Kornilov’s challenge had ‘thrown Petrograd into an uproar’. Everyone dreaded the city once more becoming a battleground.26 The loss of Riga had already created panic, with people besieging the railway stations for any train out to the safety of the countryside. ‘In the War Hotel, storm center of the storm center,’ wrote Bessie Beatty, ‘we sat and awaited the inevitable.’ Arno Dosch-Fleurot advised her to get out before the trouble started: ‘The hotel may still be here in the morning, but it may not, and there is no use in taking chances,’ he told her. Military men to whom Beatty talked at the Astoria agreed that both Kornilov and Kerensky were determined characters, ‘so it will be a fight to the finish’. Most of them were eagerly awaiting the arrival of Kornilov: ‘For them it was all settled. Kerensky would be overthrown – Korniloff would capture the city. The death-penalty would be restored; the leaders of the Soviet would be hanged. Russia’s troubles would be over.’27
Sunday 27 August dawned warm, cloudless and sunny; the Nevsky ‘was crowded with the usual shifting masses of pedestrians, peopled impelled this way, drawn that, hurrying, loafing, hating, loving, living in spite of war and revolution,’ recalled Leighton Rogers.28 Sir George Buchanan had headed out to the golf course at Murino and it wasn’t until his return in the evening that he was informed, when summoned to the Russian Foreign Office with the new French ambassador Joseph Noulens, that Kornilov was marching on Petrograd and Kerensky had declared him a traitor. Frantic preparations were now being made across the city to resist this advance. But to achieve this, Kerensky had been forced into the necessary compromise of appealing to the Bolsheviks of the Petrograd Soviet for support. Lenin was in hiding in Finland; from jail Trotsky advocated supporting Kerensky for now, in order to defuse the Kornilov threat. At their stronghold at the Smolny Institute, where they had been transferred from the Tauride Palace in July, the Petrograd Soviet marshalled the leaders of the garrison and the new workers’ voluntary militia – the Red Guards, formed after the February Revolution – to organise workers, sailors from Kronstadt and ordinary civilians in the defence of the city.
Thousands of workers were given back weapons that had been confiscated from them after the July Days and, in what seemed an act of madness, supplied with additional guns and ammunition. All over the streets of Petrograd groups of militia began drilling. Bessie Beatty witnessed workers from the munitions factories, assisted by engineers and sappers, digging trenches and building barricades, in a dash to ‘throw a trench around the city’. Phil Jordan described seeing ‘thousands and thousands of Soldiers’ at the Nicholas Station just arrived from the front, who were marched straight to the Nevsky to dig trenches. ‘Just think of diging trenches in the heart of the city,’ he crowed, as he anticipated yet more violence on the streets.29
The following day, word was out that General Krymov’s ‘Savage Division’ was only two days away. Meriel Buchanan recalled people being as fearful of this – Kornilov’s advance guard of four thousand largely Muslim Caucasian cavalry, legendary for its ferocity – as they were of the Kronstadt sailors.30 Members of the diplomatic corps were advised to leave for Moscow or Finland, but once again Sir George Buchanan refused to leave the British colony without diplomatic protection, and his wife and daughter would not countenance evacuation, either. Instead, Lady Georgina’s British Colony Hospital, which had recently closed down, was made ready to offer refuge to women and children from the community, should the need arise. Although US ambassador David Francis felt in no way threatened or worried about his personal safety, he acknowledged that many of his fellow nationals were, and in response he instructed J. Butler Wright to charter a small steamboat, ‘upon which Americans who so desire can take refuge in the event disturbances should occur’. Meanwhile, as Wright noted in his diary, the diplomatic corps had found itself ‘in the unacceptable situation of having to go through the motions of agreeing with and supporting the government while it secretly wish[ed] fervently that Kornilov might win’.31
