If the truth be told, neither Francis nor Buchanan particularly enjoyed the social round of Petrograd society. It was their flamboyant French counterpart, Maurice Paléologue, who was the most accomplished socialite in the diplomatic corps and who also ‘held the best dinner parties for the smartest and most frivolous set’.44 Indeed, the suave and gossipy Paléologue seemed to spend more time socialising than on diplomatic business. He was regularly seen at the ballet and opera – both of which were enjoying their heyday during the war. When not there, he seemed to be ‘forever in the grand ducal drawing rooms gossiping with the Princesses’, or dining out with the Petrograd glitterati.45
For members of the diplomatic community like Paléologue, as well as other foreign nationals in the city, war till now had not been so hard to bear. The hottest ticket in town was still a night at the ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre. All Petrograd society – Russian and expatriate – went to see and be seen at its Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon performances, and all still dressed up for the occasion. Most seats were sold by private subscription and well in advance; people would pay up to 100 rubles to obtain one of the few made available for sale. Even at this time of food queues, you could still see crowds standing in line for tickets for the ballet. Ambassador Francis rated the autumn season at the Mariinsky the ‘best in the world’; together with most of the diplomatic community, he had sat ‘spellbound’ through a three-hour performance of Don Quixote starring prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina.46 The two other major Petrograd theatres were still flourishing: the Alexandrinsky, for straight theatre, and the Mikhailovsky, with its resident French troupe, which was the centre for French culture among the Russian intelligentsia and was where they all went to practise their French.
Petrograd, for all its privations and its growing atmosphere of social disaffection, still provided ‘the perfect life of dissipation’ for those unrepentant sybarites craving excitement and self-indulgence.47 Nicholas II might have introduced a ban on vodka sales in 1914 to control the legendary drunkenness of Russia’s largely peasant, conscript army, but if you had the right money you could still be served fine wines, champagne, whisky and other hard liquor in the cabinets privés of the best restaurants and hotels in the city.48fn8 In former years the Hotel de France and Hotel d’Angleterre had enjoyed the patronage of the French and English colonies, but during the war it was the Astoria that gained precedence. It had been built in 1912 on the eastern side of St Isaac’s Square at the corner of Bolshaya Morskaya and Voznesenskaya, to cater to tourists coming to St Petersburg for the 1913 Romanov Tercentenary; and it was named by its Swedish architect, Fredrik Lidvall, in honour of the renowned New York hoteliers, the Astor brothers.
Such had been its popularity with British visitors that the Astoria had set up a bureau to deal specifically with their needs and boasted a ‘gigantic map of the London tube system and a large library of English books from Chaucer to D. H. Lawrence’.49 With ‘ten elevators, an electric light system for calling servants, city telephone lines, an automated vacuuming system, steam-driven central heating, as well as 350 rooms soundproofed with cork insulation’, the hotel also had a grand restaurant that catered for up to two hundred people, a Winter Garden atrium and Art Nouveau banqueting hall.50 Its French restaurant had become a place of welcome retreat for war-weary Russian officers home from the front, as well as for Allied attachés, embassy officials and expatriates – a magnet, too, for discreet high-class prostitutes. Although its rival, the Hotel d’Europe, which also offered a roof garden and luxurious glass-domed restaurant, was a favourite haunt of Ambassador Francis, most new foreign arrivals in the city headed for the Astoria. Such, however, had been the influx of visiting military men that by the end of 1916 the hotel had lost much of its pre-war glamour, so much so that Italian-born restaurant manager Joseph Vecchi felt it had become ‘a kind of glorified barracks’.51
