to raise any sense of excitement, hope or expectation at this latest change of government. Willem Oudendijk had walked through the city with his wife and ‘found everything quiet’. ‘Thus the second Revolution had been accomplished,’ he wrote later. ‘We did not realize what a great historical day we were living in as we trod our way home through the perfectly tranquil streets filled with apathetic, indifferent looking people.’58

For a couple of days there had been no news of Kerensky. ‘No one had the remotest idea’ what was going to happen next, recalled Bessie Beatty. ‘Where is Korniloff?* … Where are the Cossacks?’ Last and worst of all, ‘Where are the Germans? Rumour was riding a mad steed.’59 In response to the arrest of Kerensky’s ministers and the pre-emptive proclamation of power by the Bolsheviks, the moderates on the left had established their own ‘Committee for Salvation of Country and Revolution’ in order to try and rally anti-Bolshevik groups and ensure that a legitimate government would be voted in by the Constituent Assembly promised for November. By the night of the 27th rumours had begun circulating that Kerensky was on his way with the Cossacks and that they were now at Gatchina, twenty-nine miles to the south. The following day a proclamation was circulated that Kerensky had taken Tsarskoe Selo and would be in Petrograd on the Sunday, 29 October. In response to the news that reinforcements were on their way, and encouraged by the Committee for Salvation to take a stand, early that morning a company of cadets disguised as soldiers of the Semenovsky Regiment, and using false papers and the correct passwords, succeeded in getting past the few Red Guards at the Central Telephone Exchange on Morskaya, while others using the same ruse occupied the Astoria Hotel.60 At the Astoria, Bessie Beatty was surprised by the youth of their leader, ‘a boy officer, a cigarette hanging nonchalantly from the corner of his mouth and a revolver in his hand’, who had ‘lined the Bolshevik guards up against the wall and disarmed them’.61

The cadets – some of whom had been captured at the Winter Palace on the 25th and set free – certainly did not lack courage, but without reinforcements and with very limited supplies of ammunition, and even less sign of proper organisation or leadership, they could not hold out for long. Beatty and Rhys Williams had no difficulty – as ‘Amerikanskie tovarishchi’ – getting into the Telephone Exchange two blocks from the Astoria to see for themselves. The cadets seemed to Beatty ‘mere children in this business of war’ and were building barricades of ‘boxes and boards’ supplemented with logs from a nearby woodpile to defend their position. Rhys Williams thought they seemed confident of the imminent arrival of Kerensky’s troops.62 From inside the building, he and Beatty watched them take up positions behind the woodpile barricade and a couple of motor trucks, as a ‘gale of bullets’ came from an attacking force of Red Guards and sailors.

Soon the cadets had retreated to a back room, where they had ‘thrown down their guns and were waiting for the end’.63 In a pantry, Beatty found ‘a boy officer with a huge breadknife, trying to cut the buttons from his coat with hands that trembled so they made a long job of it’. Another was desperately trying to tear off his identifying epaulettes. She could not miss the irony: ‘suddenly the thing for which these boys had striven – the coveted gold braid and brass buttons of an officer’s uniform, symbol of their superiority – had become their curse’. She realised that at that point ‘any one of them would have given the last thing he possessed on earth for the suit of a common working-man’. In a corridor she found Rhys Williams confronted by a desperate cadet officer, who was pleading with the American to let him have his coat so that he could try and make his escape in disguise. She saw the anguish in the boy’s eyes, but it was clear that Rhys Williams, as a devout socialist, was gripped by a moral dilemma. He had won the respect and confidence of the Russian workers during his time in Petrograd: ‘If I give him my coat they will recognize it and think me a traitor.’ He couldn’t bring himself to do it, and yet both he and Beatty recognised that ‘the whole tragic situation was done up in the plight of this one feeble human being trying to save his life’.64

In the afternoon the building was stormed. As the cadets were taken away by Red Guards and sailors loudly ‘shouting for vengeance’, Rhys Williams appealed to them not to ‘sully the ideals of your Revolution’ by yielding to the temptation to kill them. In their memoirs, Rhys Williams and Beatty remained silent on the fate of the cadets but, as John Reed noted, although most of those from the Telephone Exchange ‘went free’, ‘a few … in their panic tried to flee over the roofs, or to hide in the attic, and were found and hurled into the street’.65

All that day Reed had been listening to the ‘volleys, single shots, and the shrill clatter of machine-guns [that] could be heard, far and near’, as groups of cadets engaged in skirmishes with Red Guards across the city.66 They also came under siege at two of their bases: the Alexandrovsky Military Academy on the Moika, and the Vladimirsky Military School on Grebetskaya on the Petrograd Side. Those at the Vladimirsky had put up stiff resistance and managed to repel two armoured cars with machine guns, but then the Bolsheviks brought up three field guns and began bombarding them. ‘Great holes were torn in the walls of the school,’ wrote Reed; the cadets put up a frantic defence as ‘shouting waves of Red Guards, assaulting, crumpled under the withering blast’.67 The firing did not let up until 2.30 p.m. when the cadets were forced to put up a white flag. ‘With a rush and a shout,’ Reed saw soldiers and Red Guards pour into the school, ‘through windows, doors and holes in the wall’. Five of the cadets were savagely beaten and bayoneted to death, and the remaining two hundred who surrendered were taken away to the Peter and Paul Fortress. En route another eight cadets were set upon by a mob of Red Guards and murdered.68 The Vladimirsky itself was almost reduced to rubble by the Bolshevik bombardment.

Countess Nostitz was horrified by the scenes that unfolded at the Alexandrovsky Military Academy. For her, the ‘heroism of these boys, mere children of fifteen and sixteen’, had been the ‘one redeeming feature in that black day of horrors’. When the college was attacked, some of the cadets had taken cover in the huge woodpiles stacked in front of it, ready for winter:

Routed out, they clambered to the top and fired into the ranks of the Bolsheviks in a last desperate attempt to check their advance. Hopelessly outnumbered, they fought on until their ammunition gave out, then stood, their round childish cheeks chalk-white, waiting for death. It was horrible to watch the Bolsheviks playing with them as a cat plays with a mouse, prolonging the moment of suspense, carefully singling out their living targets till they had shot them all down, one by one.69

The cadets’ bodies lay there for days untended, ‘stacked one on top of the other on the woodpile’. As those inside the academy surrendered, a Red Cross worker recalled how ‘at the Moika Canal a number of these young men were lined up, with their hands tied behind their backs, and shot down from behind, falling head-foremost into the water’.70 Elsewhere, any identifiable cadets found on the streets for the next few days were attacked and murdered by marauding sailors and Red Guards, much as the police had been sought out in February; Louis de Robien saw how a car full of cadets trying to escape had broken down on Gogol Street, and Red Guards had pounced on it and massacred them all; their mutilated bodies were left lying on the pavement for hours.71 Thankfully, the British had succeeded in safely smuggling out the eight cadets who had been guarding their embassy – and sent them home ‘dressed up as civilians’.72*

For Bessie Beatty, the rout of the cadets had been ‘a day of shame’, ‘a sacrifice of the innocents as needless as it was useless’, and she laid much of the blame on the shoulders of those who had sent these young boys to fight for them while staying safely out of reach. The ‘ill-starred Cadet rising’ had marked a brief and unequal trial of strength between Lenin’s new government and the Committee for Salvation.73 ‘Kerensky has again failed us, as he did at the time of the July rising and of the Kornilov affair,’ Sir George Buchanan noted sadly in his diary on 30 October. Having briefly rallied support from eighteen Cossack companies under General Krasnov, Kerensky had accompanied their march on Tsarskoe Selo. But here he had once again prevaricated, and Krasnov had pulled back to Gatchina at the prospect of his 1,200 men being sacrificed to a mixed force of 50,000 Bolsheviks and workers, which was now being rallied against them. Soon afterwards Kerensky fled – no one knew where – and went into hiding, before escaping to Finland in May 1918.*

On 2 November, Lenin’s government announced the final defeat of the Provisional Government. But it had been a defeat without honour. The abandonment of the defence of Petrograd to ‘a few Cossacks, a battalion of women and some children’ had, as Louis de Robien concluded, ‘only succeeded in alienating everyone’; it had made Kerensky’s government ‘an object of ridicule’.74 It had also ensured that the demise of the old bourgeois government – and the inception of the new Soviet one – was ‘ignominious, without fanfare, or heroics’.75

* $110 at the October 1917 exchange rate, which had increased from 6.20 rubles to the dollar in January, to eleven rubles to the dollar.

* Figures vary considerably. The guard may have been a couple of thousand initially, but many deserted their posts in the hours that followed.

† Bochkareva, having recovered from her wounds in hospital in Petrograd, had gone to Moscow to try and get the Women’s Battalion there to go with her to defend Riga. In 1919 Bochkareva was arrested by the Bolsheviks, accused of being ‘on enemy of the people.’ She was shot on 16 May 1920.

* The charge was actually a blank one, though a myth was subsequently perpetuated that the shots had been live.

* John Reed’s more dramatic version of the ‘storming of the Winter Palace’ (it wasn’t) would become the stuff of legend, immortalised in Eisenstein’s equally hagiographic 1928 film October.

* The most reliable sources suggest there were three cases of rape and one suicide.

* Kornilov escaped from jail on 6 November and went south to join anti-Bolshevik Cossack forces in the Don region. He went on to command a volunteer unit against Bolshevik forces, but was killed in April 1918 in the Kuban region of southern Russia.

* Sir George Buchanan noted with some distaste, however, that while guarding the embassy the cadets had purloined some of its whisky and wine and had drunk themselves stupid and been sick.

* Settling in France, Kerensky became embroiled in émigré politics and regularly criticised the new Soviet government from exile. He subsequently lived in Berlin and Paris, before settling in the USA in 1940, where he wrote his memoirs and broadcast regularly on Russian affairs. He died in New York in 1970.

15

‘Crazy People Killing Each Other Just Like We Swat Flies at Home’

On 17 November, Phil Jordan sat down to write one of his long anecdotal letters describing recent events. It had been a harrowing time; the Bolsheviks, he told Mrs Francis’s cousin Annie Pulliam, had ‘shot Petrograd all to pieces’. ‘We are all seting [sitting] on a bomb Just waiting for some one to touch a match to it,’ he added, with his usual vivid sense of drama. ‘If the Ambassador gets out of this Mess with our life we will be awful lucky.’ For once the redoubtable Phil was anxious: ‘These crazy people are Killing each other Just like we Swat flies at home.’ Even his boss was admitting to his son Perry, ‘I never knew of a place where human life is as cheap as it is now in Russia.’ But sad to say, murder and robbery and acts of violent retribution were now so commonplace that he had found himself becoming ‘accustomed’ to it.1

In Moscow the October Revolution had been far more savage and bloody. The cadets there had been ‘forewarned and forearmed’ and had taken up strong defensive positions in the Kremlin and other strategic buildings.2 It had taken ten days for the Bolsheviks to wrest power, with fierce battles on the streets and around the Kremlin leaving more than a thousand dead, and with atrocities against the surrendering cadets far more widespread than those in Petrograd. The US consulate had been badly damaged by gunfire; the Hotel Metropole, where many foreign nationals were staying, had been partially destroyed. Leighton Rogers’s colleagues at the Moscow branch of the National City Bank – which was housed in Moscow’s National Hotel – had had to take refuge in the potato bins in the cellar, where he heard tell they had held a three-day poker game during the worst of the fighting.3

In Petrograd both the British and American embassies, although not attacked, had been virtually cut off from the outside world; none of their telegrams were getting through, their diplomatic couriers were not allowed out and their mail was blocked as well. Officials at the US embassy were doing everything possible to induce their nationals to leave Russia the minute they could and, in particular, had been evacuating women and children by the Trans-Siberian Railway. With the first real ice and snow of the winter setting in, on 5 November thirty-five American men, women and children left the city by train, together with many of the members of the US Red Cross Mission who had decided to quit.4 The problem of getting these nationals out of Russia was manifold: there were wives who did not wish to abandon their husbands; women fearful of travelling alone; people who did not have the money for the fare; even ‘enemies who cannot stand the thought of ten days in the same car’, as J. Butler Wright noted – not to mention the perilous nature of the journey itself, with trains being stopped and boarded by rabbles of Red Guards at many points along the line. For the British the situation had become even more strained, when Trotsky refused exit permits to members of the colony wishing to leave, in retaliation for the arrest and internment in England of two Bolsheviks who had come to spread anti-war propaganda. ‘Britishers, at present, are virtually prisoners in Russia,’ Consul Arthur Woodhouse told his twenty-year-old daughter Ella, now safely back in England:

We are having a lively time at this office. Frenzied H.H.H.s [‘helpless, hopeless hystericals’] still come along as usual, and refuse to be comforted. I am thankful to say that the bulk of the Britishers has left. Those who are still here would like to do so, of course, but either cannot for lack of means, or, under present conditions, are not permitted to quit.5

It was a particularly difficult time for the ambassador, too. Assassination threats were being made against Sir George Buchanan in the Bolshevik press, which derided him as ‘Tsar of Petrograd’, and it was rumoured that Trotsky was going to have him arrested. Sir George’s family begged the ambassador not to go out for his daily walks, but he refused, assuring them that he ‘did not take Trotsky’s threats too seriously’.6 He stuck to his guns and, ‘with great dignity and determination’, also resolutely refused to receive Trotsky and declined his offer of Red Guards ‘for the protection of the embassy’.7 Buchanan informed London that ‘the Government is now in the hands of a small clique of extremists, who are bent on imposing their will on the country by terroristic methods’, and he would have no truck with them. The Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, had telegraphed from England urging him to return home, but Sir George was adamant: ‘It would not do for me to leave Petrograd, as my presence here reassures the colony,’ he responded in early November. But his wife, fearful for her husband’s failing health, had found it all a terrible strain and admitted they were ‘having a horrid time’.8

Much like Buchanan and Woodhouse, David Francis had refused to be intimidated; ‘I will never talk to a damn Bolshevik,’ he had growled, also refusing the offer of Bolshevik guards for the US embassy. ‘It evidently never occurred to him to leave his post whatever came,’ wrote his friend Julia Cantacuzène-Speransky, ‘though he spoke quite frankly of the threats and dangers to which he was constantly subjected.’9 This was not to mention the strain Francis had been under recently, thanks to gossip within the embassy about his friendship with Russian resident Matilda von Cram, whom he had befriended on the boat from America, and who was still suspected of being a German spy. Separated from his family and increasingly isolated from his disapproving staff, many of whom seriously doubted his professional competence, Francis had doggedly clung to the charming company of Madame Cram – who still visited regularly to keep him company and teach him French – and his staunchest ally, Phil Jordan. But recently Francis’s aide, J. Butler Wright, had become seriously worried about the ambassador’s health, noting an increased mental and physical exhaustion (Francis often worked till two or three in the morning, as Phil Jordan knew). More worrying, however, was the fact that Francis had become muddled and inconsistent in his official dealings; he seemed to have ‘lost his moorings’. On 22 November an encoded cable was sent to Washington, recommending ‘that to prevent public humiliation formal orders be sent to [the] Ambassador to hasten to Washington’.10

For the many British and American expatriates who could not leave Petrograd there was nothing to do that winter but lie low and ‘see how this new government of workers and peasants would be constituted … and translate their dream into reality’.11 Smolny remained a cauldron of political debate, rivalry and invective, but the masses had ceased to care and did their best to get on with their lives. As far as Louis de Robien was concerned, the people were ‘bored with the whole question’. What did the leadership holed up at the Smolny have to offer them? Certainly not bread. Nothing but ‘Theories, dogmas, opinions, doctrines, hypotheses – all expressed in words lacking any sense of proportion’. ‘This,’ wrote French resident Louise Patouillet, ‘is the moral baggage that most of the revolutionary leaders carry with them’:

Meetings with an endless number of splinter groups or plenary sessions, interminable voting on points of order or corrections to the points of order. Useless, and consequently inevitable, debates that go on without a break, all day, all night. An endless stream of speakers whose hands are bound by the chains of party dogma, and who can only see things through their dead, doctrinaire eyes.12

What ordinary Russians needed, Patouillet wrote, were ‘deeds not words’. Her compatriot Louis de Robien had also become deeply cynical of any prospect of a viable political solution in Russia: ‘Parties are founded, cartels are established, people make mergers, Committees are formed, and so are committee Councils, and council Committees: they all claim to be saving the country and the world, but each day one hears of some new split and some sensational new patching-up.’13

In this continuing atmosphere of conflict and uncertainly Lenin had pushed ahead, unchallenged, with the Bolshevik programme of socialisation and the systematic destruction of all vestiges of the old imperial order. His first and most dramatic diktat was the Decree on Land, abolishing private ownership and confiscating all such lands for redistribution among the peasantry. The delegates at the Congress of Soviets had unanimously ratified it before the congress was dissolved on 27 October. Freedom of the press was also quashed, although many opposition papers went underground, just as the revolutionary press had done in tsarist times; the State Bank was taken over, and advertising became a state-controlled monopoly. Freedom of speech was remorselessly eroded – first the political clubs were closed, and then all public meetings apart from official government ones were banned.

