The American missionary and theologian Jarred Scudder arrived during the general strike. He was struck by the glut of warships in the Neva delta and found the capital ‘like a giant fort with mammoth cannon pointing out to sea’. Since its first days, St Petersburg had been a city full of uniforms – now it was a city mobilised. The ‘steady tramp of soldiers could be heard at all hours’ and anti-German fever ran high, as Russia was threatened by the expansionist ambitions of the impatient and blustering Kaiser Wilhelm II. Excited mobs rolled through the streets, destroying German shop fronts and looting stock as the authorities turned a blind eye. Scudder was booked into the German-owned Astoria Hotel and was greeted in a profoundly guttural French that would have fooled nobody. A mob sacked the German Embassy, recently designed by Peter Behrens on the far side of St Isaac’s Square. They rampaged for two hours before the fire brigade arrived to hose down the crowd. Anxious that the Astoria would be the next target, Scudder decamped to the American Embassy, where he found a mass of hysterical Germans seeking asylum. Having made an important contribution to Peter’s city, these inhabitants were losing what it had taken them decades to achieve.71 As for Yiddish-speaking Jews, they were doubtless treasonous and were therefore arrested and shot.
On 28 June, the Serbian agent Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Austria would take revenge and wanted German support, knowing that Russia would intervene. France would help Russia. Britain would help France. European war. The tsar celebrated a Te Deum in the Winter Palace, appeared on the balcony, and 25,000 patriots fell to their knees. Having been rent by domestic strife, would Russia now unite in combat against Germany? Production was stepped up. Huge contracts landed on the desks of industrialists such as Putilov, Lessner and Lebedev. Orders for 700 field guns, telephone and telegraphy equipment, aircraft engines and millions of shells sent factories into overdrive.72 In a powerful and didactic sequence in his masterly celluloid polemic The End of St Petersburg, Vsevolod Pudovkin revealed the interdependence of capital and carnage as exploding shells on the Russian front sent the stock of Putilov, Lessner and Lebedev soaring. He left the viewer in no doubt about what Russian soldiers were dying for: ‘Tsar, homeland, CAPITAL.’ In the smoke and smog-filled air of St Petersburg, the working day – that is, every day of the week – was extended to up to twelve hours in machine plants and thirteen hours in textile mills. Accidents multiplied in the insufferable heat, and inflation devoured rotten wages. The German-sounding Peterhof became Petrodvorets, and Petersburg became Petrograd. Meanwhile – as Nabokov observed ‘Beethoven turned out to be Dutch.’73
In the first five months of the First World War, Russia lost nearly two million men. During the bitter winter of 1914-15, shortages of food and fuel at home began to impinge. Meriel Buchanan remembers that when the hot-water pipes burst in the British Embassy – housed in a palace built by Catherine the Great for her favourite, Sergei Saltikov guests were obliged to sit wrapped up in their fur coats. They were the lucky ones. On the streets, the crowds and flags disappeared, lines for bread and milk lengthened, and wives and parents clustered round shop windows on the Nevsky where the telegrams of death were posted.74 As the Germans advanced in the summer of 1915, trainloads of soldiers – thousands, daily – were carried to the front while the wounded, along with countless refugees, flooded into the capital.75 Shanty towns sprung up. Petrograd reverted to the uncertainties of St Petersburg’s earliest days.
