Countess Nostitz was horrified by the scenes that unfolded at the Alexandrovsky Military Academy. For her, the ‘heroism of these boys, mere children of fifteen and sixteen’, had been the ‘one redeeming feature in that black day of horrors’. When the college was attacked, some of the cadets had taken cover in the huge woodpiles stacked in front of it, ready for winter:
Routed out, they clambered to the top and fired into the ranks of the Bolsheviks in a last desperate attempt to check their advance. Hopelessly outnumbered, they fought on until their ammunition gave out, then stood, their round childish cheeks chalk-white, waiting for death. It was horrible to watch the Bolsheviks playing with them as a cat plays with a mouse, prolonging the moment of suspense, carefully singling out their living targets till they had shot them all down, one by one.69
The cadets’ bodies lay there for days untended, ‘stacked one on top of the other on the woodpile’. As those inside the academy surrendered, a Red Cross worker recalled how ‘at the Moika Canal a number of these young men were lined up, with their hands tied behind their backs, and shot down from behind, falling head-foremost into the water’.70 Elsewhere, any identifiable cadets found on the streets for the next few days were attacked and murdered by marauding sailors and Red Guards, much as the police had been sought out in February; Louis de Robien saw how a car full of cadets trying to escape had broken down on Gogol Street, and Red Guards had pounced on it and massacred them all; their mutilated bodies were left lying on the pavement for hours.71 Thankfully, the British had succeeded in safely smuggling out the eight cadets who had been guarding their embassy – and sent them home ‘dressed up as civilians’.72fn8
For Bessie Beatty, the rout of the cadets had been ‘a day of shame’, ‘a sacrifice of the innocents as needless as it was useless’, and she laid much of the blame on the shoulders of those who had sent these young boys to fight for them while staying safely out of reach. The ‘ill-starred Cadet rising’ had marked a brief and unequal trial of strength between Lenin’s new government and the Committee for Salvation.73 ‘Kerensky has again failed us, as he did at the time of the July rising and of the Kornilov affair,’ Sir George Buchanan noted sadly in his diary on 30 October. Having briefly rallied support from eighteen Cossack companies under General Krasnov, Kerensky had accompanied their march on Tsarskoe Selo. But here he had once again prevaricated, and Krasnov had pulled back to Gatchina at the prospect of his 1,200 men being sacrificed to a mixed force of 50,000 Bolsheviks and workers, which was now being rallied against them. Soon afterwards Kerensky fled – no one knew where – and went into hiding, before escaping to Finland in May 1918.fn9
On 2 November, Lenin’s government announced the final defeat of the Provisional Government. But it had been a defeat without honour. The abandonment of the defence of Petrograd to ‘a few Cossacks, a battalion of women and some children’ had, as Louis de Robien concluded, ‘only succeeded in alienating everyone’; it had made Kerensky’s government ‘an object of ridicule’.74 It had also ensured that the demise of the old bourgeois government – and the inception of the new Soviet one – was ‘ignominious, without fanfare, or heroics’.75
15
‘Crazy People Killing Each Other Just Like We Swat Flies at Home’
ON 17 NOVEMBER, Phil Jordan sat down to write one of his long anecdotal letters describing recent events. It had been a harrowing time; the Bolsheviks, he told Mrs Francis’s cousin Annie Pulliam, had ‘shot Petrograd all to pieces’. ‘We are all seting [sitting] on a bomb Just waiting for some one to touch a match to it,’ he added, with his usual vivid sense of drama. ‘If the Ambassador gets out of this Mess with our life we will be awful lucky.’ For once the redoubtable Phil was anxious: ‘These crazy people are Killing each other Just like we Swat flies at home.’ Even his boss was admitting to his son Perry, ‘I never knew of a place where human life is as cheap as it is now in Russia.’ But sad to say, murder and robbery and acts of violent retribution were now so commonplace that he had found himself becoming ‘accustomed’ to it.1
