Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  The crisis in the war had also escalated that month, with continuing Russian military disasters, including the surrender of two Army Corps and a major defeat at Tarnopol; extensive territories in Galicia and Bukovina had also been lost. By 22 July one million Russian troops were in retreat; many thousands had been captured and even more had deserted. There was now real fear of a German advance on the capital. Arthur Ransome was desperate to leave. He had had yet another bout of dysentery (his fourth that year) and was weak and hungry and longing for home. He could not expect his family – even living under wartime rationing in England – to have any comprehension of how difficult things currently were in Russia:

  You do not see the bones sticking through the skin of the horses in the street. You do not have your porter’s wife beg for a share in your bread allowance because she cannot get enough to feed her children. You do not go to a tearoom to have tea without cakes, without bread, without butter, without milk, without sugar, because there are none of these things. You do not pay seven shillings and ninepence a pound for very second-rate meat. You do not pay forty-eight shillings a pound for tobacco.fn9

  ‘If ever I do get home,’ he concluded, ‘my sole interest will be gluttony.’75

  Donald Thompson was equally despondent. He, too, had been losing a lot of weight. ‘My stomach has the right to have a personal grudge against me,’ he told his wife, ‘for it is so seldom that I give it even a taste of proper food.’ So hungry and exhausted was he that he now promised her this would be his last foreign assignment. ‘Today [8 July] I feel as you always want me to feel – sick and tired of being a war photographer.’76 On the 15th he started making plans to travel home; but he would not leave without first getting a permit, personally signed by Kerensky, to take his precious film footage and photographic images out of the country. On 1 August he finally caught the Trans-Siberian express to Vladivostok. From there he picked up a steamer to Japan and on across the Pacific to California.

  Thompson had no regrets to be leaving at last. Five months previously he had seen the people of Petrograd march with a clearness of intent – for the idealistic revolutionary concepts of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity; but now he could find no more words of hope. ‘I see Russia going to hell, as a country never went before.’77

  12

  ‘This Pest-Hole of a Capital’

  IN THE EARLY hours of Tuesday 1 August, Nicholas Alexandrovich – formerly Tsar of All the Russias, but now just plain Colonel Romanov – was sent away from Tsarskoe Selo with his family, by rail to Western Siberia. They would be left to languish at the Governor’s House in Tobolsk for the next nine months while the government debated what best to do with them.fn1 Their former home, the Alexander Palace, was left empty; and the Tsar’s private railway line that had linked Tsarskoe Selo to the capital was torn up, its rails and sleepers sent for reuse elsewhere. Few foreign observers in Petrograd had had much to say about the demise of the Romanov dynasty after more than three hundred years; the Tsar’s removal – the details of which were not revealed, or his destination, either – left most of them indifferent, as people in the capital continued to struggle with desperate food shortages, unstable government and civil unrest. Tsarist Russia already seemed a long way in the past.

  A few chosen members of the forty-strong US Red Cross Mission that had arrived in town on 25 July were, however, allowed sight of the interior of the deserted palace not long after the imperial family was taken away, prior to the palace’s opening to the curious as a museum. They noticed many touching reminders of the Tsar’s family: books open on tables, sheet music still propped up on the piano: ‘Evidently it had been left in a great hurry, things lying around, toys of the children on the floor, an unfinished letter on the Empress’s desk,’ commented George Chandler Whipple.1 ‘Here and there on a table or mantelpiece lay a number of Kodak snapshots taken evidently by the children,’ recalled his colleague, Orrin Sage Wightman. Perhaps most poignant of all was the sight of one of the Tsarevich Alexey’s abandoned French exercise books, in which he had written his name at the top of the page ‘and in his childish writing was inscribed in French, “The French lesson is very hard today.”’ This brief, private glimpse of a now-vanished era had been quite ‘overwhelming’, wrote Wightman. ‘To get into the life of a deposed Czar, not long after the nation had fixed it up as a museum, but when the marks of his living presence were still fresh, was indeed a privilege the memory of which will never leave me.’2

