Arno Dosch-Fleurot had seen the mob being incited to storm the US embassy by a political agitator down at the Kazan Cathedral: ‘Come with me and we’ll take the American Ambassador prisoner until they set Mooney free,’ he had shouted. Fleurot had hurried to the embassy, to be met by an excitable Phil Jordan: ‘Lord a-lucky,’ Phil told him:
ebery night the ambassador takes a walk with only me, I tol’ him he oughtn’t t’ do it. To-night we had some guests still here when de militia telephone. Jes’ think if we’d been a-walkin’ and dose fellers wid de black flag had a come along. Ambassador Francis only knows two words in Russian ‘Amerikanski Posol’ (American Ambassador). If dose fellers as’ed him anything he’d a said ‘Amerikanski posol’. Wouldn’t they ’a’ rubbed their han’s an’ said, Look wa’at de good Lord has gone an brought us.36
Inevitably, in both Francis’s subsequent memoirs and other retellings of the incident, Jordan’s vivid vernacular was sanitised.fn4 The protest itself turned into a damp squib. Blame for inciting it was soon laid at Lenin’s door, but privately it had unnerved Francis and worried embassy officials about the safety of their mission and US nationals in the city in this new escalating climate of anarchy.37
On 18 April (OS; 1 May NS) the Petrograd Soviet decided to observe European May Day according to the Western calendar, ‘so as to fall in time with the proletariats of all countries and illustrate the international solidarity of the working classes, in spite of the war and the illusions of the bourgeoisie’. If the Field of Mars burials had been the first public act of mourning of the revolution, the ‘colossal demonstration’ planned for May Day at the same location was to be its first public holiday.38 Guests at the city’s hotels were warned they would have to fend for themselves; staff were taking the day off, and no rooms would be serviced or meals served. All restaurants, businesses, offices and shops would be closed. Nor would there be any trams or izvozchiki. ‘No one did a thing all day,’ Leighton Rogers later recalled, ‘except parade and rant.’39
From 5.00 a.m. people began congregating in central Petrograd. Donald Thompson, making the best he could of the chaos still prevailing in the Astoria, jumped out of bed in his bullet-riddled room when he heard bands playing outside his window and saw thousands marching past the Astoria towards the Nevsky. All the bridges were thick with crowds thronging in from the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides carrying red banners. It was sunny, but there was a cold and biting wind and the thawing ice on the Neva had refrozen into great jagged floes. The huge and orderly march-past of celebrants lasted the whole day and was carried off to great theatrical effect – several foreign observers later recalled it as being, for them, the high point of the public celebration of the revolution. For visiting British Labour MP Morgan Philips Price, it seemed like the dawning of the Red Day of Socialism. ‘I do not think I ever saw a more impressive spectacle,’ he later wrote:
It was not merely a labour demonstration, although every socialist party and workmen’s union in Russia was represented there, from anarcho-syndicalists to the most moderate of the middle-class democrats. It was not merely an international demonstration, although every nationality of what had been the Russian Empire was represented there . . . [it was] really a great religious festival, in which the whole human race was invited to commemorate the brotherhood of man.40
This vast parade was, he asserted, revolutionary Russia’s ‘message to the world’, reflected in ‘a steady stream of oratory’ that ‘flowed from hundreds of speaker’s booths that covered every available free spot in the parks and squares of the city’.41 Edward Heald was there to see it; in the square in front of the Astoria they had erected so many platforms for speakers that he and his YMCA colleagues ‘could stand in one spot and hear six different orators going at once from as many platforms’. ‘Unhesitatingly, soulfully, forcefully, the stream of eloquence flowed hour after hour. As soon as one speaker would tire, after about half an hour, another speaker would be rushed to the platform, hoisted up, and carry on without a second’s interruption.’ It was the same at the square in front of a Winter Palace decorated with a very long banner proclaiming ‘Long Live the Internationale’, where a seemingly endless succession of speakers – both for and against the government – took it in turns, ‘all of them getting rousing cheers’.42
Claude Anet was at the Winter Palace as well, covering the story for Le Petit Parisien. ‘The huge square was like a human ocean in which the swaying of the crowd resembled the motion of waves,’ he recalled, with ‘thousands of red flags with gold-lettered inscriptions fluttering in the wind’. Everyone seemed tolerant and good-natured. ‘I took photographs; I was dressed as a bourgeois; obviously I was not one of the people’, but the crowd ‘stepped back so as not to inconvenience me, and watched me working with interest’. He noticed how carefully and respectfully people listened to the speakers, and how they had an ability to ‘endure without end interminable garrulity’.43 A huge cross-section of Russian workers was present: ‘post office and telegraph clerks, students, marines, soldiers, workmen and working women, with bright scarves round their heads . . . school-children, urchins of eight to ten years old, girls and boys holding each other by the hand, domestic servants, with a banner proclaiming the emancipation of the waiting-maid, the cook and the footman, waiters from restaurants’.44 There were dozens of military orchestras, too, playing the obligatory Marseillaise and popular tunes from Russian opera and dance; and banners everywhere calling for ‘land, liberty, peace, down with the war’.
