The ARH’s founder, Lady Muriel Paget, stubbornly refused to give up on her Russian relief work, however, and remained in Kiev, organising famine relief and running soup kitchens for six thousand people – eventually leaving in February 1918 via Siberia, Japan and the USA. In 1924 she set up the British Subjects in Russia Relief Association to help those still stranded in Russia, many of whom were eventually evacuated to Estonia. Of the many nurses and VADs who worked at the ARH, aside from the well-connected Lady Sybil Grey and Dorothy Seymour, we know virtually nothing of their later lives, though one or two of their memoirs and letters have surfaced, thanks to an extensive search in the course of research for this book.
While the careers of some of the British and American diplomats in Russia have already been written about and their archives survive (if scattered across the UK and USA), we know almost nothing, after they left Petrograd, of the many still-unsung and now long-forgotten expatriates – the nannies and governesses, engineers, businessmen and entrepreneurs, their wives and children – who lived and worked in the capital and wrote so vividly and movingly of their experiences in their diaries and letters home. Some, like Bousfield Swan Lombard, chaplain of the English Church in Petrograd, suffered persecution under the Bolsheviks. Bousfield remained loyally at his post after many in the British community had left, driven by a strong sense of responsibility for the 400 or so fellow nationals still stranded in the city – many of them teachers and governesses who had been in Russia all their lives and had ‘sunk all their savings in some bank’. But Petrograd was such a dispiriting place to be, ‘like a city of the dead’, a place of ‘lawless stagnation’, as he told his wife back home, and he was hugely relieved to finally leave Russia in October 1918 after his release from prison.14 Having lost virtually everything, Bousfield was compensated by the government for his eight years of loyal service in Russia to the measly tune of £50, upon which £43 16s. 7d. was immediately clawed back for the cost of his repatriation to Britain. Bousfield’s and other valuable testimony relating to Petrograd in 1917 is held at the Leeds Russian Archive, which is a treasure trove of memory of the British colonies in Russia from the nineteenth century.
It is hard to be certain exactly how many British, American and French newspaper correspondents (not to mention other foreign reporters) came and went in Petrograd during 1917, as many were not given bylines in their press articles and only a small proportion of them published memoirs. But what is striking is how many there were of them, and how doggedly – cheerfully even – they endured the terrible privations of cold and hunger along with the rest of the population. These journalists often mention each other, in passing, in their own writings, but because of the jobbing nature of their work, always on the move from story to story, virtually nothing has survived of their archives – and, more disappointingly, of the photographs that several of them took.
Arno Dosch-Fleurot spent the rest of his life working as a newspaper correspondent in Europe, and was one of the first reporters to enter Germany at the end of World War I; he tried several times to return to Russia to write on the new Soviet state, but was refused permission. He later married a Russian and lived in Berlin in the 1930s, where he witnessed the rise of Hitler; on the outbreak of World War II, the Nazis arrested him and he was held in detention for fifteen months. For the remainder of his life he was Spanish correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, dying in Madrid in 1951.15 His book Through War to Revolution – poignantly dedicated to ‘The Unknown Russian Soldier over whose tomb burns no flame’ – describing his experiences on the Eastern Front and in Russia, came out in 1931, but is one of many accounts of Petrograd in 1917 that has been too long overlooked.
