The square in front of the Winter Palace had now been turned into a military camp, with armoured cars, artillery and Red Cross ambulances drawn up in front of the War Department nearby; there were guards posted on every street corner, stopping cars and questioning their drivers. On Suvorov Square, Meriel Buchanan heard troops coming and going all day and machine guns being dragged into position. The Buchanans were still being prevailed upon to leave the capital for their own safety, ‘but naturally we could not and would not do so’, wrote Lady Georgina, as it would set a bad example; after all, ‘what would the colony say if we ran away?’47 But at 6.00 a.m. on the 6th they were woken and asked to move down to the coach house, just as they were, in their slippers and dressing gowns, and be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Government troops had been ordered to seize both the fortress and the Kschessinska Mansion directly across the river. The British embassy was in the direct line of fire and it was feared that the Bolsheviks would turn the big guns of the fortress straight at them. Sir George, however, was not to be hurried: ‘I wish,’ “the old Man” sighed wearily, ‘these people would put it off till a little latah’; and with that he ‘turned on to his other side and relapsed into sleep’.48
When Sir George did finally emerge from his bedroom, he refused to budge from the embassy: ‘Thanks very much, but my wife and daughter want to see it,’ he insisted. When an alarmed Bertie Stopford rushed to the embassy on hearing of the coming assault on the fortress, he found the ambassador ‘on the balcony surrounded by his secretaries – instead of sitting in the cellar, as they had been told to do – eagerly watching the troops advancing on their stomachs across the Troitzka Bridge’. Sir George later recorded that he had spent ‘an exciting morning’ watching, till around 1.00 p.m. From her vantage point in the corner drawing room, Lady Georgina had found it all rather thrilling: ‘One really almost felt one was in the front trenches.’49
Leighton Rogers had seen the first reinforcements arrive, ‘a regiment of soldiers on portable bicycles’ from the front at Dvinsk, who were to take part in the assault on the Peter and Paul. He noted this was a different breed from the ill-disciplined and slovenly troops in the city:
That they were seasoned fighters was obvious from their rugged bronzed faces, the worn look of their equipment, which was complete and ready down to camp-kitchens cooking mess and carts with hay for the horses pulling them. Slowly and keeping the front wheels of their cycles in perfect alignment they rolled along the Quay and turned onto the [Liteiny] bridge. And in a methodical, business-like manner they made ready for an assault. It was a strange scene: these men so calmly preparing for a killing, the brooding Fortress with its red rag of a flag barely stirring in the warm summer air, the ranks of guns pointed across the unruffled Neva.50
As things turned out, little was required beyond a show of government strength; by around 11.30 a.m. the Kschessinska Mansion had capitulated without a fight and about thirty of Lenin’s men were arrested (Lenin himself had been spirited away to a safe house); shortly after 1.00 p.m. the fortress, too, had surrendered. Donald Thompson was with the government forces when they entered the Kschessinska Mansion. They found it stashed with hardware: ‘seventy brand new machine-guns and a great quantity of provisions and arms, as well as numerous commandeered cars in the yard’. Later that day he was shown ‘a lot of what they said were important documents’, which ‘showed that Lenine was unquestionably connected with the Germans’.51 It was now that the Provisional Government pulled its only trump card. The documents found at Lenin’s headquarters showed that the Bolsheviks had been receiving funding from the German General Staff. Such evidence was political dynamite at a time of rampant public hatred of the German enemy. A statement was quickly published in the evening paper, Zhivoe slovo [The Living Word], and some of the details were also passed on to the mutinous regiments in the Petrograd garrison. This news turned the tide against the Bolsheviks and brought waverers over to the side of the government.
