While Seymour was keen to stay and watch events unfold, elsewhere in Petrograd there were British nationals, such as nurses Grant and Moir, who were desperate to get home. British consul Arthur Woodhouse, based in offices on Teatralnaya Ploshchad near the Mariinsky Theatre, had been busy since the outbreak of the war helping repatriate British subjects stranded all over Russia – from the Baltic to the Urals. ‘There was a stream of people wanting to go home, which was to turn into a flood, with the refugees from territories overrun by the Germans,’ recalled his daughter Ella, noting that many of them were ‘those who had lost their jobs in the general upheaval, like the hundreds of governesses who had been employed by wealthy families all over the country . . . After years abroad, these pathetic women were returning to the old country, many of them with no real homes to go back to.’ It was a sad sight; ‘such numbers of them came in tears that we named them the H.H.H. class (helpless, hopeless, hystericals)’.35
Embassy business struggled on, in the face of this mounting workload and predictions of imminent social breakdown. The first day of the Russian New Year, a day of intense cold, had been marked by a glittering reception for eighty members of the diplomatic corps in the ballroom of the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. While US ambassador Francis – along with his nine members of staff – had eschewed the formal diplomatic paraphernalia of knee breeches, buckled shoes and plumed hats, choosing to wear a dress coat and wing collar, the rest of the diplomatic community travelled out in full rig, on the ‘sumptuous’ special train provided.36 From there they processed in sleighs laden with fur rugs through the swirling snow, past the frosted trees of the park, to the ringing of sleigh bells. All it needed was ‘some baying wolves’ to make it the classic Russian scenario, thought American diplomat Norman Armour.37 ‘There this enchanted wonderland lay before our eyes,’ wrote French diplomat Charles de Chambrun: ‘The ornate façade of the palace stood waiting for its guests, illuminated by a thousand lights and surrounded by a semi-circle of whiteness.’ Still, he wondered – as did many of his fellow diplomats – ‘after all that had already happened, and all that people were saying, and all that was still brewing, how were we going to find the master of all this magnificence?’38
‘After shedding countless wraps’ the assembled diplomats waited until the double doors to the red and gilded reception hall were thrown open by two tall Ethiopian guards in turbans and they were ‘ushered into the most imposing room that I had ever seen, lined with endless gold mirrors and countless electric lights,’ recalled J. Butler Wright. They were then arranged in groups in order of precedence, behind their ‘dean’, Sir George Buchanan, and his staff, when Nicholas II, simply dressed in a grey Cossack cherkeska, entered the room to greet them. During the course of the two-hour reception he conversed charmingly, with his usual smiles and handshakes, and in perfect English or French. ‘He asked me how long I had been here, how I liked it, whether the cold was too severe and promised beautiful weather in the summer,’ recalled Wright.39 Nicholas was a master of such empty pleasantries, but he became visibly uncomfortable when Sir George Buchanan seized the opportunity to impress upon him ‘the necessity for a strong offensive on the Eastern Front to relieve pressure on the Western’. Norman Armour thought this inappropriate of the British ambassador on such a purely social occasion: ‘I watched as the Emperor twisted his astrakhan cap, displaying increased irritation as Buchanan talked on.’40
Otherwise, the Tsar’s responses in conversation were mundane, his eyes kindly but vacant. In the opinion of Charles de Chambrun, it was clear that he was ‘not taking much interest in the replies’.41 Ambassador Francis, seduced by the Tsar’s superficial charm, failed to notice his air of exhaustion: ‘We were all impressed with the cordiality of His Majesty’s manner, by his poise and his apparent excellent physical condition, as well as by the promptness of his utterances,’ he noted in his diary. To his mind, the Tsar ‘gave appearance of having supreme confidence in himself’, so much so that he was happy to go off ‘for a smoke’ with US naval attaché Newton McCully and talk about ‘the fall of Porfirio Diazfn12 in Mexico’ – rather than the state of Russia.42 But Wright, like his companion Armour, had thought Nicholas ‘seemed very nervous and his hands fidgeted continually’. French ambassador Paléologue concurred: Nicholas’s ‘pale thin face’ had ‘betrayed the nature of his secret thoughts’.43