A similar fate has been shared by Isaac Marcosson’s The Rebirth of Russia, published soon after he left Petrograd, as well as his other journalism on the subject. Marcosson returned to Russia in 1924, shortly after the death of Lenin, to see the extent to which ‘the iron hand of Bolshevism had strangled freedom’. He found the country in an alarming state of ‘dilapidation’ and its beautiful, historic churches ‘converted into stables’. It was a chilling experience and he was glad to bid farewell ‘to espionage, tapped telephones, opened mail, incessant smells, and the oppression that attends constant surveillance’. On his return he wrote an excoriating indictment of the Soviet Union in a series of twelve articles for the Saturday Evening Post entitled ‘After Lenin – What?’ The Soviets promptly banned the newspaper, and Marcosson, from Russia.16
The most notable journalists – aside from British newspaperman Arthur Ransome, who went on to enjoy a celebrated career as a writer – remain the ‘Four Who Saw the Sunrise’, as Bessie Beatty alluded to herself and her companions John Reed, Louise Bryant and Albert Rhys Williams in the dedication to her 1918 book The Red Heart of Russia. Beatty returned home to a successful career in journalism and for many years hosted a popular New York radio show, before dying in 1947. Rhys Williams remained a committed communist activist and, unlike many of his anti-Bolshevik fellow journalists, was welcomed back to the Soviet Union on many occasions between 1922 and 1959; he died in 1962. His unrepentant support for the new Bolshevik Russia was in stark contrast to the utter dismay of Harold Williams, who had shown such passionate support for the ideals of February, only to see everything he hoped for stripped away and destroyed in the early months of 1918. ‘If you lived here you would feel in every bone of your body, in every fibre of your spirit, the bitterness of it,’ he wrote in the Daily Chronicle of 28 January 1918:
I cannot tell you all the brutalities, the fierce excesses, that are ravaging Russia from end to end and more ruthlessly than any invading army. Horrors pall on us – robbery, plunder and the cruellest forms of murder are grown a part of the very atmosphere we live in. It is worse than Tsarism . . . The Bolsheviks do not profess to encourage any illusions as to their real nature. They treat the bourgeoisie of all countries with equal contempt; they glory in all violence directed against the ruling classes, they despise laws and decencies that they consider effete, they trample on the arts and refinements of life. It is nothing to them if in the throes of the great upheaval the world relapses into barbarism.17
Although the American quartet of fellow socialists all produced memoirs of their own, more optimistic experience of Russia in revolution, it is John Reed’s account, Ten Days that Shook the World, published in 1919, that eclipsed them all, further aggrandised by Warren Beatty’s 1981 Hollywood film Reds. History has since criticised the four friends for playing into the hands of the Bolshevik propaganda machine as Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ – a term frequently applied to fellow travellers of the revolution. The brash and charismatic Reed lived fast and hard, pushing his health in the face of chronic kidney disease, and paid the inevitable price. He died young, of spotted typhus, in Moscow, after being persuaded back to Russia in 1920 to attend a congress in Baku. He was accorded a hero’s burial in the Kremlin Wall, and Eisenstein’s later film October was renamed after the title of his book, but Stalin was none too happy with Reed’s account and ordered the bowdlerisation of the Russian translation, to diminish Trotsky’s role and accentuate his own.
Reed’s widow Louise Bryant, who made it to Russia just in time to sit by her husband’s deathbed, continued with a sporadic career in journalism and remarried in 1923, but her drinking and ill health led to her early death in 1936. Her third husband, diplomat William Bullitt, laid a wreath on Reed’s grave on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1932, but when the plaque commemorating Reed at the Wall was sought out by visitors in the early 1960s, it was discovered that it had been quietly removed and his ashes reburied in a new, collective site behind the Lenin Mausoleum, reserved for ‘fallen heroes’ of the revolution.
As for the intrepid duo of Florence Harper and Donald Thompson, it is greatly regretted that nothing is known of Harper’s subsequent career after leaving Petrograd, aside from a handful of articles about her time in Russia that she published soon afterwards, including one for the Daily Ma
il in which she vividly described her own and Thompson’s ‘mad chase’ following the story of the ‘B-V (Bolshi-Viki)’.18 Back in the USA, she featured in an interview with the Boston Sunday Globe in June 1918, in which she talked of her good fortune in coming through the February Revolution ‘without a scratch’:
I have been in Petrograd during the Bolsheviki uprisings, sometimes out all night. I have been in street riots in Moscow, I nursed at the front, got trench fever, and trench foot, crossed the North Sea, sailing on a transport that four submarines chased, and am still alive and well. My friends say that they will have to tell off a firing squad for me on Judgment Day.19
Beyond this, Florence Harper simply disappears from view, and from the record.