Petrograd was now under martial law: ‘The air is full of rumours,’ wrote Raymond Robins, ‘it is a wild time.’32 At around five that morning Florence Harper had been woken by the sound of firing in the square outside the Astoria and heard a surge of people coming into the lobby below. Peeping out of her room, she saw sailors banging on the doors of several rooms and marching Russian officers away under guard. Bessie Beatty was disturbed by the noise, too, and when she ventured out of her room found a ‘sea of cutlasses’ in the hall outside. It was ‘filled with Russian sailors, perhaps a couple hundred of them, husky chaps with rifles in their hands, and every rifle topped with the most bloodthirsty-looking blade I had ever seen’. ‘Life holds no further terrors for the man or woman who has faced two hundred such weapons all gathered in one spot,’ she observed. In comparison, ‘an Atlantic Ocean submarine would seem like a friendly neighbor come to call’.33
At first she thought the men were Kronstadters; they had taken possession of the hotel and were now examining passports and searching rooms. It turned out they were from the Soviet and ‘had decided to take things into their own hands and arrest all officers whom they suspected of counter-revolutionary tendencies’ and who might side with Kornilov. In the process they had terrorised the female residents of the hotel, who were huddled in groups on the landings. Some of the men forced their way into Harper’s room, searched it and walked away with her camera. At lunch she found everyone buzzing with a mix of excitement and fear. Forty Russian officers had been arrested and taken away from the hotel; seven more were arrested later. All were hauled off to the Peter and Paul Fortress on a charge of ‘plotting against the revolution’.34
And then, as suddenly as the Kornilov threat had manifested itself, it evaporated. On Wednesday the 30th the papers published a note from Kerensky’s government saying that the ‘revolt’ – if that indeed had been what it was – had failed. Kornilov’s march on Petrograd was beaten before it even got started; beaten not by any military action to repel it, but by the pro-Bolshevik railway workers, who had refused to move his troop trains and had also sabotaged the rail network needed to get the trains to Petrograd, by jamming signal points, damaging bridges and tearing up or blocking the lines.fn5 Troop trains full of Krymov’s men had been left at a standstill. And when his advance guard did encounter opposition troops, they had refused to act against Kerensky and the Petrograd Soviet; indeed, they had openly fraternised with these troops and were persuaded by them to stand down.35
Kerensky now put out an order for Kornilov’s arrest. His position throughout this debacle had been highly ambivalent. British embassy counsellor Francis Lindley felt that Kerensky – ‘torn between his fear of aiding a counter-revolutionary movement and his honest desire to assert the authority of the Government’ – had made the wrong decision. ‘Like all socialists in a similar position he preferred his party loyalty to the good of his country. It was the end of him.’36 Whether or not Kerensky had genuinely believed that Kornilov was intending a coup against him, rather than the suppression of the Bolshevik-led Soviet, remains unclear. Willem Oudendijk certainly felt that Kerensky’s ‘nervous fear of being replaced by Kornilov made him act with reckless and fateful impulsiveness’.37
US resident Pauline Crosley reported widespread rumours in diplomatic circles that it had been ‘fully understood’ that Kornilov had intended to establish a Military Government – ‘with Kerensky’s knowledge and approval’ – to protect Russia from a Bolshevik coup; that a dramatic and triumphant entry into Petrograd had been planned for Kornilov’s troops, but that ‘during the night . . . some one or some thought suggested to Kerensky that he would lose power and prestige as Korniloff’s increased’. Her conclusion was that Kerensky’s ambition ‘could not stand that pressure’ and that he had ‘foiled an honest attempt to save Russia’, as a result of which Russia was ‘worse off than ever before’.38
Either way, the Kornilov affair prompted an inevitable upsurge in support for the Bolsheviks, who quickly recovered the ground
they had lost after the debacle of the July Days. On 1 September Kornilov was arrested and taken to jail. On 4 September, Trotsky and many of the Bolshevik leaders were released from prison on Kerensky’s orders. Kerensky had now proclaimed Russia a republic, but nobody in the Soviet or the former government wanted to work with him in yet another doomed coalition. As a last desperate measure, and one guaranteed to further alienate public opinion, Kerensky assumed command of the army and imposed his own temporary French revolutionary-style Directorate of five, with himself as virtual dictator.