  The members of the Red Cross Mission had travelled to Petrograd from Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railway, in the imperial train in which Nicholas II had signed the abdication. Accommodated in its nine sumptuous carriages, they had enjoyed the comforts of ‘nickle-silver toilets, beautiful Russian leather seats, silk covered cushions’ and had slept in ‘beds of damask linen with pillow cases of silk and all marked with the double eagle and crest’.3 Bessie Beatty was at the Nicholas Station to witness their arrival, which was greeted by Ambassador Francis and his staff. While she admired the group’s demonstrable ‘wealth of human sympathy’, the expertise of its team of doctors and sanitary engineers, and the seventy tons of much-needed surgical supplies it had brought with it, she wondered ‘what sort of a dent’ it could possibly make in Russia at this late stage.4fn2

  No sooner had the mission emerged from the station than Orrin Sage Wightman noticed how ‘shot up’ Petrograd’s crowded, dusty streets looked. There was no sign of any police; no regulation of traffic, and you took your life in your hands trying to cross the street.5 All the buildings were ‘dingy and shabby and plastered over with bills and posters relating to the revolution’. They covered ‘the stores, the churches, the palaces, the bases of statues, the telegraph poles, the fences. Wherever a poster would stick, there it was pasted. This gave the city a very unkempt appearance.’ All sign of imperial splendour had been defaced or stripped away and there were red flags everywhere, including one ‘placed in the hands of the bronze statue of Catherine the Great in the park on the Nevsky’. The only respite came when for three days small gala booths decorated with flowers, branches of yew and evergreens and bunting sprung up across the city, selling bonds for the government’s recently launched Liberty Loan.6fn3

  Some of the members of the mission were accommodated at the Hotel de France on Morskaya. ‘A wretched place, but the best now available,’ recalled civil engineer and pioneer of public health reform, George Chandler Whipple. The rooms were ‘none too clean’; breakfast was chewy black bread and weak tea, reinforcing the realisation that ‘we were in a war held city’. Indeed, such were the drastic food shortages that the hotel manager had warned them ‘that sometimes he could give us a good meal and sometimes he could not’.7 Whipple and some of his colleagues soon transferred from the dirty and vile-smelling ‘Buggery’, as they had nicknamed the infested Hotel de France, to the distinctly cleaner and more cheerful Hotel d’Europe, where they were thrilled to get coffee with boiled milk at breakfast. It did not take many days of Petrograd rations for the group to fall upon the hospitality offered at a reception in their honour at the American embassy, during which J. Butler Wright noted how the Red Cross Mission ‘consumed tea, sugar, and white bread in an alarming manner’.8

  Over at the Astoria – or the ‘War Hotel’ as she called it, and appropriately so, as its exterior was still battle-scarred – Bessie Beatty was pleased to note a distinct improvement in conditions, thanks to recent repairs and renovations. ‘After living for a whole summer each unto himself alone, breakfasting, lunching, teaing, and dining in our own rooms, we suddenly came out of hiding and looked one another over’:

  The bloodstains of the Revolution had been scoured from the rose-colored carpet in the drawing-room. The boards had come down from the broken windows, and new glass and gorgeous crushed mulberry curtains had taken their place. The dining-room, a few weeks ago the repository of armless chairs and legless tables, dumb victims of the vengeance of an angry mob, now fronted the world arrayed in white napery.
9

  The casual observer might have imagined that residents at the Astoria were living in the lap of luxury, ‘but there was none’. The food was as dire as ever: at lunch the first course was ‘chopped meat and kasha stuffed into cabbage leaves, and the second the same chopped meat and kasha inadequately hidden by the half of a cucumber’.10

