Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  Although Pankhurst was not allowed to meet the former Tsar and his wife Alexandra, now under house arrest at the Alexander Palace, she and Kenney did enjoy a private visit to Tsarskoe Selo, where Lenin’s erstwhile political colleague and a founder of the RSDLP, Georgiy Plekhanov, was now residing after thirty years in exile in Switzerland. Plekhanov seemed ‘pale and sickly’, but his manners were faultless when he entertained them to Russian high tea: a bubbling samovar and ‘delicious white bread, plenty of butter, and caviar and a few other dainties’ – all most welcome to Pankhurst, who was suffering agonies with her stomach. ‘What a joy to get some clean, nice, wholesome, digestible food,’ she remarked. Plekhanov was extremely courteous; ‘there was nothing of the demagogue about him,’ thought Kenney, ‘and although he had suffered far more greatly for his cause than Lenin, he had none of the latter’s hateful bitterness.’ He told Pankhurst of his admiration for Bochkareva; and of his concern that Russia be kept from falling into anarchy and remain true to the Allied cause. Kenney never forgot his sad, regretful parting words to them: ‘There are two things that people only appreciate when they have lost them,’ he told her, ‘and these are their health and their country.’51

  Health was certainly something that Emmeline Pankhurst, like the frail Plekhanov (who died of tuberculosis the following May), had now lost. She was unable to digest the coarse black bread on offer at the hotel, and her Russian admirers – mainly nurses and teachers – took it in turns to queue for precious white bread for her.52 With the Astoria, like all Petrograd hotels, prey to endless strikes by waiters, chambermaids and cooks (such as that on 30 June), these female volunteers also came and cleaned and serviced her rooms and provided tea and other food. Through all the vagaries of life in revolutionary Petrograd, Pankhurst retained her inimitable regal manner, looking, as Florence Harper noted, ‘every inch the dowager queen of the militants’ at a meeting she held at the Astoria on ‘how best to reach the Russian working women and teach them the meaning of politics’.

  Harper was no suffragist, although she could not help but admire Mrs Pankhurst’s indomitable resolve as well as her undoubtedly good intentions; but her mission, Harper felt sure, was doomed to failure. She had no understanding or experience of the lives and mentality of the Russian working classes, especially the women. ‘Here we have suffered for years things that Englishwomen have never even dreamed of,’ one of them told Harper. ‘What right has Mrs Pankhurst to think she can teach us? We accept and appreciate her sympathy, but that is all. Let her go home and go on with her war work.’53 Pankhurst’s remaining time in Petrograd was, inevitably, largely spent preaching to the converted few rather than rabble-rousing to the masses, as she had hoped.

  By the end of June, the summer heat had brought an overwhelming smell of uncleaned sewers to Petrograd, made worse by the malodorous stagnant waters of the canals. A plague of flies descended, bringing dysentery and cholera. Warnings were posted on all public buildings and at consulates and embassies advising people not to eat fresh fruit and vegetables unless thoroughly washed in sterilised water. It was more than Florence Harper could bear, to resist the lure of fresh strawberries; Emmeline Pankhurst and Jessie Kenney were horrified to see her eating them one day, but she stuck to her failsafe of copious doses of castor oil. ‘Everyone was suffering from stomach trouble of one kind or another,’ she recalled.54

  Continuing food shortages were making it harder to find anything safe to eat, so she stuck to ‘hardtack, caviar, and sardines’ – expensive but necessary extravagances if she was to stay well. There was still food to be had in the provinces, and she managed to obtain honey and precious cheese smuggled in by an English friend. But at the Astoria most mornings Harper’s requests for bread, milk and butter would all be met by a surly ‘Nyet’. Black coffee was usually the only thing on offer, drunk with a lump of sugar from her precious supply: ‘I guarded it jealously, and hid it away carefully, in fact it was the only thing in my room that was always locked up.’ A friend arrived one evening with flour, sugar – and bacon, the one thing all Americans craved. ‘If he had brought a million rubles, he could not have been more welcome. The excitement of seeing real American bacon,’ she recalled, ‘was so great that then and there we arranged a luncheon-party simply for the purpose of eating it.’55

