In Petrograd, old tsarist officials were under guard and under threat. Kokovtsov was abducted on the way to the bank by a group who commandeered a car and paraded him along the Nevsky, shouting that here was ‘the former tsarist minister, the thief, Count Kokovtsov caught red-handed dragging from the bank a million roubles with which to rescue the tsar’. After the incident, the Kokovtsovs were assigned live-in guards to monitor them day and night.102
At the end of March, the American Ambassador became the first authority to recognise the Provisional Government that had been established on II March. The man who came to be its leader after the July disturbances, Alexander Kerensky, was short and of an ‘extremely nervous temperament’. By sheer coincidence, he had attended the same school in Simbirsk on the Volga as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.103 Miscalculating that the soviet movement would implode, Kerensky’s short-lived government would be toppled by that childhood acquaintance, who – by October 1917 – had become, as Lenin, the Chairman of the People’s Commissars. In the meantime, under the Provisional Government, by early April a semblance of order had returned to the capital. Factories were back at work, but producing less. Dancers and singers at the Mariinsky performed, its auditorium stripped of imperial eagles, its ushers wearing greasy jackets, its audience including workers.
Diaghilev’s troupe was performing at the Teatro Constanzi in Rome when Kerensky took power, and the impresario was summoned home to become Minister of the Fine Arts – an offer he refused. A more immediate problem was that the troupe could no longer use the tsarist national anthem as a curtain-raiser, and Stravinsky sat up all night orchestrating that dirge of serfdom, ‘The Volga Boatmen’, which Mily Balakirev included in his 1860s collection of folk songs. Later, in Paris, when it was sung and the red flag was unfurled onstage before a performance of The Firebird, Le Figaro took exception. Diaghilev tartly retorted, ‘In Russia today the red flag is the emblem of those who recognise that the well-being of the world depends on the freedom of its people.’104
As America entered the war, Germany deployed a secret weapon to disrupt the Russian effort. They allowed Lenin and thirty Bolshevik comrades to speed across their territory in a sealed train in order to reach Russia. Arriving in Petrograd on 3 April, Lenin was smuggled in an armoured car to the Kschessinskaya mansion, which he occupied with the help of sympathetic troops. From a small kiosk in the garden, the Bolshevik leader stirred the population against the war and the bourgeois government. He wanted peace and the transfer of power to the soviets. He would no longer accept the Menshevik vision that communism would be achieved through the present bourgeois revolution. In his ‘April Theses’, Lenin declared his contempt for a Provisional Government that comprised ‘capitalists and landlords’, and he encouraged Bolsheviks to struggle to transfer power to the soviets. Opposite the mansion was the Cirque Moderne, which could hold up to 10,000 spectators and – although badly lit and gloomy – was ideal for revolutionary meetings.105 As a result of such gatherings, and of urgent canvassing in factories and on the streets, the Bolsheviks raised their membership fortyfold between the spring of 1917 and the October Revolution. May Day celebrations brought the centre of Petrograd to a standstill, with the peaceful demonstration of thousands of socialists, demanding bread and peace, waving red flags and singing the ‘Marseillaise’. But Lenin’s strategy of street manifestations failed to deliver these demands, and in early July the streets were, once again, covered in blood. After a peaceful Bolshevik march, the government decided to ban demonstrations and appealed to the Cossacks to disperse the crowds. A lorry full of revolutionary Kronstadt sailors with a machine gun mounted at the rear retaliated by gunning down a cavalcade of Cossacks approaching Liteiny Bridge, scattering bodies over four blocks. In the ‘driving rain . . . the street was . . . running with blood’.106 On 3 July, soldiers of the First Machine Gun Regiment – refusing to be sent to the front – came out on the streets in aid of the soviet cause. Thousands of workers joined them, as did 20,000 Kronstadt sailors. When Kerensky ordered a severe response to the Bolshevik insurrection, Lenin fled to Finland.
Troops of the Provisional Government firing on peaceful demonstrators, 4 July 1917.