In Moscow the October Revolution had been far more savage and bloody. The cadets there had been ‘forewarned and forearmed’ and had taken up strong defensive positions in the Kremlin and other strategic buildings.2 It had taken ten days for the Bolsheviks to wrest power, with fierce battles on the streets and around the Kremlin leaving more than a thousand dead, and with atrocities against the surrendering cadets far more widespread than those in Petrograd. The US consulate had been badly damaged by gunfire; the Hotel Metropole, where many foreign nationals were staying, had been partially destroyed. Leighton Rogers’s colleagues at the Moscow branch of the National City Bank – which was housed in Moscow’s National Hotel – had had to take refuge in the potato bins in the cellar, where he heard tell they had held a three-day poker game during the worst of the fighting.3
In Petrograd both the British and American embassies, although not attacked, had been virtually cut off from the outside world; none of their telegrams were getting through, their diplomatic couriers were not allowed out and their mail was blocked as well. Officials at the US embassy were doing everything possible to induce their nationals to leave Russia the minute they could and, in particular, had been evacuating women and children by the Trans-Siberian Railway. With the first real ice and snow of the winter setting in, on 5 November thirty-five American men, women and children left the city by train, together with many of the members of the US Red Cross Mission who had decided to quit.4 The problem of getting these nationals out of Russia was manifold: there were wives who did not wish to abandon their husbands; women fearful of travelling alone; people who did not have the money for the fare; even ‘enemies who cannot stand the thought of ten days in the same car’, as J. Butler Wright noted – not to mention the perilous nature of the journey itself, with trains being stopped and boarded by rabbles of Red Guards at many points along the line. For the British the situation had become even more strained, when Trotsky refused exit permits to members of the colony wishing to leave, in retaliation for the arrest and internment in England of two Bolsheviks who had come to spread anti-war propaganda. ‘Britishers, at present, are virtually prisoners in Russia,’ Consul Arthur Woodhouse told his twenty-year-old daughter Ella, now safely back in England:
We are having a lively time at this office. Frenzied H.H.H.s [‘helpless, hopeless hystericals’] still come along as usual, and refuse to be comforted. I am thankful to say that the bulk of the Britishers has left. Those who are still here would like to do so, of course, but either cannot for lack of means, or, under present conditions, are not permitted to quit.5
It was a particularly difficult time for the ambassador, too. Assassination threats were being made against Sir George Buchanan in the Bolshevik press, which derided him as ‘Tsar of Petrograd’, and it was rumoured that Trotsky was going to have him arrested. Sir George’s family begged the ambassador not to go out for his daily walks, but he refused, assuring them that he ‘did not take Trotsky’s threats too seriously’.6 He stuck to his guns and, ‘with great dignity and determination’, also resolutely refused to receive Trotsky and declined his offer of Red Guards ‘for the protection of the embassy’.7 Buchanan informed London that ‘the Government is now in the hands of a small clique of extremists, who are bent on imposing their will on the country by terroristic methods’, and he would have no truck with them. The Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, had telegraphed from England urging him to return home, but Sir George was adamant: ‘It would not do for me to leave Petrograd, as my presence here reassures the colony,’ he responded in early November. But his wife, fearful for her husband’s failing health, had found it all a terrible strain and admitted they were ‘having a horrid time’.8
Much like Buchanan and Woodhouse, David Francis had refused to be intimidated; ‘I will never talk to a damn Bolshevik,’ he had growled, also refusing the offer of Bolshevik guards for the US embassy. ‘It evidently never occurred to him to leave his post whatever came,’