The Municipal Duma of Petrograd, which till late November valiantly resisted Bolshevik intimidation, was forcibly dissolved at bayonet point and its mayor and councillors arrested.14 All courts opposing the new Soviet regime were closed, replaced by the Military Revolutionary Tribunal, which proceeded ruthlessly to deal with ‘counter-revolutionists’, ‘speculators’ and any other perceived enemies of the new socialist state. ‘Petrograd greeted the day of the tribunal’s first sitting with apprehension,’ recalled Bessie Beatty, pronouncing it ‘the beginning of the terror’. On that sombre day ‘press and populace discussed little besides the guillotine’.15 In a final ominous act of official repression, on 7 December a new body for ‘Combating Counter-Revolution’ was created: the Chrezvychainaya Komissiya – better known by its acronym Che-Ka, and located unobtrusively on the fourth floor of a house on Gorokhovaya.16 It was here that prominent members of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy (if they hadn’t already fled Russia) were brought for interrogation. Sometimes, at night, the occasional crack of a rifle could be heard; there was talk of a trench along a rear wall of the building, where people were taken out and shot.

On 12 November, elections to the long-awaited Constituent Assembly had finally begun. Leighton Rogers found it an interesting exercise: there were nineteen political parties vying for seats, and the campaign was a veritable ‘battle of posters’. Everywhere across the city ‘buildings, walls, and all available hoarding spaces [were] plastered with them, as much as ten deep’, for as Rogers noted, it was ‘considered clever indeed for members of a Party to sneak out at night and cover every opposition poster with one of its own’. One of the groups had an office in his apartment building and ‘on three occasions’ he had seen their representatives ‘setting forth after midnight with rolls of posters and buckets of paste’. ‘There may be some truth in the statement made the other day as a joke,’ he added, ‘that the Party with the most paste and posters will win.’17

At the end of the two-week voting period it was clear that the Bolsheviks had not gained the mandate they had confidently been expecting; far from it, they were very much in the minority, with only 24 per cent of the vote. Lenin was incensed and postponed the opening of the Assembly scheduled for 28 November to the New Year; if he had had his way, he would have done away with it altogether.* The continuing political vacuum was marked by an inexorable increase in Bolshevik tyranny and the arrest and murder of political opponents. Winter 1917–18 inaugurated what Willem Oudendijk called a ‘bayonetocracy’ – ‘a soldiers’ dictatorship’, in the words of Louis de Robien – and with it the widespread imposition of summary justice. The rifle and the bayonet ruled in a city swollen with idle soldiers returned from the front, who were noted for their unpredictable, anarchic behaviour. ‘Our own bourgeois Revolution of 1789 lapsed into the excesses of the Terror, and ended with Bonaparte and his wars,’ noted de Robien. ‘But that was not enough to cure us.’18 He held out little hope for the Russians, having lately witnessed a typical example of the ugly face of mindless, arbitrary violence when he saw ‘two soldiers bargaining for apples with an old woman street vendor’:

Deciding that the price was too high, one of them shot her in the head while the other ran her through with his bayonet. Naturally, nobody dared to do anything to the two soldier murderers, who went quietly on their way watched by an indifferent crowd and munching the apples which they had acquired so cheaply, without giving a thought to the poor old woman whose body lay in the snow for part of the day, near her little stall of green apples.19

Anxiety communicated itself wherever one went: ‘Never, on any face one passed, did one see a smile,’ remembered Meriel Buchanan, ‘never, down any of the wide streets was there the sound of a laugh, a note of music, or even the ringing of bells from the churches.’ ‘By the time I left, this feeling of hatred towards anybody not obviously belonging to the proletariat was almost tangible. One literally felt it, whenever one went out into the street,’ remembered Ella Woodhouse.20

For the Americans it was just the same; Phil Jordan admitted that the situation in Petrograd was ‘something awful’:

Streets are full of all the cut throats and robbers that are in Russia. you can hear the machine guns and cannons roaring all night and day. thousands are being killed. why we are alive I can not tell. they break into private homes and rob and kill all the people. in a house not very [far] from the embassy they killed a little girl and 12 rifle baynets found stuck through her body. oh the horrible Sights that is to be seen … I have fond out that the best thing to do right now is keep your mouth shut and look as much like an American as you can … All the thugs that have been turned out of prison was armed with a rifle … we cant tell at what minute the Germans will take Petrograd. If they come right at this time I don’t know what we would do because we cant get out. we are like a rat in a trap. the Bolshevicks have torn up all the rail roads. I cant tell but this Ford might be a life Saver. All the business houses and banks are closed. The city is pitch dark. At times we only have tallow candles for light, the plants have no coal and Very little wood. The Banks are in charge of the Boshevicks and escaped convicks and thieves are on guard with machine guns and rifles, the food question is growing worse every day … the Ambassador told me two days ago to be packed with as little as possible because we might have to go and leave it all behind.21

The recent Decree on Land – and, with it, the dissemination of Lenin’s favourite Marxist dictum that ‘property is theft’, implying that people should steal back that which had been stolen from them – ‘had initiated a stampede’. ‘Private property was at public mercy,’ wrote Leighton Rogers, as the Bolsheviks urged that it be searched out and seized with whatever force was necessary.’22 With looting, robbery and murder becoming the order of the day – and night – it was difficult for those foreign observers who had had a degree of sympathy for the ideals of the February Revolution to hang on to their convictions, when they now saw them betrayed daily by the aberrations of the new Bolshevik dictatorship.23 Even Red Cross official Raymond Robins, who had so eagerly greeted the new dawn of October, telling his wife Margaret that ‘This is the Great Experience’, was beginning to have his doubts. ‘Think of it,’ he wrote to Margaret on 8 November, ‘the most extreme Socialist-Peace-Semi-Anarchist Government in all the world maintaining its control by the bayonet, proscribing all publications except those that favor their program, arresting persons without warrant and holding them for weeks without trial and without charge.’24

The one ray of hope came when, on 2 December, Trotsky announced that the Bolsheviks had agreed an armistice with the Germans; peace negotiations would begin at Brest-Litovsk on the 9th. Everyone wanted an end to the war and a return to normality, for the next act in the drama was now staring Russia in the face: famine. Next to peace, the one and only topic of conversation – not just among ordinary people on the streets, but in the grandest drawing rooms of Petrograd – was ‘the best way to get hold of a sack of flour or a few eggs’.25 ‘Even the foreign colony, whose members were far better off than the Russians,’ recalled Bessie Beatty, ‘heard the gray wolf howling. We were a hungry lot from morning until night. Most of us developed an appetite such as we had never known. We scraped the plates clean.’26

Phil Jordan had constantly risked his safety going out in the ambassador’s Ford to distant street markets and outlying villages to try and find food. ‘After living in a wild country like this for 18 months it makes you feel like there is only two decent places to live,’ he told Annie Pulliam, ‘one is heaven the other is America.’27 Just recently, while out shopping, he had been gathering up his purchases ready to leave when ‘about three hundred Bulsheviks rushed in the market with cocked rifles’. One of them told him no one was allowed to buy anything in the market any more because ‘we are going to take it all for our friends’. ‘You get out of here and be dam quick about it. I Said I will not leave this place until my money is returned. he then tol the Clerk to give me my money. they then began … shooting to frighten the people and took every thing in the market.’28

With the quest for food proving such a dangerous and costly exercise among the relatively privileged expatriate community, it was no wonder that when Robbie Stevens, director of the National City Bank, gave a Thanksgiving Dinner on 2 November for all twenty-four of his employees, everyone ‘turned out in all their glad rags’ to enjoy some good food while it was on offer.

While the ‘gray wolf’ of hunger remained a ‘sleeping serpent’ and had yet to foment further social unrest in Petrograd, the ever-present menace of alcohol was, as Bessie Beatty observed, far more serious.29 All foreign observers had agreed that the tsarist ban on vodka sales had been the one thing that had saved the revolution in February from even worse savagery and violence, inflicted by mobs maddened by drink. But on the night of 23–4 November the revolutionaries finally laid their hands on the untapped alcoholic nirvana languishing in the cellars of the Winter Palace.

After the palace was taken, it was discovered that the Tsar’s wine cellars were still intact, stashed full of wine, champagne and brandy. Indeed, Petrograd itself still retained more than eight hundred private wine cellars belonging to the clubs and former aristocracy, with one vault alone containing 1.2 million bottles. The alcohol stored in the Winter Palace included priceless bottles of champagne that had ‘lain undisturbed for three hundred years’, according to Bessie Beatty, all of which was valued at something like ‘thirty million rubles’. Once word got out that it was all still sitting there, the Bolsheviks knew that the tovarishchi would come running. The Military Revolutionary Committee pondered what to do. They were badly in need of funds and the best and obvious option would be to sell it, perhaps to the British or Americans.30 A safer option would have been to take it away and dump it wholesale – perhaps in the Neva, before the mob got their hands on it. In the end, the best solution seemed to be simply to send in a contingent of Red Guards ‘whose revolutionary spirit was sufficiently strong to withstand the temptation of the liquor’, to smash the bottles and then pump out all the alcohol, for the cellars would be awash with it.31

The night the Red Guards went in, Bessie Beatty thought ‘the whole populace was going to be killed’, for she heard the constant sounds of what she thought were rifles going off. But no, it was the sound of the ‘popping of thousands of corks’ up at the Winter Palace.32 Inevitably, the men sent in to wreak this destruction could not resist the lure of rare vintage Tokay from the reign of Catherine the Great, and happily proceeded to drink away ‘the inheritance of Nicholas Romanov’.33 Armed sailors were sent in to try to restore order – but a large crowd of drunken men was wreaking havoc by then, lurching around ankle-deep in the wine from the broken bottles, and would not be dispersed. Shooting and fighting broke out. Finally three companies of fire engines were sent to turn their hoses on the cellars – flooding them and smashing many more of the wine bottles in the process. Several who were too drunk to escape were drowned or froze to death in the ice-cold river water from the hoses.34 Leighton Rogers heard tell of a soldier on a tram bemoaning the fact that ‘sixty-three of his comrades had died in the carousal in the Winter Palace wine cellar, shot by their fellows in quarrels or too drunk to swim the flood created by fire engines’; upon which, a woman sitting across the aisle from him ‘raised her eyes piously and sighed, “sixty-three, thank God”’.35

News spread fast across Petrograd about the rich pickings to be had up at the Winter Palace. Soon everyone was joining in, recalled Meriel Buchanan: ‘Crowds, eager for a little booty, arrived on the scene. Soldiers in motor lorries drove up, and went away again with cases full of priceless wine. Men and women, with their bags and baskets heavy with bottles, could be seen selling them to passers-by in the streets. Even the children had their share of the booty, and could be met staggering under the weight of a magnum of champagne, or a bottle of valuable liqueur.’36 For days the sour reek of alcohol hung over the Winter Palace.* Even as far along the embankment as the British embassy the air was redolent with it. Soldiers and sailors lay dead-drunk in the snow, which was stained red, not with blood this time, but with wine. ‘In some places the crowds scooped it up in their hands, trying to get the last drop of flavour out of it, fighting each other for the remains,’ recalled Meriel Buchanan; others lay down in the gutters trying to drink the wine that ran there from so many broken bottles.37

But the pillaging and the deaths did not stop at the Winter Palace; alcohol-lust caught fire among the Red Guards, as well as soldiers and sailors filling the city, and many went on the rampage, breaking into private wine cellars and drinking themselves into a bestial stupor. The English Club soon succumbed, as too did Yeliseev’s emporium on the corner of the Nevsky, a favourite of the foreign diplomatic community. The only way that Contant’s restaurant managed to protect its wine cellar was by ‘installing twenty or so hefty chaps provided with rifles, machine-guns and grenades, whom it pays, feeds, and supplies with drink in abundance’. (By Christmas, Contant’s would be the only restaurant still able to serve wine.)38 Russian friends of the Buchanans started arriving at the British embassy because soldiers had broken into their homes and ‘were not only drinking all their wine, but were breaking up the furniture, and, being too drunk to know what they were doing, were indulging in promiscuous shooting’.39 One night Phil Jordan had heard an ‘awful thumping’ and breaking of glass three doors down from the embassy, and went out to discover that eight or nine soldiers had battered their way into a wine store and had ‘all got as drunk as they could’. The temperature was 18–20 degrees below zero, and yet ‘the next morning the Street for one block was full of drunken Soldiers Some Sleeping in the Snow Just as you could in bed’. ‘And Mrs Francis think,’ he added. ‘No law not a policeman or any one to say Stop.’40

‘The whole of Petrograd is drunk,’ admitted the newly appointed People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, in a moment of exasperation.41 ‘Night after night came the sounds of bedlam,’ wrote Leighton Rogers, as the drinking continued: ‘talking, laughing, shouts, groans, flashes of light in the darkness, glimmerings of candles, shots and frantic stumbling about … the entire city seemed to have caught the carousel fever.’42 From the British embassy, Meriel Buchanan could hear the pandemonium broken by ‘interminable choruses of Russian folk songs’. A thriving trade in stolen booze soon sprang up, with some of the fine vintage wines still bearing the imperial crest being resold by looters. Even members of the British and American colonies admitted to buying some of it. Louis de Robien noted how some particularly enterprising fraudsters had been selling bottles of ‘champagne’ from the Winter Palace that they had secretly emptied of their original contents during their binges and replaced with ‘water from the Neva’. The Bolshevik government meanwhile continued to try and destroy wine stores before the mob got to them: in the Duma cellars 36,000 bottles of brandy were smashed; three million rubles-worth of champagne was destroyed elsewhere. There was, however, one unforeseen consequence of the job of the official bottle-smashers: even if they piously refrained from drinking any of the wine themselves, they became hopelessly inebriated from all the fumes.43

As Christmas 1917 approached, life in Petrograd had never seemed more arbitrary, more dangerous. ‘The Bolsheviks are nominally at the head of affairs,’ wrote Denis Garstin, ‘but in reality it’s mob law – in which the mob is there but not the law. Trotsky and Lenin, hating the bourgeoisie more and more every day, issue new edicts destroying everything, repudiating debts, marriages, murders, alliances, enemy crimes – oh, they’re having a great time.’44 ‘I am afraid of an intoxicated Russian with a gun,’ admitted Pauline Crosley who, having opted to remain in Petrograd with her husband, avoided going out as much as possible, in common with most of her friends. Other foreigners who had decided not to leave, such as Paulette Pax, who was determined to fulfil her contract at the Mikhailovsky Theatre, ‘for the prestige of France’, stayed at home. But she found it hard to endure the endless days shut up in her apartment with her windows shuttered and, finally, took a chance and went out – simply to escape ‘the stifling sense of entombment’.45

But there was little worth venturing out for, as yet another squalid winter drew in: a frozen Neva and snowbound streets; empty ‘churches where nobody prayed’; few functioning trams, and those there were bursting to capacity; half the shops closed and shuttered; prolonged power cuts – made worse by serious shortages of coal, wood, kerosene and candles; bread made of straw; butter and eggs almost unheard of. And all the time the purchasing power of the ruble continued to plummet. ‘Comparisons with former prices are beyond the arithmetical capacity of my brain,’ Pauline Crosley wrote. ‘I simply know that I would rather walk than to pay forty roubles (about $4.00 in our money just now) to an izvozchik for a 15 minute ride.’ What more could she tell her family back home? ‘In general the news is: Petrograd is still here; a part of Moscow is no longer there; many handsome estates are no longer anywhere; the Bolsheviki are everywhere.’46 And now the banks were on strike. ‘All business is running on momentum and nearing the point of immobility,’ wrote Leighton Rogers on 29 November. ‘So we drag along, hoping each day that the following one will disclose an improvement in the situation; but we have been hoping this for eight months now, and it has grown steadily worse.’47

At the beginning of December, Sir George Buchanan fell ill yet again. ‘My doctor tells me that I am at the end of my tether,’ he admitted. He was forced to agree that he must leave Russia. With the opening of the Brest-Litovsk peace conference on 9 December he had finally, reluctantly, given up all hope for Russia. It was clear to him that the war was ‘more hated than even the tsar had been’, and for the British mission in Petrograd to continue trying to keep Russia in it was futile.48 His colleague David Francis, meanwhile, was adamant: ‘I am willing to swallow pride, sacrifice dignity and with discretion do all necessary to prevent Russia from becoming an ally of Germany.’ But it was too late; on 7 December Phil was writing to Mrs Francis: ‘do you know that at the present time that Petrograd is … full of Germans [released POWs] Struting around the Streets as proud as peacocks. All the Russian people are quite happy that the Germans are here. They Say that when the Germans do take Petrograd that we Shall have some kind of law and order to live under.’49

On 12 December by the Russian calendar, the British, American and other remaining foreigners shut out the grim realities of starving Petrograd to celebrate Christmas – for by the European, Gregorian calendar it was 25 December. ‘In the midst of war and revolution,’ Bessie Beatty remembered, ‘we not only celebrated Christmas, but we celebrated it twice.’ And to her ‘sunshine-fed California soul’, that Christmas ‘stepped ready-made from a fairy tale’.50 Muddy Petrograd, made even more mournful by the tattered exteriors of the neglected and bullet-marked stucco buildings, was now transformed by the breathtaking beauty of a winter that came ‘toppling out of the heavens’, with snow piling up ‘in billows on roofs and chimneys, and the icycles hang[ing] like crystal fringes from the woodwork’.