A sometime Menshevik who had come over to the Bolsheviks was briefly arrested. According to Raymond Robbins, head of the American Red Cross Mission, Leon Trotsky was ‘a poor kind of a son of a bitch but the greatest Jew since Christ’.107 After four days of detention, Trotsky was released and cunningly prepared for a coup under the cover of the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which would become the supreme governing body of the country after the socialist revolution. By the time Lenin returned to a Petrograd suburb, bread rations had fallen yet again and sugar was ‘a perhaps’. From Catherine the Great’s sceptre on the statue fronting the Alexandrinsky Theatre, a tiny red flag waved.108
Although Kerensky styled himself the man ‘to save Russia’, Sir George Buchanan suggested that the Provisional Government ‘lost a unique opportunity of putting down the Bolsheviks once and for all after the disturbances’ in July. As a measure of how things had changed, when Buchanan and fellow ambassadors were invited to the opera, they were introduced to the surprising occupants of the royal box: Vera Figner and Vera Zasulich – heroines of the long struggle against autocracy.109
During August, the Romanov family were removed to Tobolsk in Siberia, in case the Bolsheviks prevailed or the German army pushed through. Red propaganda was making an impact in the trenches, and deserters were streaming into Petrograd. To stop everything falling apart, General Lavr Kornilov – the former tsarist Chief of Staff, whom Kerensky appointed Commander-in-Chief – advanced on the capital to mount a coup. His intention was to set up a military dictatorship or perhaps even restore the monarchy. Railway workers refused to transport his troops, and workers and the Red Guard turned out to defend the city. The attempt disintegrated and Kornilov was placed under arrest. Meanwhile, people worried about the chance of bombardment from the sea. The late-summer German advance on Riga, and its fall, threw Petrograd into panic. Women and children from the British colony were evacuated. State archives were to be moved to Moscow and there was talk of government relocation. Barges were loaded with official documents and ciphers – one was packed with such enthusiasm that it sank under the weight of the infamous tsarist paperwork. More than 800 crates were prepared to ship Hermitage treasures to the safety of the Moscow Kremlin. Two trains departed over the following weeks, but a third was prevented by the upsets of late October.110
Kerensky appealed to the people to support his government and, in desperation, on 24 October the printing presses of several Bolshevik papers were seized. But it was too late. The initiative had passed into the hands of the revolutionaries. Soldiers insulted the police. Cossacks killed policemen. A crowd beat a soldier to death in the street for stealing.111
On 25 October, at about eight on a raw morning, the cruiser Aurora – which had survived the Strait of Tsushima – arrived from Kronstadt, manned by sailors sympathetic to the revolution. On the streets of Petrograd there was sporadic gunfire, but the military were increasingly going over to the Bolsheviks. Motor cars used by members of the government were vandalised or appropriated – though Kerensky, borrowing an American flag from one of the secretaries at the US Embassy, went off under diplomatic cover to muster the troops and master the situation. The following day, 26 October, delegates from the revolutionary committee, backed by armoured cars, came to the Winter Palace to demand an unconditional surrender. There was no reply and at about nine o’clock the Aurora fired a blank over the Neva.112
Karsavina was performing that night. The audience was sparse and only one-fifth of the company was dancing. Afterwards she was on her way to dine in the Millionnaya when machine guns started to rattle, and the dancer worried that she might get it in the leg. After dinner, while walking home, she saw someone shot and tumble into the gently falling snow.113 When people awoke on 27 October 1917, the city was white; the government was red.
; PART III
COMRADES & CITIZENS
1917–2017
12
RED PETROGRAD
1917–21
If the city was surprisingly quiet, the Smolny was buzzing.
Quarenghi’s gracious Palladian Institute for Noble Maidens had been requisitioned by the Petrograd soviet to function as the nerve centre of their revolution. Messengers clutching urgent despatches and porters staggering under large bundles of propaganda bumped along sporadically lit corridors thick with cigarette smoke. Crudely lettered placards, slung on doors to former classrooms, signalled the new scheme of things: ‘Union of Socialist Soldiers’, ‘Central Committee of the Petrograd Soviet’. According to eyewitness reporter John Reed, the huge meeting hall – freezing, since fuel ran short – was now baking with ‘the stifling heat of unwashed human bodies’ in feverish debate. A Harvard-educated radical with the eagerness of an excited puppy, Reed was convinced that Petrograd was about to spark world revolution. His celebrated account, Ten Days that Shook the World – as partisan as Eisenstein’s film October – offers a spirited picture of the first days of the revolution.