Maurice Paléologue had gone to witness the ‘splendid spectacle’ at the Field of Mars on the eve of his departure from Russia. After three years as French ambassador, it was a time for painful reflection and a deep sense of loss: for him, May Day 1917 marked ‘the end of a social order and the collapse of a world’. His years in Russia had left him with little to be optimistic about: the Russian Revolution was ‘composed of elements too discordant, illogical, subconscious and ignorant for anyone to judge at the present time what its historical significance may be or its power of self-diffusion’.45
Having already had a difficult time of it in Petrograd for the last six months, Leighton Rogers was totally disenchanted. So hungry had he been that day, and so desperate to escape his cold, damp apartment, that he had spent his time wandering round the Hermitage Museum, contemplating Old Master still-lifes of food – ‘plucked geese, freshly caught fish, vegetables and fruit’ – in preference to admiring the museum’s exceptional collection of Rembrandts. Later he had gone in search of supper with a colleague, but everywhere was closed and after several hours they had capitulated and returned to their apartment, where they made do with tea and black bread – ‘all there was left in the larder’ – and got into bed to keep warm. Rogers had had enough of it: ‘Parades, parades, parades. When this is over I shall never want to see another. The streets are blocked with them every afternoon, work seems to have been abandoned and parading adopted as a business.’46
Two days after the great wave of optimism of the May Day celebrations the first serious rumblings of conflict in the government broke out, related to the details of Russia’s war aims, as laid out in 1914. America’s recent entry into the war had indirectly been the cause of what would be a major clash between Milyukov’s government and the Soviet. Eager to celebrate the announcement of US entry, Milyukov had given a press interview on the Provisional Government’s war aims, in which he had reiterated undertakings made by the tsarist government on the outbreak of war in 1914 to fight for a decisive victory and support post-war annexations by the Allies – notably that of Constantinople by Russia – and the imposition of punitive war reparations on Germany. Milyukov’s ‘Note’, as it became called, had immediately antagonised the pro-peace Petrograd Soviet, which was pushing for Russia’s unconditional withdrawal from the war, without strings.