Vecchi rued the severe shortages that prevented him from providing the kind of grand dinners that even a year ago he had still been able to conjure up for private parties. For food supplies to Petrograd had, by the end of 1916, shrunk to about one-third of what was needed. A severe lack of manpower on the land had affected output, with so many peasants conscripted into the army; but many of the shortages were artificial, caused by profiteering and the breakdown in the national railway system. At depots and supply centres in the food-producing south, flour and other food supplies lay stranded and rotting, for lack of rolling stock to bring them by rail to Russia’s hungry cities in the north. There was still plenty of food available out in the provinces, as many foreign visitors testified, and hard-pressed housewives often made gruelling journeys out of the city in attempts to buy butter, eggs, meat and fish from the local peasantry. By now stories were rife in Petrograd about the deliberate stockpiling of flour, meat and sugar by speculators in order to push the prices ever higher. Even the moneyed classes could no longer obtain white bread, but they could certainly still lay their hands on fine food when they wanted to have a party, as National City Bank employee Leighton Rogers noted with amazement, when invited that winter to the house of a Russian acquaintance for ‘just a little family affair’:
The huge buffet in a reception room looked as though a food warehouse had burst open – pickled fish, sardines, anchovies, smelts, herrings, smoked eel, smoked salmon; bowls of caviar, entire hams, tongue, sausage, chicken, paté-de-fois-gras; red cheese, yellow cheese, white cheese, blue cheese; innumerable salads; basket of celery, pickles and olives; sauces – pink, yellow, lavender. All this and much more was piled in three great tiers, with an immobile cascade of fruits in the centre, and flanked by rows of vodka and kummel carafes.52
It turned out that this bacchanalian feast was merely the zakuski, or hors d’oeuvres, preceding a full sit-down dinner of salmon, roast venison and pheasant, followed by ice-cream bombe and yet more fruit and cheeses, served with wines from claret to burgundy and champagne. At the end of the dinner, as a special treat, Rogers’s Russian host had produced the ultimate treat for his American guests: ‘two packets of Beeman’s Pepsin chewing gum’.53
Beyond the doors of this and other comfortable private mansions ‘Russia lay like a prostrate Mars, starving to death,’ wrote Negley Farson, who till now had led an unrepentant sybaritic life in the clubs and restaurants of the city.54 But even he had become disenchanted with staying up all night on binges with his expatriate friends and cronies, enjoying champagne and crayfish in the company of prostitutes in the cabinets privés at the Villa Rodé – a restaurant near the Stroganovsky Bridge that was patronised by Grigory Rasputin, the Tsar’s and Tsaritsa’s controversial spiritual guru and adviser. All the fashionable restaurants were feeling the pinch – including Contant’s, haunt of the Dutch ambassador Willem Oudendijk (later known as William Oudendyk); and the Café Donon, a favourite of US embassy official J. Butler Wright. The old expatriate life at the New English Club had also ‘dwindled to nothing’: ‘Its beefsteak dinners had vanished forever’ by the end of 1916, as Farson recalled.55
Most basic foodstuffs, like milk and potatoes, had quadrupled in price since the outbreak of war; other crucial commodities such as bread, cheese, butter, meat and fish were as much as five times more expensive. Ella Woodhouse, daughter of the British consul, recalled that ‘we had to keep a maid, whose only job was to stand in queues for milk, for bread, or whatever else there was to be had’.56 As winter set in, the queues got ever longer and more resentful, with ‘more and more talk of inefficiency and corruption in high places’. Official wastage and mismanagement of food and fuel supplies (with only wood and no coal available) were on a colossal scale; corruption among Russian officials was rife. Petrograd felt like a city under siege: no one had the appetite for self-indulgence any longer. ‘The Roman Holiday atmosphere of the Hotel Astoria was gone. Fear had now taken its place.’57 In his daily walks along the Embankment, Sir George Buchanan was appalled by the long queues for food. ‘When the hard winter weather sets in these lines will become
inflammable material,’ he wrote in November 1916. At the US embassy, Fred Dearing had much the same sense of foreboding: ‘The air is thick with talk of catastrophe,’ he wrote in his journal.58
For those in big business – the textile mills, copper factories, munitions works – the profits continued to mount, while for their workers the spectre of famine seemed ever more present. ‘An air of deep despondency already by then hung over the capital,’ recalled Willem Oudendijk. ‘It was clear that the war put too heavy a strain on the country’s economic life . . . Cabs had practically disappeared and tram-cars rumbled along, packed to overflowing.’ The muddy streets were shabby and the shops depleted. The Russians to whom he spoke put it all down to the rottenness of the bureaucratic system:
Conversations were carried on mostly in whispers as if one was afraid of being overheard, although there was nobody near, and the conviction was expressed that things could not go on as they were, that a storm was approaching, although nobody seemed to have a fixed idea whence it would come nor how much damage it would cause.59
‘Everyone from Grand Dukes to one’s sleigh driver all thunder against the regime,’ observed Denis Garstin of the British Propaganda Bureau in Petrograd.60 From the grandest mansion to the shivering bread queues, one topic of conversation prevailed: the Empress’s relationship with Grigory Rasputin. Against all the objections of the imperial family, Nicholas and Alexandra had stubbornly refused to remove him from his favoured position, and had made matters worse by appointing a series of increasingly reactionary ministers. With Nicholas away at army HQ, Alexandra was left alone, alienated from the Russian court and most of her relatives, and relying ever more heavily on their ‘friend’. In her intense isolation she took nobody’s advice seriously, except Rasputin’s. Repeated warnings were sent to Nicholas of the escalating danger to the throne; his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich, begged him to stop his wife from bringing the monarchy into further disrepute by meddling in the affairs of government. ‘You stand on the eve of an era of new troubles,’ he warned. Sir George Buchanan was of the same mind: ‘If the emperor continues to uphold his present reactionary advisers, a revolution is, I fear, inevitable.’61
In this atmosphere of ‘strained suspense’, people were talking openly about the need for a palace coup and for the Empress to be shut up, out of harm’s way, in a nunnery.62 Unrestrained innuendo and gossip about ‘The Dark Powers’ that she and Rasputin represented were the sole topic of conversation in the exclusive clubs, where ‘Grand Dukes played quinze and talked of “saving” Russia.’63 The assassination of Rasputin seemed the only solution – the panacea that would avert crisis and save the monarchy from the brink of disaster.
On the night of 16–17 December 1916 Rasputin went missing. Over at the Mariinsky Theatre, French ambassador Paléologue had been enjoying Smirnova dancing the lead role in Sleeping Beauty that night, and recalled that her ‘leaps, pirouettes and “arabesques” were not more fantastic than the stories which passed from lip to lip’ about plots to remove the Empress and her ‘friend’ from power. ‘We’re back in the days of the Borgias, Ambassador,’ confided an Italian diplomat.64 When Rasputin’s body was fished out of the river a few days later, Alexandra was ruthless in her response, confining Rasputin’s hot-headed young murderers, Prince Felix Yusupov to his estate in the country, and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich to house arrest, while the Russian public celebrated their act of ‘heroism’.
A powerful, fatalistic atmosphere had descended over the city by the end of the year. ‘The approaching cataclysm was already in every mind, and on everybody’s lips,’ recalled Robert Bruce Lockhart.65 The sense of doom was made worse by the blackout of the streets at night, ‘for fear of the Zeppelins’, the darkness broken only by searchlights fanning the sky for them. Russia could not hold out much longer against Germany on the Eastern Front. Fourteen million men had been mobilised since 1914 and losses so far amounted to more than seven million killed, wounded or captured. Yet still the demand for conscripts was insatiable; all over the city – on the Field of Mars, Palace Square and the embankments along the Neva – one could see the constant drilling of column upon column of soldiers and field artillery. Ordinary Russians looked on with increasing indifference; ‘the desperate and embittering old problems of how to get enough to eat reabsorbed their attention’.66
For Leighton Rogers, Petrograd in winter was ‘the weather waste heap of the world’; he had hardly seen the sun since his arrival in October and, when it did emerge, it was gone by 3.00 p.m. ‘We seem to be away up on top of the world shrouded in white mists which swallow its brilliance.’67 As flurries of snow and intense cold set in, everyone wondered how much longer the current explosive situation would prevail, how long it would be before ‘the lines of shivering women, their feet numb and frozen, their trembling fingers clutching their shawls tighter round their heads’ might vent their anger and storm the food shops.68 Everywhere you went there were groups of them:
shuffling, pushing, jostling each other; eager, trembling hands outstretched for their basin of soup, querulous voices asking for just a little more, begging for a bottle of milk to take home to a dying baby, telling long, rambling, pitiful stories of want and misery and cold.69