Reed’s wife, fellow reporter Louise Bryant, was also in the Smolny. She rejoiced at the sound of typewriters clicking in a hundred rooms and marvelled at the meetings of soviets from across Russia. Delegates who had never spoken in public before came mud-covered and blood-spattered from the trenches to make impassioned pleas to the assembly,1
The American Embassy in Petrograd ‘regarded Mr Reed as a suspicious character and had him watched’. They found out that he was a socialist who ‘believes that the workmen can manage the factories themselves’2 – anathema to the representatives of a robustly capitalist republic. Reed was exultant as he watched the drama of October 1917 gather speed. Kerensky made his last desperate appeal for support from the Russian people on 11 October, the day before the Petrograd soviet formed a Military Revolutionary Committee to direct their insurrection. On the days leading up to the revolution there were pockets of Bolshevik agitation scattered around the country and in Petrograd, on 22 October, there was a major fund-raising drive: the Day of the Petrograd Soviet.3 On the 23rd, Reed recorded that ‘two thousand Red Guards tramped down the Zagorodny Prospekt behind a military band playing the Marseillaise’, ‘blood red flags’ held aloft. All the ‘business men, speculators, investors, landowners, army officers, politicians, teachers, students, professional men, shopkeepers’ and clerks were against them. On ‘the side of the Soviets were the rank and file of the workers’.4
Overnight on 24 October, the Military Revolutionary Committee instructed Red Guards to seize key institutions: army garrisons, railway stations and Lvov’s Central Post Office on Pochtamtskaya Street. Volunteers drawn from factories and the military, the Red Guard were detailed to use force to protect soviet power. They would later become part of the Red Army founded under Trotsky’s leadership. A Women’s Battalion had been created to to set an example of courage to male troops reluctant to attack the enemy. When they assembled in Palace Square to leave for the front, the Red Guards dispersed them and – like the 1880 bomber, Stephan Khalturin, with his dynamite and detonating agents – wandered into the palace through the service entrance. Apprehending members of the Provisional Government, they took possession without violence. Some started to pilfer, and both Bryant and Reed recorded the reproaches of optimistic revolutionaries standing at the threshold of decency and fairness: ‘Comrades, this is the people’s palace. This is our palace.’5 ‘Comrades! Don’t take anything. This is the property of the people.’6 In Pudovkin’s 1927 film, The End of St Petersburg, the wife of one of the comrades arrives at the palace with what was to have been a hot meal for her husband. She carries an empty pot because she has distributed its contents to other hungry Red Guards. The revolution was more important than family ties.
Others had a different take on the events. Sir George Buchanan recorded that soldiers and workers ‘looted and smashed whatever they could lay their hands on’. As for the Women’s Battalion, Buchanan sent General Knox to obtain their release from a barracks ‘where they were being most brutally treated by the soldiers’.7 Marta Almedingen heard ‘grim stories’ about lamp posts ‘decorated with policemen’.8 Anarchists and opportunists armed themselves, seized some of the best houses and lived by mob rule. Members of the Provisional Government narrowly escaped a lynching as they were escorted from the palace to the Peter and Paul Fortress.9 Robert Bruce Lockhart recalled that Moisei Uritsky – later chief of the Petrograd Cheka – was ‘pulled from his sleigh by bandits, stripped of all his clothes, and left to continue his journey in a state of nudity’. Meriel Buchanan’s car was stopped by a shot from Red Guards who wanted to commandeer the vehicle. With a pistol pressed to his temple, an embassy official protested that the car was British. He prevailed and they drove home. Bruce Lockhart never went out alone, never ventured far and kept his finger on the trigger of the pistol in his pocket.10 People lived in terror of a motor car without lights, which toured the city intermittently, machine-gunning at random. The British Ambassador was told by his doctor that he ‘was at the end of his tether’ as friends arrived ‘to take refuge in the embassy’. Their own cellars had been ‘occupied by soldiers who were indulging in indiscriminate firing’. Theft and murder were ‘becoming common everyday proceedings’.11
A Red Guard picket in the Smolny courtyard, 11 October 1917.
