Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  38. See Botchkareva, Yashka, 189–91.

  39. Dorr, ‘Marie Botchkareva, Leader of Soldiers’; Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 49.

  40. Harper, 170.

  41. Dissolution, 217; Vecchi, Tavern is My Drum, 79; Harper, 172.

  42. Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder, 314.

  43. Thompson, 274.

  44. Poutiatine, War and Revolution in Russia, 73–4.

  45. Patouillet, 1:147.

  46. Shepherd, ‘The Soul That Stirs in “Battalions of Death”’, Delineator, XCII:3, March 1918, 5.

  47. Harper, 173, 174; see Chapter X for the Women’s Death Battalion.

  48. See Botchkareva, Yashka, 217.

  49. Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder; Britannia, 3 August 1917.

  50. Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 37. Pankhurst relayed Yusupov’s version of events to Rheta Childe Dorr, who was one of the first to publish this account from the horse’s mouth.

  51. Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 53, 54.

  52. Mitchell, Women on the Warpath, 66.

  53. Harper, 163, 165, 166.

  54. Ibid., 180.

  55. Ibid., 187, 183.

  56. Ibid., 182, 192.

  57. Ibid. 253, 185; Francis, 145.

  58. Harper, 188, 189, 192.

  59. Rogers, 3:8, 87.

  60. Wright, 93.

  61. Ibid., 91.

  62. Gerda and Hermann Weber, Lenin, Life and Works, New York: Facts on File, 1980, 134.

  63. Harper, 254.

  11 ‘What Would the Colony Say if We Ran Away?’

  1. See Figes, People’s Tragedy, 396.

  2. Harper, 194–5.

  3. Harper, 199; Ransome, quoted in Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, 120.

  4. Harper, 202.

  5. Thompson, 284, 283. Morgan Philips Price also visited in June and wrote a piece published in the Manchester Guardian on 17 July, see Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, 103–10.

  6. Crosley, 79–80.

  7. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 419; Figes, People’s Tragedy, 426–8.

  8. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 25; Thompson, 288.

  9. Dissolution, 219; Mission, 152; Robien, 82.

  10. Dissolution, 220, and Petrograd, 134; Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘From the Petrograd Embassy’, 20, letter of 22/9 July.

  11. Robien, 83; Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie Soviétique, 65, has a drawing of de Buisseret’s motor car loaded down with heavily armed Bolsheviks. Thompson, 287.

  12. Nellie Thornton, ‘Englishwoman’s Experiences during the Russian Revolution’, 2–4.

  13. Garstin, ‘Denis Garstin and the Russian Revolution’, 593.

  14. Patin, Journal d’une institutrice française, 48.

  15. Stopford, 171; Poole, Dark People, 4, 5.

  16. Crosley, 90–2.

  17. Blunt, Lady Muriel, 109.

  18. Stopford, 175.

  19. The World, 19 July 1917, quoted in Hawkins, ‘Through War to Revolution with Dosch Fleurot’, 70–1.

  20. Harold Williams, Shadow of Tyranny, 57.

  21. New York Times despatch for 4/17 July in ibid., 57, 58–9.

  22. Poole, Dark People, 5.

  23. Poole, The Bridge, 276; Poole, Dark People, 8; see also Thompson, 296.

  24. Robien, 83.

  25. Beatty, 115.

  26. Ibid., 118.

  27. Robien, 83; Petrograd, 136.

  28. Harold Williams, Shadow of Tyranny, 63.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘From the Petrograd Embassy’, 21.

  31. Petrograd, 136–7.

  32. Dissolution, 222; Poole, The Bridge, 275.

  33. Beatty, 119, 121.

  34. Wright, 101.

  35. Rogers, 3:8, 98.

  36. Ibid., 3:8, 99–100.

  37. Dissolution, 222–3.

  38. Beatty, 122.

  39. Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 143.

  40. Francis, 137; Robien, 85.

  41. Rogers, 3:8, 101; Williams, 88.

  42. Francis, 138; See Chapter 6; P. N. Pereverzev, ‘Lenin, Ganetsy, I Ko. Shpiony!’, http://militera.lib.ru/research/sobolev_gl/06.html

  43. Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘From the Petrograd Embassy’, 21.

  44. Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 143.

  45. Barnes, 249, letter of 9/22 July.

  46. Stopford, 176.

  47. Dissolution, 225; Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘Letters from the Petrograd Embassy’, 21.

  48. Gerhardie, Memoirs of a Polyglot, 125.

  49. Mission, 154; Dissolution, 226; Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 174–5; Stopford, 177; Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘Letters from the Petrograd Embassy’, 21.