wrote his friend Julia Cantacuzène-Speransky, ‘though he spoke quite frankly of the threats and dangers to which he was constantly subjected.’9 This was not to mention the strain Francis had been under recently, thanks to gossip within the embassy about his friendship with Russian resident Matilda von Cram, whom he had befriended on the boat from America, and who was still suspected of being a German spy. Separated from his family and increasingly isolated from his disapproving staff, many of whom seriously doubted his professional competence, Francis had doggedly clung to the charming company of Madame Cram – who still visited regularly to keep him company and teach him French – and his staunchest ally, Phil Jordan. But recently Francis’s aide, J. Butler Wright, had become seriously worried about the ambassador’s health, noting an increased mental and physical exhaustion (Francis often worked till two or three in the morning, as Phil Jordan knew). More worrying, however, was the fact that Francis had become muddled and inconsistent in his official dealings; he seemed to have ‘lost his moorings’. On 22 November an encoded cable was sent to Washington, recommending ‘that to prevent public humiliation formal orders be sent to [the] Ambassador to hasten to Washington’.10
For the many British and American expatriates who could not leave Petrograd there was nothing to do that winter but lie low and ‘see how this new government of workers and peasants would be constituted . . . and translate their dream into reality’.11 Smolny remained a cauldron of political debate, rivalry and invective, but the masses had ceased to care and did their best to get on with their lives. As far as Louis de Robien was concerned, the people were ‘bored with the whole question’. What did the leadership holed up at the Smolny have to offer them? Certainly not bread. Nothing but ‘Theories, dogmas, opinions, doctrines, hypotheses – all expressed in words lacking any sense of proportion’. ‘This,’ wrote French resident Louise Patouillet, ‘is the moral baggage that most of the revolutionary leaders carry with them’:
Meetings with an endless number of splinter groups or plenary sessions, interminable voting on points of order or corrections to the points of order. Useless, and consequently inevitable, debates that go on without a break, all day, all night. An endless stream of speakers whose hands are bound by the chains of party dogma, and who can only see things through their dead, doctrinaire eyes.12
What ordinary Russians needed, Patouillet wrote, were ‘deeds not words’. Her compatriot Louis de Robien had also become deeply cynical of any prospect of a viable political solution in Russia: ‘Parties are founded, cartels are established, people make mergers, Committees are formed, and so are committee Councils, and council Committees: they all claim to be saving the country and the world, but each day one hears of some new split and some sensational new patching-up.’13
In this continuing atmosphere of conflict and uncertainly Lenin had pushed ahead, unchallenged, with the Bolshevik programme of socialisation and the systematic destruction of all vestiges of the old imperial order. His first and most dramatic diktat was the Decree on Land, abolishing private ownership and confiscating all such lands for redistribution among the peasantry. The delegates at the Congress of Soviets had unanimously ratified it before the congress was dissolved on 27 October. Freedom of the press was also quashed, although many opposition papers went underground, just as the revolutionary press had done in tsarist times; the State Bank was taken over, and advertising became a state-controlled monopoly. Freedom of speech was remorselessly eroded – first the political clubs were closed, and then all public meetings apart from official government ones were banned.
The Municipal Duma of Petrograd, which till late November valiantly resisted Bolshevik intimidation, was forcibly dissolved at bayonet point and its mayor and councillors arrested.14 All courts opposing the new Soviet regime were closed, replaced by the Military Revolutionary Tribunal, which proceeded ruthlessly to deal with ‘counter-revolutionists’, ‘speculators’ and any other perceived enemies of the new socialist state. ‘Petrograd greeted the day of the tribunal’s first sitting with apprehension,’ recalled Bessie Beatty, pronouncing it ‘the beginning of the terror’. On that sombre day ‘press and populace discussed little besides the guillotine’.15 In a final ominous act of official repression, on 7 December a new body for ‘Combating Counter-Revolution’ was created: the Chrezvychainaya Komissiya – better known by its acronym Che-Ka, and located unobtrusively on the fourth floor of a house on Gorokhovaya.16 It was here that prominent members of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy (if they hadn’t already fled Russia) were brought for interrogation. Sometimes, at night, the occasional crack of a rifle could be heard; there was talk of a trench along a rear wall of the building, where people were taken out and shot.
