On 1 February 1918, it was time to blink. Blink and it became 14 February. Out with tsarism went Peter the Great’s antiquated Julian Calendar, and Russia – just as it began to turn its back on the West and look inward – adopted the Gregorian Calendar, which was in use almost everywhere else. St Petersburg had been created by Peter the Great to deflect history. The Bolshevik Revolution erupted in the city, not only because it was the seat of industry and power, but because it was also a cradle of change. But when, in early 1918, the Germans once again advanced towards Petrograd and even attempted – unsuccessfully – to bomb the city from the air, it became apparent that Petrograd was too vulnerable to remain the capital, and the Bolsheviks moved their government to Moscow. Vissarion Belinsky called St Petersburg ‘a new city in an old land’.22 Ironically, when that old land was shaken by a new vision, its power centre retreated to its old capital and absolutism prevailed.
The German threat to Petrograd was removed when the government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918 – an act that prompted the British to send an expeditionary force to Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. By then the relocation of the administration had already emptied Petrograd of much of its purpose. The unappealing, high-pitched speech-maker and member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, Grigory Zinoviev, took charge of the city’s Council of Commissars. But Zinoviev divided his time between Petrograd and Moscow, where he also headed the powerful engine of world revolution, the Third International, founded in March 1919. His frequent absences hardly endeared him to his diminished city, where telephonists sat in vain waiting for news of revolutionary outbreaks across the globe.23
The Cheka was set up at no. 2 Gorokhovaya, the building where Vera Zasulich had attempted to assassinate Fyodor Trepov. The Extraordinary Commission with Responsibility for Counter-Revolution and Sabotage was headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, who had served as Lenin’s bodyguard. Under ‘paralysed’ lids, noted Bruce Lockhart, Dzerzhinsky’s eyes ‘blazed with a steady fire of fanaticism’.24 His Cheka would terrorise the unwilling into accepting the revolution, executing them in the evening and disposing of the bodies during the night. Various crimes were dealt with, such as espionage, speculation and counterfeiting, but by far the bulk of the executions carried out by the Petrograd Cheka punished counter-revolution and banditry – just over 1,000 executions were officially recorded in the eighteen-month period from its founding in December 1917.25
When Cheka headquarters also moved to Moscow, Anatoli Lunacharsky’s education and arts department of the government remained in Petrograd until the spring of 1919.26 A gentle yet persuasive cosmopolitan, Lunacharsky dubbed himself ‘an intellectual among Bolsheviks and a Bolshevik among intellectuals’.27 Believing that it was not for a government to interfere too vigorously with the arts, he wanted to preserve the best of the old order, yet facilitate revolutionary expression. Lunacharsky was the leader of Proletkult, the body dedicated to the development of culture for the masses. It organised cells in factories and studios where workers could practise art, and lecture rooms where they could begin to encounter literature.28 It also promoted choral music with a new cannon of revolutionary hymns.29 Lunacharsky was also commissar of Narkompros, the unwieldy People’s Commissariat for Education, which controlled all aspects of pedagogical, intellectual and artistic life. Wireless was in the first stages of development, so Narkompros turned to cinema as a medium for popularising soviet ideals. There were screenings for workers in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace. Agit-trains and agit-boats – gaudily decked out in revolutionary red – travelled throughout the country, spreading the word. On board were libraries, printing presses and darkened spaces in which to show films.30 The Academy of Fine Arts was closed and Narkompros set up the Petrograd Free Studios, open to anyone over sixteen years of age. Among a host of other activities, young soviet women prepared themselves for athletics by imitating the poses of the Greek statuary in the collection.
Working from the old apartments of the royal children in the Winter Palace, Lunacharsky insisted that only rooms with no artistic interest should be used for social or administrative purposes. The rest of the palace should become a state museum, part of the Hermitage, in which a Museum of the Revolution had been installed by staff working in such icy conditions that they were ‘streaked with blue blotches, their hands frost-bitten’. After months of operating in this appalling environment, ‘severe cases of rheumatism and tubercular infections’ broke out among them. As for the presentation of more traditional museum exhibits, in Petrograd alone there was so much to expropriate that the museums promised to be even richer than they had been in the past.31 With the best of the imperial collection moved to Moscow’s Kremlin for safe keeping, curators devoted their energies to cataloguing the rich private collections. Property and movables, accumulated over the centuries, were to be owned by the people. A photograph of peasants getting their first glimpse of a palatial interior shows them dumbstruck. Wide-eyed, it seemed as if they had arrived in heaven. Or – if they were well instructed in Bolshevik thinking – in hell.