Throughout the ‘July Days’, as they became known, Donald Thompson had been out with his camera and tripod, sometimes on foot, but often racing up and down the streets in a hired car with the ‘camera sticking up in the tonneau’, looking ‘not unlike a new kind of gun’, as Florence Harper recalled. ‘In fact it looked so dangerous that it gave us a clear passage up the Nevsky.’ With reckless abandon, Thompson had set up his camera at every opportunity ‘and proceeded to crank’.fn6 But late that afternoon he had witnessed a final, sickening demonstration of mob savagery reminiscent of the February days, which he did not record on film. Out at the Tauride Palace he had seen three revolutionists dressed as sailors fire from a motor car on a group of officers on the steps of the building, after which they had driven away at speed, only to be stopped soon afterwards by a motor truck that blocked the road. The men had been dragged from the car and promptly lynched by the crowd that had gathered. It was a new kind of savagery that he hadn’t seen before: ‘they stretched them up to the cross arm of a telegraph pole, and didn’t tie their hands. Then they drew them off the ground about three feet. All three of them as they were hanging tried to hold on to each other, but the mob knocked their hands away and they slowly strangled to death.’ Hardly the most comforting story with which to conclude a letter to his wife Dot, back home in Kansas.52
With the disturbances now subsiding, Arthur Ransome, in a telegraph to his newspaper that night, summarised the chaos and futility of recent events in curt and dramatic form:
Nothing could be sadder than events of these last few days stop soldiers brought out into streets by agitators on all kinds pretexts march along without slightest understanding what all trouble about stop . . . whole town including soldiers in state of excited nerves stop single shot anywhere starts fusillade in which suffer innocent persons who fall victims to panic of others stop . . . No visible object sought by demonstrators and none attained stop for twenty four hours town practically at their mercy and absolutely nothing done . . . big number people killed wounded and all for no purpose stop this becoming obvious to many demonstrators stop . . . none of enthusiasm of revolution stop instead puzzled simple folk moving this way and that stirred up by contradictory agitation.53
‘Petrograd is quiet now,’ wrote Harold Williams in his own despatch to the New York Times, ‘but there is a heavy and bitter feeling of humiliation and degradation in the air over this insane and preposterous adventure. Why was it allowed? Why was it not checked at the very outset?’ He was appalled at the unscrupulous and cowardly behaviour of ‘the Leninite plague’ that had stirred up violence in ‘these ignorant masses’ with their ‘criminal propaganda’.54
Kerensky was furious that the government had not been able to take control of the situation during his absence at the front. He was determined that its replacement, formed on 7 July, under his premiership and supplanting a demoralised Prince Lvov, would be allowed ‘dictatorial powers in order to bring the army back to discipline’, and he demanded new controls that did not kowtow to ‘any interference on the part of soldiers’ committees’.55 Retaining his role as Minister of War, Kerensky appointed as commander-in-chief of the army General Kornilov, whose immediate response was to call for the restoration of courts martial and capital punishment for desertion at the front. The mutinous troops of the Petrograd garrison were to be disbanded and punished by being sent to the front; the Kronstadt sailors were disarmed and sent back to their base, although the government sadly lacked the will or the muscle to punish them.
Petrograders awoke on the 7th to discover that ‘for a time, at least, the power of the Bolsheviki had been broken’.56 A warrant had now been issued for the arrest of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik ringleaders. Trotsky was quickly held, but Lenin eluded the round-up. After spending a few days hidden away in a safe house in Petrograd, he travelled north to Razliv, where he hid out in a hay barn before shaving off his beard and donning a wig and workmen’s clothes and escaping to the safety of Helsinki. ‘This Lenine, who escaped . . . and his
confederate, Trotzky, who was a hash slingerfn7 in New York a few months ago, have done more to ruin Russia than any two men I know of in history,’ Donald Thompson told his wife. ‘I think that Kerensky’s only solution is to catch these two and give them the limit. I know that if I had the chance I would take a good deal of pride in shooting both of them.’ Ambassador Francis, rarely so emphatically critical, had no doubts either about the government’s failure to seize the upper hand and arrest Lenin and Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders, try them for treason and execute them. Had they done so in July, he later wrote, ‘Russia probably would not have been compelled to go through another revolution.’57
Ten days after the fighting, a day of mourning was set aside for the lavish funeral rites of seven of the twenty Cossacks killed in the street fighting.58 In stark contrast to the secular funeral for the victims of the February Revolution, the ceremonial on 15 July was an intensely Orthodox one – designed, so one British observer was told, as a ‘rebuke’ to the socialist groups that had organised the Field of Mars burials without any religious ceremony. Apparently some of the relatives of victims buried there had subsequently paid for private services to be conducted over the graves. Kerensky, ever one for high drama and the exploitation of public sentiment, had wished to turn these obsequies into a moment of communal theatrics, thought Ernest Poole, proclaiming that the Cossack heroes should be ‘buried in the graveyard where the Russian grand dukes lay’.59
At five on the afternoon of the 14th, the dead were brought in coffins covered with silver cloth surrounded by a Cossack guard of honour carrying black pennants on their lances, to lie in state in St Isaac’s Cathedral. Heaped with flowers and surrounded by flaming candles, the coffins lay there overnight on catafalques raised high in a position of great honour before the ‘holy gate’ of the iconostasis and surrounded by the cathedral’s ‘towering columns of lapis lazuli and malachite’. An endless stream of mourners poured into the cathedral all night: ‘Cossacks, soldiers, sailors, Red Cross nurses, priests and Tartars, Georgians and Circassians, in costumes and uniforms of a hundred kinds and hues.’60 The cathedral was so dark inside ‘you could see only human shadows pressing close around you,’ recalled Ernest Poole, ‘but on the stone-paved floor you heard the slow shuffle of thousands of feet.’