Despite vowing he would never enter a war zone again, Donald Thompson was back in Russia the following summer – trailing the US intervention forces in Siberia. Like many others, he optimistically hoped that the Allied Intervention would bring about a counter-revolution and the end of Bolshevik tyranny, but after several months filming in Russia and watching the disarray in the Allied forces, he returned home disappointed. Nevertheless he became something of a celebrity in the USA when he released his five-reel silent film The German Curse in Russia in January 1918fn3 – a virulently anti-German, anti-Bolshevik propaganda exercise in support of the US press campaign to discredit the new Russian government – which was well received in the American trade press. Thompson continued to work as an independent film-maker during the 1920s and 1930s; he died in Los Angeles in 1947.
In 1918 Harper and Thompson both brought out extremely vivid memoirs of their time in Petrograd; Thompson also published a valuable book of his photographs. It is a matter of considerable regret, not to mention a loss to history and scholarship therefore, that Thompson’s original photographic negatives do not appear to have survived; there is no archival paper trail for him, or for Harper, like so many other of those groundbreaking journalists.fn4 Three of Thompson’s films survive in whole or in part,fn5 but, at the time of writing, no prints of The German Curse in Russia – shot partly in Petrograd during the revolution, and which was distributed by Pathé – seem to have survived, although the author has ascertained that the film was later cannibalised and some of the footage re-used in Hermann Axelbank’s 1937 documentary film From Tsar to Lenin.fn6
As for the most unlikely heroes of this tale – the young, green college graduates of the National City Bank of New York – there is little known about any of them, except Leighton Rogers.fn7 Having made the decision to leave, Rogers had considerable difficulty getting out of Russia to enlist for the US army. The Russians refused to give him a exit visa and eventually the British helped get him, by subterfuge, onto a freight train that was travelling out of the city to the port of Murmansk. For the next long and terrifying fourteen days Rogers endured a hair-raising journey to the Russian coast, barely surviving the bone-chilling cold and hunger; it was only the store of canned food that he had brought with him in a knapsack that kept him going.20 Arriving in London on April Fool’s Day 1918, he enlisted for the American Expeditionary Forces and served in army intelligence in England and France during 1918–19. In 1924 he published Wine of Fury, a fascinating novel based on his Petrograd experiences, and later worked in aeronautics. Sadly, his account of his time in Russia, ‘Czar, Revolution, Bolsheviks’, based on his diaries, was never published, but the typescript is preserved in the Library of Congress. Rogers never married and lived quietly with his sister Edith until his death in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1962.21
These are but a few conclusions to so many forgotten stories; the last echoes of a generation of lost voices. But if one had to single any one out, there is one voice above all others that strikes a nerve in its own inimitable way: the utterly truthful, ingenuous voice of an obscure African American, Phil Jordan, an unlettered man and political innocent, and a loyal servant of US diplomacy, who lived to tell the tale. His glorious letters, written in his vivid vernacular style, and reflecting an enduring sense of being ‘a stranger in a strange land’, remain the only known published account of the revolution by an African American.22fn8 They provide us with an unforgettable sense of exactly what it was like to be caught, in Petrograd, in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Acknowledgements
I CANNOT REMEMBER exactly when it was that I first started collecting foreign eyewitness accounts of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but my interest mushroomed during my days as a freelance copy editor in the 1990s. At the time, I was handling a lot of history manuscripts and it struck me how much seemed to have been written about the revolution by Russians, but how relatively little I had come across that was said by those many non-Russians who, for various reasons, were stranded in the city that year. I knew there had to be more to the story than just the over-hyped account of the one man, John Reed, who had always seemed to dominate, with his Ten Days that Shook the World.
I also knew there had to be plenty of women, aside from Reed’s partner Louise Bryant, who had watched events unfold. And what about all those other journalists, not to mention the diplomats, businessmen, industrialists, nurses and doctors, aid workers and the wives and children they often took with them? What about the British governesses and nannies who, I knew, were well in evidence in Russia at the time? I was aware that the capital had had a thriving British colony going back to the eighteenth century (as, too, had Moscow) and that the Leeds Russian Archive at my old university held some fascinating material on some of them.