The playwright Maxim Gorky was the ‘Noah of the Russian intelligentsia’,32 determined to protect culture in post-revolutionary Russia. He warned Lenin that shops were springing up across northern Europe selling antiques smuggled out of Russia, and the leader issued a decree in September 1918 prohibiting the export of art treasures. Gorky petitioned Lenin after the Cheka arrested the poet and first husband of Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, for harbouring anti-Bolshevik sentiments and participating in a trumped-up monarchist conspiracy. Gorky obtained a reprieve from Lenin in Moscow but, by the time he returned to Petrograd, Gumilev had been executed along with sixty others. In December 1919, Gorky converted the Eliseev mansion into the House of Arts, a meeting place and refuge for intellectuals and creative people.33 Princess Wolkonsy was offered a room in what had been Eliseev’s study, with family photos still hanging on the wall. She remembered the shock of hardly recognising figures like Andrei Biely and ‘the cream of the Russian intelligentsia . . . dirty and lice-ridden, silently devouring their miserable dinner’ in the communal refectory. Despite such conditions, the House of Arts provided a bolthole in difficult times.34
Facing what Lunacharsky called ‘the agonising process of reducing its economic and political significance’, Petrograd set about changing street names. Anything with a Romanov association was replaced with the name of a socialist luminary.35 Monuments went up to Radishchev and Herzen. Marx was given pride of place in front of the Smolny. Among these new tributes, it was an angular and distorted futurist monument to the regicide Sofia Perovskaya whose ‘misshapen face’ challenged notions of what was an apt style for socialist art.36 ‘Individualistic’ and self-indulgent, modernism was already under threat. Nevertheless, those relics of ‘bourgeois individualism’ – the futurists – were usefully employed to provide an arresting spectacle for Petrograd’s May Day holiday. In October, for the first anniversary of the revolution, Nathan Altman swathed 16,000 metres of canvas painted with cubist and futurist designs all around Palace Square.37 It was almost tsarist in its excess and inappropriate amid the hardships of civil war. Two years later, the event became even more spectacular, but even less – in aesthetic terms revolutionary. In an unashamed demonstration of Bolshevik hyperbole, 8,000 Red Army soldiers ‘re-enacted’ the storming of the palace into which their comrades had strolled, unopposed, in October 1917.38
Aside from such extravagant celebrations, Petrograd had become a ghost town. Cholera returned in the spring of 1918, as efforts to repair sanitation stagnated. The perilous economic situation was aggravated by the termination of the war with Germany, which resulted in 200,000 factory workers being laid off during the spring and summer. So bad was the situation that the unemployed were offered free passage on the railways to allow them to escape to the countryside in search of food.
By June, armed opposition to the Bolsheviks had coalesced into a White Army in the south, comprising Russians nostalgic for the monar
chy and commanded by tsarist generals. Ex-allies intervened in the civil war: the French navy was in the Black Sea, the Americans arrived in the Far East and the British in Murmansk, all eager to crush the socialist revolution and protect their interests. With the Red Guard moving off from Petrograd to fight the civil war, the Cheka – licensed to kill – policed the city. They raided SR strongholds and moved against the bourgeoisie. As the Krasnaya gazeta put it, ‘The cheka for the bourgeoisie, boiling water for lice!’39 In August, Moisei Uritsky, Petrograd Commissar for Internal Affairs, was assassinated at his desk in a revenge killing. Days later, Lenin was shot in the lung and the neck by a near-blind young SR, Fanya Kaplan. Such violent threats by Bolshevik opponents provoked the Red Terror – a campaign of intense repression, in the form of torture and execution, unleashed against counter-revolutionaries. In six weeks, between 500 and 1,300 were killed and 6,000 arrested by the Cheka. Bolsheviks began to use institutional violence as a political tool. It became a basic strategy of the Soviet state.40 During the Red Terror the official number of prisoners killed by the Cheka was 12,773, but some unofficial estimates reached 300,000 people killed between September 1918 and 1920.