  50. Rogers, 3:8, 102–3.

  51. Thompson, 308, 309.

  52. Ibid., 312; Harper, ‘Thompson Risks Life’.

  53. Ransome, Despatch 184, 5 [18] July 1917.

  54. Williams, Shadow of Tyranny, 65.

  55. Knox, With the Russian Army, 662–3; Mission, 156.

  56. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 28.

  57. Thompson, 315; Francis, Russia from the American Embassy, 141.

  58. Overall about twenty Cossacks were killed and seventy wounded in the July Days; around a hundred horses were killed. See B.V. Nikitin, ‘Rokovye gody’ (Novye pokazaniya uchastnika), http://www.dk1868.ru/history/nikitin4.htm

  59. Stebbing, ‘From Czar to Bolshevik’, 44; Poole, The Bridge, 280.

  60. Beatty, 129; Crosley, 110–11; Poole, The Bridge, 280–1.

  61. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 32.

  62. Beatty, 130.

  63. Patin, Journal d’une institutrice française, 50.

  64. Robien, 90.

  65. Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 146.

  66. Beatty, 131.

  67. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 32–3, Poole, Dark People, 12.

  68. Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 74, 75.

  69. Ibid., 76.

  70. Kenney papers, JK/3/Mitchell/5, UEA, 20; Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 34.

  71. Cantacuzène, Revolutionary Days, 315.

  72. Crosley, 99–100.

  73. Ibid., 105. For the two militias operating in Petrograd, see Hasegawa, ‘Crime, Police, and Mob Justice’, 58–61.

  74. Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways in Diplomacy, 223; Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 29.

  75. Ransome, letter to his mother, 23 [10] July 1917.

  76. Thompson, 324.

  77. Ibid., 313.

  12 ‘This Pest-Hole of a Capital’

  1. Whipple, Petrograd diary, 133.

  2. Wightman, Diary of an American Physician, 64–5, 63.

  3. Robins, letter 13 [26] July, Falers Library.

  4. Beatty, 149. For Travis see ‘Tragedy and Comedy in Making Pictures of the Russian Chaos,’ Current Opinion, February 1918, 106.

  5. Wightman, Diary of an American Physician, 35.

  6. Whipple, ‘Chance for Young Americans’, Literary Digest, 26 January 1918, 47; Whipple, Petrograd diary, 85.

  7. Whipple, Petrograd diary, 79, 80–1.

  8. Ibid., 97; Wright, 111.

  9. Beatty, 146–7.

  10. Ibid., 147.

  11. Whipple, Petrograd diary, 90.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid., 95.

  14. Wightman, Diary of an American Physician, 38, 39, 41, 44.

  15. Letter 15 August, in Salzman, Reform and Revolution, 182.

  16. Letter 1/14 August, Falers Library; 5/18 August, Falers Library.

  17. Letter 9/22 August and 6/19 August, Falers Library.

  18. Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways of Diplomacy, 234.

  19. Robien, 100.

  20. See Pipes, People’s Tragedy, 448; Long, Russian Revolution Aspects, Chapter XIII.

  21. Beatty, 148.

  22. Fleurot, 174.

  23. Knox, 679.

  24. Mission, 171–2.

  25. John Sh
elton Curtiss, The Russian Revolutions of 1917, Malabar, FL: R. E. Krieger Publishing Co., 1957, 50.

  26. Rogers, 3:8, 139.

  27. Beatty, 153, 154, 155.

  28. Rogers, 3:8, 136.

  29. Beatty, 159; Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 143.

  30. Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 179.

  31. Francis, 162; Wright, 123.

  32. Salzman, Reform and Revolution, 193.

  33. Beatty, 156.

  34. Beatty, 157; Harper, 278–9, 280–1.

  35. Poole, An American Diplomat in Bolshevik Russia, 15–16; Gordon, Russian Year, 213.

  36. Lindley, untitled memoirs, 14–15.

  37. Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways in Diplomacy, 236.

  38. Crosley, 192, 193.

  39. Harper, 287.

  40. Foglesong, ‘Missouri Democrat’, 37; Francis, 160–1.

  41. Wright, 129.

  42. Crosley, 174; see also Wright, 108.

  43. Wright, 122.

  44. Crosley, 173-4; Wright, 121, 122.

  45. Woodhouse, FO 236/59/2258, 2 October.

  46. Bosanquet letters, 28 December 1916, 193; Jennifer Stead, ‘A Bradford Mill in St Petersburg’, Old West Riding, 2:2, Winter 1982, 20.