During December, wine cellars and storage depots in the city were ransacked. Bolshevik militias were sent to arrest pillaging workers in the Winter Palace. Some of them took to the priceless vintages and became too drunk to carry out their duty. Thousands of bottles were broken or smashed on the Neva’s ice, to prevent rioters drowning in alcohol. Armed tenants mounted guard in halls and courtyards twenty-four hours a day. Cashiers and shopkeepers were murdered for the meagre contents of a till, and more and more shops were boarded up. Gangs found rich pickings in the vacant apartments of the bourgeoisie. When sailors, soldiers and police raided the thieves’ den near the Obvodnovo Canal, they uncovered a staggering hoard of swag.12
Meanwhile, proclamations flew out from the Smolny a spate of decrees worthy of Paul I. ‘To THE CITIZENS OF RUSSIA! . . . State Power has passed into the hands of . . . the Petrograd Soviet.’ They proposed ‘a democratic peace, abolition of landlord property-rights . . . labour control over production’ and the formation of a Soviet government. The Mensheviks challenged Bolshevik claims: ‘The promise of immediate peace – is a lie! The promise of bread – a hoax! The promise of land – a fairy tale.’ Lenin riposted: ‘All private ownership of land is abolished immediately without compensation . . . Any damage whatever done to the confiscated property which from now on belongs to the whole People, is regarded as a serious crime, punishable by revolutionary tribunals.”13 Until the creation of a Constituent Assembly – the avowed aim of the revolution – a provisional worker/peasant government was to function under a Council of People’s Commissars. This included Lenin, Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, an active Bolshevik since the beginning who had been exiled to Siberia for his revolutionary activities and had taken over the editorship of the paper Pravda after his arrival in Petrograd in 1917.
Money was urgently needed by the government to pay the workers, but bank staff had gone on strike. By mid-December, civil servants, schoolteachers, the Union of Artists and the staff at the Alexandrinsky Theatre all came out. The poor continued to be hungry, the rich were still in the happy position of ignoring government allocations and enjoying restaurants and crowded cabarets.14 Across the city, food shops were empty, while Bryant recalled ‘window after window full of flowers, corsets, dog-collars and false hair!’ The hair came from ‘emancipated’ women. The corsets were of the ‘out-of-date, wasp-waist variety’. 15 ‘ The customers for such punishing garments – refusing to be emancipated – had fled. Street lighting was erratic. Trams broke down and lay abandoned. Meriel Buchanan witnessed ‘disorder and dirt and neglect’ everywhere.16 In churches,
‘nobody prayed’. Writer Viktor Shklovsky noted that, by the middle of January 1918, Petrograd had grown quiet – there was ‘no regular life of any kind, only wreckage’. Coffee ‘was made of rye’, people ate ‘potato peel gruel’.17 The painter Yuri Annenkov remembered ‘rotten, frozen offal’18 for sale. Nutrient-deficient women stopped menstruating. Two years later, Princess Wolkonsy recorded the devastating impact of undernourishment on the birth rate.19 She was a member of one of Russia’s oldest aristocratic families, and she courageously returned to post-revolutionary Petrograd from England to rescue her imprisoned husband, who had been a surgeon in the city before the revolution.
Attempts to alleviate misery were often quashed by a zealous excess of revolutionary logic. When the Vyborg soviet tried to establish a free canteen for the unemployed, it was castigated for its ‘bourgeois philanthropy’.20 Slowly, however, the Bolsheviks began to get a grip on the situation. Their priorities included terminating the war with Germany and the formation of the Constituent Assembly. In the last free elections to be held in Russia for more than seventy years, the Bolsheviks lost out to the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had people’s welfare rather than state power at heart. But the Bolsheviks were taking bloodthirsty measures to secure their revolution. By the time the Assembly first sat in early January 1918, they had put their troops on the street to subdue opposition and had killed around ten people and wounded dozens.21 Then – in a clear indication of the shape of things to come – the Bolsheviks closed the Assembly, over which they had failed to gain control in the election.
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