One piece of unfinished business was Colonel Romanov and family, who – when moved to Ekaterinburg in April – were greeted by a crowd yelling, ‘Hang them!’ It sounded merely like the excited clammerings of a mob, but it was the fanfare announcing the end of the Romanov dynasty. On 17 July 1918, first the tsar, then the empress, then the tsarevich and his sisters were shot. The assassins boasted that they chased the grand duchesses round the cellar, firing at them.41 Their spree was an effortless and pleasurable massacre – like that enjoyed by the hunters in Empress Anna’s Jagdwagen.
Paul Dukes studied music in St Petersburg before the war. As he spoke Russian and knew the country, he was asked by the British government to observe the revolution. Inducted into Britain’s fledgling MI6 – then known as the SIS – Dukes returned to Petrograd in November 1918 to gather high-quality, unbiased information and estimate the chances for regime change. His forged identification papers were relatively easy to use, given the illiteracy of many Red Guards. Dukes knew a man who travelled from Petrograd to Moscow using his English tailor’s bill as a pass. With twenty disguises at his disposal one as a Cheka employee called Joseph Ilyich Afirenko, another as a Red Army soldier – Dukes monitored events and attempted to spring tsarist sympathisers from jail. Through the darkest part of the night, he would drift in a fishing skiff in the mouth of the Neva, waiting for a Royal Navy torpedo boat to slip past the Kronstadt watch and collect whatever material he had to offer. His reports confirmed the breakdown of the self-styled ‘Metropolis of the World Revolution’. The uncollected residue of the first-anniversary celebrations – ‘shreds of washed-out red flags’ – were strung over the streets from house to house. Skeletal horses lay dead where they fell. There were books for sale, many of them looted from private libraries, but it was necessary to obtain a licence to purchase anything other than the ubiquitous soviet propaganda. Rotten vegetables in the markets, ‘bits of herring on microscopic pieces of black bread’ and a ‘liquid of tea-substitute’ in the bar of the Finland railway station all testified to the ‘stagnation of normal life’.42 With good reason, Dukes called his book about his time in Russia not Red Dawn, but Red Dusk.
On Vasilevsky Island where she was living, Marta Almedingen remembered haggard people haunted by the fading painted panels on bakeries long since shut.43 Ghosts of plump rolls and ochre loaves mocked a population without butter, and condemned to make do with one – often rotten – egg per week.44 When the American anarchist Emma Goldman asked to try the ration of bread given to workers at the Putilov factory, they told her to ‘Bite hard.’45 Determined people pretended they had no use for food46 – mind over absence of matter. The desperate sold anything, from clothes and knick-knacks to gangrenous bread patties, which customers sniffed before they purchased. Citywide communal eateries with free food for children under fourteen were not up and running until the middle of 1919. When they did open, people found the cooking unappetising at best. There were, as Emma Goldman put it, ‘rude awakenings in the Soviet Arcadia’.47
Arriving in ‘the metropolis of Cold, of Hunger, of Hatred, and of endurance’ in the winter of 1919, the revolutionary Victor Serge found the façades of imperial residences ‘painted over in ox-blood red’. Lilina Zinoviev, wife of the Petrograd soviet leader, told him that ‘we are besieged people in a besieged city. Hunger riots may start, the Finns may swoop on us, the British may attack.’48 A spate of strikes erupted as workers watched the party privileged eating well, while their promised increase of rations did not materialise. Holidays were cancelled. The Cheka fired on hungry strikers.49 The revolution was clearly under threat.
