The day after the departure of Maurice Paléologue another crisis in the government had filled the whole of the diplomatic corps with renewed gloom. On 3 May, Milyukov, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Guchkov, Minister of War – their positions now untenable, as a result of the ‘April Days’ protests – had resigned. Their departure marked an end to any liberal influence in the Provisional Government. The Soviet, with its crucial control of the army, was too powerful to disregard; it was clear that this disjointed and ill-matched dual government of socialist Soviet and bourgeois Provisional Government was not working. The only solution was the formation of a new Coalition Provisional Government on 5 May, once again under the token premiership of Prince Lvov and this time with the inclusion of six socialists – three of whom, Irakli Tsereteli, Viktor Chernov and Matvey Skobelev, were members of the Petrograd Soviet.65 Alexander Kerensky – now firmly in the ascendant as Minister of War – was charged with the urgent task of galvanising the Russian offensive on the Eastern Front.
Violence and anarchy, meanwhile, were spreading across the city. ‘Anarchy raises her finger higher and higher,’ wrote Edward Heald, for it was ‘too attractive to the Russian character’.66 An eight-hour working day was proclaimed in early May but, despite this, production in the factories was in crisis, with dwindling supplies of coal and raw materials forcing many to close. The internal labour situation was made worse by continuing strikes, especially in Russia’s crucial coalfields. There was a growing air of public disenchantment as the initial revolutionary euphoria receded; everyone was tired of parades and demonstrations, of talk and endless queues; the streets were ‘full of beggars and newsboys and cheap prostitutes’.67 Pauline Crosley, newly arrived wife of a US naval attaché, was having to employ four maids because of the time they needed to spend standing in line daily ‘for bread, meat, fish, milk, butter, eggs, kerosene, candles’. Wood was very hard to get and there were interminable queues also for clothes and cigarettes. ‘‘I never imagined I would see so many idle men!’ she wrote home at the end of May. ‘Thousands of men in uniform doing nothing but sit on benches in the few parks and eat sunflower seeds!’ Everywhere she went she heard talk of how Russia could be ‘saved’. ‘Why don’t the Allies save Russia? Why doesn’t the United States do something to save Russia?’ – she was asked over and over again.68
By the end of May there had been many departures and several new arrivals in the expatriate community of Petrograd. James Stinton Jones had been sent back to London, where his account of the February Revolution had been splashed across the pages of the Daily Mail, ‘with the whole front page covered with my photographs and the reverse side full of the story as I had told it’. In July he published his experiences in book form, as Russia in Revolution, Being the Experiences of an Englishman in Petrograd during the Upheaval – one of the first eyewitness accounts by a non-Russian to reach the West.69 Isaac Marcosson had also left, sailing to Aberdeen and then travelling to London, where he installed himself in the Savoy Hotel to write his Rebirth of Russia, published in August. He had not been sorry to see the end of the perennial accommodation problems that he had endured: ‘Like most Petrograd hotels during that hectic period,’ he later recalled, it had been ‘a sort of madhouse sheltering a strange jumble of nationalities, who went elevatorless, sugarless, bathless and almost breadless. The only thing we had in abundance was odour, which is an essential part of Petrograd “atmosphere”.’ He was glad to enjoy the comforts once more of a real, functioning bathroom.70
Several foreign journalists had also left after the excitement of February 1917, because they now found things too quiet in reporting terms. ‘Many did not seek to hide their disappointment; they had hoped to find in the Revolution a unique opportunity for obtaining good copy, and instead they were asking themselves every evening how to put together a hundred lines to send to their paper,’ recalled one observer:
In short, the streets, apart from the red flags, the excessive dirt, and the trams laden with soldiers, had their usual aspect. Ministerial crises were neither more nor less frequent than in Paris. The very number of public meetings made them insipid in the end. On the surface Russian life seemed much the same as it had been before the Revolution: the staffs in the ministries were still at their posts, and in this country, free henceforward in a sense that no other country in the world has ever been, we were reminded by the doorkeepers when we visited the Hermitage Museum that we must remove our hats.71