  47. Buchanan, Dissolution of an Empire, 242; Stebbing, From Czar to Bolshevik, 104.

  48. Robien, 104.

  49. Ibid., 123.

  50. Cantacuzène, Revolutionary Days, 352–3, 354; Crosley, 135–6.

  51. Pax, Journal d’une comédienne française, 77.

  52. Lubbock Morning Avalanche, 13 March 1919.

  53. Anet, 164; Cordasco (Woodhouse), online memoir.

  54. Crosley, 135–6; see also 197.

  55. Robien, 106; Crosley, 153.

  56. Robien, 106.

  57. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 297.

  58. Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 122.

  59. Harper, 162, 166.

  60. Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 127.

  61. Harper, 167; Kenney, ‘Price of Liberty’, 133.

  62. Harper, 167, 293. For Harper, Pankhurst and Kenney’s rail journey out of Russia, see Harper, Chapter XIX.

  63. Poole, The Bridge, 271.

  64. Morgan, Somerset Maugham, 227.

  65. Maugham, Writer’s Notebook, 137–8.

  66. Maugham, ‘Looking Back’, Part III, Show: The Magazines of the Arts, 2, 1962, 95.

  67. Hastings, Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 226.

  68. Hugh Walpole, ‘Literary Close Ups’, Vanity Fair, 13, January 1920, 47.

  69. Hastings, Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 227.

  70. For Reed’s career prior to Petrograd, see Bassow, Moscow Correspondents, 22–5; Service, Spies and Commissars, 50–4; Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia; Seldes, Witness to a Century, 42–5.

  71. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia, 75.

  72. Bryant, 21, xi.

  13 ‘For Color and Terror and Grandeur This Makes Mexico Look Pale’

  1. Bryant, 19–20.

  2. Fuller, Letters, 16.

  3. Fuller, Journal, 7, 8–9.

  4. See Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary, 289.

  5. Francis, 167, 168, 165–6.

  6. Rogers, 3:9, 147.

  7. Homberger, John Reed, 105; Williams, 22.

  8. See Williams, 30–1.

  9. Ibid., 35, 36.

  10. Francis, 169.

  11. Fuller, Journal, 15.

  12. Rogers, 3:10, 241. George F. Kennan, who was a friend of Reed and was interviewed for Warren Beatty’s 1981 film Reds, agreed that Reed could be ‘inconsiderate, intolerant, needlessly offensive . . . he could be grievously wrong about many things’. But there he was, with all that energy, in the centre of things in Petrograd, ‘flaming like a human torch with its contagious enthusiasm, absorbing into his youthful frame the immense, incipient antagonism that was eventually to separate two great people and to devastate his own life and so many others. His was one American way of reacting to the Revolution. It deserves to be neither forgotten nor ridiculed.’ Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 68, 69.

  13. Bryant, 25.

  14. Ibid., 42, 43, 37.

  15. Ibid., 39–40.

  16. Gordon, Russian Year, 219.

  17. See Pax, Journal d’une comédienne française, 43–6. Pax had actually returned to France for several months.

  18. Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways in Diplomacy, 227; Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia, 44; see also Reed, 38–40.

  19. Reed, 61.

  20. Gordon, Russian Year, 219.

  21. Brun, Troublous Times, 2.

  22. Rogers, 3:9, 159.

  23. Harold Williams diary, quoted in Tyrkova-Williams, Cheerful Giver, 193.

  24. Maugham, Writer’s Notebook, 145.

  25. Ibid., 146.

  26. Ransome report to Daily News, quoted in Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, 174.

  27. Williams, Shadow of Tyranny, 125; Wright, 130.

  28. Brogan, Life of Arthur Ransome, 144, 145.

  29. Maugham, Writer’s Notebook, 150.

  30. Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, 177.

  31. Williams, Shadow of Tyranny, 28; published in New York Times, 6 October NS.

  32. Mission, 188–9.

  33. Salzman, Reform and Revolution, 197.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Mission, 191; see also Robien, 121.

  36. Wright, 129.

  37. Mission, 193; Robien, 122.

  38. Hastings, Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 228.

  39. Rogers, 3:9, 149, 148; Patouillet, 2:194. For the return of the Salvation Army to Petrograd, see Aitken, Blood and Fire, Tsar and Commissar, Chapter 8: ‘1917: A Transient Freedom’.

  40. Cantacuzène, Revolutionary Days, 352–3.

  41. Destrée, Les Fondeurs de la neige, 27.

  42. Ibid.

  43. Bruce, Silken Dalliance, 163; Reed’s experience was also described in Madeleine Doty’s Behind the Battle Line, 46. Doty, a Greenwich Village friend of Louise Bryant and a trained lawyer, arrived in Petrograd in November 1917, returning to the USA with Bryant and Beatty the following January.