A soup kitchen was started by the ladies of the British Embassy. They held sewing parties and started a relief fund.76 A British Convalescent Home on Vasilevsky Island and an Anglo-Russian hospital on the Nevsky were supervised by the ambassador’s wife. The Americans opened an orphanage, and the empress set up a hospital in the Winter Palace with well over a hundred beds crammed into the Nicholas Hall. Alexandre Benois visited the dimly lit wards and saw, elsewhere in the palace, that the decorations added by Nicholas and Alexandra revealed ‘an outstanding lack of taste’.77
Fokine remained ballet master at the Mariinsky throughout the war. There were new productions for which people queued long hours in all weather, watching the latest recruits bayonet hay-stuffed dummies as they drilled in Teatralnaya Square. The ballet audience appeared grimmer and greyer – gone were the splendid uniforms and exotic frocks.78 After a performance, Karsavina recalled that artists congregated at the Stray Dog, a brashly decorated, cramped and clubby cabaret. There was dancing. There were satirical sketches tumbling over one another in anarchic delight. There were talks, discussions and debates. On Monday evenings – continuing the tradition of Nurok and Nouvel’s Contemporary Music society – the Stray Dog presented serious concerts.79 Diaghilev wrote asking Karsavina to join the Ballets Russes in a tour of America. She protested that she neither could nor would: ‘In the great sadness of those years I would not of my own accord have missed a day.’ As for Diaghilev, he brought everything the Nevsky Prospekt had taught him to a thoroughgoing understanding of Broadway. He chided Americans for their inappropriate nostalgia for European elegance, when he – who helped shape modernism – knew the importance of the flashiness and brashness of the Great White Way: ‘It is time the American people realised themselves. Broadway is genuine.’ It offered the multitude of absurd impressions that had surprised Gogol on the Nevsky Prospekt: a hairdo, a hat, a nose, a tart, an overcoat, a sign, a jolt, a jostle – speed, rhythm, razzamatazz. Diaghilev loved it: Broadway was the Nevsky run riot. For all its backwardness and incoherence, Russia was making waves in a new age in the new world. Diaghilev spoke to the New York Times about his 1905 portrait exhibition at the Tauride: ‘It has always seemed wonderful to me that in the same year the portraits of the nobility went out of the Palais, the Duma, representative of the people, came in.’80 So Karsavina stayed in Petrograd, danced and enjoyed the company of artists revitalised by the uncertainties of the future. She was also lucky enough to savour the delights of a rapidly vanishing order. She often dined with Maurice Paléologue, the French Ambassador – on one occasion at an early hour, so guests could enjoy the sunset over the Neva. It was, she recalled ‘a charming party; the sunset alone failed’.81 A few years and a different world later, the poet Osip Mandelstam dreamed that
We shall meet again, in Petersburg, as though we had buried the sun there.82
Outside the theatres, palaces and embassies, the warm autumn of 1916 grew ‘feverish’ with ‘richly coloured gossip’, food riots grew in ‘frequency and scale’ and public meetings were forbidden.83 Meriel Buchanan noted that Empress Alexandra’s ‘stiffness and aloofness . . . alienated all circles and the court of Russia’. It was rumoured, she wrote, that the ‘Empress trafficked with Germans’ and ‘everywhere the slander spread and ripened . . . The German influence at court! . . . The power of Rasputin!84 There was hearsay that the grand duchesses were smuggling gold to Germany in coffins that allegedly contained corpses.85 In November 1916, the tsar was forced to replace Boris Sturmer, because the prime minister had a German name. There would be a cascade of prime ministers as the country tumbled towards revolution. Sturmer was replaced by Alexander Trepov, whose father had been shot by Vera Zasulich and whose older brother – during the troubles of 1905 – became notorious for instructing his troops not to spare bullets. Infiltrating bread queues, German agents were stirring the hungry and disaffected against the war. The danger of the unholy coalition – the German-born empress and the degenerate Rasputin – pushed the powerful and the responsible into plots. A troika attempted to kill Rasputin.86 A motor car hit his sleigh and overturned it. He survived. A story circulated that the reprobate was bragging about his sexual encounters with the royal family when a shocked Prince Yusupov offered his pistol, for Rasputin to do the decent thing. Rasputin turned it on Yusupov – but missed. The killing of the healer was, in fact, less spontaneous.87
The Yusupov Mansion on the Moika, with its elegant rotunda, its Moresque salon, its jewel of a theatre, its furniture once owned by Marie-Antoinette and its gallery full
of paintings by Watteau, Fragonard and Rembrandt, was the home of the fabulously wealthy transvestite Felix Yusupov. Married to the tsar’s niece, Irina, the slight Prince Felix was an accomplished cross-dresser. He had been thrilled to be ogled by Edward VII in Paris, and also got his kicks from tarting with Nevsky prostitutes. When he returned from studying at Oxford in 1909, he had consulted Rasputin about his sexuality. The holy man gave Yusupov advice and attempted to debauch him. Seven years later, the prince was in the visitors’ gallery of the Duma when he heard the URP leader, Vladimir Purishkevich, railing against Rasputin. Together they hatched a conspiracy.