Wilfully blind to the gathering resentment on the streets, the demi-monde indulged in a last gasp of spending as Christmas approached, partying in the theatres and cabarets and nightclubs of the city:
Through the revolving-doors of the Hotel Astoria passed the same endless procession of women in furs and jewels and men in glittering uniforms. Across the bridges limousines passed to and fro and troikas made music in the streets – the music of sleigh bells and steel runners on the snow . . . As ever, the streets were thronged, the tram-cars crowded to suffocation, the restaurants doing a roaring trade. And everywhere people talked, as they only talk in Russia, the land of endless talk.70
Out across the Neva the squalid, barrack-block tenements of the industrial quarter of the Vyborg Side had seen a major strike by 20,000 metal and armaments workers on 17 October. Ground down by war, disease, unsanitary living conditions, low wages and hunger, they were demanding improved pay and conditions ever more vociferously. ‘Every unusual noise, even the unexpected sound of a factory whistle, was enough to bring them into the streets. The tension was becoming painful. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, was waiting for something to happen.’ In the workers’ quarters, revolutionary talk ‘ran like fire through stubble’ and revolutionary agitators were there to further fan the flames of dissent.71 After a second major strike on 26 October, thousands of workers were locked out. By the 29th, forty-eight factories were in lockdown and 57,000 workers on strike. Fierce clashes with the police continued until these workers were reinstated.72
To many in the diplomatic community, the collapse of Russia seemed imminent and British subjects were already being urged to go home. But although Sir George Buchanan was emphatically predicting revolution, David Francis was of the opinion that this would not happen ‘before the war ends’ or, more likely, ‘soon thereafter’.73 He and his staff celebrated Christmas US-style (on what was 12 December, on the Russian calendar) with ‘turkey and plum pudding’.74 Sir George, meanwhile, had more serious things on his mind. Deciding to make one final attempt to warn the Tsar of the danger of imminent revolution, he set off for the Alexander Palace, fifteen miles south of the city at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘If the Emperor received him sitting down,’ he told Robert Bruce Lockhart before he left, ‘all would be well.’75 When Buchanan arrived on 30 December, the Tsar received him standing. Nevertheless, Buchanan tried hard to persuade him of the seriousness of rising discontent in the city, and urged him to do his utmost to restore confidence in the throne by making social and political concessions before it was too late: ‘it rested with him either to lead Russia to victory and a permanent peace or to revolution and disaster,’ Sir George later wrote. But Nicholas dismissed his concerns and said he was exaggerating.76 Half an hour later a gloomy Buchanan
left. He had said his piece and was relieved to ‘have got it off his mind’.77 But his advice had fallen on deaf ears, as he had anticipated. Nicholas had further alienated public opinion recently by appointing the arch-reactionary Alexander Protopopov as Minister of the Interior – a man bent on preserving the autocracy at any cost, and a known associate of Rasputin – an act that, moreover, prompted other ministers to resign en masse in protest.
As New Year 1917 arrived, over at the US embassy Phil Jordan had somehow managed to get hold of contraband Russian champagne for a party. The rugs were rolled back and there was dancing into the early hours.78 French ambassador Paléologue saw the old year out at a party at the home of Prince Gavriil Konstantinovich, where everyone talked of the conspiracies against the throne and ‘all this with the servants moving about, harlots looking on and listening, gypsies singing and the whole company bathed in the aroma of Moet and Chandon brut imperial which flowed in streams!’79
At the Astoria Hotel the band played ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ during dinner, as an English nurse looked forward to leaving the city, after witnessing the misery of Polish refugees at the British colony’s soup kitchen:
And here we are in the Astoria Hotel, and there is one pane of glass between us and the weather; one pane of glass between us and the peasants of Poland; one pane of glass dividing us from poverty, and keeping us in the horrid atmosphere of this place, with its evil women and its squeaky band!80
With even the tsarist secret police now predicting the ‘wildest excesses of a hunger riot’, the smashing of that one fragile pane of glass seemed inevitable.81
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