All in all, it was an impressive gathering, of which much was made retrospectively by memoirists, Francis included, as marking ‘the glitter and pomp of a dying era’.44 ‘Little did any of us realize that we were witnessing the last public appearance of the last ruler of the mighty Romanoff dynasty,’ he later wrote in his memoirs; the Tsar had seemed to have no idea that ‘he was standing on a volcano’.45 Chambrun’s overall impression was that Nicholas had looked ‘more like an automaton needing winding up than an autocrat fit to crush all resistance’.46 A wider air of exhaustion and foreboding had been detected, too, by Ambassador Paléologue: ‘among the whole of the Tsar’s brilliant and glittering suite, there was not a face which did not express anxiety’. After enjoying the sherry and sandwiches and tipping the staff ‘liberally’, the diplomatic corps headed back to Petrograd.47 A few hours later Wright was drinking vodka and gorging himself on caviar and zakuski at Armour’s flat on the Liteiny, to celebrate the New Year. In the days that followed, Wright enjoyed trips to the opera to see Tchaikovsky’s Evgeniy Onegin, the ballet with Meriel Buchanan at a packed Mariinsky Theatre, bridge at Princess Chavchavadze’s (‘a rather brilliant gathering’), dinner at the Café de Paris and skating at an exclusive private club, where being a member of the diplomatic corps ‘was always and everywhere an Open Sesame’.48 If the Tsar was standing on the edge of the volcano, then so too were most of the diplomatic community, along with the blinkered sybarites of Russian high society.
Eight days after the Tsar’s reception an Allied delegation of high-ranking British, French and Italian officials led by Lord Milner – an eminent member of David Lloyd George’s War Cabinet – arrived in the city for a major conference aimed at consolidating continuing cooperation with Russia and keeping her in the war. Although the expatriate community looked forward to the inevitable junketing that such a visit would generate, it came at a time of serious industrial unrest. For on the very day the mission arrived in the capital, 150,000 workers went on strike and marched in commemoration of the massacre of peaceful protesters, killed that same day, twelve years previously. Bloody Sunday 1905 was an ever-present memory for the oppressed working classes of Petrograd, as tension continued to build in the city.
Tsarist officialdom, however, was preoccupied with the more immediate crisis in Petrograd’s desperate accommodation shortage, which the arrival of the mission had provoked. Guests on the ground floor of the already overcrowded Hotel d’Europe had their rooms commandeered for the duration, but found there was ‘nowhere to go and no rooms to be had at any price’.49 A last-ditch orgy of official parties beckoned over the next three weeks, prompting a brief lifting of spirits in the weary capital. ‘For a short time one could almost have imagined oneself back in pre-war St Petersburg,’ recalled Meriel Buchanan, who made the most of the glittering social whirl:
A sudden gaiety swept over the town. Court carriages with beautifully groomed horses and the crimson and gold of the Imperial liveries passed up and down the streets. An endless stream of motors stood at all hours of the day before the Hotel d’Europe, where the Missions had been lodged. Dinners and dances took place every night; the big royal box at the ballet was filled with French, English and Italian uniforms.50
Nicholas II once again put on his gracious public face for a gala dinner at Tsarskoe Selo, with Sir George Buchanan sitting at his right hand. The gathered delegates joined in the charade of sharing ‘meaningless remarks about the Alliance, war and victory’. Nicholas was, as always, ‘vague’ in conversation and, after a succession of dutiful and dull exchanges, withdrew with a smile.51 The reclusive Empress had, as usual, been ab
sent. It was left to the leading ladies of the Petrograd aristocracy, in the guise of Grand Duchess Vladimir and Countess Nostitz (an American adventuress who had married into the aristocracy)fn13, to organise some of the other lavish entertainments laid on for the mission, with Nostitz claiming that she had been chosen to host the reception on 6 February at her home because ‘the Empress was too ill to receive at the Palace’. It would leave an abiding impression on her:
The night of that last splendid reception is stamped forever on my memory. I have only to close my eyes to see again our rose and gilt salon with its magnificent old family portraits, its exquisite tapestries, crowded with that brilliant assembly of guests. All the Court, the cream of Petrograd society, three hundred of its greatest names, all the Diplomatic Corps and their wives, the members of the Delegation – Lord Milner, one of England’s foremost Ministers, Lord Brooke, Sir Henry Wilson, Lord Clive, Lord Revelstoke, Sir George Clerk, General de Castelnau, France’s hero, Sociologue, the Italian delegate, Gaston Doumergue, they were all there that night.52
When the visit came to an end, few felt it had achieved anything of political significance. Robert Bruce Lockhart had been far from impressed with the ‘interminable round of festivity’, later observing that ‘rarely in the history of great wars can so many important ministers and generals have left their respective countries on so useless an errand’. Ambassador Paléologue felt likewise: the conference had dragged on for three weeks ‘to no purpose’, and ‘no practical result ha[d] emerged from all the diplomatic verbiage’. What point was there, he asked, in the Allies sending Russia huge consignments of materiel – ‘guns, machine-guns, shells and aeroplanes’ – when she had ‘neither the means of getting them to the front nor the will to take advantage of them?’53
Lord Milner had also confided that he thought the trip a waste of time, having realised ‘the inefficiency of the Russians’ at getting anything done, and had decided that Russia was doomed – at home, and at the front. It was, however, ‘the general consensus of informed opinion, both Allied and Russian’, that ‘there will be no revolution until after the war’.54 Maurice Paléologue, though, saw it differently. As the French delegates prepared to return home, he gave them a message to take to the President in Paris: ‘A revolution crisis is at hand in Russia . . . Every day the Russian nation is more indifferent towards the war and the spirit of anarchy is spreading among all classes and even in the army.’ The October strikes in the Vyborg Side had, in Paléologue’s view, been ‘very significant’; for when violence had broken out between strikers and the police, the 181st Regiment – called on to assist the police – had actually turned on them. A division of Cossacks had had to be ‘hastily called in to bring the mutineers to their senses’. If there were to be an uprising, Paléologue warned, ‘the authorities cannot count on the army’. And he went even further: the Allies must also quietly prepare for the likely ‘defection of our ally’ – out of the war and, with it, its role in the defence of the Eastern Front.55 Sir George Buchanan was now so consumed by a mounting sense of imminent disaster that he reported to the British Foreign Office in London that ‘Russia will not, in my opinion, be able to face a fourth winter campaign if the present situation is indefinitely prolonged.’ Trouble, ‘if it comes, will be due to economic rather than political causes’. And it would begin ‘not with the workmen in the factories, but with the crowds waiting in the cold and the snow outside the provision shops’.56
By February the daily consignment of flour to Petrograd had dropped to just twenty-one wagonloads, instead of the normal 120 needed. What white bread there was ‘had become greyer and greyer until it was uneatable’, due to excessive adulteration. Official mismanagement, corruption and wastage of supplies were prodigious, made worse by a crippled rail network that was unable to transport food efficiently from the provinces – where it was still plentiful – to the cities that most needed it. People were incensed to discover that, due to the hikes in the price of oats and hay, much of the black bread – the staple diet of the poor – was being fed to the capital’s 80,000 horses to keep them alive: ‘every horse was eating up the black bread allowance of ten men’.57 Sugar was now so scarce that many of the patisseries and confectionary shops had had to close. Word spread like wildfire about food going to waste, of ‘millions of pounds of cheap Siberian beef’ being left to rot in railway sidings:
Few of the munition-workers, whose wives or children spent more than half their time in the queue before a bread-shop, had not heard of the ‘fish graveyards’ of Astrakhan, where thousands of tons of the spoiled harvest of the Caspian were buried; and all classes had heard of the ‘saccharine rivers’ which travellers had seen flowing from leaky sugar warehouses in the great beet-growing districts of South Russia and Podolia.58
