Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  You will have to go with me to the State bank . . . In your automobile.

  ‘I haven’t got one,’ Steve protested.

  ‘You’re a bank Director – you must have an automobile.’

  Fortunately Steve’s Russian was good and he proceeded to explain in no uncertain terms that ‘this was an American bank and Americans were democratic, unpretentious people who didn’t always furnish their bank Directors with automobiles’.58 Having pondered this, Red announced that all of the bank’s cash would be confiscated. Unfortunately, with the State Bank closed, they only had a few thousand rubles in the tills at the time. Red was visibly disappointed. It turned out that it was a prearranged given that any Bolshevik units sent to ‘nationalise’ business institutions were allowed to divide between themselves whatever cash they found there. ‘On the assumption that an American bank would be piled to the rafters with loose cash a lottery had been organized, with the winning squad drawing the American assignment.’ Red was furious: ‘What kind of a bank is this, anyway?’ he shouted. ‘No automobile for the Director and hardly any money in the cash-drawer . . . I’ll have to explain to them’ – upon which he informed his men that the lack of cash was due to the trickery of the devious Americans, ‘which just proved that we were dangerous people, the worst enemies the proletariat could possibly have’. ‘Weren’t we bankers,’ he shouted, ‘and didn’t that make us capitalists; and weren’t we foreigners, and therefore international capitalists? There wasn’t any lower order of the human race, he said, in admonishing his men to keep close watch on us.’59

  After taking the keys to the safe and strong boxes and informing the clerks that they were all under house arrest, Red carted Steve off to the State Bank to release more funds. Meanwhile about a dozen ‘soldati’ stayed on guard in the hall, ‘sitting on our gold furniture’, Fuller remembered, gorging on the bank’s precious supply of bread, and lying down to take a nap on the period sofas and chairs. The young bank clerks sat there disconsolately until someone remembered the gramophone they had used for the Christmas party, brought it in and began playing American ragtime. One by one the Bolsheviks guarding them left their posts and gathered round to listen. When Red returned hours later with Steve, ‘that’s the way he found us,’ recalled Rogers, ‘with a couple of Russian Guards trying to dance to the Amerikansky capitalistical music’.60 Red’s occupation of the bank lasted well into the New Year; Rogers recalled him strutting around ‘like a kingpin’: it was ‘the great moment of his life and he [was] making the most of it’. Such was his dictatorial behaviour, however, that Rogers feared Red was getting ‘a bit Napoleonic’.61

  Similar peremptory Bolshevik takeovers were made of British businesses across the city. Mechanical engineer James Stinton Jones had returned in September to wind up his business affairs and transfer his money to London, but had been very uneasy at the ‘prison atmosphere’ that he had found in Petrograd. The bank holding his money had now been taken over by Bolsheviks, but he demanded – and managed to get – 500 rubles (about £50) from his account. It was not enough, however, to pay the staff at his office and workshop, whom he was forced to sack. Then one morning the Bolsheviks came and demanded the keys to his workshop and stores, containing £20,000 worth of machinery and equipment. They returned soon afterwards for the keys to his flat:

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked . . .

  ‘Hand over the key of your flat to Comrade ——, the bearer of this letter.’

  ‘What do you mean? It is evening, it is cold, what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘That is your business.’ Then, looking at the coat rack, he enquired, ‘Is that your cloak and galoshes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Take them.’

  I turned to go into the room and he asked me where I was going.

  ‘I am going to the bedroom to get the photograph of my mother.’

  Again pointing to my coat, he said: ‘Get your coat and galoshes.’ As I gave the key to him, I was left with only the clothes I was wearing.