By mid-May – and after almost four years away from home, reporting from Russia and the Eastern Front – Arthur Ransome was weary and desperate to leave. ‘There’s no getting away from politics and it’s my job to watch them as closely as I can and to guess what is happening and what is going to happen,’ he wrote to his mother, informing her of his hopes of returning home for a month, ‘but . . . you can’t imagine how sick I am of it all. At the same time things here keep happening so fast that I am equally pulled towards not risking being away . . . I daren’t leave Petrograd for more than twenty four hours because of the chance of some new political crisis or rather a new manifestation of the almost permanent crisis.’ The endless privations endured by many of the foreign correspondents over the last few months had worn them all down, he continued: ‘We aren’t human beings any more but bits in a machine, and we have to spin round exactly as we must and not occupy ourselves with the landscape for the sake of the rest of the machine.’ His colleague Harold Williams of the Daily Chronicle had had a nervous breakdown and had gone to the Caucasus for a rest. ‘I’d give my eyes . . . to get out of Petrograd,’ Ransome wrote. ‘Petrograd politics with good intervals of the front are all right. But Petrograd undiluted would turn the sanest man crazy.’72
On 24 May the intrepid Florence Harper had left her colleague Donald Thompson behind in Petrograd, to volunteer as a nurse with a US flying hospital on the Eastern Front at Dvinsk.fn5 As she left, another took her place as the sole American female reporter in Petrograd. New Yorker Rheta Childe Dorr was a seasoned left-wing journalist, a champion of women’s suffrage and labour reform, sent on behalf of New York’s Evening Mail. Before she left, her managing editor had called her into his office. ‘For heaven’s sake, Mrs Dorr,’ he admonished her, ‘don’t send us any essays on the Russian soul. Everybody else has done that. Go to Russia and do a job of reporting.’73 Dorr’s determination to do just that would be abundantly demonstrated in the following three months. She would also find herself crossing paths in Petrograd with an old suffragist friend, Emmeline Pankhurst – founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) – with whom she had spent time in Paris during the winter of 1912–13 when ghosting Pankhurst’s autobiography, My Own Story.
With Allied confidence in Russia’s war effort crumbling, the indomitable Pankhurst – no longer the bête noire of the British government, having put her suffrage campaign on hold for the duration of the war – had set out for Russia’s turbulent capital on her own one-woman mission to galvanise the Russian people. The channel for her pro-war propaganda drive was not, however, the army. It was those the army had left behind: the women of Petrograd.
PART 2
THE JULY DAYS
10
‘The Greatest Thing in History since Joan of Arc’
EMMELINE PANKHURST ARRIVED in Petrograd in early June 1917 ‘with a prayer from the English nation to the Russian nation, that you may continue the war on which depends the face of civilization and freedom’. She truly believed, she insisted, in an address published in Novoe vremya (New Times), ‘in the kindness of heart and the soul of Russia’.1 She had travelled with one of her most dedicated associates, Jessie Kenney, a former Lancashire cotton-mill worker who, with her sister Annie, was a staunch WSPU activist. Kenney had been the society’s youngest national organiser and, now aged thirty, had become essential support to the tired and frail Pankhurst. It was not a good time for a fifty-nine-year-old woman in Pankhurst’s state of health to be in Petrograd, but she was determined, at a critical time
in the war, ‘to do her darndest for Russia’.2
As a lifelong radical and political activist, Pankhurst had always been sympathetic to the revolutionary cause and in the 1890s had entertained prominent Russian political exiles to tea at her Russell Square home in London. On the outbreak of war in 1914 she had immediately abandoned her militant campaigning for votes for women, to support the national war effort, and had been touring Britain rallying women to the cause ever since. She had rejoiced at the overthrow of the old and oppressive tsarist order in February 1917, but by the early summer the Provisional Government in Russia seemed to its Western allies to be increasingly vulnerable. The possibility of Russia pulling out its troops greatly alarmed Pankhurst; it would ‘rob the Russian people of the freedom for which they have had their revolution, and would involve them in a far worse slavery than the old,’ she asserted. And so she volunteered to go to Russia along with Kenney as ‘patriotic British women, loyal to the national and Allied Cause’, in order to rally flagging public morale. It was a decision that had greatly dismayed her pacifist daughter Sylvia who, simultaneously, was privately campaigning to see both Britain and Russia out of the war.3
