Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

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

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

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

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

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

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

  7

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Maurice Paléologue was shocked at the speed with which the Tsar had capitulated: it had all ‘taken place in such casual, commonplace and prosaic fashion, and above all with such indifference and self-effacement on the part of the principal hero,’ he thought. ‘The Czar of all the Russias has been dethroned as easily as a recalcitrant school-boy is made to stay in after school,’ wrote Edith Hegan, on hearing the news. ‘The dynasty of the Romanoffs had disappeared in the storm,’ observed Claude Anet. ‘It had found no one to defend it; it had crumbled away as if all life were extinct in it.’ ‘Nikolai has abdicated. Everybody is relieved. There will be no Vendée,’fn1 wrote another (American) observer.7 Most of the Americans in Petrograd were equally enthusiastic, but Donald Thompson couldn’t help wishing that if the Tsar had returned to the city sooner, and if he had driven straight away down the Nevsky Prospekt ‘and stood up in the back of his automobile with his hat off and talked, as Teddy Roosevelt would have done, he would still be Czar of Russia’. It seemed simple enough to him: give the people bread, and agree to a new government. Thompson felt sorry for the Tsar: ‘at heart he was a real Russian and even now I believe if he were asked, he would go to the front and fight for Russia’. As for the ‘brilliant future’ that everyone tried to convince him was coming, now the Tsar had gone, Thompson didn’t think it ‘very promising’.8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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