The following day, after a long and elaborate funeral service featuring the full Russian Orthodox panoply of gleaming icons and crosses, incense and two hundred choirboys – a ‘triumphant symphony of grief’, as Rheta Childe Dorr remembered it – the funeral procession left the cathedral.61 Outside, the vast crowd that had gathered in the square and the surrounding streets awaited it, many weeping and carrying black mourning flags. For once there were no red revolutionary flags in sight. Great waves of music surged back and forth across the streets from numerous bands, as the coffins, ‘borne on ornate canopied hearses drawn by black horses’, passed rows of Cossacks, the horses ‘standing at perfect attention’, and were taken for burial at the Alexander Nevsky monastery at the far end of the Nevsky Prospekt.62
‘Well, at least these were not buried like dogs, as ours were,’ remarked a woman in the crowd, reflecting bitterly on the lack of religious ceremony for the victims of the February Revolution.63 Louis de Robien was moved to see the parents of some of the dead Cossacks – simple peasants from as far away as the Urals or the Caucasus – who had come all this way to follow their sons’ coffins. In Cossack tradition, the dead men’s riderless horses followed the cortège, with stirrups crossed over the empty saddles. One of the horses had been seriously injured, noted De Robien, ‘and was limping pitifully behind its master’s coffin’. On another horse ‘the dead man’s son, a little Cossack of about ten years old, had been put up into the saddle’.64
Never one to miss such a spectacle, Phil Jordan was as always close by, awestruck by the immensity of the occasion: ‘the press Said Over one million people . . . think of such a large crowd and all frightened half to death. every time the man would strike his base drum the crowd would Shiver,’ he told Jane Francis.65 Rheta Childe Dorr saw the occasion as ‘an hour of hope’ – a demonstration by Kerensky’s government designed to chasten the Soviet and serve as a warning to the extremists. ‘The casual observer in Petrograd would have said that revolutionary disturbances were a thing of the past,’ wrote Bessie Beatty after the Cossack funeral, ‘that order had come to stay. But the casual observer would have failed to understand the breadth and depth of the movements stirring beneath the surface.’ For thirty-year-old Beatty – a convinced socialist, who had covered miners’ strikes in Nevada – the July Days had been ‘only the beginning of the class struggle in Revolution’.66
The day of the Cossack funeral, in his first public appearance as Prime Minister, Alexander Kerensky, dressed in a plain khaki uniform and puttees, had swept up in a limousine as the last coffin was carried out of St Isaac’s, to be greeted by ‘a mighty cheer’ as people rushed forward shouting his name. He had made a short speech on the steps of the cathedral and then ‘waved the crowd to silence and bade them stand quietly back’, before walking on hatless and with bowed head behind the procession. ‘He would not have been human if he had not felt a thrill of triumph at this reception,’ remarked Rheta Childe Dorr. Ernest Poole noted Kerensky’s charismatic power: ‘On that day the government seemed embodied in this one man’, and in the first weeks after the July Days every foreign visitor to Petrograd had wanted to meet the new Prime Minister.67
But he was a difficult man to see, ‘as he allow[ed] himself to be got at by everybody’, noted Jessie Kenney, having been told that Kerensky’s ministers were trying to ‘guard him against dissipation of his energies’. On 21 July she and Emmeline Pankhurst were finally invited to the Winter Palace to meet him. ‘People say that he wants to be another Napoleon,’ Kenney had noted in her diary a few days before, and when they arrived that morning Kerensky seemed to be living up to the role, adopting the appropriate pose on cue and seated at a table formerly used by the Tsar, ‘with the thumb of one hand in his coat’. ‘I wondered at the time if this were the Napoleonic gesture.’68 He then ushered Pankhurst to a seat by the fireplace where they chatted in French, with an interpreter occasionally adding things in Russian at Kerensky’s behest. Kenney noted the animation with which he spoke, but:
I did not have the impression of a man dedicated to one end, in the way that Lenin was . . . or Plekhanov, or Mrs Pankhurst. He had been a fine lawyer, was an enthusiast, an orator of eloquence, but did not have the restraint over himself that the others possessed. There was vacillation here, a man open to his passion and his moods . . . Quite obviously he was no match for Lenin, who, relentless and dominating, would ride mercilessly over everything and everyone in his path.