  Stinton Jones returned to England after having spent most of the last thirteen years in Russia, taking with him only those clothes and what remained of the 500 rubles.62

  During her final two weeks in Petrograd, Meriel Buchanan found it very hard not to cry. In leaving Russia, she felt as if she was ‘deserting somebody I had loved very dearly, and abandoning them to die in utter misery. Day after day I went to say goodbye to one more building, to one more place which had become dear and familiar: the Kazan Cathedral on the Nevsky . . . the Alexander column in the Winter Palace square; the beautiful equestrian statue of Peter the Great by Falconet.’63 She felt far more pain at leaving the city than at making choices about which possessions to pack in the one small trunk allotted her. Her heavy white Russian shuba lined with grey squirrel and with a fox-fur collar, her ornate court dress and train of silver brocade had to be left; her Siamese cat, too. The embassy silver was sent on by sea from Archangel, but much of the beautiful furniture collected by her parents during their long years in diplomatic service in Europe – the antique Dutch cabinet, French Empire chairs, Marie Antoinette’s writing table, the Aubusson carpet – all had to be left behind.64 The day before their departure she walked ‘rather sadly through the desolate silent streets of the town which had become, after so many years, almost a home to me, and which I felt I would never see again’. It was intensely cold, with an icy wind blowing from the river, the snow piled high by the roadsides. In an empty St Isaac’s Cathedral she lit a candle at the icon of the Miraculous Mother of St George. That evening she dined at the Military Club on the Millionnaya with Colonel Knox and other military attachés who would be leaving Petrograd with them.65

  Her father was equally melancholy: ‘Why is it that Russia casts over all who know her such an indefinable mystic spell that, even when her wayward children have turned their capital into a pandemonium, we are sorry to leave it?’ he asked in his diary.66 On Tuesday 26 December 1918, at 7.45 a.m., the Buchanans left the embassy in the darkness of another power cut, making their way downstairs by the light of a flickering kerosene lamp, past the portraits on the landing of Queen Victoria, King Edward and Queen Alexandra, King George and Queen Mary. Their sobbing Russian maids saw them into their car, which jerked off slowly through piled-up banks of snow to the bleak and freezing Finland Station, where they were waved off by a few diplomatic colleagues and members of the British colony. A bribe of two bottles of finest embassy brandy had secured them a sleeping car to themselves.

  Willem Oudendijk had gone to the embassy the previous day to wish his colleague farewell. ‘Seldom,’ he wrote, ‘has any British diplomat left his post under more dramatic circumstances than Sir George Buchanan did on that occasion. He had been an extremely popular figure in Russian society; he had succeeded in making himself the most important member of the whole diplomatic body.’ From the outbreak of war in 1914, when Sir George had been looked up to for his moral support of the Russian nation, he had been forced to watch in dismay the slow, inexorable ‘crumbling of everything that held the Russian nation together’ and to find himself the object of Bolshevik hatred as an enemy, a representative of ‘the English bankers, generals and capitalists who desired nothing else but to feast on the blood of Russia’s toiling masses’. ‘What diplomat has ever lived through such heart-breaking changes during his tenure of office?’ asked Oudendijk. ‘In the midst of all this turmoil Sir George Buchanan stood like a rock, unperturbed; in looks, in words, in deeds a perfect British gentleman.’67fn5

  Buchanan’s American colleague, David Francis, remained in Petrograd, however, under instructions from Washington (which had thought better of recalling him at this critical time) to do his best to effect a rapprochement with the Bolsheviks. The faithful Phil had been hoping to see his boss (whose health, too, was failing) home to safety. ‘I am all packed up ready to fly at a minutes Notice,’ he told Mrs Francis, adding that ‘At times I wish the Ambassador did not have So much of that Kentucky blood in him
and then mabe he would not take Such chances.’ He was worried that the ambassador seemed intent on remaining in Petrograd ‘Just a little longer than he ought to’.68

  As Russia saw out its old, Orthodox year, over at the French Embankment, with a blizzard raging outside, Pauline Crosley had been able to get enough wood to have an open fire in one room, lit by candlelight and kerosene lamps, where she and her husband had managed to entertain a few visitors. But they were only too aware of the ‘evident effort to drive foreigners out’. It was so disheartening. ‘Russia is a wonderful country,’ she wrote, ‘full of lights and shadows, though just now the shadows have the advantage. It is too bad that the world must lose so much that was beautiful in Russia to receive – what? Something much worse than nothing.’69