Against such a backdrop, Beatty wrote, even Christmas 1917 was magical, ‘however empty the shops or troubled the people’.51 The American Red Cross Mission held a lunch for American correspondents on Christmas Day; a crackling fire was lit and a decorated tree took pride of place. ‘We pulled down the blinds and shut out war and revolution, while we laughed merrily over the Russian conception of mince pie.’ At their palatial new fourteen-roomed apartment Fred Sikes and Leighton Rogers ‘put out a mighty good meal’ for some of their bank colleagues, recalled John Louis Fuller: roast goose, vegetables, a ‘five layer cake’, plus wine – some of it from the Winter Palace and bought on the black market. But the ‘best was to come on Christmas night’ at a party for the entire American colony, laid on at the National City Bank.52 Bessie Beatty deemed it ‘a triumph, taxing all the ingenuity of a clever woman and half a dozen resourceful men’, explaining that ‘the miracle of providing food for two hundred people with Petrograd’s cupboard stripped almost bare was a real achievement’. The presiding genius of this ‘conjuring trick’ had been Mildred Farwell, Petrograd correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, married to a member of the Red Cross Mission, who organised the obtaining of ‘baking powder from Vladivostok, six thousand versts away, to make American layer cakes. The eggs came from Pskoff, up near the Russian front. The Ambassador’s pantry was robbed of its white flour. And the turkeys came from heaven knows where.’53*

That night, recalled Beatty, the old Turkish embassy ‘took on all its former glory’, decked out in flags and with its huge gilded mirrors reflecting ‘a whirling company of women in shimmering frocks and men whose evening clothes had not been out of their creases for many a day’. ‘Our plain, bare old counters, only used to having money handed across them were covered with good things to eat,’ John Louis Fuller wrote in his journal. ‘White bread sandwiches, turkey, chicken salad, cranberries, jam cakes of all kinds and apple pies … another counter held the punch bowl made of about ten different kinds of wine.’ Needless to say, ‘before the party was more than half over [it] had all been consumed’. Everyone had a riotous time till 3.00 a.m., dancing to a balalaika band and a twelve-piece orchestra playing the one-step and American ragtime. A Russian guest who was an opera singer entertained with a marvellous rendition of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. Leighton Rogers waltzed around, ‘bumping ambassadors at every step and causing a great jingling of brass-work among the generals present with all their decorations’, but he was a poor dancer and gave it up as a bad job.54

Over at the British embassy, Christmas night had been rather low-key in comparison, marked by the official farewell for Sir George Buchanan. The Allied Naval and Military Missions were invited, plus one hundred members of staff of the embassy and some Russian friends. It would be the last party held by the British diplomatic community in Petrograd. Luckily there had been no power cut that evening, ‘so the crystal chandeliers blazed with light as they had done in the past’ and, although he was very unwell, Sir George was there, standing ‘at the top of the staircase receiving the guests as they came up, and with his monocle which dangled down from his neck and broad ribbon, look[ing] as much an Ambassador as any Ambassador can look’. Embassy official William Gerhardie recorded the characteristic diffidence with which Sir George responded to a rousing chorus of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ at supper, insisting that he was ‘neither jolly nor good’ and that ‘all he could say of himself was that he was a “fellow”’.55

Meriel Buchanan never forgot that last sad party:

Although the ballroom was stacked with tins of bully beef and other provisions, although every officer there had a loaded pistol in his pocket, and there were rifles and cartridge cases hidden in the Chancery, we tried to forget the desolate streets and the threat of constant danger. We played the piano and sang songs, we drank champagne and laughed to hide the sadness in all our hearts.56

Two days after these happy Christmas celebrations, the Bolsheviks put all of the foreign banks in Petrograd under direct state control and sent armed detachments of Red Guards to occupy them. That morning, 14 December, a ‘loud commotion and raised voices erupted in the downstairs main entrance’ of the National City Bank. The next thing Leighton Rogers and John Louis Fuller knew, ‘metal-shod footwear thumped on the marble stairs as a squad of Bolshevik soldiers clattered into our banking rooms’. The men were led by a ‘strutting little red-head in officer’s uniform, black leather boots and all’, who banged a long blue revolver on the counter, ‘flourished a grimy document, and announced that by order of the People’s Commissars he was seizing the bank and closing it’. The staff were ordered to hand over all keys, and their ledgers too were to be confiscated.* Despite their lack of Russian, the desk clerks got the gist of ‘Red’s’ message (as Rogers nicknamed him) and closed up their ledgers and handed them over as the soldiers ‘echeloned along the counter and rested their rifles on it, bayonets bristling’.57 By now the manager, Steve, had emerged from his office to discover that his bank belonged to the Russian people, and to be told by ‘Red’:

You will have to go with me to the State bank … In your automobile.

‘I haven’t got one,’ Steve protested.

‘You’re a bank Director – you must have an automobile.’

Fortunately Steve’s Russian was good and he proceeded to explain in no uncertain terms that ‘this was an American bank and Americans were democratic, unpretentious people who didn’t always furnish their bank Directors with automobiles’.58 Having pondered this, Red announced that all of the bank’s cash would be confiscated. Unfortunately, with the State Bank closed, they only had a few thousand rubles in the tills at the time. Red was visibly disappointed. It turned out that it was a prearranged given that any Bolshevik units sent to ‘nationalise’ business institutions were allowed to divide between themselves whatever cash they found there. ‘On the assumption that an American bank would be piled to the rafters with loose cash a lottery had been organized, with the winning squad drawing the American assignment.’ Red was furious: ‘What kind of a bank is this, anyway?’ he shouted. ‘No automobile for the Director and hardly any money in the cash-drawer … I’ll have to explain to them’ – upon which he informed his men that the lack of cash was due to the trickery of the devious Americans, ‘which just proved that we were dangerous people, the worst enemies the proletariat could possibly have’. ‘Weren’t we bankers,’ he shouted, ‘and didn’t that make us capitalists; and weren’t we foreigners, and therefore international capitalists? There wasn’t any lower order of the human race, he said, in admonishing his men to keep close watch on us.’59

After taking the keys to the safe and strong boxes and informing the clerks that they were all under house arrest, Red carted Steve off to the State Bank to release more funds. Meanwhile about a dozen ‘soldati’ stayed on guard in the hall, ‘sitting on our gold furniture’, Fuller remembered, gorging on the bank’s precious supply of bread, and lying down to take a nap on the period sofas and chairs. The young bank clerks sat there disconsolately until someone remembered the gramophone they had used for the Christmas party, brought it in and began playing American ragtime. One by one the Bolsheviks guarding them left their posts and gathered round to listen. When Red returned hours later with Steve, ‘that’s the way he found us,’ recalled Rogers, ‘with a couple of Russian Guards trying to dance to the Amerikansky capitalistical music’.60 Red’s occupation of the bank lasted well into the New Year; Rogers recalled him strutting around ‘like a kingpin’: it was ‘the great moment of his life and he [was] making the most of it’. Such was his dictatorial behaviour, however, that Rogers feared Red was getting ‘a bit Napoleonic’.61

Similar peremptory Bolshevik takeovers were made of British businesses across the city. Mechanical engineer James Stinton Jones had returned in September to wind up his business affairs and transfer his money to London, but had been very uneasy at the ‘prison atmosphere’ that he had found in Petrograd. The bank holding his money had now been taken over by Bolsheviks, but he demanded – and managed to get – 500 rubles (about £50) from his account. It was not enough, however, to pay the staff at his office and workshop, whom he was forced to sack. Then one morning the Bolsheviks came and demanded the keys to his workshop and stores, containing £20,000 worth of machinery and equipment. They returned soon afterwards for the keys to his flat:

‘What do you want?’ I asked …

‘Hand over the key of your flat to Comrade ——, the bearer of this letter.’

‘What do you mean? It is evening, it is cold, what am I supposed to do?’

‘That is your business.’ Then, looking at the coat rack, he enquired, ‘Is that your cloak and galoshes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Take them.’

I turned to go into the room and he asked me where I was going.

‘I am going to the bedroom to get the photograph of my mother.’

Again pointing to my coat, he said: ‘Get your coat and galoshes.’ As I gave the key to him, I was left with only the clothes I was wearing.

Stinton Jones returned to England after having spent most of the last thirteen years in Russia, taking with him only those clothes and what remained of the 500 rubles.62

During her final two weeks in Petrograd, Meriel Buchanan found it very hard not to cry. In leaving Russia, she felt as if she was ‘deserting somebody I had loved very dearly, and abandoning them to die in utter misery. Day after day I went to say goodbye to one more building, to one more place which had become dear and familiar: the Kazan Cathedral on the Nevsky … the Alexander column in the Winter Palace square; the beautiful equestrian statue of Peter the Great by Falconet.’63 She felt far more pain at leaving the city than at making choices about which possessions to pack in the one small trunk allotted her. Her heavy white Russian shuba lined with grey squirrel and with a fox-fur collar, her ornate court dress and train of silver brocade had to be left; her Siamese cat, too. The embassy silver was sent on by sea from Archangel, but much of the beautiful furniture collected by her parents during their long years in diplomatic service in Europe – the antique Dutch cabinet, French Empire chairs, Marie Antoinette’s writing table, the Aubusson carpet – all had to be left behind.64 The day before their departure she walked ‘rather sadly through the desolate silent streets of the town which had become, after so many years, almost a home to me, and which I felt I would never see again’. It was intensely cold, with an icy wind blowing from the river, the snow piled high by the roadsides. In an empty St Isaac’s Cathedral she lit a candle at the icon of the Miraculous Mother of St George. That evening she dined at the Military Club on the Millionnaya with Colonel Knox and other military attachés who would be leaving Petrograd with them.65

Her father was equally melancholy: ‘Why is it that Russia casts over all who know her such an indefinable mystic spell that, even when her wayward children have turned their capital into a pandemonium, we are sorry to leave it?’ he asked in his diary.66 On Tuesday 26 December 1918, at 7.45 a.m., the Buchanans left the embassy in the darkness of another power cut, making their way downstairs by the light of a flickering kerosene lamp, past the portraits on the landing of Queen Victoria, King Edward and Queen Alexandra, King George and Queen Mary. Their sobbing Russian maids saw them into their car, which jerked off slowly through piled-up banks of snow to the bleak and freezing Finland Station, where they were waved off by a few diplomatic colleagues and members of the British colony. A bribe of two bottles of finest embassy brandy had secured them a sleeping car to themselves.

Willem Oudendijk had gone to the embassy the previous day to wish his colleague farewell. ‘Seldom,’ he wrote, ‘has any British diplomat left his post under more dramatic circumstances than Sir George Buchanan did on that occasion. He had been an extremely popular figure in Russian society; he had succeeded in making himself the most important member of the whole diplomatic body.’ From the outbreak of war in 1914, when Sir George had been looked up to for his moral support of the Russian nation, he had been forced to watch in dismay the slow, inexorable ‘crumbling of everything that held the Russian nation together’ and to find himself the object of Bolshevik hatred as an enemy, a representative of ‘the English bankers, generals and capitalists who desired nothing else but to feast on the blood of Russia’s toiling masses’. ‘What diplomat has ever lived through such heartbreaking changes during his tenure of office?’ asked Oudendijk. ‘In the midst of all this turmoil Sir George Buchanan stood like a rock, unperturbed; in looks, in words, in deeds a perfect British gentleman.’67*

Buchanan’s American colleague, David Francis, remained in Petrograd, however, under instructions from Washington (which had thought better of recalling him at this critical time) to do his best to effect a rapprochement with the Bolsheviks. The faithful Phil had been hoping to see his boss (whose health, too, was failing) home to safety. ‘I am all packed up ready to fly at a minutes Notice,’ he told Mrs Francis, adding that ‘At times I wish the Ambassador did not have So much of that Kentucky blood in him and then mabe he would not take Such chances.’ He was worried that the ambassador seemed intent on remaining in Petrograd ‘Just a little longer than he ought to’.68

As Russia saw out its old, Orthodox year, over at the French Embankment, with a blizzard raging outside, Pauline Crosley had been able to get enough wood to have an open fire in one room, lit by candlelight and kerosene lamps, where she and her husband had managed to entertain a few visitors. But they were only too aware of the ‘evident effort to drive foreigners out’. It was so disheartening. ‘Russia is a wonderful country,’ she wrote, ‘full of lights and shadows, though just now the shadows have the advantage. It is too bad that the world must lose so much that was beautiful in Russia to receive – what? Something much worse than nothing.’69

Leighton Rogers had seen out the old year by taking a walk up the Nevsky, but it had only convinced him ‘beyond doubt’ of Russia’s present economic and social disintegration. He could see it on every face he passed:

the frantic throng on the sidewalks, ragged, gaunt, worried, with the look of the fugitive imprinted on their pallored faces, hurrying along as though driven before a storm of unknown forces. People with rude bundles, some with hard-won loaves under their arms, and others with neither bundles nor bread, only the hunger for it. Thin, aged children forced to labor before their time; crippled soldiers turned out of hospitals by their native country with no other payment for their sacrifice than the privilege of begging on its streets; and professional beggars everywhere – blind, you say? Absolutely eyeless. The whole thing more like a conception of Doré than reality – a panorama of ‘les miserables’.70

As the last day of 1917 turned, there was one comfort at least for Rogers: ‘a letter from home – the first in a long time’. Written in September, it had taken four months to reach him. He was sad and dispirited, and thinking more and more about friends back home who had left for the Western Front. Petrograd had worn him down. After more than a year he had decided to quit the bank and join them. ‘The Bolsheviks have stolen the Russian Revolution and may endure,’ he wrote as he looked back on his time in the city. ‘I hope not, fervently, but it is a possibility that must be faced … The future in Russia is dreadful to contemplate. Not only is she out of this war but she is out of our world for a long time to come. We had better make up our minds to that and concentrate on our own fight.’71

* When the Constituent Assembly finally met at 4.00 p.m. on 3 January 1918, it lasted precisely twelve hours. It was dispersed by Lenin at 4.00 a.m. the next day.

* What was left of the Winter Palace wine collection was eventually removed to Kronstadt, where loyal sailors smashed it up.

* Beatty makes no mention of whether her socialist colleagues Reed, Bryant and Rhys Williams joined in on any of the American colony’s Christmas festivities, and their own memoirs are silent on the subject.

* According to Rogers, the National City Bank of New York was the first American financial or business institution to be taken over by the Bolshevik government.

* British chaplain Bousfield Swan Lombard wrote to his wife that he was ‘pretty certain that Georgie Porgie only got away just in time’ and that had he remained in Petrograd he would have been arrested by the Bolsheviks, as was the Romanian minister, Count Diamandi, early in the new year.

POSTSCRIPT

The Forgotten Voices of Petrograd

Sir George Buchanan and his family arrived by boat at Leith in Scotland on 17 January 1918 and travelled back to London, to congratulatory messages from the British government and lunch at Buckingham Palace. But his health collapsed entirely soon afterwards and he took an extended rest in Cornwall. By now committed to the idea that only an armed Allied intervention would save Russia, he gave numerous talks on the subject and was deeply despondent when that intervention (of 1918–19) failed. Sir George was also bitterly disappointed not to be offered a peerage for his long years of service to British diplomacy, and felt humiliated by the derisory compensation offered him by the government for the loss of his property and investments in Russia. The invitation to take up the ambassadorship to Rome in 1919 for only two years seemed a clear indication that his services would no longer be required thereafter.1

On her return to England, Lady Georgina continued to work tirelessly for British and Russian refugees of the revolution, but in Rome she fell terminally ill with cancer and her suffering blighted the family’s time there. She died in April 1921, shortly after they returned to England.2 With the help of an editor, Sir George turned his Petrograd diaries into a book, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories, published in 1923; he died the following December. His daughter Meriel wrote several books about her time in Russia, including Petrograd, The City of Trouble in 1918 and, in 1932, Dissolution of an Empire, in which she defended her father’s reputation after he had come under unjustified attack for not doing enough to effect the evacuation of the imperial family to the safety of the UK in 1917.3

After the departure of the Buchanans, the British embassy in Petrograd was left with a skeleton staff of ‘Last-Ditchers’, headed by the consul Arthur Woodhouse, who was entrusted with the increasingly onerous responsibility for the well-being of the several hundred British subjects, mainly women, who remained in the city. Together with members of the British military mission, Woodhouse managed to get much-needed supplies of food to them as the situation got ever more desperate. But on 31 August 1918 a group of Red Guards forced their way into the embassy and, during the ensuing mêlée, naval attaché Captain Francis Cromie was killed.4 Thirty embassy staff and officials were arrested, including the chaplain, Rev. Bousfield Swan Lombard, and Consul Woodhouse. They were incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress until October, when they were finally released and evacuated to England via Sweden. For some time the embassy stood empty and neglected; by 1920 it was in use as a storehouse for confiscated works of statuary, furniture and art, ‘like some congested second-hand art shop in the Brompton Road’, before they were sold off by the Bolsheviks.5

In February 1918, with Russian peace negotiations with Germany having ground to a stalemate, the German army had advanced to within one hundred miles of Petrograd. On 11 March the Bolsheviks therefore transferred the seat of government to Moscow and the remaining members of the diplomatic community were evacuated to Vologda, 350 miles south. Many of David Francis’s American colleagues left Russia at this time but, with the departure of Sir George Buchanan, Francis had become dean of the Allied diplomatic corps and was determined to hang on, claiming he did not want ‘to abandon the Russian people, for whom I felt deep sympathy and whom I had assured repeatedly of America’s unselfish interest in their welfare’.6 Phil Jordan was, however, now anxious to leave; after several breakins at other embassies in Petrograd he had come to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks ‘don’t respect foreign embassies any more’.7

On 26 February 1918* the American diplomats left Petrograd by special train for Vologda. Here Francis and Phil settled in surprisingly happily, making themselves at home in a simple but ‘dandy’ (so thought Phil) two-storey wooden house on the main high street where, for the next five months, visitors could enjoy the informal ‘clubhouse atmosphere’ and the stranded diplomats spent their evenings playing poker and smoking cigars. They drank bourbon when they could get it or otherwise ‘plumped for vodka’. They had taken the good old Model T Ford with them and Francis used it to drive around seeking out potential sites for a golf course in the area.8 But in October 1918, with civil war now raging in Russia, Francis fell ill with a severe infection of the gall bladder and had to be evacuated by US cruiser from Murmansk. Phil nursed him through a high fever during an extremely stormy sea crossing.