On 12 November, elections to the long-awaited Constituent Assembly had finally begun. Leighton Rogers found it an interesting exercise: there were nineteen political parties vying for seats, and the campaign was a veritable ‘battle of posters’. Everywhere across the city ‘buildings, walls, and all available hoarding spaces [were] plastered with them, as much as ten deep’, for as Rogers noted, it was ‘considered clever indeed for members of a Party to sneak out at night and cover every opposition poster with one of its own’. One of the groups had an office in his apartment building and ‘on three occasions’ he had seen their representatives ‘setting forth after midnight with rolls of posters and buckets of paste’. ‘There may be some truth in the statement made the other day as a joke,’ he added, ‘that the Party with the most paste and posters will win.’17
At the end of the two-week voting period it was clear that the Bolsheviks had not gained the mandate they had confidently been expecting; far from it, they were very much in the minority, with only 24 per cent of the vote. Lenin was incensed and postponed the opening of the Assembly scheduled for 28 November to the New Year; if he had had his way, he would have done away with it altogether.fn1 The continuing political vacuum was marked by an inexorable increase in Bolshevik tyranny and the arrest and murder of political opponents. Winter 1917–18 inaugurated what Willem Oudendijk called a ‘bayonetocracy’ – ‘a soldiers’ dictatorship’, in the words of Louis de Robien – and with it the widespread imposition of summary justice. The rifle and the bayonet ruled in a city swollen with idle soldiers returned from the front, who were noted for their unpredictable, anarchic behaviour. ‘Our own bourgeois Revolution of 1789 lapsed into the excesses of the Terror, and ended with Bonaparte and his wars,’ noted de Robien. ‘But that was not enough to cure us.’18 He held out little hope for the Russians, having lately witnessed a typical example of the ugly face of mindless, arbitrary violence when he saw ‘two soldiers bargaining for apples with an old woman street vendor’:
Deciding that the price was too high, one of them shot her in the head while the other ran her through with his bayonet. Naturally, nobody dared to do anything to the two soldier murderers, who went quietly on their way watched by an indifferent crowd and munching the apples which they had acquired so cheaply, without giving a thought to the poor old woman whose body lay in the snow for part of the day, near her little stall of green apples.19
Anxiety communicated itself wherever one went: ‘Never, on any face one passed, did one see a smile,’ remembered Meriel Buchanan, ‘never, down any of the wide streets was there the sound of a laugh, a note of music, or even the ringing of bells from the churches.’ ‘By the time I left, this feeling of hatred towards anybody not obviously belonging to the proletariat was almost tangible. One literally felt it, whenever one went out into the street,’ remembered Ella Woodhouse.20
For the Americans it was just the same; Phil Jordan admitted that the situation in Petrograd was ‘something awful’:
Streets are full of all the cut throats and robbers that are in Russia. you can hear the machine guns and cannons roaring all night and day. thousands are being killed. why we are alive I can not tell. they break into private homes and rob and kill all the people. in a house not very [far] from the embassy they killed a little girl and 12
rifle baynets found stuck through her body. oh the horrible Sights that is to be seen . . . I have fond out that the best thing to do right now is keep your mouth shut and look as much like an American as you can . . . All the thugs that have been turned out of prison was armed with a rifle . . . we cant tell at what minute the Germans will take Petrograd. If they come right at this time I don’t know what we would do because we cant get out. we are like a rat in a trap. the Bolshevicks have torn up all the rail roads. I cant tell but this Ford might be a life Saver. All the business houses and banks are closed. The city is pitch dark. At times we only have tallow candles for light, the plants have no coal and Very little wood. The Banks are in charge of the Boshevicks and escaped convicks and thieves are on guard with machine guns and rifles, the food question is growing worse every day . . . the Ambassador told me two days ago to be packed with as little as possible because we might have to go and leave it all behind.21
Caught in the Revolution Page 33