  Leighton Rogers had seen out the old year by taking a walk up the Nevsky, but it had only convinced him ‘beyond doubt’ of Russia’s present economic and social disintegration. He could see it on every face he passed:

  the frantic throng on the sidewalks, ragged, gaunt, worried, with the look of the fugitive imprinted on their pallored faces, hurrying along as though driven before a storm of unknown forces. People with rude bundles, some with hard-won loaves under their arms, and others with neither bundles nor bread, only the hunger for it. Thin, aged children forced to labor before their time; crippled soldiers turned out of hospitals by their native country with no other payment for their sacrifice than the privilege of begging on its streets; and professional beggars everywhere – blind, you say? Absolutely eyeless. The whole thing more like a conception of Doré than reality – a panorama of ‘les miserables’.70

  As the last day of 1917 turned, there was one comfort at least for Rogers: ‘a letter from home – the first in a long time’. Written in September, it had taken four months to reach him. He was sad and dispirited, and thinking more and more about friends back home who had left for the Western Front. Petrograd had worn him down. After more than a year he had decided to quit the bank and join them. ‘The Bolsheviks have stolen the Russian Revolution and may endure,’ he wrote as he looked back on his time in the city. ‘I hope not, fervently, but it is a possibility that must be faced . . . The future in Russia is dreadful to contemplate. Not only is she out of this war but she is out of our world for a long time to come. We had better make up our minds to that and concentrate on our own fight.’71

  POSTSCRIPT

  The Forgotten Voices of Petrograd

  SIR GEORGE BUCHANAN and his family arrived by boat at Leith in Scotland on 17 January 1918 and travelled back to London, to congratulatory messages from the British government and lunch at Buckingham Palace. But his health collapsed entirely soon afterwards and he took an extended rest in Cornwall. By now committed to the idea that only an armed Allied intervention would save Russia, he gave numerous talks on the subject and was deeply despondent when that intervention (of 1918–19) failed. Sir George was also bitterly disappointed not to be offered a peerage for his long years of service to British diplomacy, and felt humiliated by the derisory compensation offered him by the government for the loss of his property and investments in Russia. The invitation to take up the ambassadorship to Rome in 1919 for only two years seemed a clear indication that his services would no longer be required thereafter.1

  On her return to England, Lady Georgina continued to work tirelessly for British and Russian refugees of the revolution, but in Rome she fell terminally ill with cancer and her suffering blighted the family’s time there. She died in April 1921, shortly after they returned to England.2 With the help of an editor, Sir George turned his Petrograd diaries into a book, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories, published in 1923; he died the following December. His daughter Meriel wrote several books about her time in Russia, including Petrograd, The City of Trouble in 1918 and, in 1932, Dissolution of an Empire, in which she defended her father’s reputation after he had come under unjustified attack for not doing enough to effect the evacuation of the imperial family to the safety of the UK in 1917.3

  After the departure of the Buchanans, the British embassy in Petrograd was left with a skeleton staff of ‘Last-Ditchers’, headed by the consul Arthur Woodhouse, who was entrusted with the increasingly onerous responsibility for the well-being of the several hundred British subjects, mainly women, who remained in the city. Together with members of the British military mission, Woodhouse managed to get much-needed supplies of food to them as the situation got ever more desperate. But on 31 August 1918 a group of Red Guards forced their way into the embassy and, during the ensuing mêlée, naval attaché Captain Francis Cromie was killed.4 Thirty embassy staff and officials were arrested, including the chaplain, Rev. Bousfield Swan Lombard, and Consul Woodhouse. They were incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress until October, when they were finally released and evacuated to England via Sweden. For some time the embassy stood empty and neglected; by 1920 it was in use as a storehouse for confiscated works of statuary, furniture and art, ‘like some congested second-hand art shop in the Brompton Road’, before they were sold off by the Bolsheviks.5