Pankhurst’s initiative was welcomed with open arms by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Although her self-created mission – largely funded by monies raised through the suffragette newspaper Britannia – was intended to appeal to all classes, her personal objective was ‘to help the women of Russia, to organize them, and to teach them how to use the vote’.4 She therefore went on the rather grand assumption that Russian working women had no comprehension of the meaning of the vote, or of the power it would invest in them, and she had come ‘to give them the benefit of her experience’.fn1 It was, however, Russian women’s support for the war that was her immediate concern. They had, after all, played a key role in the February Revolution, their protests about bread shortages triggering the riots; they knew what they wanted ‘even better than the men did’.5
Prior to their departure, Jessie Kenney had travelled to Paris to consult with Christabel Pankhurst, co-founder with her mother of the WSPU: ‘my wardrobe was getting low, and although there would be no time for shopping, it was imperative that I should get the necessary outfit’.6 She had no suitable clothes for either the hot summer in Russia or the freezing winter, should they stay that long, and so Christabel sorted out some clothes from her own wardrobe to lend Jessie. She also told her to be sure to purchase a ‘big solid diary’ and keep daily notes. The most important thing she wanted to know was Jessie’s opinion of Kerensky, as ‘his character might affect the destiny of Russia’. In parting, Christabel also gave Jessie a little bag containing five pounds to keep round her neck: ‘money talks, even in Revolutions,’ she told her, ‘and should anything happen to separate you from Mother, you will get some kind of help.’7
Departing by ship from Aberdeen, the two women sailed on the only passenger boat plying regularly between the UK and Norway in wartime – thanks to protection by an Allied convoy. It was crowded with exiles returning to Russia, many of them women and children. From Kristiania they travelled by train into Petrograd on the same train as Lady Muriel Paget and a group of doctors and nurses returning to the Anglo-Russian Hospital. They arrived at 2.30 in the morning to a city that ‘seemed wrapped in silence’, made magical by ‘that mysterious light of the white nights of Russia’.8 After a few days at the Hotel Angleterre they moved next door to the Astoria, the rooms arranged for them by Czech envoy Thomas Masaryk, who immediately gave them ‘two special warnings’: one, ‘never to go out if there were the slightest chance of getting caught between the opposing mobs’, as the women ‘had no idea of what the force and violence of a Russian mob could be like’; and the other, to be prepared to go hungry or take the risk of food poisoning – the food in hotels now being ‘seriously contaminated’.9
Emmeline Pankhurst’s host in Russia was a leading feminist and medical practitioner, Anna Shabanova, founder of the Russian Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society – a moderate middle-class organisation that, unlike the WSPU, pursued social reform by strictly legal means.10 Pankhurst was also assigned three interpreters who went through the Russian papers daily for her. One of them was Edith Kerby, who had been working at the British embassy compiling similar reports on the daily press for the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau,fn2 and who had asked Sir George Buchanan if she could be released for ten days to be their interpreter. Kerby found the legendary suffragette ‘old, quiet and very elegantly dressed, with lace and frills, hats and gloves and a fussy net over her crimped hair etc.’ – a whiff of old-style English gentility that seemed incongruous in revolutionary Petrograd.11
A few days before Pankhurst’s arrival a more prestigious American delegation – the nine-man Root Mission – had reached Petrograd from Vladivostok, on what had till recently been the imperial train, on a goodwill mission for President Wilson. To all intents and purposes, their task was to welcome Russia into the democratic community and gauge her continuing participation in the war, but the mission was conducted ‘amid a cloud of uncertainty and speculation’, according to Leighton Rogers, who met a few of the mission’s ‘supernumaries’ at the Hotel d’Europe. They didn’t have much idea of what they hoped to achieve, he concluded, but – unlike Pankhurst’s limited funding – they had ‘six hundred thousand dollars to spend and were going to carry out that assignment at least.’12 Not surprisingly, the leading delegates were accommodated in the luxurious Romanov suites at the Winter Palace and ‘fed better than any one in Russia’. They had white bread, and sugar and meat – and, more than that, ‘the entire wine cellar of the czar was placed at their disposal’. (Diplomat Norman Armour heard that, after rummaging around in the palace’s cellars, their Russian hosts found some rye whisky ‘that had been laid in for the visit of General Grant in 1878’).13fn3