On 16 December 1916, Yusupov lured the healer to his mansion, perhaps with the promise of pimping his wife. Six cakes containing potassium cyanide, along with poisoned wine, were prepared. At first Rasputin – who was invited for a hot night out – refused this modest hospitality and, in the absence of the beautiful Irina, suggested going to a nightclub. As Yusupov procrastinated, his guest started to nibble the cakes and sip the wine, but they appeared to have no effect, and the impatient Yusupov went to fetch his Browning. Bored by the lack of action, Rasputin insisted, once again, on a night out. Yusupov suggested that he should rather pray, and then shot him. Rasputin slumped, then revived and broke out of the mansion, with Purishkevich hard on his heels, shooting at him. It was 4 a.m. Soldiers passing came to investigate and expressed their relief at the murder. Heavily bound and weighted, Rasputin was dumped through a hole in the ice near the Petrovsky Bridge. As the news spread across the capital, people rejoiced. Strangers embraced. Cabbies refused tips. One of the conspirators was given a standing ovation at the theatre.88 Then, on the 19th, the body was recovered. In spite of the distress of the empress, the tsar was advised not to punish the assassins. Alexander Kerensky, who would lead Russia’s post-imperial Provisional Government, suggested – mistakenly – that the murder would strengthen the monarchy. The British Ambassador thought the assassination, ‘though prompted by patriotic motives, was a fatal mistake. It made the Empress more determined than ever to be firm, and it set a dangerous example, for it prompted people to translate their thoughts into action.’89
The action had started long ago. It began with Radishchev and Herzen and Chernyshevsky and gathered strength in the salons, garrets and open spaces of St Petersburg. It intensified when Dmitri Karakozov fired six shots at Nicholas II. Vera Figner and her friends raised the pitch of protest to regicide when they blew the emperor to kingdom come. Action simmered on factory floors and rocked the capital with protest and revolution in 1905. It gathered strength as Russia went to war and the empire was abandoned to Alexandra and Rasputin. So it was hardly surprising that, by February 1917, Kokovtsov felt everybody ‘sensed that something extraordinary was about to happen but no one had any clear idea what it would be’.90 Weariness with the war was undermining well-being. Shortages of basic food had become more acute over the previous months. Alexander Kerensky, the lawyer and politician who was soon to play a key role in the first of the two 1917 revolutions, noted that for the women queuing for whatever food was available, hunger was ‘becoming the only tsar’. Prices rose steeply and, on the morning of 23 February, workers in a textile mill in the Vyborg district downed tools in desperation. It was International Women’s Day, temperatures rose and people took to the streets, clamouring for bread. That evening, bakers were looted in the poorer quarters, and Cossacks went thundering down the Nevsky to protect the celebrated patisserie Filipov, which was besieged for its chocolate cakes and tarts.91 Meriel Buchanan thought it hardly surprising that the Bolshevik promise of ‘Bread – Peace – and Freedom’ should have tempted a people who were uneducated and untaught, and worn out by three years of untold suffering. David Francis, who had arrived in the capital nearly a year earlier ‘as Ambassador from the greatest Republic of the New World to the Court of the mightiest Autocracy of the Old’, heard of German agitators stirring unrest among those in the long lines ‘waiting to be served small amounts of sugar or meat in the shops where such things are distributed’.