Florence Harper bumped into Arno Dosch-Fleurot in the lobby of the Astoria after news came of Kornilov’s arrest. ‘We both used language not exactly polite,’ she recalled. ‘I was filled with blind rage. We all knew it was the last chance. The Bolsheviki were armed; the Red Guard was formed. The split was definite; Kerensky was doomed.’39 Everyone in diplomatic circles agreed that his government had been fatally weakened. David Francis’s sympathies were with Kornilov, although he was obliged to preserve an impartial stance in public. Kornilov was ‘a brave soldier and patriot whose mistake was making demands before public sentiment was sufficiently strong in their favor to force their acceptance.’40 He felt that the Provisional Government could only save the situation if it took ‘prompt and decisive steps to restore the discipline of the army and navy’. But within the US embassy he was the only person with any remaining hope that this might happen. ‘Everyone, with only the exception of D.R.F., believes that a clash – and a serious one – is bound to occur soon,’ wrote J. Butler Wright. He and his colleagues were deeply despondent, having seen Kornilov as Russia’s last hope. And they were beginning to doubt the sixty-seven-year-old ambassador’s grip on the situation; he seemed tired, old and out of touch.41
The failure of the Kornilov march on Petrograd at the end of August did much to accelerate the departure, which had already begun after the July Days, of foreign nationals from Petrograd. All remaining embassies in the city now began making contingency plans for the evacuation of their staff and their colonies of expatriates. ‘All those whose duties permit them to go are being sent away,’ Pauline Crosley told her family. ‘All Embassies are planning for the escape of those who must remain. There is no fear of the Germans coming soon, but a serious Bolshevik uprising is anticipated, and its success means Anarchy.’42 At the end of August, J. Butler Wright was sent by David Francis to ‘spy out a possible exit from this pest-hole of a capital in case the government blows up or we are forced to evacuate suddenly’.43 Deciding he would take no chances, on 9 September Wright put his wife and son on a train to Moscow, further away from the German front, and where the internal situation was less fraught.
Naval attaché Walter Crosley, on Francis’s instructions, had meanwhile chartered ‘a steamer large enough to accommodate the entire American Colony’, which had been anchored on the Neva. Plans were in place by 3 September for the evacuation of 266 people: the entire US colony, embassy and consulate staff and members of the Red Cross Mission; but this was a last resort, if their safe and orderly evacuation to Moscow by rail should prove impossible. The US consulate had also already evacuated a large amount of its archives to its counterpart in Moscow by special courier, and other important documents were sent out from the embassy with the Red Cross Mission when it left for there.44
The British had been making similar contingency plans, even discussing the possibility of mooring ‘two of our submarines’ in the Neva opposite the embassy for an emergency evacuation. British consul Arthur Woodhouse observed in a letter that ‘you can size up the situation by the number of Britishers leaving the country. In a word, it is not a fit place for English ladies and children.’ But his duty ‘plainly requires my presence here,’ he told his wife in response to her pleas that he should leave. ‘I must stay on to the end . . . The office is practically a tourist bureau now-a-days. Ordinary consular work is a thing of the past.’45
Some of the British families who had lived in Petrograd for generations and who had built homes and established businesses there were already preparing to return to England, forced to abandon their businesses and leave many of their treasured possessions behind and travel with only what they stood up in. ‘I was wearing all my clothes, I couldn’t bend my arms at all, and I had gold sovereigns stitched into my coat lining. Mother carried her precious silver-wedding teapot,’ recalled Dorothy Shaw, who was thirteen at the time and whose father was a manager at Thornton’s woollen mill in Petrograd; they were one of thirty-six English families who worked there and had settled in the vicinity of the mill. She and her mother made their way to Bergen where, after a three-week wait, they got on HMS Vulture, a British official despatch boat operating between England and Norway, escorted by two torpedo boats, which brought them and other British refugees back across a North Sea bristling with German U-boats.46