After recovering at a naval hospital in Scotland, Francis was transferred to London. Shortly after Christmas 1918 the proud Phil Jordan accompanied him as valet to a dinner with King George and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. When they finally returned to the States in February 1919, Phil was again accorded the ultimate accolade – an invitation to the White House. ‘I was born in Hog Alley,’ he later remarked, ‘and I think you know that a kangaroo can jump further than any other animal, but I don’t believe he could jump from Hog Alley to the White House – that was some jump.’9 In 1922 Francis suffered a stroke and never really recovered his health. He died in St Louis in January 1927, having ensured that his sons would take care of the ever-present Phil, who was provided with rent-free accommodation and a small trust fund until his death from cancer in Santa Barbara in 1941.10

With Russia’s withdrawal from the war, the Allied hospitals in Petrograd were closed down. Lady Georgina Buchanan’s British Colony Hospital had already closed in July 1917, partly due to a loss of morale at the erosion of good manners and respect shown for its work by the Russian patients, but also because there were fewer of them – mainly cases of scurvy. Those wounded who remained had, since the revolution, become increasingly obstreperous.11 The committee of the American colony hospital also voted to close its establishment – the only wounded Russian soldiers left, as Pauline Crosley noted, ‘were those wounded fighting amongst themselves’ and it had become ‘too dangerous for the colony women to work there’.12 Their unused supplies were handed over to the Salvation Army to distribute.

The days of the Anglo-Russian Hospital’s usefulness had also come to an end, and in November 1917 the London committee that funded it voted to withdraw its hospital facilities on 1 January 1918. There was, however, the question of ‘what was to happen to the hundreds of pounds worth of beautiful instruments and equipment’ that it contained. Francis Lindley reported that a Red Cross commissioner ‘suggested that it should be made over to the Soviets’, but the administrators were loath to do this, knowing that it would either be purloined or wilfully destroyed. Instead everything was secretly packed up and taken to the Finland Station, and from there sent to Archangel under the protection of a British Armoured Car Division. It eventually arrived back at Red Cross HQ in London, ‘which was better than being left to be wasted by incompetent Soviets’.13 In 1996 the Russians placed a plaque commemorating the ARH at the front entrance of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich’s palace,* which can still be seen today.

The ARH’s founder, Lady Muriel Paget, stubbornly refused to give up on her Russian relief work, however, and remained in Kiev, organising famine relief and running soup kitchens for six thousand people – eventually leaving in February 1918 via Siberia, Japan and the USA. In 1924 she set up the British Subjects in Russia Relief Association to help those still stranded in Russia, many of whom were eventually evacuated to Estonia. Of the many nurses and VADs who worked at the ARH, aside from the well-connected Lady Sybil Grey and Dorothy Seymour, we know virtually nothing of their later lives, though one or two of their memoirs and letters have surfaced, thanks to an extensive search in the course of research for this book.

While the careers of some of the British and American diplomats in Russia have already been written about and their archives survive (if scattered across the UK and USA), we know almost nothing, after they left Petrograd, of the many still-unsung and now long-forgotten expatriates – the nannies and governesses, engineers, businessmen and entrepreneurs, their wives and children – who lived and worked in the capital and wrote so vividly and movingly of their experiences in their diaries and letters home. Some, like Bousfield Swan Lombard, chaplain of the English Church in Petrograd, suffered persecution under the Bolsheviks. Bousfield remained loyally at his post after many in the British community had left, driven by a strong sense of responsibility for the 400 or so fellow nationals still stranded in the city – many of them teachers and governesses who had been in Russia all their lives and had ‘sunk all their savings in some bank’. But Petrograd was such a dispiriting place to be, ‘like a city of the dead’, a place of ‘lawless stagnation’, as he told his wife back home, and he was hugely relieved to finally leave Russia in October 1918 after his release from prison.14 Having lost virtually everything, Bousfield was compensated by the government for his eight years of loyal service in Russia to the measly tune of £50, upon which £43 16s. 7d. was immediately clawed back for the cost of his repatriation to Britain. Bousfield’s and other valuable testimony relating to Petrograd in 1917 is held at the Leeds Russian Archive, which is a treasure trove of memory of the British colonies in Russia from the nineteenth century.

It is hard to be certain exactly how many British, American and French newspaper correspondents (not to mention other foreign reporters) came and went in Petrograd during 1917, as many were not given bylines in their press articles and only a small proportion of them published memoirs. But what is striking is how many there were of them, and how doggedly – cheerfully even – they endured the terrible privations of cold and hunger along with the rest of the population. These journalists often mention each other, in passing, in their own writings, but because of the jobbing nature of their work, always on the move from story to story, virtually nothing has survived of their archives – and, more disappointingly, of the photographs that several of them took.

Arno Dosch-Fleurot spent the rest of his life working as a newspaper correspondent in Europe, and was one of the first reporters to enter Germany at the end of World War I; he tried several times to return to Russia to write on the new Soviet state, but was refused permission. He later married a Russian and lived in Berlin in the 1930s, where he witnessed the rise of Hitler; on the outbreak of World War II, the Nazis arrested him and he was held in detention for fifteen months. For the remainder of his life he was Spanish correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, dying in Madrid in 1951.15 His book Through War to Revolution – poignantly dedicated to ‘The Unknown Russian Soldier over whose tomb burns no flame’ – describing his experiences on the Eastern Front and in Russia, came out in 1931, but is one of many accounts of Petrograd in 1917 that has been too long overlooked.

A similar fate has been shared by Isaac Marcosson’s The Rebirth of Russia, published soon after he left Petrograd, as well as his other journalism on the subject. Marcosson returned to Russia in 1924, shortly after the death of Lenin, to see the extent to which ‘the iron hand of Bolshevism had strangled freedom’. He found the country in an alarming state of ‘dilapidation’ and its beautiful, historic churches ‘converted into stables’. It was a chilling experience and he was glad to bid farewell ‘to espionage, tapped telephones, opened mail, incessant smells, and the oppression that attends constant surveillance’. On his return he wrote an excoriating indictment of the Soviet Union in a series of twelve articles for the Saturday Evening Post entitled ‘After Lenin – What?’ The Soviets promptly banned the newspaper, and Marcosson, from Russia.16

The most notable journalists – aside from British newspaperman Arthur Ransome, who went on to enjoy a celebrated career as a writer – remain the ‘Four Who Saw the Sunrise’, as Bessie Beatty alluded to herself and her companions John Reed, Louise Bryant and Albert Rhys Williams in the dedication to her 1918 book The Red Heart of Russia. Beatty returned home to a successful career in journalism and for many years hosted a popular New York radio show, before dying in 1947. Rhys Williams remained a committed communist activist and, unlike many of his anti-Bolshevik fellow journalists, was welcomed back to the Soviet Union on many occasions between 1922 and 1959; he died in 1962. His unrepentant support for the new Bolshevik Russia was in stark contrast to the utter dismay of Harold Williams, who had shown such passionate support for the ideals of February, only to see everything he hoped for stripped away and destroyed in the early months of 1918. ‘If you lived here you would feel in every bone of your body, in every fibre of your spirit, the bitterness of it,’ he wrote in the Daily Chronicle of 28 January 1918:

I cannot tell you all the brutalities, the fierce excesses, that are ravaging Russia from end to end and more ruthlessly than any invading army. Horrors pall on us – robbery, plunder and the cruellest forms of murder are grown a part of the very atmosphere we live in. It is worse than Tsarism … The Bolsheviks do not profess to encourage any illusions as to their real nature. They treat the bourgeoisie of all countries with equal contempt; they glory in all violence directed against the ruling classes, they despise laws and decencies that they consider effete, they trample on the arts and refinements of life. It is nothing to them if in the throes of the great upheaval the world relapses into barbarism.17

Although the American quartet of fellow socialists all produced memoirs of their own, more optimistic experience of Russia in revolution, it is John Reed’s account, Ten Days that Shook the World, published in 1919, that eclipsed them all, further aggrandised by Warren Beatty’s 1981 Hollywood film Reds. History has since criticised the four friends for playing into the hands of the Bolshevik propaganda machine as Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ – a term frequently applied to fellow travellers of the revolution. The brash and charismatic Reed lived fast and hard, pushing his health in the face of chronic kidney disease, and paid the inevitable price. He died young, of spotted typhus, in Moscow, after being persuaded back to Russia in 1920 to attend a congress in Baku. He was accorded a hero’s burial in the Kremlin Wall, and Eisenstein’s later film October was renamed after the title of his book, but Stalin was none too happy with Reed’s account and ordered the bowdlerisation of the Russian translation, to diminish Trotsky’s role and accentuate his own.

Reed’s widow Louise Bryant, who made it to Russia just in time to sit by her husband’s deathbed, continued with a sporadic career in journalism and remarried in 1923, but her drinking and ill health led to her early death in 1936. Her third husband, diplomat William Bullitt, laid a wreath on Reed’s grave on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1932, but when the plaque commemorating Reed at the Wall was sought out by visitors in the early 1960s, it was discovered that it had been quietly removed and his ashes reburied in a new, collective site behind the Lenin Mausoleum, reserved for ‘fallen heroes’ of the revolution.

As for the intrepid duo of Florence Harper and Donald Thompson, it is greatly regretted that nothing is known of Harper’s subsequent career after leaving Petrograd, aside from a handful of articles about her time in Russia that she published soon afterwards, including one for the Daily Mail in which she vividly described her own and Thompson’s ‘mad chase’ following the story of the ‘B-V (Bolshi-Viki)’.18 Back in the USA, she featured in an interview with the Boston Sunday Globe in June 1918, in which she talked of her good fortune in coming through the February Revolution ‘without a scratch’:

I have been in Petrograd during the Bolsheviki uprisings, sometimes out all night. I have been in street riots in Moscow, I nursed at the front, got trench fever, and trench foot, crossed the North Sea, sailing on a transport that four submarines chased, and am still alive and well. My friends say that they will have to tell off a firing squad for me on Judgment Day.19

Beyond this, Florence Harper simply disappears from view, and from the record.

Despite vowing he would never enter a war zone again, Donald Thompson was back in Russia the following summer – trailing the US intervention forces in Siberia. Like many others, he optimistically hoped that the Allied Intervention would bring about a counter-revolution and the end of Bolshevik tyranny, but after several months filming in Russia and watching the disarray in the Allied forces, he returned home disappointed. Nevertheless he became something of a celebrity in the USA when he released his five-reel silent film The German Curse in Russia in January 1918* – a virulently anti-German, anti-Bolshevik propaganda exercise in support of the US press campaign to discredit the new Russian government – which was well received in the American trade press. Thompson continued to work as an independent film-maker during the 1920s and 1930s; he died in Los Angeles in 1947.

In 1918 Harper and Thompson both brought out extremely vivid memoirs of their time in Petrograd; Thompson also published a valuable book of his photographs. It is a matter of considerable regret, not to mention a loss to history and scholarship therefore, that Thompson’s original photographic negatives do not appear to have survived; there is no archival paper trail for him, or for Harper, like so many other of those groundbreaking journalists.* Three of Thompson’s films survive in whole or in part,† but, at the time of writing, no prints of The German Curse in Russia – shot partly in Petrograd during the revolution, and which was distributed by Pathé – seem to have survived, although the author has ascertained that the film was later cannibalised and some of the footage re-used in Hermann Axelbank’s 1937 documentary film From Tsar to Lenin.‡

As for the most unlikely heroes of this tale – the young, green college graduates of the National City Bank of New York – there is little known about any of them, except Leighton Rogers.§ Having made the decision to leave, Rogers had considerable difficulty getting out of Russia to enlist for the US army. The Russians refused to give him a exit visa and eventually the British helped get him, by subterfuge, onto a freight train that was travelling out of the city to the port of Murmansk. For the next long and terrifying fourteen days Rogers endured a hair-raising journey to the Russian coast, barely surviving the bone-chilling cold and hunger; it was only the store of canned food that he had brought with him in a knapsack that kept him going.20 Arriving in London on April Fool’s Day 1918, he enlisted for the American Expeditionary Forces and served in army intelligence in England and France during 1918–19. In 1924 he published Wine of Fury, a fascinating novel based on his Petrograd experiences, and later worked in aeronautics. Sadly, his account of his time in Russia, ‘Czar, Revolution, Bolsheviks’, based on his diaries, was never published, but the typescript is preserved in the Library of Congress. Rogers never married and lived quietly with his sister Edith until his death in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1962.21

These are but a few conclusions to so many forgotten stories; the last echoes of a generation of lost voices. But if one had to single any one out, there is one voice above all others that strikes a nerve in its own inimitable way: the utterly truthful, ingenuous voice of an obscure African American, Phil Jordan, an unlettered man and political innocent, and a loyal servant of US diplomacy, who lived to tell the tale. His glorious letters, written in his vivid vernacular style, and reflecting an enduring sense of being ‘a stranger in a strange land’, remain the only known published account of the revolution by an African American.22* They provide us with an unforgettable sense of exactly what it was like to be caught, in Petrograd, in the Russian Revolution of 1917.

* New Style; the Bolsheviks finally adopted the Western calendar on 1 February OS, instantly adding thirteen days to make it 14 February.

* Now known as the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace.

* It was also known as BloodStained Russia, German Intrigue, Treason and Revolt in the USA and was premiered under that title in New York in December 1917.

* Some, like Rheta Childe Dorr, lost all their notes and materials, which were confiscated at the border by the Bolsheviks when they left. Dorr had to write the whole of her book, Inside the Russian Revolution, from memory.

† With the Russians at the Front; Somewhere in France; and War As It Really Is. Nothing is known either of the whereabouts of the 75,000 feet of film shot by Lieutenant Norton C. Travis in Petrograd over eighteen days, or whether any of it has survived.

‡ The Axelbank film may also have used footage shot by Lieutenant Travis, among uncredited footage from numerous other cameramen, including Russians, who filmed in Petrograd and whose work was recycled for this film.

§ Fred Sikes rose through the ranks of the NCB, retiring as Vice President, and died in 1958. Chester Swinnerton also stayed with the bank and managed its South American branches; he died in New Hampshire in 1960.

* Fleeting sightings of other African Americans in Russia at the time of the revolution all leave us frustrated at the lack of a paper trail on their lives there. One such is Jim Hercules, one of the possibly four black American ‘Nubian guards’ at the Alexander Palace, who served Nicholas and Alexandra and their family right up until the revolution, and who may well have been stranded in Russia for some time afterwards.

Acknowledgements

I cannot remember exactly when it was that I first started collecting foreign eyewitness accounts of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but my interest mushroomed during my days as a freelance copy editor in the 1990s. At the time, I was handling a lot of history manuscripts and it struck me how much seemed to have been written about the revolution by Russians, but how relatively little I had come across that was said by those many non-Russians who, for various reasons, were stranded in the city that year. I knew there had to be more to the story than just the over-hyped account of the one man, John Reed, who had always seemed to dominate, with his Ten Days that Shook the World.

I also knew there had to be plenty of women, aside from Reed’s partner Louise Bryant, who had watched events unfold. And what about all those other journalists, not to mention the diplomats, businessmen, industrialists, nurses and doctors, aid workers and the wives and children they often took with them? What about the British governesses and nannies who, I knew, were well in evidence in Russia at the time? I was aware that the capital had had a thriving British colony going back to the eighteenth century (as, too, had Moscow) and that the Leeds Russian Archive at my old university held some fascinating material on some of them.