‘While we put jam in our tea and work-people drank it unsweetened,’ wrote US official Philip Chadbourn, inspecting internment camps for Germans in Russia, ‘everyone knew that the country was full of grain, and that the provincial towns were full of flour’.59 On 19 January an official announcement of imminent bread rationing – as little as one pound per person a day – sparked panic buying. People were now standing so long in line at the bakers’ shops that they were suffering from hypothermia. If they were lucky enough to get any, they would hurry off, ‘hugging close to themselves the warm piece of bread they had bought, in a vain attempt to receive from it a little heat’.60
Even the foreigners were suffering, albeit relatively speaking. ‘We are so short of everything here now, that ham or bacon is more acceptable than a bouquet of orchids,’ complained J. Butler Wright at the US embassy, adding that ‘whisky is in the same category’. He was overjoyed when a courier arrived from Washington with twenty-seven pouches of mail, as well as ‘bacon, Listerine, whiskey, dioxygen,fn14 marmalade, papers, etc etc’.61 Trying to keep warm in his hotel room, photographer Donald Thompson could still get coffee, ‘but it’s coffee only in name and the bread is not bread at all’. He was, he admitted, ‘beginning to feel the pangs of hunger – even in the Astoria Hotel’.62
Hunger was made worse by the continuing sub-zero temperatures affecting the supply of fuel to the city by rail. Rowing boats on the Neva were chopped up for firewood, and even more desperate measures were resorted to: ‘at dead of night’ people slunk into the nearest cemetery ‘to fill whole sacks with the wooden crosses from the graves of poor folk’ and take them home for their fires.63
Once more there was a wave of strikes. This time, the tsarist police were taking no chances. On Minister of the Interior Protopopov’s orders, machine guns were being secretly mounted on the roofs of all the city’s major buildings, particularly around the main thoroughfare, the Nevsky. J. Butler Wright noted the darkening mood on 9 February:
The Cossacks are again patrolling the city on account of threatened strikes – for the women are beginning to rebel at standing in bread lines from 5.00 A.M. for shops that open at 10:00 A.M., and that in weather twenty-five degrees below zero.64
He had it on reliable information that ‘the day set for the opening of the Duma will be the day for a socialist outbreak’. In anticipation of this, 14,000 Cossacks had been brought in to Petrograd to bolster army reserves.65fn15 They were patrolling the streets of Petrograd on 14 February when the Duma reopened after its Christmas recess, but the predicted trouble never came. Proceedings at a densely crowded Tauride Palace were carried off in an atmosphere of despondency rather than confrontation. Thinking the crisis over for now and that it was safe to ‘take a short holiday’, an exhausted Sir George Buchanan and his wife set off for a much-needed ten-day rest at the dacha of a friend in the British colony located on the little island of Varpasaari in Finland.66
2
‘No Place for an Innocent Boy from Kansas’
ON SATURDAY 18 February 1917 a dispute over the sacking of workers at the vast Putilov munitions works on the south side of the city sparked a walk-out in the gun-carriage shop. Soon the rest of the workforce followed
and the management enforced a lockout. Tens of thousands of laid-off workers were milling on the streets, and the pitiful queues at the bakers’ shops were getting ever longer. Beyond their hotel windows, Florence Harper and Donald Thompson could see the people lining up overnight, and they went out onto the bitterly cold streets, looking for a story. Billboards everywhere were pasted over with proclamations from the military police ‘imploring the people not to make any demonstrations or cause disorders that might halt the manufacture of munitions or paralyze the industries of the city’.1 Thompson recalled how the people ‘tore them down the minute they were posted and spat on them’. Some of the shops on Bolshaya Morskaya near their hotel were already boarding up their windows. The two Americans knew that trouble was coming. ‘In fact, I was so sure of it,’ Florence Harper later wrote, ‘that I wandered around the town, up and down the Nevsky, watching and waiting for it as I would for a circus parade.’ Thompson was delighted. He had brought his favourite Graflex cameras made by the Eastman Company of New York and had police permits to ‘photograph any place in Petrograd’. ‘If there’s a revolution coming . . . I am in luck,’ he crowed.2
Caught in the Revolution Page 6