  Dining out had also been greatly restricted by the food shortages; as what little food there was on offer in the restaurants got worse, so the prices rose. Even Donon’s – once the haunt of the old imperial elite, and of many in the expatriate community – could offer little more than cabbage soup these days, or ‘fish that was generally good, an infinitesimal piece of game or occasionally some meat, a salad of two leaves of lettuce (which no one ate because of fear of dysentery), and a water-ice’. Such a princely meal would set journalists like Harper back nine rubles – the equivalent of $27 at the current government rate. You could still order champagne there, but it would cost you 100 rubles ($300) a bottle.56

  Everyone to whom Harper spoke was obsessed with food. For the beleaguered foreign residents, missing their favourite delicacies the longer they were stuck in Petrograd, the gift of some culinary treat was a major event. The only real chance of getting something decent to eat came when one of the embassies held a reception or party. During the visit of the Root Mission, Harper noticed how the ‘men of the American colony . . . would fish shamelessly for invitations to lunch or to dine with friends belonging to the Mission’. ‘I do not see what you fellows are grumbling about,’ one of its delegates remarked, ‘I haven’t had such good meals in years.’ Florence Harper recalled that the only time she saw good food during her nine months in Russia was when she was invited to a reception at the US embassy on Furshtatskaya, ‘when I had real white bread and real ice-cream’ – both, no doubt, obtained thanks to the persistence and scheming of the wily Phil Jordan. David Francis certainly did his best to provide rare treats for US nationals, but even he was writing to a diplomatic colleague in July, ‘if at any time you can find a man who will bring me fifty pounds of breakfast bacon I would appreciate it’.57

  One or two small miracles did, however, persist amid all the longing for unobtainable foodstuffs. Each afternoon at the Astoria the pastry chef made French pastry – heaven knows where he got the flour from – and ‘each room was allowed two cakes at forty kopeks each’; if Harper bribed the waiter she could usually get more. It was also an open secret among the American colony that if you went to the Café Empire around four in the afternoon, you might be lucky enough to purchase freshly baked white rolls and coffee – with milk. It wasn’t a place where respectable women were seen, but Florence Harper went all the same, especially when, as often, she had had nothing to eat since the night before. On one occasion that summer she had gone for thirty hours without food.58

  Many of the male American expats weren’t just missing their favourite food; they also missed their home-grown sports, so much so that the young clerks at the National City Bank asked headquarters in New York to send them out a ‘box of baseball equipment’. They staged an impromptu game in the side street between their bank and the Marble Palace, former home of Grand Duke Konstantin. The police soon saw them off, so they set up a pitch at the Field of Mars nearby. ‘Our gyrations drew a large crowd of soldiers and civilians,’ recalled Leighton Rogers. They ‘pressed in so closely upon us that they were in danger of being hit, but they didn’t know it until one youngster caught a foul ball right between the eyes’. Rogers was surprised to hear an American-sounding voice call out from the crowd ‘Say, where youse guys from?’ – it turned out to belong to a Russian who had lived in Boston for five years, where he had become ‘an ardent rooter for the Red Sox’.59

  Officials at the US embassy, however, had little time for recreation. So busy were J. Butler Wright and Ambassador Francis that the only occasion they were able to discuss embassy matters was on the journey out to Murino and back to play the occasional game of golf.60 The embassy was overburdened with far more work than i
ts staff could handle, as Wright recorded:

  Commissioners, visitors, commerce publicity, railroads, extradition, land values, military preparation, naval statistics, finance, passports, prisoners’ relief, moving picture propaganda, capacity of printing presses, house furnishing and repairing, lost passports, censorship, mail inspection, wharf and port capacity and dues, relief ships, food supply, strikes, coal mining operations, couriers for mails, ocean cables, etc, etc, etc, make up the daily work of our embassy in these days.61

  This was not to mention hosting a succession of luncheons, teas and dinners for visiting US officials, who continued to pour into Petrograd after the Stevens Railroad Commission and the Root Mission had distracted them from the realities of a city once more on the edge of a resumption of violence. ‘Even the most fanatical optimist could not help acknowledging that the Provisional Government was tottering,’ wrote Florence Harper in June. The Bolsheviks, although still in the minority and outgunned by the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, had recently been flexing their muscles at the 1st All Russian Congress of Soviets. During the congress Lenin had launched into a tirade against the war as nothing but ‘a continuation of bourgeois politics’ with its roots in imperialism.62 But his attempt to stymie Kerensky’s appeal for a mandate to launch a new Russian offensive had failed. In a last-ditch attempt to rally patriotic nationalism, Kerensky had set off on a tour of the south-western front in May, during which he exploited his gift for stump-oratory in numerous hortatory appeals to the troops. On 16 June he ordered a massive Russian artillery barrage of enemy lines and, two days later, a major assault in Galicia. With the so-called ‘Kerensky Offensive’, the Provisional Government had shot its last bolt.