So, beginning with the people I had gathered at the LRA, I began to seek out other lost and forgotten eyewitnesses of Petrograd in 1917, in particular from the American and French diplomatic communities. Along the way I picked up an assortment of other nationalities, and an interest that had begun as something of a hobby grew into a serious pursuit. Ten years ago I realised there might be a book in it. But I had to bide my time, because I knew that the best possible moment for such a book would be the centenary of the revolution in 2017.

In the course of my happy but increasingly obsessive collecting of people who had witnessed the convulsions in Petrograd, many friends – old and newly acquired – helped along the way by offering suggestions, seeking out material for me and helping me track down some of my more stubborn subjects. I am most grateful to all of them, for the many and varied ways in which they contributed to the writing of this book, as follows: my fellow Russianists Doug Smith and Simon Sebag Montefiore for a dialogue on Russia, the Romanovs and much sage advice; my good friend Candace Metz-Longinette Gahring in St Louis for helping me access documents in the Missouri archives and elsewhere; Roger Watson for filling me in on the cameras used by Donald Thompson; Mark Anderson of the Chicago Public Library, a genius at winkling out difficult-to-find articles from old magazines; Ilana Miller for doing likewise in California; Marianne Kouwenhoven for help with tracking down Belgian and Dutch diplomats; Ken Hawkins for kindly sharing his thesis on Arno Dosch-Fleurot; Amy Ballard at the Smithsonian; and Griffith Henniger, Henry Hardy, June Purvis, Jane Wickenden and William Lee for their helpful contributions.

My special thanks must go to Harvey Pitcher, author of Witnesses of the Russian Revolution (John Murray, 1994), who offered valuable advice when I visited him in Norwich and most generously passed on all his research material to me; to Sue Woolmans for checking out material held in the BBC Radio archives and being such a stalwart friend and supporter of my work; to film historian Dr David Mould at Ohio University for sharing both his knowledge of Donald Thompson and an ongoing and stubborn desire to track down Thompson’s lost films; to the stalwart Phil Tomaselli for once again providing scans of sources at the National Archives; to Charles Bangham and Brian Brooks for sharing their family memoir of Edith Kerby; and to John Carter for letting me see his grand father Bousfield Swan Lombard’s letters from Petrograd. I also owe a huge thank-you to my friend David Holohan for his excellent translations of French eyewitness material and for photocopying some hard-to-find sources for me in London. Finally, once more I am deeply grateful to Rudy de Casseres in Finland, a superb Russianist, who read and commented on the text and helped me obtain some important research material in Russian, checking through many issues of the newspaper Novoe vremya for material for me – a task that defeated my eyesight.

In order to offer new insights on the revolution from previously uncited sources, I searched long and hard in forgotten books and online library and archive catalogues and was gratified to uncover a wealth of new material, particularly in US archives. Sadly, I was not able to use it all, but I would like to express my gratitude to the following archives and archivists for the material with which they so promptly and generously provided me: the Falers Library & Special Collections, New York; the Indiana Historical Society; the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Missouri History Museum, St Louis; the Library of Congress; the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, and Harvard University Archives. In California, Ron Basich once more sought out sources for me at the Hoover Institution and arranged for photocopies and scans. In all cases every attempt has been made to contact copyright holders for permission to quote material held in these archives.

During the writing of Caught in the Revolution I drew on a wealth of other material held in archives in the USA, which, although not quoted in this book, provided very useful background, and my thanks are due to: Carole Hsin at Yale; Robin Carlaw at Harvard; Dale Stieber at Occidental College; Lee Grady at the Wisconsin Historical Society; Karen Kukil at Smith College; Thomas Whittaker at the University of Chicago Library; and Tanya Chebotarev at the Bakhmeteff Archive.

In the UK I am deeply indebted to my friend and fellow Russianist, Richard Davies, archivist of the Leeds Russian Archive for his considerable and unflagging support in this project, and for his patience and good humour in sorting out a long request list of sources that I wished to consult when I visited, and for his continuing sage advice. Richard’s dedicated work at the LRA over many years has ensured that this wonderful resource now holds a unique place in the UK for those researching the British in Russia before the revolution, and I would like to take this opportunity to urge anyone holding such family papers to consider donating them to it. All LRA sources quoted are with the kind permission of rights owners, where it has been possible to trace them. My thanks also must go to the Arthur Ransome Literary Estate; to Bridget Gillies and the University of East Anglia for the use of material from the wonderful Jessie Kenney archive; to the John Rylands Library and the University of Manchester; the National Library of Wales for Sir George Bury’s 1917 report; Peter Rogers at the Stewart Museum, Burnby Hall; and the National Archives and the Imperial War Museum for access to manuscripts that they hold. There is a wealth of untapped material in the BBC Radio 4 archives dating back to the 1950s, and in its TV archives as well. I am grateful to Vicky Mitchell and to the BBC Radio Archives for permission to quote from the Louisette Andrews TV interview. I should also like to make a particular point of singling out the valuable leads I gained from Lyubov Ginzburg’s fascinating thesis ‘Confronting the Cold War Legacy: The Forgotten History of the American Colony in St Petersburg’ (University of Kansas, 2010), which pointed me in the direction of one of the heroes of my book – Leighton Rogers.

My thanks are also due to David Mould for sharing photographs of Donald Thompson; to Amanda Claunch at the Missouri History Museum for providing photographs of David R. Francis and Philip Jordan; to Ulysses Dietz for a photograph of his great-aunt Julia Cantacuzène-Speransky and to Bruce Kirby at the Library of Congress for seeking out and providing a scan of a much sought-after photograph of Leighton Rogers.

As always, dedicated editorial and publicity teams were involved in the production of this book on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, Jocasta Hamilton, Sarah Rigby, Najma Finlay, Richard T. Kelly and the team at Hutchinson all offered unfailing commitment to, and encouragement in, the research and writing of this book. Richard has been a first-class editor and I am most grateful for his sensitive response to the manuscript and to what I was trying to achieve. My thanks also go to my diligent copy editor Mandy Greenfield and proof reader Mary Chamberlain.

In New York, my dear friend Charlie Spicer at St Martin’s Press has remained a stalwart ally and advocate of my work. This has been our fifth book together and I truly value his guiding hand. I am also grateful to April Osborn, Karlyn Hixson, Kathryn Hough and the tremendously hard-working PR and marketing team at St Martin’s Press for their commitment and indomitable energy.

Throughout the research and writing of Caught in the Revolution I had the unfailing encouragement of my family and also a wonderful agent, to whom this book is dedicated. Caroline Michel at Peters, Fraser & Dunlop has been a true friend, wise counsel and advocate from the moment I joined the agency and I count myself enormously lucky to have her representing my work. But I also enjoy the valuable support of Rachel Mills, Alexandra Cliff, Marilia Savvides and the Foreign Rights team at PFD, who work so hard at selling my books in other markets. Jon Fowler and James Carroll have also been great friends and supporters of my public speaking and my work in broadcast media.

I always find it very difficult to let go of my subjects at the end of any book. The colourful cast of characters in Caught in the Revolution has lived in my head for the last three years – some of them for far longer – and they have left an indelible impression on me. They have also left me frustrated, because I want to find out more about their time in Russia and their lives after they left. With this is mind, I would be delighted to hear from any descendants or relatives of any of my subjects, who might hold letters, photographs or other material relating to their time in Petrograd in 1917. I can be contacted via my agents, Peters, Fraser & Dunlop at www.petersfraserdunlop.com or my own website, www.helenrappaport.com.

It goes without saying that I would also be thrilled to hear from anyone with material relating to this story, written by people who were there, but about whom I do not know! Finally, and most particularly, I would dearly love to see any other letters written from Russia by Philip Jordan, or to hear from anyone with further memories of him or his life. The ultimate serendipity would be to rediscover a complete copy of Donald Thompson’s 1919 silent film The German Curse in Russia, which I fear has, sadly, long since been lost. But I live in hope.

Helen Rappaport

West Dorset, 2016

Notes

Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

ABBREVIATIONS

Anet Claude Anet, Through the Russian Revolution

Barnes Harper Barnes, Standing on a Volcano

Beatty Bessie Beatty, The Red Heart of Russia

Bryant Louise Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia

Crosley Pauline Stewart Crosley, Intimate Letters from Petrograd

Dissolution Meriel Buchanan, Dissolution of an Empire

Fleurot Arno Dosch-Fleurot, Through War to Revolution

Francis David R. Francis, Russia from the American Embassy

Harper Florence Harper, Runaway Russia

Heald Edward Heald, Witness to Revolution

Houghteling James Houghteling, Diary of the Russian Revolution

Mission Sir George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, vol. 2

Paléologue Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs, 1914-1917

Patouillet Patouillet, Madame [Louise]: TS diary, October 1916–August 1918, 2 vols

Petrograd Meriel Buchanan, Petrograd, The City of Trouble

Reed John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World

Robien Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917-18

Rogers Leighton Rogers Papers, ‘Czar, Revolution, Bolsheviks’

Stinton Jones James Stinton Jones, Russia in Revolution

Stopford Anon. [Albert Stopford], The Russian Diary of an Englishman

Thompson Donald Thompson, Donald Thompson in Russia

Williams Albert Rhys Williams, Journey into Revolution

Wright J. Butler Wright/William Thomas Allison, Witness to Revolution: The Russian Revolution Diary and Letters of J. Butler Wright

Prologue: ‘The Air is Thick with Talk of Catastrophe’

1 Violetta Thurstan, Field Hospital and Flying Column, 94. Thurstan, like many visitors to Petrograd at the time, was overwhelmed by Petrograd’s scale and seductive power: ‘It is one of those cities whose charms steal upon you unawares. It is immense, insistent, arresting, almost thrusting itself on your imagination … everything is on such an enormous scale, dealt out in such careless profusion … the palaces grandiose, the very blocks of which they are fashioned seem to have been hewn by Titans’. Rogers, Box 3: Folder 7, 12–13 (hereafter styled as 3:7, etc.).

2 Dearing, unpublished MS memoirs, 88.

3 Almedingen, I Remember St Petersburg, 120–2; see also an atmospheric evocation of Petrograd in 1916 in Walpole, The Secret City, 98–9, 134, and in Leighton Rogers, Wine of Fury.

4 Almedingen, Tomorrow Will Come, 76.

5 Steveni, Things Seen in Russia, London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1913, 80. Steveni’s Petrograd Past and Present, published in 1915, has an excellent Chapter XXXI on the history of the British colony; see also Cross, ‘A Corner of a Foreign Field’ and ‘Forgotten British Places in Petrograd’.

6 Lombard, untitled TS memoirs, section headed ‘Things I Can’t Forget’, 64.

7 Ibid., untitled TS memoirs, section VII, n.p.

8 Stopford, 18.

9 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 150.

10 Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, The Gourmet’s Guide to Europe, Edinburgh: Ballantyne, Hanson & Co., 1908, ‘St Petersburg Clubs’, 303.

11 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 95.

12 Dissolution, 9.

13 Ibid., 5–7.

14 Bruce, Silken Dalliance, 174, 159; Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 424. For a profile of Sir George by a contemporary in Petrograd, see Pares, ‘Sir George Buchanan in Russia’, Slavonic Review, 3 (9), March 1925, 576–86.

15 Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 121.

16 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 95.

17 Blunt, Lady Muriel Paget, 62; Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 118.

18 Meriel Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 130.

19 Barnes, 182, 206.

20 Francis to Senator William J. Stone, 13/26 February 1917, quoted in Ginzburg, ‘Confronting the Cold War Legacy’, 86.

21 See Barnes, 406–7; ‘D. R. Francis Valet Dies in California’, St Louis Post Dispatch, 1941; Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 140–1; Barnes, 69.

22 Barnes, 186; Samuel Harper, The Russia I Believe In, 91–2; Harper, 188.

23 Francis, 3.

24 Salzman, Reform and Revolution, 228.

25 Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 41.

26 Saul, Life and Times of Charles Richard Crane, 134; Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 281–2.

27 Rogers, 3:9, 153.

28 Houghteling, 5.

29 Barnes, 194.

30 Ibid., 195.

31 Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 23.

32 For a discussion of allegations that Matilda de Cram was a spy, see e.g. Allison, American Diplomats in Russia, 66–7. General William V. Judson’s report to the US Secretary of War, in Salzman, Russia in War and Revolution, 267–70, is a contemporary evaluation from the point of view of someone working at the US embassy. Barnes (passim) also discusses their relationship.

33 Barnes, 199, 200–1.

34 ‘Missouri Negro in Russia is “Jes a Honin” for Home’, Wabash Daily Plain Dealer, 29 September 1916.

35 Ibid., 207.

36 Ibid.

37 Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 56.

38 Wright, 4.

39 Dearing, unpublished memoirs, 219.

40 Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy 32.

41 Ibid., 31.

42 Quoted in Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie Soviétique, 243.

43 Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 38.

44 Lindley, untitled memoirs 5.

45 Dearing, unpublished memoirs, 144.

46 Heald, 25; Barnes, 207; Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 70; Wright, 10.

47 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 94; Steveni, Petrograd Past and Present, Chapter XIII, ‘The Modern City and the People’.

48 According to Louise Patin, Journal d’une institutrice française, 19, French residents were given special permits to obtain wine.

49 Suzanne Massie, Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia, Blue Hill, Maine: Heart Tree Press, 1980, 407.

50 http://thegaycourier.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/legendary-hotel-celebrates-100-years.html

51 Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 96.

52 Rogers, 3:7, 21–2.

53 Ibid., 23.

54 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 180.

55 Ibid., 181.

56 See the memoirs of Ella Cordasco (née Woodhouse), which are only available online at: https://web.archive.org/web/20120213165523/http://www.zimdocs.btinternet.co.uk/fh/ella2.html

57 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 180.

58 Dearing, unpublished memoirs, 87.

59 Oudendyk, Ways and By-Ways in Diplomacy, 208.

60 Garstin, ‘Denis Garstin and the Russian Revolution’, Walpole 589.

61 Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich, quoted in Pipes, Russian Revolution, 256; Memorandum to Foreign Office 18 [5], August 1916, Mission, 19.

62 Petrograd, 78.

63 Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow, 311; Petrograd, 70.

64 Paléologue, 733.

65 Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 158.

66 Arthur Bullard, Russian Pendulum, London: Macmillan, 1919, 21; see also Houghteling, 4–5.

67 Rogers 3:7, 17, 7–8.

68 Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 138.

69 Petrograd, 50.

70 Gordon, Russian Year, 35.

71 Ibid., 40.

72 Figures in many sources vary, but see: http://rkrp-rpk.ru/content/view/10145/1/

73 Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 69.

74 Wright, 15.

75 Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 119.

76 Dissolution, 151; Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 141.

77 Stopford, 94.

78 Barnes, 213.

79 Paléologue, 755.

80 Christie, ‘Experiences in Russia’, 2; MacNaughton, My Experiences in Two Continents, 194.

81 http://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/police-conditions-in-petrograd-1916/

1 ‘Women are Beginning to Rebel at Standing in Bread Lines’

1 Fleurot, 96.

2 Ibid., 99, 100; Hawkins, ‘Through War to Revolution with Dosch-Fleurot’, 20. Dosch-Fleurot finally left in March 1918.

3 Fleurot, 99, 100.

4 Ibid., 101.

5 Hawkins, ‘Through War to Revolution with Dosch-Fleurot’, 22; Fleurot, 103–4.

6 Thompson, 30. For Thompson’s wartime career prior to Petrograd, see Mould, ‘Donald Thompson: Photographer at War’, and Mould, ‘Russian Revolution’, 3.

7 Heald, 23.

8 Thompson, 17.

9 Harper, 19.

10 Houghteling, 14, 4.

11 Cahill, Between the Lines, 217, 221.

12 Ibid., 218.

13 Ibid., 219.

14 Mason, ‘Russia’s Refugees’, 142.

15 Ibid.

16 Petrograd, 48.

17 For details of her life and career, see Blunt, Lady Muriel, and Sybil Oldfield, Women Humanitarians, London: Continuum, 2001, 160–3; Powell, Women in the War Zone, 296–7.

18 Blunt, Lady Muriel, 59.

19 Jefferson, So This Was Life, 85.

20 Several of the other diplomatic communities funded hospitals in Petrograd during the war: the US colony’s hospital was at 15 Spasskaya; the Belgians had one named for their King Albert; the Dutch had a hospital at 68 English Embankment; the Danes ran two hospitals, one at 11 Sergievskaya and another for lower ranks named after the Danish-born dowager Maria Feodorovna, at 13 Pochtamskaya. There were also French, Swiss and Japanese hospitals for the wounded. See Yuri Vinogradov, ‘Lazarety Petrograda’, http://www.proza.ru/2010/01/30/984

21 Lady Georgina Buchanan, letter 16 December 1916, Glenesk-Bathurst papers.

22 Novoe vremya, 6 February 1917.

23 Lady Georgina Buchanan, letters of 7 October 1916 and 20 January 1917, Glenesk-Bathurst papers.

24 Jefferson, So That Was Life, 84–6; Harmer, Forgotten Hospital, 67–8.

25 Letter to mother, 19 [6] September, quoted in Wood, ‘Revolution Outside Her Window’, 74; Powell, Women in the War Zone, 301.

