Ladders were brought from all directions by citizens eager to remove the old imperial blight on the face of the new socialist Russia. When there were no ladders to be had, people shinned up buildings and onto roofs to do the job. Once thrown down into the street, the insignia were stamped on, burned on huge bonfires or simply flung into the canals. A few people – some of them foreign residents – were eager to get their pickings: ‘We wanted souvenirs,’ wrote James Houghteling, ‘but everything we saw was too big.’22 Unfortunately, in their eagerness to do away with all trace of the Romanovs, the self-appointed iconoclasts roaming the streets in search of targets failed to distinguish between the Russian imperial eagle – symbol of oppression – and the American eagle, symbol of freedom. Several of the latter were destroyed, although the Americans managed to save the huge iron eagle atop the Singer Building on the Nevsky, by ‘drap[ing] the proud bird in the Stars and Stripes until only the beak protruded from the red, white, and blue folds’.23
One of the most obvious targets for the destruction of emblems of tsarism was the Winter Palace. One fanatic, so Associated Press correspondent Robert Crozier Long heard, had even demanded ‘the complete razing of the Winter Palace, declaring that “the debris might be left – a heap of shapeless stones and rotting wood – as a finer monument to the fall of the Romanoffs than the handsomest monument to Liberty reared anywhere else on earth”’.24 Meanwhile, the red flag had already gone up over the palace itself, replacing the yellow imperial flag, and the Romanov coats of arms and eagles on its historic wrought-iron gates were either removed or covered up with red cloth. Such became the demand for red fabric for this, and for the masses of ribbons, brassards and flags in evidence all over the city, that in the end people resorted to simply cutting the blue and white strips away from the now-rejected Russian national flag and displaying the remaining red strip.25
As this frenzy of destruction continued, the imperial insignia and aristocratic coronets were even wrenched off the bonnets of commandeered motor cars, and electric street signs forming the large letter ‘N’ with a crown were also dismantled and destroyed. It was now considered treasonous to buy or display a portrait of the Tsar. ‘Where portraits of the Emperor could not be removed – such as those in the Chamber of the Council of Empire – they were covered with white crepe.’26 Even at the Academy of Art ‘the placards attached to the various paintings stating that they were the gift or loan of members of the royal family had all such references cut out.’ Church services, too, felt the immediate impact of the change of regime and became considerably shorter, with all the prayers for the imperial family being removed from the liturgy and replaced with a prayer for the ‘Divine Protection of the Fatherland’.27
The most potent signifier of change for Meriel Buchanan came at a concert at the Mariinsky Theatre, where she was sad to see that the imperial arms and big golden eagles had been torn down in the auditorium, ‘leaving gaping holes’. The handsome imperial blue drop-curtain had also gone – replaced by ‘an odd red-and-gold one’.28 All the old tsarist splendour had vanished: the formerly well-dressed ushers in their gold-braided court uniforms now wore ‘plain grey jackets which made them look indescribably shabby and dingy’. The clientele of this new egalitarian theatre was also, for her, decidedly downmarket: ‘soldiers in mud-stained khaki lolled everywhere, smoking evil-smelling cigarettes, spitting all over the place and eating the inevitable sunflower seeds out of paper bags’. Elsewhere, a motley crowd of unwashed proletarians sat in their day-clothes – leather jackets replacing the usual evening dress – with their ‘muddy boots on the brocade sofas’. For Buchanan, the new socialist ‘doctrine of Liberty’ was one that ‘preached a contempt for beauty’. Even the corps de ballet seemed ‘less in harmony, slow to obey the conductor’s baton, whispering in corners, slack and inattentive in their movements’. This once-beautiful theatre had been transformed into a meeting place, an office. It was all too much for the European old guard and bluebloods of the foreign diplomatic service, such as the Buchanans. This was no brave new world, but one of ‘dilapidation, of demoralization and decay’.29
The night of Thursday 2 March saw such an intense blizzard that the following morning it was impossible to go out on the streets. Winter was hanging on with a vengeance, the temperature sticking at freezing. With the snow piling up against shop fronts and buildings to a height of about fifteen to twenty feet, the weather certainly ‘cooled revolutionary ardour’ and, as David Francis noted, ‘had the effect of keeping even the rampant socialists within doors’.30 It didn’t last long: on 5 March newspapers finally reappeared, after a week’s silence, and vendors were ‘almost overwhelmed by the news-hungry populace’ venturing out in the cold to read up on the dramatic events of the last few days. For journalist Arthur Ransome, this was an especially heartening sight: ‘their tone and even form are so joyful that it is hard to recognize them. They are so different from the censor-ridden mutes and unhappy things of a week ago. Every paper seems to be executing a war-dance of joy . . . it is as if all Russia had spat out the gags forced in mouths by the old regime of oppression.’