  Meanwhile in the capital there was a resurgence of massive street demonstrations against the war, fomented by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. At the end of June the members of the Root Mission were advised to relocate to Finland for their own safety. ‘The Allied colony of Petrograd was disappointed and disgusted,’ wrote Florence Harper. ‘They knew that if the Mission only waited a little while longer, they would see an exhibition of rioting that would convince its members how weak the Provisional Government actually was.’63

  11

  ‘What Would the Colony Say if We Ran Away?’

  DURING THE FEBRUARY Revolution, Kronstadt, a grim island fortress and naval base at the mouth of the River Neva nineteen miles from Petrograd, had been the scene of some of the most savage violence when 30,000 sailors had run riot; the admiral and sixty-eight officers – the cream of the Imperial Navy – had been massacred in a brutal orgy of killing, seen as retaliation for the harsh discipline the men had endured under the tsarist system. Since then the area had become a hotbed of revolutionary militancy, stockpiled with weapons seized during the revolution and ripe for Bolshevik exploitation. In defiance of the authority of the Provisional Government, revolutionaries at Kronstadt had seized the ships in dock and the arsenal, and had voted in their own autonomous Bolshevik-dominated Soviet, which had operated as a virtual fiefdom until it finally came under the Petrograd Soviet’s control at the end of May.1 Kronstadt remained a dangerous, volatile place from which the Bolsheviks were planning to draw key support in the coming days; it was also a place that Florence Harper and Donald Thompson wanted to investigate.

  At the end of June when they went out to this supposedly forbidding ‘fortress’, all they saw as they arrived ‘was an island of green and white’, with the beautiful dome of its cathedral rising above the other buildings. They had been warned that they wouldn’t be allowed to land, but ‘Thompson just grinned’ and marched onshore with his cameras. When stopped and asked why they had come, he explained that he wanted to ‘see the men who were making history in Kronstadt’.2 Together with Harper, he walked along the cobbled streets to the headquarters of the Soviet, where they met ‘Tovarishch Parchevsky’, the local Bolshevik police commissar. Flattered that Thompson wanted to ‘make cinema pictures’ of Kronstadt, he placed two cars at their disposal and took them, accompanied by several surly-looking Bolshevik minders, on a guided tour. ‘They all looked like cutthroats,’ thought Harper. ‘They were dirty, unshaven, and most of them were without collars.’ A collar, it appeared, was the mark of a bourgeois, ‘and in Kronstadt to be a bourgeois was to sign one’s death warrant’.3fn1

  During the day they spent there, Thompson and Harper’s revolutionary minders ensured that they positioned themselves front of camera at every photo-opportunity. ‘Each house was pointed out with pride as the scene of another murder,’ Harper recalled, as the men told her sickening stories about the ‘glorious fight for freedom of the Kronstadt people’.4 She felt extremely uncomfortable in the company of the tovarishchi: ‘It isn’t pleasant to be an imperialist in a hot-bed of socialism.’

  Thompson, however, remained undaunted by the experience, and a couple of days later went out to the Kschessinska Mansion to try and see Lenin. He waited for two hours and, when Lenin finally appeared, asked him to ‘pose for a picture’. When Boris the interpreter explained that Thompson was from America, Lenin told him ‘he would have nothing to do with me and that we had better leave Petrograd’.5 There was good reason to heed this warning; Boris had heard talk that the following day – 3 July – there was going to be ‘trouble with Lenine and his bunch of cut-throats’. Rumours of a second revolution or coup had been rife ever since the Bolshevik leader’s return from exile. ‘There is an undercurrent here, plainly evident, but not possible for a stranger to trace and impossible to describe, indicating that we may expect an upheaval before very long,’ wrote naval attaché’s wife Pauline Crosley. ‘I know of meetings, drilling, propaganda and accumulation of arms that can only mean one thing. When that thing will happen, no one not in the “meetings” can tell.’ But she expected that sooner or later Russians would start killing each other again.6