26 Wood, ‘Revolution Outside Her Window’, 75; letter 23 [10] September, Powell, Women in the War Zone, 301.

27 Seymour, MS diary for 4 October [22 September], IWM ; Powell, Women in the War Zone, 301; Moorhead, Dunant’s Dream, 64.

28 Blunt, Lady Muriel, 66.

29 Farson, ‘Aux Pieds de l’Impératrice’, 17.

30 Harmer, Forgotten Hospital, 57; Powell, Women in the War Zone, 302.

31 Harmer, Forgotten Hospital, 25; Powell, Woman in the War Zone, 303.

32 Violetta Thurstan’s view of the three women, quoted in Moorhead Dunant’s Dream, 235.

33 Jefferson, So That Was Life, 92. Lady Sybil Grey’s diary, quoted in Harmer, Forgotten Hospital, 67. It is regretted that Lady Sybil’s diary is in private hands and is not yet available for research.

34 Harmer, Forgotten Hospital, 118.

35 Cordasco (Woodhouse), online memoir.

36 Wright, 21.

37 Armour, ‘Recollections’, 7. For his account of the reception, see 7–9.

38 Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 42.

39 Wright, 21, 22.

40 Armour, ‘Recollections’, 8.

41 Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 42.

42 Francis, 49.

43 Wright, 22; Paléologue, 764.

44 Weeks, American Naval Diplomat, 106.

45 Francis, 50–1.

46 Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 43.

47 Paléologue, 764; Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 42; Wright, 22.

48 Wright, 26.

49 Ibid.

50 Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 141; Petrograd, 89–90; Stopford, 100.

51 Paléologue, 776.

52 Nostitz, Romance and Revolutions, 178; see also Wright, 33.

53 Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 163; Paléologue, 783.

54 Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 162–3; Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 142.

55 Paléologue, 793.

56 Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 142; Mission, 57; Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 138.

57 Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow, 321; Bury, ‘Report Regarding the Russian Revolution’, II.

58 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 22.

59 Ibid. Chadbourn published his valuable account of the February Revolution under the pseudonym Paul Wharton.

60 Emily Warner Somerville, ‘A Kappa in Russia’, 123.

61 Wright, 33, 34.

62 Thompson, 334.

63 Almedingen, I Remember St Petersburg, 186–7.

64 Wright, 34.

65 Ibid.; Thompson, 37; Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow, 322.

66 Mission, 59. The Whishaws were an old established family in the British colony, whose company Hills & Whishaw was involved in the exploitation of oilfields at Baku. Stella Arbenina (aka Baroness Meyendorff ), who features in this book, was a member of the Whishaw family.

2 ‘No Place for an Innocent Boy from Kansas’

1 Thompson, 33.

2 Ibid., 37; Harper, 24.

3 Paléologue, 796.

4 Ibid., 797.

5 British embassy counsellor Francis Lindley noted in his memoirs that a report on the mission prepared for the British Foreign Office, and far more optimistic in tone than those sent from the embassy, had only just been printed and reached the FO when the revolution broke. It had to be hastily retrieved and suppressed. Lindley, untitled memoirs, 28.

6 Paléologue, 808.

7 Weather statistics for 1917 in Russia show that the average temperature was -13.44 Centigrade and that the significant rise in temperature so often given (e.g. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 308, and Pipes, Russian Revolution, 274) as occurring on Friday 24th did not in fact happen until Monday 27th, when the temperature finally rose above zero, to 0.03 degrees C. It was not until 13 March that it finally climbed well above zero and reached 8 degrees C. For a detailed discussion, see: Ezhenedelnik statisticheskogo otdeleniya petrogradskoy gorodskoy upravy, 1917, no. 5, p. 13.

8 Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 104; Fleurot, 118; Wright, 42.

9 Thompson, 39.

10 Fleurot, 118; Gordon, Russian Year, 97.

11 Thompson, 41.

12 Ibid., 43.

13 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 217; Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, ‘Women’s Suffrage and Revolution in the Russian Empire 1905–1917’, Aspasia, 1, 2007, 18; Thompson, 43.

14 Harper, 26.

15 Ibid., 27.

16 Thompson, 43; Harper, 27.

17 Thompson, 44.

18 Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow, 337.

19 Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 105.

20 Thompson, 44; May Pearse, diary, 24 February 1917.

21 Thompson, 46–7.

22 Rivet, Last of the Romanofs, 171; Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole, 159; Pocock MS diary, n.p.

23 Wright, 43. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 308.

24 Ransome, despatch 48, 23/24 February 1917.

25 Thompson, 47.

26 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 224–5; Bury, ‘Report Regarding the Russian Revolution’, IV; Fleurot, ‘In Petrograd during the Seven Days’, 258. Fleurot, 118.

27 See Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow, 336–7. The poor quality of the northern capital’s water precluded top-quality baking in the vicinity of the Winter Palace and necessitated daily rail deliveries from Filippov’s bakeries in Moscow. See: http://voiceofrussia.com/radio_broadcast/2248959/18406508/

28 Anon., ‘The Nine Days’, 213, 214. It has, sadly, proved impossible to ascertain who wrote this article, but the author talks of working in the Singer Building, so it was probably a member of staff at the US consulate, or possibly an employee of Westinghouse, which was also based there.

29 Thompson, 48.

30 Gordon, Russian Year, 97.

31 Ransome, Despatches 49 and 48; Golder, War, Revolution and Peace in Russia, 34.

32 The Tsaritsa punctiliously recorded the temperature in her diary each day. Throughout the whole of February she records it as ranging from -19 degrees Centigrade on 5 February to -4.5 on the 24th. See e.g. V. A. Kozlov and V. M. Khrustalev, eds, The Last Diary of Tsaritsa Alexandra, London: Yale University Press, 1997.

33 Anon., ‘The Nine Days’, 213.

34 Ibid.

35 Golder, War, Revolution and Peace in Russia, 334.

36 Fleurot, ‘Seven Days’, 258.

37 Robien, 8.

38 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 233.

39 Ibid., 235.

40 Robien, 8; Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 55.

41 Hasegawa says 36,800, see February Revolution, 238.

42 Markovitch, La Révolution russe, 17.

43 Bury, ‘Report Regarding the Russian Revolution’, V.

44 Heald, 50; ‘From Our Own Correspondent [Robert Wilton], “The Outbreak of the Revolution”’, The Times, 21 [8] March 1917.

45 Hall, One Man’s War, 267, 263.

46 Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Window’, 556.

47 Harmer, Forgotten Hospital, 119; Poutiatine, War and Revolution, 45–6.

48 Dorothy Cotton, letter, 4 March 1917, Library Archives of Canada; Blunt, Lady Muriel, 104.

49 Thompson, 50.

50 Patouillet, 1:55.

51 Grey, ‘Sidelights on the Russian Revolution’, 363.

52 Harper, 29; Thompson, 49.

53 Harper, 28–9.

54 Stinton Jones, 62.

55 Fleurot, 123.

56 [Wilton], ‘Russian Food problem’, The Times, 9 March 1917; [Wilton], ‘The Outbreak of the Revolution, The Times, 21 March 1917.

57 Heald, 50.

58 Rogers, 3:7, 43–4.

59 Thompson, 51.

60 Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 55.

3 ‘Like a Bank Holiday with Thunder in the Air’

1 Patouillet, 1:56.

2 Rogers, 3:7, 44.

3 Rogers, 3:7, 45–6; see also the account by Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 2, which had been wrongly dated as 12 March OS, instead of 14 March OS.

4 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 248; Wright, 43.

5 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 249.

6 Ibid., 251; Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow, 342.

7 Markovitch, La Révolution russe, 19; Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow, 342.

8 Anet, 12.

9 Rogers, ‘Account of the March Revolution’, 7.

10 Thompson, 53.

11 Gordon, Russian Year, 103.

12 Thompson, 54, 57; Harper, 29–30.

13 Harper, 31.

14 Thompson, 58, Harper, 31.

15 Patouillet, 1:60; Anon., ‘Nine Days’, 214; Thompson, 58.

16 Harper, 32, 33.

17 Rogers, 3:7, 46.

18 Reinke, ‘My Experiences in the Russian Revolution’, 9.

19 Anet, 13.

20 Thompson, 59; Rogers, 3:7, 46.

21 Rogers, ‘Account of the Russian Revolution’, 8–9; Rogers, 3:7, 46; see also Stopford, 102.

22 Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Window’, 556.

23 Fleurot, 122; Thompson, 60–1.

24 Stopford, 103. A document in The National Archives, KV2/2398, reveals the details of Stopford’s original trip to Russia in 1916 and implies that he did some unofficial spying/snooping for Buchanan. In Russia he was well acquainted with the bisexual Felix Yusupov (the NA document alludes to Stopford’s homosexuality in a veiled comment about him being ‘a moral eccentric’). Stopford also had considerable experience in buying artworks from Fabergé for Cartier in Paris. In July 1917 he managed to get into Grand Duchess Vladimir’s palace unseen, rescue the best of her jewels from the safe and get them safely out of Russia; of these, her tiara was eventually bought by King George V and is still worn by Queen Elizabeth II. In 1918 Stopford was prosecuted for homosexual offences and jailed for a year in Wormwood Scrubs, after which he settled in Paris. For further details on his life – much of which remains sketchy – see Clarke, Hidden Treasures of the Romanovs.

25 Thompson, 60–1.

26 Some later accounts of the February Revolution deny the presence of machine guns, but far too many eyewitnesses testify to their presence on rooftops. See, for example, John Pollock’s account, ‘The Russian Revolution’, written from first-hand experience, which claims that Protopopov ‘had the roofs at every important street corner garrisoned by police with machine-guns’ and goes on to observe that the revolution had succeeded thanks to this misjudgement: ‘Had they been properly posted in the streets at strategic points and a sound scheme of cooperation arranged among the police and gendarmes, some fifty thousand in strength, they could have swept every living thing from the streets: placed in dormer windows and behind parapets, the mitrailleuses were extremely difficult to train on their objective’; 1070–1. Sir George Bury’s ‘Report’ also contains numerous references to the deployment of machine guns.

27 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 252; Gordon, Russian Year, 101, 102.

28 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 263; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 276; Joseph Fuhrman, ed., The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999, 692.

29 Thompson, 62.

30 Pax, Journal d’une comédienne française, 11–12.

31 Ransome, Despatch 50, 25 February, 11.00 p.m.

32 Reinke, ‘My Experiences in the Russian Revolution’, 9.

33 Butler Wright’s report to Francis, 10/23 March 1917, is included in Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 113.

34 Thompson, 63.

35 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 22–3.

36 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 265.

37 Ibid., 267.

38 Gordon, Russian Year, 105.

39 Thompson, 64.

40 See Patouillet, 1:59–60.

41 Keeling, Bolshevism: Mr Keeling’s Five Years in Russia, 76.

42 Harper, 37; Patouillet, 1:162.

43 Anon., The Nine Days’, 215.

44 Whether Thompson was actually able to grab any successful shots of the street fighting seems unlikely, as none were included in his collection of photographs of the revolution published as BloodStained Russia in 1918. He did manage to catch some static shots of bodies in morgues and of the funerals of the victims, but his major photographic coup came in May/June with his extensive coverage of Emmeline Pankhurst’s visits to Maria Bochkareva and the Women’s Death Battalion, which was widely reproduced in the Western press.

45 Thompson, 64, 67; Harper, 37–8.

46 Harper, 39–40; Thompson, 69–70.

47 Dorothy Cotton, letter of 4 March OS – though within the letter she reverts to NS; Grey, ‘Sidelights on the Russian Revolution’, 363; Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 109, which claims that 100 people were killed during this incident alone.

48 Poutiatine, War and Revolution, 47–8; Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Window’, 557.

49 Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Window’, 558.

50 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 24.

51 Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Window’, 558.

52 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 268; Grey, ‘Sidelights on the Russian Revolution’, 364; Anet, 16.

53 ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ – Robert Wilton’s report for The Times, 16 March (NS) – his first major despatch to get through and be published in the UK; see also Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 110.

54 Clare, ‘Eye witness of the Revolution’, n.p.

55 Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 110; Markovitch, La Révolution russe, 24; Anon., ‘The Nine Days’, 215; Hasegawa, February Revolution, 268–9.

56 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 24.

57 Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 3.

58 Ransome, Despatch 52.

59 Harper, 41–2.

60 Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 109; see also Wilton’s report in The Times, 16 March 1917.

61 Wilton in The Times, 16 March 1917; Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘From the Petrograd Embassy’, 19.

62 Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 109.

63 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 272–3.

64 Pax, Journal d’une comédienne française, 16–18.

65 Fleurot, 124–5; Arbenina, Through Terror to Freedom, 34.

66 Anet, 11; Stopford, 108.

67 Paléologue, 811; Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 57. In an uncanny parallel with Petrograd 1917, a demonstration by Frenchwomen on that same date in 1789, over the high price of bread and escalating hunger in Paris, had led to a mass march on the palace at Versailles.

68 Arbenina, Through Terror to Freedom, 34–5; Anet, 15.

69 Armour, ‘Recollections’, 5.

70 Rogers, ‘Account of the March Revolution’, 11; Anet, 11; Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 57.

71 Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 47–9; Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 112; Hasegawa, February Revolution, 275.

72 Thompson, 72, 73.

4 ‘A Revolution Carried on by Chance’

1 Rogers 3:7, 48.

2 Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 4; Rogers 3:7, 46–7.

3 For descriptions of the bank, see Fuller, ‘Journal of John L. H. Fuller’, 9–10, and letter to his brother of 19 [6] September, in Fuller, ‘Letters and Diaries’, 20.

4 Rogers, 3:7, 46–7.

5 Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 89.

6 Marcosson, ‘The Seven Days’, 262.

7 Petrograd, 96.

8 Ibid., 97; Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 24.

9 Butler Wright report, in Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 115.

10 Mission, 63; Paléologue, 814–15.

11 Paléologue, 816.

12 Fleurot, ‘In Petrograd during the Seven Days’, 260; Fleurot, 126; see also Hasegawa, February Revolution, 278–81.

13 Paléologue, 813.

14 Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 52.

15 Thompson, 78.

16 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 286.

17 Marcosson, ‘The Seven Days’, 35; Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 52; Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole, 458.

18 Knox, With the Russian Army, 553–4; as Sir George Buchanan observed in a ciphered telegram to the Foreign Office: ‘The danger is that men have no proper leaders. I saw about 3000 to-day with only single young officer’. FO report, 12/27 March, 299, The National Archives.

19 Knox, With the Russian Army, 554–5; Stinton Jones, 107–8.

20 Stinton Jones, 108–9.

21 Gordon, Russian Year, 110; Anet, 23.

22 Thompson, 81.

23 Anet, 19–20.

24 Thompson, 81–2.

25 Paléologue, 814; Gordon, Russian Year, 110; Robien, 12.

26 Anet, 22; Butler Wright report to Francis in Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 114–15.

27 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 24.

28 Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole, 454.

29 Stinton Jones, 120.

30 Reinke, ‘My Experiences in the Russian Revolution’, 11; Gordon, Russian Year, 109.

31 Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Hospital Window’, 558–9.

32 Fleurot, 130.

33 Stinton Jones, 131.

34 See Poutiatine, War and Revolution, 50–1; Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 56; Fleurot, ‘In Petrograd during the Seven Days’, 262.

35 Knox, With the Russian Army, 554–5; see also Stinton Jones, 107–8.

36 Gibson, Wild Career, 127.

37 Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 122; Stinton Jones, 110.

38 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 287; Keeling, Bolshevism, 86, 85.

39 Lombard, ‘Things I Can’t Forget’, 92, 90; Stinton Jones, 144.

40 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 187.

41 Stinton Jones, ‘Czar Looked Over My Shoulder’, 97; Gibson, Wild Career, 135.

42 Fleurot, ‘In Petrograd during the Seven Days’, 261.

43 Springfield, ‘Recollections of Russia’, n.p.

44 Lindley, untitled memoirs, 29.

45 Pearse, diary, 27 February/12 March; Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 4.

46 Stinton Jones, 134, 132–3.

47 Seymour, MS diary for 12 March [27 February].

48 Lombard, ‘Things I Can’t Forget’, 92–3.

49 Seymour, MS diary for 12 March [27 February]; Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Hospital Window’, 558.

50 According to Poutiatine, War and Revolution, 55, it turned out that machine guns had been firing on the street from a window of the house next door to the ARH on the Fontanka side, and there were two more firing ‘from the attic of a tall house on Nevskii, diagonally across from us’.

51 Sybil Grey diary, quoted in Blunt, Lady Muriel, 104.

52 Cotton, letter of 4 March, 3; Seymour, quoted in Wood, ‘Revolution Outside her Window’, 80; see also Pocock, MS diary for Monday 27 February.

53 Pax, Journal d’une comédienne française, 18–23.

54 Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 56.