In addition to the newspapers, ‘every conceivable kind of incendiary pamphlet was sold on the sidewalk and without restraint’ and walls everywhere were ‘literally plastered with proclamations, posters and propaganda bulletins’.31 Returning to Russia for his second term as Dutch ambassador, Willem Oudendijkfn2 was forcibly struck by the freedom of speech that prevailed. On the train in from Finland he had found himself surrounded by ‘revolutionary emigrants’ on their way back to Russia, who ‘talked and talked without ceasing’. ‘Everybody thought himself an apostle of a new salvation,’ he noted, ‘and propounded his views with great vehemence to anybody who cared to listen.’32 ‘Walking the city one could stop and hear opinions freely expressed on any street corner,’ Ambassador Paléologue also noted. Impromptu open-air meetinki (the English word was rapidly adopted) could be seen ‘in progress everywhere’. Groups of twenty or thirty would spontaneously gather, and then ‘one of the company mounts a stone, or a bench, or a heap of snow and talks his head off, gesticulating wildly. The audience gazes fixedly at the orator and listens in a kind of rapt absorption. As soon as he stops another takes his place and immediately gets the same fervent silence and concentrated attention.’ Paléologue found it an ‘artless and affecting sight’, particularly when one remembered ‘that the Russian nation ha[d] been waiting centuries for the right of speech’.33
James Stinton Jones wondered whether the Russians were ready, or able, to deal with such a sudden abundance of liberty. In his view, they were too new to it ‘to understand its uses and to know how to avoid its abuses . . . The poorer classes of Russia have never been accustomed to having an opinion of their own . . . Now they find themselves a political factor, they are hopelessly at sea, the prey of the last unscrupulous demagogue they have heard.’ ‘It will take time for Russia to realize what she wants,’ he added. ‘There is no cohesion, no common ideal to inspire her people. She is conscious of having killed a dragon; that is all.’34
Not long after the newspapers began printing again, the trams reappeared; only now they were draped in red flags and banners bearing inscriptions such as ‘Long Live the Republic’. James Houghteling saw the first one arrive across the Troitsky Bridge from the Petrograd Side, ‘with a band playing and a great red banner spread aloft: “Land and the Will of the People”.’35 Everybody in Petrograd was glad to get mobile again, and the familiar trams seemed the final affirmation that life had returned to normal at last. This had not, however, been achieved without some difficulty: the Petrograd Soviet had been obliged to issue a notice ‘drawing attention to the . . . removal of the operating-handles from cars at the beginning of the revolution and ask[ing] that any patriot having a handle in his possession return it to the Municipal Office’. Having daily had to walk back and forth on foot following the unravelling story, journalist Claude Anet was relieved – he had been covering twelve to seventeen miles
a day. ‘If the Revolution continued, I should have the legs of a country postman.’36
While most expatriates welcomed with a degree of wry cynicism the gradual and spasmodic restoration of services in the city, there were some who remained incorrigibly, hopelessly optimistic about this wonderful new dawn in Russia. Harold Williams of the Daily Chronicle, a committed pacifist and socialist from a Methodist background, shared Arthur Ransome’s effusive response to events, talking excitedly of a ‘flow of brotherly feeling’ in the streets and of how the ‘strong sense of common responsibility for order has united all classes in one great army of freedom’. Life in Russia, he insisted, was ‘flowing in a healing, purifying torrent. Never was any country in the world so interesting as Russia is now. Old men are saying “Nunc Dimittis”,fn3 young men singing in the dawn, and I have met many men and women who seem walking in a hushed sense of benediction.’37
There was so much dramatic change for new arrivals in the city to take in. Anglo-Irish journalist Robert Crozier Long was taken aback, upon arriving on 7 March, by the ‘unexampled reversal of ranks and conditions which in a week the Revolution had brought about in the most despotic and class-crystallized country of Europe.’38 ‘I found the capital delirious with freedom,’ recalled American journalist Isaac Marcosson, who had previously been covering the Western Front, ‘the people still blinking in the light of the sudden deliverance’.39 For Marcosson, the persisting, unreal state of euphoria at recent events was like ‘New York City on the night of a presidential election, but with this difference: the returns were piling in all the time and the whole world seemed to be elected’.