All in all, Kenney found Kerensky rather overbearing and noted an antipathy towards Pankhurst; perhaps, she wondered, he was jealous that so many people had asked to meet her. Before they left he made a point of indicating the ornate silver inkstand and quill pen placed on his desk: ‘The Czar used to sign his documents with this pen,’ he told them portentously.69
Kenney concluded that here was a man trapped between too many conflicting forces and the task was simply too much for him. He certainly did not lack the magnetism required for the role of Prime Minister, thought Rheta Childe Dorr, but even Kerensky could not ‘take that huge, disorganized, uneducated, restless, yearning Russian mob by the scruff of the neck and compel it to listen to reason’.70 Dorr’s compatriot, Princess Cantacuzène-Speransky, had a similar view. Kerensky ‘seemed to lose his grip on things’ after the July Days – whether from ill health or the strain of his overwhelming responsibilities. She noticed that the ‘man of the people’ image of the early days of the revolution – a man whom people trusted for his honesty and patriotism – had receded; and now that he was living at the Winter Palace in rooms formerly occupied by Alexander III, ‘sleeping in the emperor’s bed, using his desk and his motors, giving audiences with much form and ceremony’, he seemed t
o have lost that common touch and become ever more grandiloquent. Like Kenney, she saw a ‘man struggling to maintain his personal popularity by being forced into uneasy compromises’.71
Kerensky ‘dashes busily around, from rear to front and from one front to another, making impassioned speeches, but disintegration goes on’, wrote Pauline Crosley on 13 July. She too remained unconvinced of his ability to pull things together: ‘My Russian friends assure me matters will become “normal” (normally unsettled) for a time – that the anarchists will not make another serious attempt until they have completed their organization, that they now know how easy it is to take the city and the next time they capture it they will keep it.’72
In this continuing state of unease, Petrograd at the end of July 1917 remained a city in flux resembling an armed camp. It was also a city (half the size of New York) which the collapse of the old regime in February had left without any effective, organised police protection, bar a hastily created Militia.73fn8 Although the unrest had been quelled for now, it did not feel any more secure than previously, and the rumours of further trouble continued to be ‘large and varied’. ‘A curious state of mind came over the Russian public,’ recalled Willem Oudendijk of that late summer. ‘Nothing good was expected any more, no hope filled anybody’s heart, a dull sense of acquiescence in whatever further misfortune the day might bring pervaded everywhere.’ Government, such as it was, wrote Rheta Childe Dorr, continued to exist ‘only at the will of the mob’.74
But the Bolshevik leadership, too, was in disarray, having proved unable to respond to the fast-moving demonstrations in July. Lenin had prevaricated on whether or not to steer the unrest towards a second revolution and in the end had opted for ‘wait and see’ tactics, as too had the Central Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. The truth was that the revolutionary vanguard in Petrograd had been as uncertain of the direction the demonstrations would take – proletarian revolution or coup d’état? – as anyone else. And with the Bolsheviks suffering the body blow of the damaging revelations about their links to German money, they had been forced into retreat. But for how long?
Caught in the Revolution Page 25