55 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 296; Stinton Jones, 153.

56 Walpole, Secret City, 255.

57 See Keeling, Bolshevism, 82, 85; Stinton Jones, 124–5, 164; Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 35, 54; Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole, 460.

58 Anet, 23; Pollock, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 158.

59 Metcalf, On Britain’s Business, 47.

60 Stinton Jones, ‘Czar Looked Over my Shoulder’, 97; Clare, ‘Eye Witness of the Russian Revolution’.

61 Dissolution, 166.

62 Quoted in Sandra Martin and Roger Hall (eds), Where Were You? Memorable Events of the Twentieth Century, Toronto: Methuen, 1981, 220.

63 Walpole, ‘Official Account of the First Russian Revolution’, 460; Stinton Jones, 142.

64 Fleurot, 128.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Fleurot, ‘In Petrograd during the Seven Days’, 262; Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 60.

68 Fleurot, 128–9.

69 Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 125; see also Stinton Jones, 150–1.

70 Anon., ‘The Nine Days’, 215.

71 See his report in Francis, 60–2.

72 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 292–3; Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 124; Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 122–3.

73 Stinton Jones, 140–1.

74 Bert Hall, One Man’s War, 269–70.

75 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 26.

76 Ibid.

77 Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 4, 5.

78 Locker Lampson, ‘Report on the Russian Revolution’, 240, Kettle, Allies and the Russian Collapse, 14.

79 Gibson, Wild Career, 129; Knox, With the Russian Army, 560.

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

1 Bury, ‘Report’, XIII.

2 Dissolution, 168.

3 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 26–7.

4 Dearing, unpublished memoirs, 242; Dissolution, 167.

5 Dissolution, 170.

6 Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 7.

7 Paléologue, 819.

8 Dissolution, 169–70; Mission, 66.

9 North Winship telegram to the American Secretary of State, 20 [3] March 1917; https://history.hanover.edu/texts/tel2.html

10 Houghteling, 115.

11 Locker Lampson, ‘Report on the Russian Revolution’, 240; Poutiatine, War and Revolution, 52.

12 Locker Lampson, ‘Report on the Russian Revolution, 241, 214.

13 Heald, Witness to Revolution, 57–8.

14 Locker Lampson, ‘Report on the Revolution’, 242.

15 Thompson, 89–90.

16 Locker Lampson, ‘Report on the Revolution’, 243.

17 Bury, ‘Report’, XV–XVI.

18 Grey, ‘Sidelights on the Russian Revolution’, 365.

19 Harper, 50.

20 Stinton Jones, 165.

21 Harper, 51.

22 Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 124; Grey, ‘Sidelights on the Russian Revolution’, 365; Walpole, ‘Official Report’, in Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole, 464–5.

23 Stinton Jones, 165; Poutiatine, War and Revolution, 53.

24 Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 6; Rogers, ‘Account of the March Revolution’, 16.

25 Lampson, ‘Report on the Russian Revolution,’ 244.

26 Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 130–1.

27 Walpole, ‘Official Report’, in Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole, 465.

28 Locker Lampson, 244.

29 Ibid.; Harper, 52.

30 Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 131.

31 Grey, ‘Sidelights on the Russian Revolution’, 366.

32 Harper, 56; Stinton Jones, 166.

33 Houghteling, 149. In an article for the World’s Work on 21 April (NS) entitled ‘How Tsardom Fell’, Arno Dosch-Fleurot also commented on the mercy of the alcohol ban: ‘None but a sober people could have carried out the Revolution. Had the populace of Petrograd and other cities been besotted by drink, the Revolution would never have been so remarkably free from sanguinary excesses on a large scale.’

34 Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 130–1; Harper, 53; Ysabel Birkbeck, quoted in Cahill, Between the Lines, 227.

35 Houghteling, 115.

36 Harper, 56, 59.

37 Harper, 54, 53; Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 126.

38 Harper, 52, 54.

39 Walpole, ‘Denis Garstin and the Russian Revolution’, 591.

40 Louisette Andrews, BBC2 interview with Joan Bakewell in 1977.

41 Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Hospital Window’, 559, 560.

42 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 289–90.

43 Seymour, MS diary for 13 March [28 February].

44 Rogers, ‘Account of the March Revolution’, 14; Rogers, 3:7, 52.

45 Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 8–9; see also Leighton Rogers’s account, in Rogers, 3:7, 59; and Stopford, 118.

46 Rogers, 3:7, 57; Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 63.

47 Nostitz, Romance and Revolutions, 187. In Dissolution, 172, and Petrograd, 105, Meriel Buchanan refutes this; see also Stopford, 110. For Bousfield Swan Lombard’s account, see ‘Things I Can’t Forget,’ 97.

48 Nostitz, Romance and Revolutions, 185.

49 Cordasco (Woodhouse), online memoir.

50 Houghteling, 77.

51 Margaret Bennet, MS letter 2/15 March.

52 Bury, ‘Report’, XII–XIV; Ransome, Despatch 54; Houghteling, 76.

53 Stinton Jones, 167, 267–8; Markovitch, La Révolution russe, 42.

54 Markovitch, La Révolution russe, 64.

55 Stinton Jones, 264; Seymour, MS diary for 2 March; Rogers, ‘Account of the March Revolution’, 15.

6 ‘Good to be Alive These Marvelous Days’

1 Walpole, ‘Official Account’, 464–5.

2 See Paléologue, 824.

3 Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 127.

4 Houghteling, 80, 82; Markovitch, La Révolution russe, 62.

5 Anet, 28.

6 Rogers, ‘Account of the March Revolution’, 21.

7 Houghteling, 80, 81.

8 Bury, ‘Report’, XXIII–IV; Hunter, ‘Sir George Bury and the Russian Revolution’, 67.

9 Bury, ‘Report’, XXIV; Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole, 257–8.

10 Walpole, Secret City, 257–8; see also Anet, 29.

11 Pipes, Russian Revolution, 291.

12 Knox, With the Russian Army, 561, 562.

13 Gordon, Russian Year, 124; Bury, ‘Report’, XXV.

14 Anet, 23, 30; Rivet, Last of the Romanofs, 176; Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 88.

15 Anet, 31.

16 Rivet, Last of the Romanofs, 216.

17 Pollock, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 1075.

18 Houghteling, 100. Re Protopopov’s plans, see Grey, ‘Sidelights on the Russian Revolution’, 368.

19 Walpole, ‘Official Account’, 463; Walpole, Secret City, 228, 258–9.

20 Walpole, Secret City, 258–9.

21 Paléologue, 820.

22 Pollock, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 1076.

23 See Pipes, Russian Revolution, 304–7.

24 Pitcher, When Miss Emmie Was in Russia, 13; Dawe, Looking Back, 19.

25 Harper, 59–60.

26 Rogers, 3:7, 54–5.

27 Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 7.

28 Harper, 66.

29 Hall, One Man’s War, 272.

30 Stinton Jones, 185; Markovitch, La Révolution russe, 76.

31 Barnes, 226; Francis, 72.

32 Letter to Edith Chibnall, 14 March 1917, at: http://spartacus-educational.com/Wbowerman.htm; Anon., ‘Nine Days’, 216.

33 Heald, 61, 64.

34 Pollock, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 1074.

35 Locker Lampson, quoted in Kettle, The Allies and the Russian Collapse, 45.

36 Springfield, ‘Recollections of Russia’.

37 Anon., ‘The Nine Days, 216.

38 Markovitch, La Révolution russe, 60; Patouillet, 1:72–3; Paléologue, 823.

39 Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 6.

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

1 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March,’ 28.

2 Ibid.

3 Anet, 39–40.

4 Dissolution, 175.

5 Pipes, Russian Revolution, 310–13.

6 Ransome, Despatch 67, 18 [5] March.

7 Paléologue, 830; Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution through a Hospital Window’, 559; Anet, 63; Anon., ‘The Nine Days’, 217.

8 Thompson, 114; 123, 124.

9 Anet, 53.

10 Chambers, Last Englishman, 136. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 300. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 336.

11 Golder, War, Revolution and Peace in Russia, 54; Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways in Diplomacy, 218.

12 Walpole, ‘Official Account’, 468.

13 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 30; Anet, 55.

14 Anet, 96.

15 Houghteling, 130; Golder, War, Revolution and Peace in Russia, 53.

16 Paléologue, 835, 837, 838.

17 Fleurot, 139.

18 Anet, 106, 107; Hall, One Man’s War, 273.

19 Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 121; Buchanan, FO report no. 374, 9/22 March, 121, TNA; Hall, One Man’s War, 273.

20 See Petrograd, 107; Harmer, Forgotten Hospital, 123; Blunt, Lady Muriel, 105.

21 Long, Russian Revolution Aspects, 108–9; Hegan, ‘Revolution from a Hospital Window’, 561; Jefferson, So That Was Life, 101; Poutiatine, War and Revolution, 58.

22 Houghteling, 139; Stinton Jones, 223; Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 28.

23 Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 123; also in Heald, 64.

24 Long, Russian Revolution Aspects, 108–9.

25 See Petrograd, 107.

26 Robien, 22; Golder, War, Revolution and Peace in Russia, 39; Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 123.

27 Heald, 66.

28 Dissolution, 201; Crosley, 16.

29 Dissolution, 201–2.

30 Heald, 67; Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 100.

31 Ransome, Despatch 67, 18 [5] March; Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 114, 119.

32 Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways in Diplomacy, 213–14, 216.

33 Paléologue, 847–8.

34 Stinton Jones, 275–6, 278.

35 Ibid., 246; Houghteling, 162.

36 Houghteling, 142; Anet, 48.

37 21 March NS, quoted in Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, 51, 52.

38 Long, Russian Revolution Aspects, 5.

39 Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, v.

40 Ibid., Adventures in Interviewing, 164.

41 Ibid., Rebirth of Russia, 125–6.

42 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 276.

43 Stebbing, From Czar to Bolshevik, 89–90.

44 Thompson, 125; Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways of Diplomacy, 216.

45 Metcalf, On Britain’s Business, 48.

46 Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 129.

47 Anet, 71.

48 Keeling, Bolshevism, 90–1.

49 See Houghteling, Diary of the Russian Revolution, 144–7.

50 Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, 63.

51 Foglesong, ‘A Missouri Democrat’, 28; Barnes, 229.

52 Houghteling, Diary of the Russian Revolution, 165.

53 Quoted in Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 38.

54 Houghteling, 166.

55 Wright, 48, 49.

56 Knox, With the Russian Army, 584.

57 Stopford, 133; Knox, With the Russian Army, 585; Paléologue, 858–9.

58 Paléologue, 859, 860.

8 The Field of Mars

1 Harper, 67–8.

2 Ibid., 68–9.

3 Petrograd, 112; Walpole, Secret City, 331.

4 Harper, 70.

5 Rogers, 3:8, 66.

6 Heald, 77; Dawe, ‘Looking Back’, 20.

7 Anet, 113; Rogers, 3:8, 66; Paléologue, 875.

8 Wright, 62.

9 Walpole, Secret City, 331; Anet, 112; Heald, 76; Stopford, 146.

10 Harper, 71; Recouly, ‘Russia in Revolution’, 38.

11 Metcalf, On Britain’s Business, 48.

12 Walpole, Secret City, 331; Heald, 77.

13 Golder, War, Revolution and Peace in Russia, 53.

14 Dissolution, 200; Heald, 77.

15 Rogers, 3:8, 67; see also Heald, 76–7.

16 Rogers, 3:8, 67–8; see also Anet, 114–15.

17 Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 116.

18 Stinton Jones, 268; Stopford, 147–8; Anet, 114; Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 83. Lyndall Pocock, a Red Cross orderly at the ARH, counted the coffins in the six different processions as they passed and noted: four from the Vasilievsky Side; eight from the Petrograd Side; fifty-one from the populous Vyborg Side, suggesting a majority of casualties among the workers; twenty-nine and forty in two processions from the Nevsky Side; and forty-five from the Moskovsky – making 177 in all. See Pocock, diary entry for 25 March 1917.

19 For a full discussion of the figures, see Chapter 2, ‘Beskrovnaya revolyutsiya?’, p.8, of a thesis by Ilya Orlov: ‘Traur i prazdnik v revolyutsionnoi politike’, http://net.abimperio.net/files/february.pdf

20 Anet, 100.

21 Patouillet, 1:108, 109.

22 Walpole, ‘Official Report’, 467; Reinke, ‘My Experiences in the Russian Revolution’, 9; Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 115; Harper, 198; Houghteling, 156; Thompson, 124.

23 Pollock, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 1074; Pollock, War and Revolution in Russia, 163.

24 Paléologue, 875, 876.

25 Ibid., 876.

26 Ibid., 880–1.

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

1 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 205; Jefferson, letters from Petrograd, 6.

2 Wright, 60.

3 Marcosson, Before I Forget, 247.

4 For an account of Lenin’s life in exile 1900–17, see Rappaport, Conspirator.

5 Mission, 115; Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘From The Petrograd Embassy’, 20.

6 Francis, 105–6.

7 Heald, 88, 89.

8 For an account of Lenin’s journey from Zurich to Petrograd, see Rappaport, Conspirator, Chapter 18.

9 Fleurot, 145, 146.

10 Gordon, Russian Year, 145.

11 In exile in France, Kschessinska (1872–1971) married Nicholas II’s cousin, Grand Duke Andrey Vladimirovich, and set up a ballet school where she taught, among others, the British ballerinas Margot Fonteyn and Alicia Markova. In 1955 the mansion became the location for the Museum of the October Revolution, now known as the State Museum of Political History.

12 Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 165; Wright, 68.

13 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 204.

14 Mission, 119.

15 Golder, War, Revolution and Peace in Russia, 57; Anet, 135; Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 203–4.

16 Quoted in Brogan, Life of Arthur Ransome, 126; Heald, 89.

17 Robien, 39–40.

18 Shepherd, quoted in Steffens, Autobiography, 761.

19 Gibson, Wild Career, 150; Fleurot, 146

20 Anet, 164.

21 Long, Russian Revolution Aspects, 126.

22 Paléologue, 892–3; Thompson, 160.

23 Robien, 33.

24 Heald, 81.

25 Paléologue, 887.

26 Wright, 63, 68.

27 Salzman, Russia in War and Revolution, 89–90; see also Crosley, 45, where she talks of many Russian officers coming to her naval attaché husband Walter – some even in disguise – asking to be sent to the US to join the American navy or army.

28 Wright, 68.

29 Lindley, untitled memoirs, 32.

30 Paléologue, 895–6; Robien, 40.

31 Robien, 40–1; Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 185.

32 Cantacuzène, Revolutionary Days, 275.

33 Paléologue, 897; Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 98.

34 See Paléologue, 898; Robien, 50.

35 Francis, 101, 102; ‘D. R. Francis Valet’, St Louis Post-Dispatch.

36 Fleurot, 151.

37 See Foglesong, ‘A Missouri Democrat’, 34.

38 Paléologue, 910; Robien, 48; Anet, 161; Brown, Doomsday, 102.

39 Rogers, 3:8, 73.

40 Philips Price, My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution, 21.

41 Ibid.; Heald, 86.

42 Heald, 87, 88.

43 Anet, 163–4.

44 Ibid., 163.

45 Paléologue, 912.

46 Rogers, 3:8, 73, 81.

47 Fleurot, 153.

48 Anet, 166, 167.

49 Thompson, 167–8.

50 Ibid., 169, 170.

51 Dosch, 153; Cordasco (Woodhouse), online memoir.

52 Golder, War, Revolution and Peace in Russia, 65; Paléologue 917.

53 Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 175.

54 Steffens, ‘What Free Russia Asks of Her Allies’, 137; Heald, 89.

55 Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 199.

56 Ibid., 201.

57 Fleurot, 155–6.

58 Paléologue, 925, 930; Robien, 54.

59 Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 142.

60 Hughes, Inside the Enigma, 97.

61 Ibid., 98. Henderson’s visit was also described in detail by Meriel Buchanan in Dissolution, 209–15, and in her Diplomacy and Foreign Courts, London: Hutchinson, 1928, 222–4.

62 See Dissolution, 211–12.

63 Hughes, Inside the Enigma, 99; see also Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 169, 172, and Mission, 144–7.

64 Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 471.

65 Gordon, Russian Year, 154–5.

66 Robien, 58–60; Heald, 92.

67 Robien, 62, 65; Hall, One Man’s War, 281.

68 Crosley, 60, 58.

69 Stinton Jones, ‘Czar Looked Over My Shoulder’, 102.

70 Marcosson, Before I Forget, 244.

71 Vandervelde, Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution, 31.

72 Ransome, letter 27 May 1917.

73 Dorr, Woman of Fifty, 332.

10 ‘The Greatest Thing in Hstory since Joan of Arc’

1 Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder, 313.

2 Mitchell, Women on the Warpath, 65–6; Harper, 163.

3 Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 292. See ibid., n.2, Chapter 20, 293.