Sooner or later the celebrating had to stop and reality must set in. Petrograders were, however, in a strange state of denial, having assumed that ‘the revolution meant a free and continuous meal ticket and a four-hour working day’.40 Russia had to get back to work, but the new-found equality – a world where everybody called each other tovarishch and brotherly love reigned – had, like strong drink, gone to people’s heads. Puffed up with impossible expectations, and dreaming irrational dreams of vastly reduced working days and greatly improved salaries, many workers – from the highest-paid munitions worker to the lowliest housemaid – were making impossible demands for 50–100 per cent and even 150 per cent wage increases, alongside a dramatic reduction in their working hours.41 The Putilov works were still idle, with 35,000 men on the streets, and there was a desperate need for munitions at the front.42 ‘I have been told, difficult as it is to credit it,’ remarked visiting English forestry expert, Edward Stebbing:
that a bricklayer earns at the rate of 30,000 roubles a year, a hotel waiter 80 roubles a day, a hotel boy 50 roubles, and so on – such wages as no country in the world could afford to pay, and doing only about four to six hours’ work for it, and that work so badly performed as to be absolutely harmful. Witness the state of the rolling stock on the railways and the accidents now so numerous. Factory owners, and in fact employers of labour of all kinds, are at their wits’ end to get work carried out and keep their businesses going.43
This was confirmed by Negley Farson – at that time engaged to Vera Thornton, daughter of one of the Thornton brothers, who owned the biggest mill in Petrograd and who, like other expat factory owners and managers, were fighting a losing battle to keep their Petrograd plants going. ‘The workers were like sheep who had been let out of their pen, and the English managers could not get them back,’ wrote Farson. ‘They had no idea what freedom meant, but most of them took it as an invitation not to work. There was a daily drama in every mill yard as managers tried to reason with workers demanding ridiculously high wages.’
Donald Thompson and Florence Harper had noted a distinct change in the attitude of the staff at the Astoria. ‘The servants are beginning to get stuck up with this new-born freedom,’ wrote Thompson; his room servant had told him that from now on he would have to shine his own shoes. ‘You have to call them ‘comrade’ or ‘friend’, he told his wife – rather than addressing them as chelovek (‘man’); and, like the rank and file in the army, they insisted on the use of vy instead of the informal ty.44 A British resident noticed how every evening his two housemaids would ‘spend hours standing at street corners along the Nevski Prospekt, listening to orators preaching about equality and justice’. After one such outing, they returned and told him and his wife that ‘they were in future going to the cinema every night’ and intended to work no more than ‘eight hours a day’.45 Sometimes such high-handedness backfired. A Russian housemaid working for a prominent American resident ‘served notice on her master that she wanted an increase of fifty per cent in wages and an eight-hour day’. ‘What do you mean by an eight-hour day?’ asked her employer. ‘I am only going to work from eight until eight’ was the reply. Her demand was ‘speedily granted’.46
The arbitrary enforcement of equal rights and a share of control also manifested itself in a new form of overbearing management-by-committee, which percolated down into every aspect of Russian society (and which would, in the future Soviet Union, evolve into an art form). One day in early March, Claude Anet wanted to make a telephone call at the Duma:
Three women guarded the approach to it.
‘You cannot telephone,’ they said.
‘And why?’ I asked.
‘We are reserving the telephone for public affairs.’
‘But who are you?’
‘The Telephone Committee.’