  Once the Red Cross Mission had unloaded and stored its precious medicines and food supplies under government protection, it had begun to evaluate their supply and distribution across Russia, and the setting up of mobile disinfection stations to counter the alarming spread of typhus. George Chandler Whipple had felt that it would have an uphill struggle: ‘there will be no use to talk cleanliness to people who are threatened with starvation,’ he noted in his diary.11 The bread queues were alarming and he was struck by how the crude methods used for cutting and weighing the bread rations slowed things down, making the wait even more interminable for those who had already been queuing for hours. It was clear to him that the food crisis had been ‘made doubly severe by the influx of soldiers, refugees and others’, for war had brought an increase of the city’s population from two to three million. ‘The authorities fully expect a famine in Petrograd this winter, with the starvation of several hundred thousand perhaps, unless some drastic steps are taken.’ Whipple noticed how huge stockpiles of wood were appearing everywhere, brought in to the quaysides by great flat-sided barges. Petrograd was a wood-burning city where little or no coal was available, and the price of wood was rocketing. There was nothing to buy in the shops and no shoes to be had anywhere – clothing, too, would become scarce in the coming winter, he noted. People might still be broiling in the heat of August, but come September when the rain set in, things would change dramatically.12

  Fellow Americans whom Whipple met, and who had been working on welfare projects in the city, seemed beaten down by the losing battle. Franklin Gaylord, who had lived in Petrograd for eighteen years and had devoted himself to working with the Mayak (Lighthouse) – the Russian affiliate of the YMCA – had come to the grim conclusion that Petrograd was ‘the worst, the rottenest, the stinkingest city in Europe, the streets are bad, labor is hopeless, there is no sanitation, we can’t drink the water, we can’t get food, the rooms are full of bedbugs, we don’t see the sun all winter, it is cold and gloomy and the air isn’t fit to breathe’.13 It was a discouraging start, but the Red Cross Mission duly went about its fact-finding duties, visiting food shops, the Red Cross and other welfare storehouses, travelling to hospitals and nursing communities in and around the city, inspecting waterworks and sewage plants. Typhus, TB and scurvy were the mission’s major medical concerns, and its members found working with the Russians a challenge. Dr Orrin Sage Wightman thought them ‘like a lot of children, who, after a long period of oppression have suddenly acquired a liberty which has been turned to license’. He was shocked by the ‘laziness and indifference’ he saw everywhere: the ‘supreme idea of the people’ of Petrograd appeared to be to do nothing. ‘The spirit of indolence, which they interpret as freedom, has so abased them that nothing short of intense suffering can bring them to their senses.’14

  ‘All here is chaos!’ wrote Raymond Robins, the most high-profile member of the mission and a distinguished economist and progressive politician back home.fn4 As an evangelical Christian, he had travelled to Petrograd with a crusading attitude to the challenges facing them. But he had to admit that life in the capital was ‘a day to day affair . . . Uncertainty is everywhere . . . the outlook is stormy in the extreme’.15 This sense of uncertainty was further underlined in his mind when he met Kerensky on 1 August and found him utterly worn out, ‘so busy with the mere task of keeping things together from day to day that we can see him for only formal moments. He seems so high strung and overworked as to make one wonder whether he can hold the line for the next six months’ – that is, until a government could be formed by an elected Constituent Assembly.

  Like his colleagues Robins saw the future of Russia hanging on the economic situation and the perilous food shortages. He was deeply concerned about the long lines for bread, meat, milk and sugar: ‘As go these lines, so goes the Provisional Government. If they shorten, the Government lives; if they lengthen, it will die.’16 But the Provisional Government seemed to him to be ‘men who are dreamers with responsibility and no capacity to bring their dream into being now that they have the power’. Far too much, in his opinion, depended on one man – Kerensky – ‘the only possibility of control this side of reaction or a military dictator’. But for now, at least, Robins was still clinging to a stubborn romantic idealism about Russia’s future; ‘the Russian will hold fast to a spiritual content and will bring back worship and reverence to the life of man,’ he wrote hopefully to his wife Margaret on 6 August. ‘He will found the great social democracy and give to the race the best chance for the equality of opportunity, freedom and brotherhood.’17