Despite the lavish hospitality offered to them, by revolutionary Petrograd standards, the members of the Mission had no impact on the ordinary Russian, least of all the unknown Elihu Root, a Republican, corporate lawyer and former Secretary of State: ‘Who is Gospodin Root . . . was he one of your presidents?’ Russians asked Leighton Rogers. ‘As far as the Mission representing the real spirit of America goes, it might just as well have come from Abyssinia,’ Rogers thought. ‘There’s just one man in the United States who should have been leading this group, and that’s Teddy Roosevelt. He is known and admired over here.’14 The point of it all escaped Rogers, as it did the newly arrived Californian journalist Bessie Beatty, reporting for the San Francisco Bulletin. Root gave press conferences at which she noted the trotting out of ‘simple, pat, nut-shell comments’; he had made a couple of speeches in English, which few people had understood, and had shaken the hands of various Russian officials.15 But the tone of their exchanges had been one of ‘cordial reserve’, and the feeling remained that Root was a ‘capitalist’ and ‘a hide-bound reactionary’ and his mission an opportunistic attempt by a group of US businessmen ‘seeking information about Russia to aid in her exploitation’.16 Root had little grasp of Russia and admitted that it was all cosmetic, a ‘grand-stand play’. ‘We have here an infant class in the art of being free containing one hundred and seventy million people,’ he telegraphed President Wilson, ‘and they need to be supplied with kindergarten material.’ The Russians, he had concluded, were ‘sincere, kindly, good people but confused and dazed’.17
While the Root Mission progressed through a succession of hollow diplomatic formalities, it was Emmeline Pankhurst who took centre stage, holding court at the Astoria to a ‘representative gathering of the foreign colony of Petrograd as it existed at that time’. She and Kenney were utterly ‘tireless’ in taking on an exhausting round of receptions, committee meetings and interviews. ‘They seemed to me to work day and night,’ noted Florence Harper, now back in Petrograd from the flying hospital.18 Every day was filled with meeting various Russian women activists and reformers, members of the Provisional Government, officials from the R
ed Cross and YMCA. They also visited the Anglo-Russian Hospital, and Pankhurst gave numerous interviews to Russian and foreign journalists such as Robert Wilton of The Times, as well as catching up with her friend Rheta Childe Dorr, who was also staying at the Astoria. Acting as secretary and amanuensis, Jessie Kenney had a box of visitors’ cards that rapidly filled up with invitations to tea with the expatriate social set, so much so that Pankhurst could not cope with the numbers of people wanting to meet her. She and Kenney became increasingly exhausted, finding it difficult to sleep because of the white nights and ‘the singing and talking in the streets until the early hours’.19 They sensed an escalation of political unrest, too: ‘one hears rumours and news all through each day of revolutions, strikes and counter strikes taking place so quickly that we never know what will be happening from hour to hour,’ Jessie noted in her diary. They feared for the security of the Provisional Government, even though all the Russian women they had met had assured them of their support for it: ‘They do not want the Bolsheviks to win, nor anarchy, but want some kind of democratic government,’ she added.20
Emmeline Pankhurst had been keen to hold a whole series of mass outdoor meetings while in the city, but the Provisional Government was worried that she was too pro-war and that such meetings might be provocative to the Bolsheviks and their supporters. After decades of defying the British government she had no qualms about courting the risk of a hostile Russian reception to what she had to say, but the government flatly refused to grant her permission to address public meetings. This did not prevent her, however, speaking to small groups in private houses and at her hotel, and Kenney at least was allowed to speak to a large outdoor meeting of women factory workers, held ‘outside the Anarchist Headquarters under the black flag’ on a warm and sunny 18 June, with the assembled women and girls in ‘light cotton dresses, and, on their heads, little coloured kerchiefs’.21 Despite having to speak through an interpreter, Kenney felt she had their ‘complete attention’ and was ‘warmed by the many upturned, smiling faces’, as she spoke of the British campaign for female suffrage and her country’s support for the Russian government. ‘How I wished that Mrs Pankhurst and I could have seen more of the people of Russia,’ Kenney later wrote, ‘for we were getting to love them more and more.’22
Caught in the Revolution Page 21