Four days later the government was forced to issue a disclaimer, but it was too late to prevent a surge of violent protest from revolutionaries denouncing Milyukov, insi
sting that the objectives of the war must hold to democratic ideals, and demanding the abrogation of all treaties with the Allies.47 Lenin and his followers seized on this conflict of objectives as a trigger for a pitched battle with the Provisional Government, inciting workers and soldiers to protest, in order to compel the government to capitulate or resign. At the Mariinsky Palace on the afternoon of 20 April – where the Provisional Government was in urgent talks with the Executive Committee of the Soviet –25,000 to 30,000 soldiers of the Pavlovsky, 180th, Finnish and Moscow Regiments, as well as some sailors, gathered outside with fixed bayonets, but were eventually persuaded to disperse by General Lavr Kornilov, now commander-in-chief of the Petrograd garrison.48
Down on the Nevsky, Donald Thompson saw two mobs – one anarchist, the other pro-Provisional Government – come marching down from the Morskaya and the Sadovaya. ‘Someone let fly with a gun and for a few minutes it was simply hell on that corner, with everyone lying down flat on the pavement,’ he recalled. Fifteen minutes of pandemonium left six people dead and twelve to fifteen wounded. There was more shooting later, in front of the Kazan Cathedral and near the US consulate, at the Singer Building opposite it. ‘A constant uproar prevailed on the Nevsky, till around 10.30 that evening,’ Thompson told his wife. ‘Thousands were marching for and against the government until finally it reached the point where you didn’t know what was what. Boris and I decided to take off our hats and cheer every mob that passed.’ But after they got caught up in a group of menacing armed anarchists waving black flags, they ended once again face-down on the pavement, fearing for their lives as firing broke out.49
Thompson was anxious to be ‘on the ground early’ the following morning to catch events as they unfolded. He saw that there were notices up everywhere ‘asking the people not to meet on the street any more’.50 Meetings were now only allowed ‘in halls, theatres or public buildings’ – a futile attempt to prevent further incitement to trouble. Over the next couple of days random skirmishes and relentless speechifying dominated on the streets of Petrograd. Arno Dosch-Fleurot witnessed a positive ‘storm of oratory’, as ‘people gathered by the tens of thousands to applaud the demands for a peace – without contribution or annexation’. He noted with amusement that this latter phrase had spread like wildfire, with the Russian words kontributsiya and anneksiya being adopted from English for the purpose (there being no Russian equivalent to express the precise meaning). Unfortunately, some speakers ‘believed these words to be the names of towns and proceeded to exhort their listeners ‘not to permit Russia to take Constantinople, Annexia or Contributia’. Ella Woodhouse recalled her maid telling her all about it excitedly: ‘We want peace. We don’t need those two Rumanian towns, Annexiya and Contributsiya. We are sick of war!’51
As a result of these violent disturbances, the Provisional Government was compelled to revise its position in a new note to the Allies, opposing any war contributions or annexations as part of a future peace treaty with Germany. All but the Bolshevik members of the Executive Committee of the Soviet accepted this climbdown, and the protesting troops were ordered back to their barracks. The situation had, for now, been defused, but ‘the days of Miliukov, Gutchkov and Prince Lvov are numbered,’ noted Maurice Paléologue.52 Prince Lvov looked tired and wan; he was exhausted by overwork and had aged terribly since the revolution, thought diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart when he arrived from Moscow to visit the prince, noting regretfully that ‘he was not the stuff of which revolutionary Prime Ministers are made’. Lockhart sensed the ‘same helplessness, the same apprehensions’ in other members of the government. The revolution had destroyed all Lvov’s old Liberal friends. The only man with any power was Kerensky, because he alone had the support of the Soviets.53
‘Now you’re seeing what we saw in the Seven Days,’ one visitor was told by American residents, at the end of what had been ‘the most intense and exciting week in the capital since the revolution’.54 The black flags of the anarchists marching on the Nevsky during the three days of protests had sent chills down Edward Heald’s spine; they were out to ‘plunge everything into disorder’. Russia, he told J. Butler Wright, was ‘on the lid of a powder can’. Negley Farson noted the deep atmosphere of uncertainty. Everyone was absorbed in the problem of self-preservation, for life in Petrograd ‘had become a great gamble’.55 Out on the Nevsky with US consul North Winship, he had run into a huge parade of chanting people demanding ‘Land and Freedom’. But he sensed something new, and deeply sinister, this time:
A bevy of factory girls marching arm in arm; their shawl-enveloped heads tilted skywards; their placid Slav faces lighted with a look of perfect ecstasy, and they sang as if inspired the Hymn of the Revolution . . . And then I saw it . . . a huge black banner, with a white skull and crossbones, which seemed to be grinning over the words: ‘Welcome Anarchy!’ . . . There was something loathsome about it, as if it were a flaunting invitation to indulge in all sorts of beastliness.56