  On 21 August another blow to Russia’s war effort came with news that the strategically important Baltic port of Riga, 350 miles to the south-west, had fallen to the Germans – or, rather, its Russian defenders had simply abandoned it to them without a fight. Despite this, a state of denial about the Russian army’s disintegration persisted in the capital. Willem Oudendijk had gone to the opera that evening with his wife to hear Chaliapin sing in Rimsky Korsakov’s Rusalka: the audience had been wildly enthusiastic, rushing forward from their seats and ‘recalling Chaliapin before the footlights over and over again at the end of every Act. There seemed no thought of revolution, or the Germans, or war that evening. Petrograd was now in the war zone; but what did it matter? Here was Chaliapin singing! Cheer! And applaud! Bravo, Chaliapin!’18

  The fall of Riga had come soon after a last-ditch attempt had been made at a conference held in Moscow to bridge the gap between the warring bourgeois and socialist political groups and unite them behind Kerensky’s government. He himself had appeared there in military tunic, flanked by two adjutants and adopting his distinctive Napoleonic pose – which had now earned him the sobriquet ‘Napoleonchik’ – and had made one of his familiar emotional bids for support. But even Kerensky’s ‘brilliant but fiery improvisation’, as Louis de Robien observed, no longer sufficed. Russians might traditionally ‘get even more drunk than the French themselves on eloquence and empty phrases’, but mere words were no longer ‘enough to feed the people or put a stop to anarchy’.19 Onstage Kerensky had been challenged by the commander-in-chief he had appointed in July – General Lavr Kornilov – who had given an uncompromising speech in which he laid out the draconian measures he deemed necessary to bring Russia back from the brink of defeat by the Germans; it had brought the conference to its feet.20

  During her weeks in Petrograd, Bessie Beatty had observed how Kerensky had struggled to ‘follow a middle course’ that would satisfy both the reactionary right and the Bolshevik left, and how he had resisted calls to resort to force, as Kornilov would have wished. She felt that he had been right to do so and that ‘the masses would regard any attempt to install a dictator as an attack on their Revolution and would desert the man responsible for it’. Emmeline Pankhurst had laughed at her when she had ventured this opinion at dinner. Russia must have a strong hand, she asserted, and Kerensky was a weakling. The only man who could ‘save the situation’ was Kornilov, who would ‘rule with an iron hand’.21 The appointment of the right-wing Kornilov after the disruption of the July Days, despite opposition from Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries within the government, had been seen as a toughening up by Kerensky, an attempt to shore up the floundering fortunes of his government in the face of mounting Bolshevik opposition. Kornilov, from a humble Cossack background, was a self-taught career soldier, a patriot and, in the eyes of his men, ‘a natural chieftain’.22 But he was no conciliator; and no politician, either. He was, in the opinion of General Knox, who had observed him at close hand at the front, a ‘hard-headed soldier of strong will and great courage’ who had won respect by deeds and not wor
ds.23 Violently opposed to the Soviets and their soldiers’ committees, Kornilov was now demanding absolute control over the army, at the front and in the rear.

  Sir George Buchanan could see that Kerensky had lost ground since the July Days and that Kornilov, ‘were he to assert his influence over the army and were the latter to become a strong fighting force . . . would be master of the situation’. But for now the two men needed each other: ‘Kerensky cannot hope to retrieve the military situation without Korniloff, who is the only man capable of controlling the army; while Korniloff cannot dispense with Kerensky, who, in spite of his waning popularity, is the man best fitted to appeal to the masses and to secure their acceptance of the drastic measures which must be taken in the rear if the army is to face a fourth winter campaign.’24

  The Moscow conference, which had ended in stalemate, had shown that there was clearly an irreconcilable level of antagonism between the two men. Frustrated by Kerensky’s reluctance to accord him the dictatorial powers he needed to wrest back control over the army, Kornilov sent Kerensky an ultimatum on 27 August: that he should resign as Prime Minister and cede him full military control. To back up his claim, he began moving troops on Petrograd from the north-western front under General Alexander Krymov, intent on arresting anarchist and Bolshevik troublemakers, bringing the Petrograd garrison to heel and forestalling the Bolshevik coup against the Provisional Government that he knew would come sooner or later. ‘It is time to hang the Germans’ supporters and spies led by Lenin,’ Kornilov had said. ‘And we must destroy the Soviets so that they can never assemble again.’25 This was the only way the army could be saved from dissolution, and the country from chaos.