So, beginning with the people I had gathered at the LRA, I began to seek out other lost and forgotten eyewitnesses of Petrograd in 1917, in particular from the American and French diplomatic communities. Along the way I picked up an assortment of other nationalities, and an interest that had begun as something of a hobby grew into a serious pursuit. Ten years ago I realised there might be a book in it. But I had to bide my time, because I knew that the best possible moment for such a book would be the centenary of the revolution in 2017.
In the course of my happy but increasingly obsessive collecting of people who had witnessed the convulsions in Petrograd, many friends – old and newly acquired – helped along the way by offering suggestions, seeking out material for me and helping me track down some of my more stubborn subjects. I am most grateful to all of them, for the many and varied ways in which they contributed to the writing of this book, as follows: my fellow Russianists Doug Smith and Simon Sebag Montefiore for a dialogue on Russia, the Romanovs and much sage advice; my good friend Candace Metz-Longinette Gahring in St Louis for helping me access documents in the Missouri archives and elsewhere; Roger Watson for filling me in on the cameras used by Donald Thompson; Mark Anderson of the Chicago Public Library, a genius at winkling out difficult-to-find articles from old magazines; Ilana Miller for doing likewise in California; Marianne Kouwenhoven for help with tracking down Belgian and Dutch diplomats; Ken Hawkins for kindly sharing his thesis on Arno Dosch-Fleurot; Amy Ballard at the Smithsonian; and Griffith Henniger, Henry Hardy, June Purvis, Jane Wickenden and William Lee for their helpful contributions.
My special thanks must go to Harvey Pitcher, author of Witnesses of the Russian Revolution (John Murray, 1994), who offered valuable advice when I visited him in Norwich and most generously passed on all his research material to me; to Sue Woolmans for checking out material held in the BBC Radio archives and being such a stalwart friend and supporter of my work; to film historian Dr David Mould at Ohio University for sharing both his knowledge of Donald Thompson and an ongoing and stubborn desire to track down Thompson’s lost films; to the stalwart Phil Tomaselli for once again providing scans of sources at the National Archives; to Charles Bangham and Brian Brooks for sharing their family memoir of Edith Kerby; and to John Carter for letting me see his grand father Bousfield Swan Lombard’s letters from Petrograd. I also owe a huge thank-you to my friend David Holohan for his excellent translations of French eyewitness material and for photocopying some hard-to-find sources for me in London.
Finally, once more I am deeply grateful to Rudy de Casseres in Finland, a superb Russianist, who read and commented on the text and helped me obtain some important research material in Russian, checking through many issues of the newspaper Novoe vremya for material for me – a task that defeated my eyesight.
In order to offer new insights on the revolution from previously uncited sources, I searched long and hard in forgotten books and online library and archive catalogues and was gratified to uncover a wealth of new material, particularly in US archives. Sadly, I was not able to use it all, but I would like to express my gratitude to the following archives and archivists for the material with which they so promptly and generously provided me: the Falers Library & Special Collections, New York; the Indiana Historical Society; the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Missouri History Museum, St Louis; the Library of Congress; the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, and Harvard University Archives. In California, Ron Basich once more sought out sources for me at the Hoover Institution and arranged for photocopies and scans. In all cases every attempt has been made to contact copyright holders for permission to quote material held in these archives.
During the writing of Caught in the Revolution I drew on a wealth of other material held in archives in the USA, which, although not quoted in this book, provided very useful background, and my thanks are due to: Carole Hsin at Yale; Robin Carlaw at Harvard; Dale Stieber at Occidental College; Lee Grady at the Wisconsin Historical Society; Karen Kukil at Smith College; Thomas Whittaker at the University of Chicago Library; and Tanya Chebotarev at the Bakhmeteff Archive.
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