By 25 February, the protest had taken on the dimensions of a general strike – 270,000 workers in 2,000 enterprises had downed tools, and students came out in support. Tram drivers and cabbies, vulnerable to attack by angry mobs, stopped working. The following day, people from all walks of life – from domestics to civil servants-joined the uprising. In Znamenskaya Square tension rose steadily throughout the icy afternoon until, once again, a Sunday became bloody and fifty demonstrators were shot. Nicholas, safely at Tsarskoe Selo with his family, was alerted. But what could he do? The Pavlovsky Regiment of the imperial guard mutinied and the rebellion spread, the following day, to the Semyonovsky Guards.92
Posters went up everywhere banning demonstrations – those who did not return to work the following day would be sent to the front. A few streets from the American Embassy, the cook to the commercial attaché was traumatised as he witnessed a sabre severing a policeman’s head. Sharp fragments of ice were hurled at the police on the street. Some officers, firing from windows and rooftops, prompted students and soldiers to break into the buildings where they nested and drag the snipers out into the street for public execution.93 Machine guns spat into the Sunday strollers on the Nevsky, sending them scattering down Mikhailovskaya Street out of the line of fire. In the rout, as motor cars accelerated and horse-drawn sledges galloped, people were hit and children trampled to death – ‘nearly a hundred unarmed people were shot down’.94
On Monday 27th, Kokovtsov was walking his dog along Mokhovaya Street in the early afternoon when bullets, once again, began to fly. It proved to be a decisive day. The law courts on Liteiny Prospekt, and police stations across the city, were set ablaze. Cossacks refused to face down the crowds. Meriel Buchanan, arriving back from holiday in Finland, was met by English officers in full uniform. Their embassy car was stopped at a barricade, but was eventually allowed to pass. Once safely home on the banks of the Neva, the ambassador’s daughter was not allowed to leave and sat listening to the rattle of machine guns. Her father was at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when General Alfred Knox telephoned from the embassy with news that a large part of the Petersburg garrison had mutinied and was in control of the Liteiny Prospekt.95 By the evening, the Duma in the Tauride Palace was occupied by a mob of students, workmen and renegade soldiers, who were joining the people in droves. An announcement was made to the huge crowd outside. A Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet Workers’ Deputies was created, operating from rooms of the Duma Budget Commission. They issued a declaration in Izvestia Zhurnalistov, the sole paper published on 27 February, appealing for representatives of workers, soldiers and the people of Petrograd to attend a meeting in the Duma premises that evening. At about midnight, a bedraggled figure in a soiled fur coat wandered in and declared, ‘I am the late Minister of the Interior, Protopopov. I desire the welfare of our country, and so I surrender myself voluntarily.’ Despite the fact that he was a ‘follower of Rasputin and certainly not quite sane’,96 Protopopov’s capitulation signalled the end of the old order.
On Tuesday 28 February, fighting continued as prisons were sacked and inmates were liberated. The Admiralty surrendered, under threat of bombardment from soldiers sympathetic to the revolution who were positioned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The house of Count Fredericks – a close friend to the tsar – was looted and torched. When the servants tried to lead the count’s horses from the burning stables, they were ordered to lead them back and barricade the animals inside.97 On 2 March, Nicholas abdicated in favour of his brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail, who was ‘to govern in full union with the national representatives sitting in the Legislative Institutions . . . May God help Russia.’98 On 3 March, the emperor-of-a-day abdicated, asking people ‘to obey the Provisional Government . . . until, within as short a time as possible, the Constituent Assembly, elected on a basis of universal, equal and secret suffrage, shall express the will of the nation regarding the form of government to be adopted’. Co
lonel Romanov, aka Nicholas II, was placed under guard at Tsarkoe Selo and advised to flee the country. He refused.99 The long final sequence of Alexander Sokurov’s film Russian Ark presents a moving requiem. After the most exuberant and spirited Winter Palace ball, the music stops and the guests in their gaudy regalia start down the Jordan staircase, mumbling unintelligible social noise as people do when they leave a party. Some of them are clearly bewildered as if they sense they are about to face a struggle between desperate, sometimes ignorant and often misled people, people who would fumble through the dark aftermath of autocracy. As the camera travels through a palace window to the misty Neva, the observation – ‘the sea is all around’ – dissolves imperial Petersburg into the marshy shore that preceded its founder.
The British Ambassador noted that the government, ‘by ordering the troops to fire on the people . . . fanned the prevailing discontent into a blaze that spread with lightning speed over the whole town’.100 Socialist propaganda – aided by German agents intent on knocking Russia out of the war – was effective among soldiers in their barracks and workers in their factories. The violence continued. In early March, soldiers forced entry to the chapel where Rasputin’s coffin lay, and measured his penis. Under orders from Kerensky, they were to remove the body and bury it in an unmarked grave. When their lorry broke down and a crowd gathered, it was decided to cremate the corpse without its penis – if later claims are to be believed. As for Prince Yusupov, he fled the revolution with two Rembrandts and a collection of snuff boxes, and charged his coffers with a defamation suit against MGM and their film Rasputin and the Empress a victory that prompted Hollywood’s obsessive use of disclaimers. As for Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, she became a lion-tamer in the USA.101
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