British agent Sidney Reilly was trying to coordinate a 1919 counter-revolution. Mercenaries would apprehend Lenin and Trotsky, 60,000 Whites would march on Moscow and General Yudenich would simultaneously attack Petrograd. In August, an English torpedo boat sunk the cruiser Memory of Azov during a raid on Kronstadt. In early October, General Yudenich captured Gatchina and, days later, was at the outskirts of Petrograd. Workers were mobilised to defend the deserted city, canal by canal, bridge by bridge. With little more than cabbage to eat, a tired and betrayed population erected street barricades. Yudenich tried to encircle the city, but failed to capture the Moscow-Petrograd railway. Shells burst over the Neva, the Cheka rounded up 300 suspects and the Red Army arrived by rail to defeat Yudenich at the Battle of Pulkovo Heights, sixteen kilometres south of the city.50 As Trotsky put it in Pravda on 30 October, ‘a victory for us in the Petrograd duel will mean a crushing blow for Anglo-French imperialism, which has wagered too highly on the Yudenich card. In fighting for Petrograd we are not only defending the cradle of the proletarian revolt but are also fighting in the most direct way for the extension of this revolt all over the world.’ Yudenich’s forces retreated towards the Estonian border.51
Given the disruption and deprivation, the English writer H.G. Wells was astonished by Petrograd’s theatrical activity both popular and high-brow with up to forty performances given in an evening. Large theatres, subsidised by Narkompros as they had been under the tsars, thrived.52 Louise Bryant recorded that Karsavina was dancing to a packed Mariinsky, the audience dressed in rags.53 Chaliapin demanded a huge fee to sing but, when the going got tough, he performed for flour and eggs.54 In 1920 – in an early example of outreach – he sang Boris Godunov at the Putilov Iron Works. The unpopular futurist Theatre of the Noisy Present proved to Lunacharsky that avant-garde work was inaccessible to the workers. More suitable was the simple didacticism of the Legend of the Communard. Written in 1919 by a Red Army infantryman, its socialist message appealed to a population that was hoping against hope that things could work out.55
By the early autumn of 1920, after a series of significant Red Army victories, the civil war was abating. In November, with Petrograd secure, many Hermitage paintings were returned from Moscow. By the end of the month the Rembrandt room was open, followed by the Dutch and Italian rooms in December – just in time for the pipes to burst.56 An Expertise Commission had taken up residence in the former British Embassy to catalogue the artefacts confiscated from palaces and mansions. H. G. Wells thought it resembled ‘some congested second hand art shop in the Brompton Road’. Wells had been in St Petersburg in 1914 and was in Petrograd six years later, clearly disappointed by most of what he saw. His host was his old friend Maxim Gorky, who – despite the importance of his position – possessed only the suit he wore. Across the city, wooden pavements had been torn up and wooden houses smashed for firewood. Petrograd’s roads were lined with ‘dead shops’. If Bryant found only corsets and false hair, Wells saw only ‘tea, cigarettes and matches’ necessities such as crockery were nowhere to be found. His lament for a failing revolution sounds a note of domestic despair, ‘There is no replacing a broken cup.’ Wells contended that a city is nothing but ‘shops and resta
urants and the like. Shut them up, and the meaning of a street has disappeared.’ When he shared this insight with Lenin, he was told that the purpose of towns had largely ceased. They were obsolete.57
Similarly disappointed with the direction of the revolution was the Russian-born American, Emma Goldman. Frequently imprisoned in and subsequently deported from the USA, she was welcomed by Gorky, who lauded her revolutionary credentials. Arriving in the wake of the Yudenich threat, she found Petrograd tense. Her first glimpse of soviet inequality was provided by her lodgings in the grand Hotel Astoria, requisitioned for ranking party officials and known as the First House of the Petro-Soviet. Criticism of official corruption was already widespread. Rations were graded, and Goldman wondered why – when certain stores sold butter, meat and eggs to the privileged – workers and women stood ‘long hours in endless queues for their ration of frozen potatoes, wormy cereals and decayed fish’. Zinoviev retorted that they could do little else during a civil war and an allied blockade. Goldman toured the comfortably appointed hospitals for important communists, and visited other clinics where, by contrast, equipment was non-existent and medicine rare.58 For most comrades, the best diet they could expect was buckwheat kasha and an unappetising salt-water fish called vobla, with bones that splintered easily and, if ingested, could damage the intestines.59 Oats distributed by the authorities were often consumed unwashed and uncooked, completely clogging the digestive tract. As purgatives and enemas proved useless, Princess Wolkonsky was forced to watch her patients perish in terrible torment.’60
Hygiene was a major problem. There had been eighty-eight banya in 1916. By 1921 only about twenty remained.61 Many bathers arrived covered in a ‘thick grey coat of dirt and lice’, which, once washed away, revealed huge boils and the red scars of scabies. People took to drugs to obliterate their misery. Bought from barbers and hairdressers, cocaine was freely used by people from all walks of life. Those wishing to avoid conscription could buy ‘typhus lice’ from beggars on the Nevsky Prospekt in order to infect themselves.62 When Victor Serge was sent to search for suitable apartments for party staff, he found ‘whole rooms plastered with frozen excrement’.63 As winter thawed into spring, floors were awash and in the true spirit of socialism – clearance squads were organised. The pro-revolutionary correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, Arthur Ransome roomed with Karl Radek of Lenin’s inner-circle and ran off with Trotsky’s secretary, but was forced to acknowledge the ‘appalling paralysis’ and the immanent ‘collapse of civilisation’.64
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