It had been a deeply dispiriting time for British families such as this, having to watch helplessly as their factories fell idle, irreparably damaged by punitive strikes or forced to close with the onslaught of impossible wage demands. Throughout 1917 British nationals saw the fortunes their ancestors had built up in imperial St Petersburg – some since the eighteenth century – haemorrhage away in the chaos of revolutionary Petrograd. ‘Every Sunday the English Church along the quay grew emptier,’ recalled Edward Stebbing. ‘Familiar faces were missing from the weekly working parties in the Embassy, there was sadness, separation, dispersal everywhere.’ The strain of holding things together was also telling on Sir George Buchanan. Stebbing was shocked to see ‘how really ill he looked’. With the threat of another revolution growing, Sir George sent out a request to all British subjects to notify the consulate of their address, telephone number and full details of all family members. He wanted to ensure that British nationals should leave in safety, and with dignity, if and when the time came.47
Members of the Russian aristocracy, fearful of the virulent antipathy they now encountered, were also selling up and leaving Russia. ‘Everyone would like to emigrate, but it is difficult because of the impossibility of taking money out, or of being sent sums of money from Russia,’ noted Louis de Robien; his embassy was being besieged daily by Russians wanting to go to France.48 Even Elizaveta Naryshkina, the Empress’s former Mistress of the Robes and the most senior lady at court, was now selling off her valuables. She had a Sèvres porcelain bust of Marie-Antoinette, given by the Queen herself to her grandfather, which she was desperate for the Louvre to buy, in order that she might survive.49 This option seemed infinitely preferable to the bust ‘one day grac[ing] the parlour of a Transatlantic pork merchant’. Out on the streets, members of the old imperial aristocracy were increasingly required to run the gauntlet of public hostility. They tried not to look conspicuous, for fear of drawing attention to themselves, for a good deal of animosity was now directed against anyone – be they Russian or a foreigner – perceived as being representative of the bourgeoisie. ‘Everyone who was well dressed looked anxious,’ noted Princess Cantacuzène-Speransky; ‘no one wore elegant clothes.’ ‘I discreetly cover any article of dress that might rouse their ire with something almost shabby when I go on the street,’ wrote Pauline Crosley.50
French actress Paulette Pax made sure to turn in her fur collar so that it did not show, whenever she went out, and asked her maid to lend her back the worn-out boots she had given her some time previously.51 Phil Jordan constantly worried when the ambassador went out on one of his grand walks through Petrograd: ‘Boss, you’ve got to stop struttin’ around in that fur hat, that fur collar on your coat, and those spats and cane,’ he admonished him. He was right to do so, for foreigners were bawled out for even the most modest manifestation of smart dress.52 Claude Anet was reprimanded for being a bourgeois on the Nevsky: ‘You don’t belong to us,’ he was told. ‘You are wearing gloves.’ Ella Woodhouse recalled being out wearing her ordinary overcoat and matching hat, when she boarded a crowded tram. ‘The tram jolted, I was pushed against some strap-hanger, who turned on
me angrily, and I heard another woman passenger say: “Doloi shlyapku!’’’ – ‘Down with the hat!’– it being perceived as the insignia of a bourgeoise. ‘Need I add,’ she continued, ‘that I got off at the next stop. After that, I went about in an old coat with a prominent button missing, and a shawl over my head.’53 ‘Think of a country, a Capital, in which it is unwise to appear on the street “well dressed”!’ summed up an exasperated Pauline Crosley. She was dismayed that she had not seen a single man ‘wearing a silk hat’ in ‘this large Capital of a large country’ in all the time she had been there.54
With panic spreading about a possible German advance, many of the civilian population of Petrograd were also now trying to leave the city. Thousands, ‘driven by irrational fear’ of impending disaster, were desperate to get back to their villages where they thought all would be well. Pauline Crosley could not see the sense in this mass exodus, ‘for we hear of nothing but disorders all over Russia, and I can learn of no locality that is really safe’.55 Louis de Robien saw the long queues of people waiting for train tickets, often for as long as two days. At Petrograd’s Nicholas Station, ‘the booking-hall, the platforms and the lines were full of people camping in the midst of their luggage, waiting to leave by any available train’:
Soldiers, Tovariches, and women with their children were either squatting on the platforms or sitting on their bundles, surrounded by bags, bursting packing-cases tied up with ropes, wooden trunks painted in bright colours, nondescript suitcases, Samovars, rolled-up mattresses, household utensils and gramophone horns.56
Caught in the Revolution Page 27