  In February 1918, with Russian peace negotiations with Germany having ground to a stalemate, the German army had advanced to within one hundred miles of Petrograd. On 11 March the Bolsheviks therefore transferred the seat of government to Moscow and the remaining members of the diplomatic community were evacuated to Vologda, 350 miles south. Many of David Francis’s American colleagues left Russia at this time but, with the departure of Sir George Buchanan, Francis had become dean of the Allied diplomatic corps and was determined to hang on, claiming he did not want ‘to abandon the Russian people, for whom I felt deep sympathy and whom I had assured repeatedly of America’s unselfish interest in their welfare’.6 Phil Jordan was, however, now anxious to leave; after several break-ins at other embassies in Petrograd he had come to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks ‘don’t respect foreign embassies any more’.7

  On 26 February 1918fn1 the American diplomats left Petrograd by special train for Vologda. Here Francis and Phil settled in surprisingly happily, making themselves at home in a simple but ‘dandy’ (so thought Phil) two-storey wooden house on the main high street where, for the next five months, visitors could enjoy the informal ‘clubhouse atmosphere’ and the stranded diplomats spent their evenings playing poker and smoking cigars. They drank bourbon when they could get it or otherwise ‘plumped for vodka’. They had taken the good old Model T Ford with them and Francis used it to drive around seeking out potential sites for a golf course in the area.8 But in October 1918, with civil war now raging in Russia, Francis fell ill with a severe infection of the gall bladder and had to be evacuated by US cruiser from Murmansk. Phil nursed him through a high fever during an extremely stormy sea crossing.

  After recovering at a naval hospital in Scotland, Francis was transferred to London. Shortly after Christmas 1918 the proud Phil Jordan accompanied him as valet to a dinner with King George and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. When they finally returned to the States in February 1919, Phil was again accorded the ultimate accolade – an invitation to the White House. ‘I was born in Hog Alley,’ he later remarked, ‘and I think you know that a kangaroo can jump further than any other animal, but I don’t believe he could jump from Hog Alley to the White House – that was some jump.’9 In 1922 Francis suffered a stroke and never really recovered his health. He died in St Louis in January 1927, having ensured that his sons would take care of the ever-present Phil, who was provided with rent-free accommodation and a small trust fund until his death from cancer in Santa Barbara in 1941.10

  With Russia’s withdrawal from the war, the Allied hospitals in Petrograd were closed down. Lady Georgina Buchanan’s British Colony Hospital had already closed in July 1917, partly due to a loss of morale at the erosion of good manners and respect shown for its work by the Russian patients, but also because there were fewer of them – mainly cases of scurvy. Those wounded who remained had, since the revolution, become increasingly obstreper
ous.11 The committee of the American colony hospital also voted to close its establishment – the only wounded Russian soldiers left, as Pauline Crosley noted, ‘were those wounded fighting amongst themselves’ and it had become ‘too dangerous for the colony women to work there’.12 Their unused supplies were handed over to the Salvation Army to distribute.

  The days of the Anglo-Russian Hospital’s usefulness had also come to an end, and in November 1917 the London committee that funded it voted to withdraw its hospital facilities on 1 January 1918. There was, however, the question of ‘what was to happen to the hundreds of pounds worth of beautiful instruments and equipment’ that it contained. Francis Lindley reported that a Red Cross commissioner ‘suggested that it should be made over to the Soviets’, but the administrators were loath to do this, knowing that it would either be purloined or wilfully destroyed. Instead everything was secretly packed up and taken to the Finland Station, and from there sent to Archangel under the protection of a British Armoured Car Division. It eventually arrived back at Red Cross HQ in London, ‘which was better than being left to be wasted by incompetent Soviets’.13 In 1996 the Russians placed a plaque commemorating the ARH at the front entrance of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich’s palace,fn2 which can still be seen today.