‘And who appointed you?’
‘We appointed ourselves.’
Upon which, putting them gently aside, I passed through and telephoned.47
There was also a far more worrying aspect to this unbridled, self-righteous sense of equality – and that came in the summary infliction of rough justice. British lithographer Henry Keeling was alarmed to see how ‘In Russia where few expected justice and where the police had such wide powers, the abolition of the death-penalty seemed to mean an end of all the checks on social crimes’ – especially theft. People acted as self-appointed vigilantes, defending the good name of revolution by summarily punishing those who committed crimes, as Keeling witnessed soon after the revolution:
A lady in a crowded tramcar in Petrograd . . . cried out suddenly that she had had her purse stolen. She said that it contained fifty roubles and accused a well-dressed young man who happened to be standing behind her of the theft. The latter most earnestly protested his innocence and declared that rather than be called a thief he would give the woman fifty roubles out of his own pocket. Nothing availed him; perhaps they thought he protested too much. He was taken outside and promptly shot. The body of the poor fellow was searched, but no purse was found. The upholders of the integrity of the Russian Republic returned to the tramcar and told the woman that she had better make a more careful search. She did so and discovered that the missing purse had slipped down through a hole in the pocket into the lining. Nothing could be done for the unfortunate victim of ‘justice’ so they took the only course which seemed to them to meet the case and leading the woman out, shot her also.48
On Saturday 4 March, James Houghteling and some of his colleagues at the US embassy decided the time had come for them to see the new politics in action and headed for the Tauride Palace. They had no difficulty getting in, for they were mistaken for an official US delegation – come, hopefully, to recognise the new government. Ushered through into the anteroom of the Duma president, they were greeted by Guchkov, who was a little crestfallen when they admitted the mistake.49 It was clear that the Provisional Government was anxious for official validation by foreign powers, and the men went straight to the embassy to tell the ambassador.
Whatever might be the vagaries of the improvised form of government now being enacted at the Tauride Palace, in the greater scheme of things David Francis saw its inception as a golden opportunity. He was determined that republican America should make the grand, defining gesture and ‘be the first to recognize Republican Russia’.50 On the afternoon of 5 March he compos
ed a telegram to Robert Lansing, US Secretary of State: ‘This revolution is the practical realization of that principle of government which we have championed and advocated, I mean government by consent of the governed,’ he argued. ‘Our recognition will have a stupendous moral effect, especially if given first.’51 What is more, by taking this pre-emptive step – ahead of the Allied governments of France, Britain and Italy – Francis hoped the US would thereby increase its trade with Russia and supplant the influence of the British. Expecting the USA soon to enter the war, he also believed this was in America’s interests strategically. Having surprised, if not mortified, his staff by composing his telegram without consulting with any of them, Francis asked Phil Jordan to bring his coat, hat and galoshes and, without more ado, he set off in his sleigh to see Foreign minister Milyukov, who ensured that the telegram was safely transmitted to the USA. Less than two days later Francis received Lansing’s approval. He was overjoyed. ‘It is a great coup to get in ahead of Russia’s allies,’ he told James Houghteling, ‘and it puts the United States in the position of the new government’s best friend.’52
To mark the occasion, Francis and his ‘entire official staff, ten secretaries of embassy and attachés’, drove up the Nevsky on 9 March to the Palace of the Imperial Council at the Mariinsky Palace, with the horses of the ambassadorial sleigh sporting flags stuck in the bridle over their outer ear (Norman Armour said it felt like riding ‘in a merry-go-round’).53 Francis was in ‘full dress evening clothes like a head waiter’ – not having any official diplomatic uniform. The entire Provisional Government was waiting for them, though they had had no time to dress for the occasion. They had ‘all come directly from their offices and wore sack-suits [lounge suits]’. James Houghteling thought they ‘appeared careworn but much elated at having won a place among the nations after so few days in office’.54 The brief ceremony that followed was ‘impressive’, as J. Butler Wright noted in his diary, but it was no ‘flummy-doodle’. And it was a feather in the cap for the Americans, whose embassy in the eyes of ‘certain of our diplomatic colleagues’, as Wright knew, ‘did not count for much’.55
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