It was clear that, after the latest debacle, ‘Lenin was getting results,’ thought Arno Dosch-Fleurot. ‘He had hardly been back three weeks and the effect of his activities was to be seen on every side . . . he supplied a head and a directive to the more violent revolutionists who wanted to seize the power themselves.’ Lenin had brought with him the one thing that until now the revolution had lacked: he had ‘provided violence with a doctrine’.57
Shortly before leaving Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue confided that, in his view, Russia was ‘entering upon a very long period of disorder, misery and ruin’. As he set off for the railway station, he pondered the ‘final bankruptcy of Russian liberalism, and the approaching triumph of the Soviet. ‘Weep, my holy Russia, weep!’ he wrote, recalling the words of the village idiot in the opera Boris Godunov. ‘For thou art entering into darkness.’ ‘They are recalling Paléologue at the very moment when his “strong manner” could produce results,’ wrote his colleague de Robien with considerable regret.58 As the ambassador’s train steamed out of the Finland Station under a great plume of smoke, Charles de Chambrun pondered a great diplomatic era now, with Paléologue’s departure, gone for ever:
Farewell, all that panache, the glitter of gold decorations, the wiles of diplomacy, the lavish dishes, the tricolour livery, the powdered footmen and their white stockings! Farewell belles lettres, those ‘clever’ dispatches and pompous, melodious phrases! It’s back to simplicity for us! We’ll never again see the ambassador’s car pulling up outside the residence of the charming Princess Paley, as, in times gone by, people used to see M. de Chateaubriand’s coachman dozing on his seat outside Mme Récamier’s door. We would never ever forget that we were all there, eyewitnesses to the greatest upheaval in history!59
Even as Maurice Paléologue was recalled to Paris, Lloyd George’s government in London had been debating the future of his equally respected colleague, Sir George Buchanan, and whether he might ‘no longer [be] the ideal British representative in Petrograd’, despite his equally exemplary track record. For Buchanan, like his French colleague, was now deemed too closely associated with the old tsarist regime to command the respect of the new breed of socialists in government. It was privately agreed that a new envoy should be sent, one more likely to have influence over the ‘democratic elements which now predominated in Russia to pursue the war with energy’.60
Labour MP and minister Arthur Henderson – a man who shared the socialist sympathies of the Soviet, but who in every other respect had no qualifications whatsoever for the task – was chosen by the British War Cabinet to replace Sir George, who would ostensibly be invited to come home on leave. When officials at the Petrograd embassy’s Chancery Office got wind of this they were horrified, and some threatened to resign if it happened. Word reached General Knox, who promptly sent a confidential telegram to Britain warning of the damage Buchanan’s recall would cause: ‘No British Ambassador at Petrograd has ever to an equal degree enjoyed the confidence of the Russians,’ he asserted. Was Sir George to receive the sam
e treatment as the French ambassador – this a man who, like Paléologue, enjoyed the confidence of the moderates?61
A despondent Sir George discovered, on Arthur Henderson’s arrival on 20 May, that the newcomer had been given full powers to take over the running of the British embassy. Sir George entertained him to a strained dinner, at which Lady Buchanan could barely control her seething resentment. Buchanan himself did rather better at containing ‘a certain distaste and fastidious disapprobation’, heightened by the fact that Henderson had no French, or any other language in which to converse with the more distinguished polyglot diplomats and politicians seated around the table. Leaving Henderson to it and declining to offer him the comforts of the British embassy, a dignified Sir George went off for a rest in Finland.
Henderson soon discovered the full extent of his own inadequacies, encountering a decided hostility on the part of the embassy staff to his pompous, sententious manner.62 He was shocked by the anarchy he found in Petrograd and dismayed to find himself victim of the random room-sackings that went on in all Petrograd hotels; ‘his dinner jacket and evening trousers had mysteriously disappeared from his room’ and nobody had shown the least interest in helping him find them. Forced to admit that he was ill-equipped to deal with the wily Russians, let alone build a dialogue with them, he informed Lloyd George that ‘he had come to the conclusion that no good purpose would be served by the removal of a man who understood Russia’ as well as Sir George Buchanan.63 Henderson had shown little real interest, and even less perceptiveness, during his visit, and the Russian socialists who entertained him remained equally unimpressed: ‘Your Henderson is bourgeois to his finger-tips,’ one of them told an embassy official. ‘He is like all the rest of you. He will take his wife to church at eleven o’clock every Sunday morning.’64
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