4 Harper, 162.

5 Ibid., 163.

6 Kenney, ‘The Price of Liberty’, 12–13.

7 Ibid., 13.

8 Ibid., 19.

9 Ibid.

10 Rappaport, Women Social Reformers, vol. 2, Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2001, 635.

11 Kerby, ‘Bubbling Brook’, 22.

12 Rogers, 3:8, 84.

13 Harper, 252; Armour, ‘Recollections’, 7.

14 Rogers, 3:8, 85.

15 Beatty, 38.

16 Rogers, 3:8, 86; Beatty, 35.

17 Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 22, 21.

18 Harper, 164, 162.

19 Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 27.

20 Ibid.

21 Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder, 313; see also Mitchell, Women on the Warpath, 67, 69.

22 Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 42, 43.

23 See Botchkareva, Yashka, Chapter 6, ‘I Enlist by the Grace of the Tsar’.

24 Beatty, 93.

25 Dorr, ‘Maria Botchkareva Leader of Soldiers’, La Crosse Tribune and Leader-Press, 9 June 1918.

26 Botchkareva, Yashka, 162.

27 Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 79; see also Bochkareva’s ‘Deposition about the Women’s Battalion’, which describes how it was formed; in Rovin Bisha et al., Russian Women, 1698–1917, Experience & Expression, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 222–31.

28 Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 79.

29 See Botchkareva, Yashka, 165–8.

30 Russell, Unchained Russia, 210–11.

31 See also ‘Russia’s Women Soldiers’, Literary Digest, 29 September 1917, written by an Associated Press Correspondent; Long, Russian Revolution Aspects, 98.

32 Beatty, 100–1.

33 Thompson, 271; see also Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 54–5.

34 Thompson, 272–3; Stites, Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, 296; Beatty, 107.

35 Botchkareva, Yashka, 168.

36 Thompson’s coverage of the Women’s Death Battalion attracted considerable press notice in the USA. See Mould, ‘Russian Revolution’, n. 16, p. 9.

37 Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder, 315; Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 35.

38 See Botchkareva, Yashka, 189–91.

39 Dorr, ‘Marie Botchkareva, Leader of Soldiers’; Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 49.

40 Harper, 170.

41 Dissolution, 217; Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 79; Harper, 172.

42 Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder, 314.

43 Thompson, 274.

44 Poutiatine, War and Revolution in Russia, 73–4.

45 Patouillet, 1:147.

46 Shepherd, ‘The Soul That Stirs in “Battalions of Death”’, Delineator, XCII:3, March 1918, 5.

47 Harper, 173, 174; see Chapter X for the Women’s Death Battalion.

48 See Botchkareva, Yashka, 217.

49 Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder; Britannia, 3 August 1917.

50 Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 37. Pankhurst relayed Yusupov’s version of events to Rheta Childe Dorr, who was one of the first to publish this account from the horse’s mouth.

51 Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 53, 54.

52 Mitchell, Women on the Warpath, 66.

53 Harper, 163, 165, 166.

54 Ibid., 180.

55 Ibid., 187, 183.

56 Ibid., 182, 192.

57 Ibid. 253, 185; Francis, 145.

58 Harper, 188, 189, 192.

59 Rogers, 3:8, 87.

60 Wright, 93.

61 Ibid., 91.

62 Gerda and Hermann Weber, Lenin, Life and Works, New York: Facts on File, 1980, 134.

63 Harper, 254.

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

1 See Figes, People’s Tragedy, 396.

2 Harper, 194–5.

3 Harper, 199; Ransome, quoted in Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, 120.

4 Harper, 202.

5 Thompson, 284, 283. Morgan Philips Price also visited in June and wrote a piece published in the Manchester Guardian on 17 July, see Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, 103–10.

6 Crosley, 79–80.

7 Pipes, Russian Revolution, 419; Figes, People’s Tragedy, 426–8.

8 Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 25; Thompson, 288.

9 Dissolution, 219; Mission, 152; Robien, 82.

10 Dissolution, 220, and Petrograd, 134; Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘From the Petrograd Embassy’, 20, letter of 22/9 July.

11 Robien, 83; Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie Soviétique, 65, has a drawing of de Buisseret’s motor car loaded down with heavily armed Bolsheviks. Thompson, 287.

12 Nellie Thornton, ‘Englishwoman’s Experiences during the Russian Revolution’, 2–4.

13 Garstin, ‘Denis Garstin and the Russian Revolution’, 593.

14 Patin, Journal d’une institutrice française, 48.

15 Stopford, 171; Poole, Dark People, 4, 5.

16 Crosley, 90–2.

17 Blunt, Lady Muriel, 109.

18 Stopford, 175.

19 The World, 19 July 1917, quoted in Hawkins, ‘Through War to Revolution with Dosch Fleurot’, 70–1.

20 Harold Williams, Shadow of Tyranny, 57.

21 New York Times despatch for 4/17 July in ibid., 57, 58–9.

22 Poole, Dark People, 5.

23 Poole, The Bridge, 276; Poole, Dark People, 8; see also Thompson, 296.

24 Robien, 83.

25 Beatty, 115.

26 Ibid., 118.

27 Robien, 83; Petrograd, 136.

28 Harold Williams, Shadow of Tyranny, 63.

29 Ibid.

30 Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘From the Petrograd Embassy’, 21.

31 Petrograd, 136–7.

32 Dissolution, 222; Poole, The Bridge, 275.

33 Beatty, 119, 121.

34 Wright, 101.

35 Rogers, 3:8, 98.

36 Ibid., 3:8, 99–100.

37 Dissolution, 222–3.

38 Beatty, 122.

39 Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 143.

40 Francis, 137; Robien, 85.

41 Rogers, 3:8, 101; Williams, 88.

42 Francis, 138; See Chapter 6; P. N. Pereverzev, ‘Lenin, Ganetsy, I Ko. Shpiony!’, http://militera.lib.ru/research/sobolev_gl/06.html

43 Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘From the Petrograd Embassy’, 21.

44 Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 143.

45 Barnes, 249, letter of 9/22 July.

46 Stopford, 176.

47 Dissolution, 225; Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘Letters from the Petrograd Embassy’, 21.

48 Gerhardie, Memoirs of a Polyglot, 125.

49 Mission, 154; Dissolution, 226; Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 174–5; Stopford, 177; Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘Letters from the Petrograd Embassy’, 21.

50 Rogers, 3:8, 102–3.

51 Thompson, 308, 309.

52 Ibid., 312; Harper, ‘Thompson Risks Life’.

53 Ransome, Despatch 184, 5 [18] July 1917.

54 Williams, Shadow of Tyranny, 65.

55 Knox, With the Russian Army, 662–3; Mission, 156.

56 Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 28.

57 Thompson, 315; Francis, Russia from the American Embassy, 141.

58 Overall about twenty Cossacks were killed and seventy wounded in the July Days; around a hundred horses were killed. See B.V. Nikitin, ‘Rokovye gody’ (Novye pokazaniya uchastnika), http://www.dk1868.ru/history/nikitin4.htm

59 Stebbing, ‘From Czar to Bolshevik’, 44; Poole, The Bridge, 280.

60 Beatty, 129; Crosley, 110–11; Poole, The Bridge, 280–1.

61 Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 32.

62 Beatty, 130.

63 Patin, Journal d’une institutrice française, 50.

64 Robien, 90.

65 Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 146.

66 Beatty, 131.

67 Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 32–3, Poole, Dark People, 12.

68 Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 74, 75.

69 Ibid., 76.

70 Kenney papers, JK/3/Mitchell/5, UEA, 20; Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 34.

71 Cantacuzène, Revolutionary Days, 315.

72 Crosley, 99–100.

73 Ibid., 105. For the two militias operating in Petrograd, see Hasegawa, ‘Crime, Police, and Mob Justice’, 58–61.

74 Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways in Diplomacy, 223; Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 29.

75 Ransome, letter to his mother, 23 [10] July 1917.

76 Thompson, 324.

77 Ibid., 313.

12 ‘This Pest-Hole of a Capital’

1 Whipple, Petrograd diary, 133.

2 Wightman, Diary of an American Physician, 64–5, 63.

3 Robins, letter 13 [26] July, Falers Library.

4 Beatty, 149. For Travis see ‘Tragedy and Comedy in Making Pictures of the Russian Chaos,’ Current Opinion, February 1918, 106.

5 Wightman, Diary of an American Physician, 35.

6 Whipple, ‘Chance for Young Americans’, Literary Digest, 26 January 1918, 47; Whipple, Petrograd diary, 85.

7 Whipple, Petrograd diary, 79, 80–1.

8 Ibid., 97; Wright, 111.

9 Beatty, 146–7.

10 Ibid., 147.

11 Whipple, Petrograd diary, 90.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 95.

14 Wightman, Diary of an American Physician, 38, 39, 41, 44.

15 Letter 15 August, in Salzman, Reform and Revolution, 182.

16 Letter 1/14 August, Falers Library; 5/18 August, Falers Library.

17 Letter 9/22 August and 6/19 August, Falers Library.

18 Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways of Diplomacy, 234.

19 Robien, 100.

20 See Pipes, People’s Tragedy, 448; Long, Russian Revolution Aspects, Chapter XIII.

21 Beatty, 148.

22 Fleurot, 174.

23 Knox, 679.

24 Mission, 171–2.

25 John Shelton Curtiss, The Russian Revolutions of 1917, Malabar, FL: R. E. Krieger Publishing Co., 1957, 50.

26 Rogers, 3:8, 139.

27 Beatty, 153, 154, 155.

28 Rogers, 3:8, 136.

29 Beatty, 159; Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 143.

30 Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 179.

31 Francis, 162; Wright, 123.

32 Salzman, Reform and Revolution, 193.

33 Beatty, 156.

34 Beatty, 157; Harper, 278–9, 280–1.

35 Poole, An American Diplomat in Bolshevik Russia, 15–16; Gordon, Russian Year, 213.

36 Lindley, untitled memoirs, 14–15.

37 Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways in Diplomacy, 236.

38 Crosley, 192, 193.

39 Harper, 287.

40 Foglesong, ‘Missouri Democrat’, 37; Francis, 160–1.

41 Wright, 129.

42 Crosley, 174; see also Wright, 108.

43 Wright, 122.

44 Crosley, 173-4; Wright, 121, 122.

45 Woodhouse, FO 236/59/2258, 2 October.

46 Bosanquet letters, 28 December 1916, 193; Jennifer Stead, ‘A Bradford Mill in St Petersburg’, Old West Riding, 2:2, Winter 1982, 20.

47 Buchanan, Dissolution of an Empire, 242; Stebbing, From Czar to Bolshevik, 104.

48 Robien, 104.

49 Ibid., 123.

50 Cantacuzène, Revolutionary Days, 352–3, 354; Crosley, 135–6.

51 Pax, Journal d’une comédienne française, 77.

52 Lubbock Morning Avalanche, 13 March 1919.

53 Anet, 164; Cordasco (Woodhouse), online memoir.

54 Crosley, 135–6; see also 197.

55 Robien, 106; Crosley, 153.

56 Robien, 106.

57 Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 297.

58 Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 122.

59 Harper, 162, 166.

60 Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 127.

61 Harper, 167; Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 133.

62 Harper, 167, 293. For Harper, Pankhurst and Kenney’s rail journey out of Russia, see Harper, Chapter XIX.

63 Poole, The Bridge, 271.

64 Morgan, Somerset Maugham, 227.

65 Maugham, Writer’s Notebook, 137–8.

66 Maugham, ‘Looking Back’, Part III, Show: The Magazines of the Arts, 2, 1962, 95.

67 Hastings, Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 226.

68 Hugh Walpole, ‘Literary Close Ups’, Vanity Fair, 13, January 1920, 47.

69 Hastings, Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 227.

70 For Reed’s career prior to Petrograd, see Bassow, Moscow Correspondents, 22–5; Service, Spies and Commissars, 50–4; Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia; Seldes, Witness to a Century, 42–5.

71 Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia, 75.

72 Bryant, 21, xi.

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

1 Bryant, 19–20.

2 Fuller, Letters, 16.

3 Fuller, Journal, 7, 8–9.

4 See Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary, 289.

5 Francis, 167, 168, 165–6.

6 Rogers, 3:9, 147.

7 Homberger, John Reed, 105; Williams, 22.

8 See Williams, 30–1.

9 Ibid., 35, 36.

10 Francis, 169.

11 Fuller, Journal, 15.

12 Rogers, 3:10, 241. George F. Kennan, who was a friend of Reed and was interviewed for Warren Beatty’s 1981 film Reds, agreed that Reed could be ‘inconsiderate, intolerant, needlessly offensive … he could be grievously wrong about many things’. But there he was, with all that energy, in the centre of things in Petrograd, ‘flaming like a human torch with its contagious enthusiasm, absorbing into his youthful frame the immense, incipient antagonism that was eventually to separate two great people and to devastate his own life and so many others. His was one American way of reacting to the Revolution. It deserves to be neither forgotten nor ridiculed.’ Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 68, 69.

13 Bryant, 25.

14 Ibid., 42, 43, 37.

15 Ibid., 39–40.

16 Gordon, Russian Year, 219.

17 See Pax, Journal d’une comédienne française, 43–6. Pax had actually returned to France for several months.

18 Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways in Diplomacy, 227; Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia, 44; see also Reed, 38–40.

19 Reed, 61.

20 Gordon, Russian Year, 219.

21 Brun, Troublous Times, 2.

22 Rogers, 3:9, 159.

23 Harold Williams diary, quoted in Tyrkova-Williams, Cheerful Giver, 193.

24 Maugham, Writer’s Notebook, 145.

25 Ibid., 146.

26 Ransome report to Daily News, quoted in Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, 174.

27 Williams, Shadow of Tyranny, 125; Wright, 130.

28 Brogan, Life of Arthur Ransome, 144, 145.

29 Maugham, Writer’s Notebook, 150.

30 Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, 177.

31 Williams, Shadow of Tyranny, 28; published in New York Times, 6 October NS.

32 Mission, 188–9.

33 Salzman, Reform and Revolution, 197.

34 Ibid.

35 Mission, 191; see also Robien, 121.

36 Wright, 129.

37 Mission, 193; Robien, 122.

38 Hastings, Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 228.

39 Rogers, 3:9, 149, 148; Patouillet, 2:194. For the return of the Salvation Army to Petrograd, see Aitken, Blood and Fire, Tsar and Commissar, Chapter 8: ‘1917: A Transient Freedom’.

40 Cantacuzène, Revolutionary Days, 352–3.

41 Destrée, Les Fondeurs de la neige, 27.

42 Ibid.

43 Bruce, Silken Dalliance, 163; Reed’s experience was also described in Madeleine Doty’s Behind the Battle Line, 46. Doty, a Greenwich Village friend of Louise Bryant and a trained lawyer, arrived in Petrograd in November 1917, returning to the USA with Bryant and Beatty the following January.

44 Reinke, ‘Getting On Without the Czar’, 12.

45 Crosley, 190.

46 Wright, 129.

47 Bryant, 67.

48 Fleurot, 177.

49 Ibid.

50 Rogers, 3:9, 162.

51 Ibid., 162–3.

52 Gordon, Russian Year, 217–18.

53 Bryant, 120.

54 Hastings, Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 230.

55 Mission, 196.

56 Maugham, Writer’s Notebook, 150; Reed’s verdict on Kerensky, quoted in John Hohenburg, Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times, Columbia University Press, 1995, 105.

57 Mission, 201; Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie, 116.

58 Fuller, Journal, 18–19.

59 Rogers, 3:9, 154.

60 Ibid., 155–6; Fuller, Journal, 20.

61 Cordasco (Woodhouse), online memoir.

62 Francis, 169–70.

63 Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 142–3.

64 Rogers, 3:9, 164, 167. For a description of the flat, see Fuller, Journal, 47.

65 Wright, 141.

66 Williams, 87–8.

14 ‘We Woke Up to Find the Town in the Hands of the Bolsheviks’

1 Fuller, Journal, 23.

2 Ibid., 26

3 Rogers, 3:9, 186.

4 Ibid., 187.

5 Ibid., 186.

6 Ibid., 187.

7 Ibid., 188–9.

8 Ibid., 189.

9 Ibid., 190.

10 Ibid., 190–1.

11 Ibid., 191.

12 Lindley letter, entry for 25 October, LRA, MS 1372/1.

13 Beatty, 179–80.

14 Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 180.

15 Petrograd, 187–8, 190.

16 See Pipes, Russian Revolution, 489, 495; Figes, People’s Tragedy, 486.

17 Nostitz, Romance and Revolutions, 193.

18 Reed, 91, 92.

19 Knox, With the Russian Army, 712. For descriptions of the Smolny at this time, see: Gordon, Russian Year, 231–2; Reed, 54–5, 76–7, 96–9; Doty, Behind the Battle Line, 74–6; see also Robien, 140–1.

20 Reed, 87.

21 Williams, 128–9.

22 Doty, Behind the Battle Line, 76.

23 Reed, 73.

24 According to the History of the Times, Vol. 4, 146, ‘very few correspondents’ witnessed any of these events during the night; in fact most of what happened during 24–6 October was little reported as it occurred, because of the impossibility of getting telegraphed reports out. Before he left, The Times’s own Petrograd correspondent, Robert Wilton, had warned of a second impending revolution. See Philip Knightley, The First Casualty, London: Quartet, 1978, 138.