  44. Reinke, ‘Getting On Without the Czar’, 12.

  45. Crosley, 190.

  46. Wright, 129.

  47. Bryant, 67.

  48. Fleurot, 177.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Rogers, 3:9, 162.

  51. Ibid., 162–3.

  52. Gordon, Russian Year, 217–18.

  53. Bryant, 120.

  54. Hastings, Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 230.

  55. Mission, 196.

  56. Maugham, Writer’s Notebook, 150; Reed’s verdict on Kerensky, quoted in John Hohenburg, Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times, Columbia University Press, 1995, 105.

  57. Mission, 201; Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie, 116.

  58. Fuller, Journal, 18–19.

  59. Rogers, 3:9, 154.

  60. Ibid., 155–6; Fuller, Journal, 20.

  61. Cordasco (Woodhouse), online memoir.

  62. Francis, 169–70.

  63. Bliss, ‘Philip Jordan’s Letters from Russia’, 142–3.

  64. Rogers, 3:9, 164, 167. For a description of the flat, see Fuller, Journal, 47.

  65. Wright, 141.

  66. Williams, 87–8.

  14 ‘We Woke Up to Find the Town in the Hands of the Bolsheviks’

  1. Fuller, Journal, 23.

  2. Ibid., 26

  3. Rogers, 3:9, 186.

  4. Ibid., 187.

  5. Ibid., 186.

  6. Ibid., 187.

  7. Ibid., 188–9.

  8. Ibid., 189.

  9. Ibid., 190.

  10. Ibid., 190–1.

  11. Ibid., 191.

  12. Lindley letter, entry for 25 October, LRA, MS 1372/1.

  13. Beatty, 179–80.

  14. Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 180.

  15. Petrograd, 187–8, 190.

  16. See Pipes, Russian Revolution, 489, 495; Fige
s, People’s Tragedy, 486.

  17. Nostitz, Romance and Revolutions, 193.

  18. Reed, 91, 92.

  19. Knox, With the Russian Army, 712. For descriptions of the Smolny at this time, see: Gordon, Russian Year, 231–2; Reed, 54–5, 76–7, 96–9; Doty, Behind the Battle Line, 74–6; see also Robien, 140–1.

  20. Reed, 87.

  21. Williams, 128–9.

  22. Doty, Behind the Battle Line, 76.

  23. Reed, 73.

  24. According to the History of the Times, Vol. 4, 146, ‘very few correspondents’ witnessed any of these events during the night; in fact most of what happened during 24–6 October was little reported as it occurred, because of the impossibility of getting telegraphed reports out. Before he left, The Times’s own Petrograd correspondent, Robert Wilton, had warned of a second impending revolution. See Philip Knightley, The First Casualty, London: Quartet, 1978, 138.

  25. For accounts of this episode, see: Wright, 143; Gordon, Russian Year, 254–5; Barnes, 266–7; Francis, 179; see also Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 71–2.

  26. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 492.

  27. Williams, 100–1.

  28. lbid., 101, 102, 103.

  29. Reed, 98.

  30. Beatty, 193.

  31. Reed, 100.

  32. Beatty, 202.

  33. Williams, 11; Bryant, 83.

  34. Beatty, 204; Reed, 105.

  35. Bryant, 84–6.

  36. Beatty, 210; Bryant, 86.

  37. Beatty, 210; Bryant, 86–7; Rhys Williams, 119; Reed, 108.

  38. Bryant, 87; Beatty, 211; Williams, 119.

  39. Beatty, 212, 213, 215.

  40. Williams, 122; see also Bryant, 88; Reed, 109.

  41. Fuller, Journal, 29.

  42. Crosley, 202, 200.

  43. Ibid., 204.

  44. Bruce, Silken Dalliance, 163–4.

  45. Crosley, 208.

  46. Nostitz, Romance and Revolutions, 195–6; see also Stites, Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, 299–300; Tyrkova-Williams, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk, 256–9.

  47. Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 183.

  48. Dissolution, 251; Brun, Troublous Times, 14.

  49. Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 183; Crosley, 209, 210.

  50. Robien, 136.

  51. Cantacuzène, Revolutionary Days, 413.

  52. Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 183; Dissolution, 251.

  53. Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, 184; Dissolution, 251; Knox, With the Russian Army, 713.

  54. Tyrkova-Williams, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk, 25.

  55. Williams, 126, 129.

  56. Reed, 128.

  57. Williams, 130.

  58. Oudendyk, Ways and By-ways in Diplomacy, 241.