  Sure enough, a renewal of violence came in early July when Lenin decided the time was ripe to exploit fatal weaknesses in the Provisional Government. Taking advantage of the recent collapse of the Russian offensive in Galicia, closely followed by catastrophic losses at the front, Lenin and the Bolsheviks set about further undermining public support for the Russian war effort. The offensive was launched on 18 June, with a mass demonstration supposedly calling for public unity: although peaceful, it was deliberately orchestrated into an anti-government protest. With further Bolshevik connivance, other marches and demonstrations that followed rapidly escalated into violence, which the government seemed powerless to control. By the beginning of July its position had been further undermined by the sudden resignation of four Kadet (Constitutional Democrat) ministers on the night of 2/3 July, in protest at the government’s capitulation to demands from Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary ministers for autonomy in Ukraine. This was a concession that the patriotic Kadets would not brook, fearing that it would encourage the separatist instincts of other nationalities and lead to the dismembering of Russia.

  Bolsheviks and anarchists seized this undermining of the government’s authority by whipping up protests among their supporters in the Petrograd garrison, the navy at Kronstadt and militant workers in the factory districts. Word had also got out among the 10,000 men of the 1st Machine Gun Regiment based on the Vyborg Side that they were to be sent to the front, a move designed to rid the capital of the worst Bolshevik-led troublemakers in the garrison, upon whom Lenin was relying as the muscle of any future coup against the government. After two days of feverish meetings inflamed by speeches from Trotsky and others, the men voted to stage an armed demonstration on the streets of Petrograd, and were joined by others from the garrison, including the Pavlovsky Regiment.7 But the Bolshevik Central Committee underestimated how difficult it would be, once stirred, to bring this violent rabble under control. Like dry tinder, the protest quickly broke into crackling flame.

  On 2 July, Rheta Childe Dorr had returned to Petrograd after two weeks away at the Eastern Front, to be told that the ‘bolsheviki were making trouble ag
ain’. The following morning she went out to buy newspapers and was strolling down the Nevsky when she suddenly heard rifle fire and then a machine gun – followed soon afterwards by a cavalcade of motor trucks full of armed men hurtling down the street. Donald Thompson had been out near the junction of the Nevsky and the Fontanka River when he had been caught in crossfire and had thrown himself flat on the ground. He had lain there for some time, along with many other civilians, and had finally made a run for it, fast as ‘a Kansas jack-rabbit’.8 Intermittent firing and an increasing presence of armed men in motor lorries on the streets had followed throughout the day but it wasn’t till the evening of the 3rd that the real signs of trouble began.

  Meriel Buchanan had been dressing for dinner when she saw several motor lorries and cars full of armed soldiers waving red flags drive past the embassy. After dinner even more vehicles were thundering across the bridge into the city, followed by a huge crowd of Bolshevik-led demonstrators from the factory districts. Sir George and Lady Georgina had planned to take the evening air across the river in their open carriage, but hesitated: ‘Something is going to happen,’ Sir George warned.9 Nevertheless, true to their regular English habits, they left, only to be turned back by a jam of vehicles on the Troitsky Bridge. Back on the Embankment, they encountered dense crowds of workers on Suvorov Square opposite the embassy carrying a barrage of banners celebrating anarchy and condemning the war, the bourgeoisie and the upper classes, as more and more vehicles and people continued to cross from the Petrograd Side.

  By now the trams had stopped running and all over the city armed soldiers were forcing private motor cars to stop, upon which they ‘turned the occupants out and swarmed into their places like so many insects’, dragging machine guns inside with them.10 Diplomats and foreign residents were not immune: Belgian ambassador Conrad de Buisseret’s Rolls-Royce was stopped in the street and confiscated by the Bolsheviks, as too was Donald Thompson’s hired car (his chauffeur was later killed).11 Nellie Thornton, wife of one of the mill-owning Thornton brothers, had a far more terrifying experience. She had set off into Petrograd for a trip to the cinema with three little girls, when the Rolls-Royce they were being driven in was cornered by ‘six lorries armed with Maxim Guns’. Four men jumped into the car with them and forced their driver to take them to a secluded yard, where they were surrounded by armed men. Nellie thought they were going to be raped or shot; she begged the men not to take the car and make her and the terrified children walk the twelve miles home. Eventually the soldiers allowed them to leave. Why had they done this, Nellie asked them? ‘To show you we have the power,’ they told her.12