Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

In Petrograd during the war years there was certainly no ‘Milord’ more to the manner born than the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, who oversaw the diplomatic mission and the British Chancery at its prime position at number 4 Palace Embankment, located a short walk from the Winter Palace and facing the River Neva. The embassy occupied a section of a grand mansion rented from the Saltykov family, who retained rooms at the back of the house facing the Field of Mars – the large military parade ground located not far from the Winter Palace. Arriving in St Petersburg in 1910 from an ambassadorship in Sofia, Bulgaria,fn3 Buchanan and his wife Lady Georgina had inherited the existing furnishings of reproduction Louis XVI furniture and de rigueur crystal chandeliers and red brocade hangings of any embassy, but had augmented them with their own collection of fine furniture, books and paintings collected during their long diplomatic life in Europe. This personal touch, as their daughter Meriel recalled, gave the rooms ‘a more homelike appearance, so that sometimes with the curtains drawn, one could almost imagine oneself in some old London square’.12

  Sir George had in fact been contemplating removing the embassy to better premises for some time, only for the outbreak of war in 1914 to put paid to such ambitions. Although it might have looked grand on the surface, the embassy had several shortcomings. Its sewerage system was antediluvian and the building was in need of considerable restoration and redecoration. It required a substantial staff to maintain its baroque state rooms, its Chancery offices, located on the first floor, and – two flights of circular stairs above – the ballroom and large dining room that were used for bigger official functions. An all-essential English butler, William, was supported by a host of footmen, housemaids and an Italian chef, as well as numberless Russians employed to do menial household tasks and run the kitchens.13 The Buchanans had brought a motor car with them, and their own English chauffeur, but also maintained carriages and sledges and a Russian coachman to drive them.

  Occupying centre stage not just at his own embassy, but as the acknowledged dean of the diplomatic community in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan was highly regarded by Russians and foreigners alike and inspired the greatest loyalty – if not hero worship – in those who worked for him. He was that archetypal gentleman-diplomat: an austere, monocled Old Etonian, the son of Sir Andrew Buchanan (himself a diplomat who had also served at the embassy in St Petersburg), and a man of honour in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Tall, slim and urbane, Buchanan was a classical scholar and a good linguist (though he spoke no Russian), who was widely read but who secretly loved detective novels and enjoyed nothing better than an undemanding game of bridge. His ‘imperturbable serenity’ and formality could at times be misinterpreted as excessively austere, and some of his staff found his ‘baffling simplicity’ and slightly effete absent-mindedness disconcerting. ‘He was as gentle at bridge as in all else, but dreamily unaware of whether he was playing bridge or Happy Families,’ recalled one of his staff.14

  But there was no doubting Buchanan’s modesty and – when the time came – his courage, or his unswerving loyalty towards those in his employ. It was abundantly clear to all who worked with him in those last dying days of imperial Russia that Sir George was by now a sick man, whose ill health, eroded by his unstinting dedication to duty and an increased workload during the war, had been made worse by his anxieties about the precarious position of the Tsar and the growing threat of revolution.fn4 Although Sir George occasionally managed a fishing trip to Finland or a game of golf at Murino, by the end of 1916 he seemed, to British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart, ‘a frail-looking man with a tired, sad expression’. But he had become a familiar and respected figure on the streets of the capital, and ‘when he took his daily walk to the Russian Foreign Office, his hat cocked on one side, his tall, lean figure slightly drooping under his many cares, every Englishman felt that here as much as the diplomatic precincts of the Embassy itself was a piece of the soil of England’.15

  If at times Sir George might be seen to be fading, his formidable wife made up for his flagging energies. Lady Georgina, née Bathurst, was herself ‘of the purest purple’. ‘As every Britisher knows,’ quipped Negley Farson, ‘there exist only three families: “The Holy Family, the Royal Family – and the Bathursts”.’16 Lady Georgina was an imposing woman, whose ‘heart was in proportion to her bulk’, and her prodigious energies were matched by her decided and well-voiced opinions. She was ‘indiscreet and quick to take offence: a generous friend but a dangerous enemy’, as some of her female associates in the British colony came to discover, and she ‘sat on a dozen committees and quarrelled with the lot’. She ran the domestic life of the embassy ‘like clockwork’ and ‘never fail[ed] in that passion for punctuality which in the Ambassador amounted almost to a mania’.17 Since 1914, Lady Georgina had also risen to the challenge of war work, commandeering the embassy ballroom and filling it with long tables loaded with cotton wool, lint and materials for her twice-weekly sewing parties. Here ladies of the British colony came to ‘roll bandages, to make pneumonia-jackets, all kinds of first-aid dressings, pyjamas, dressing jackets, and dressing gowns’ – some for the wounded at the front, the rest for use in the British Colony Hospital for Wounded Russian Soldiers. Located in a wing of the large Pokrovsky Hospital on Vasilievsky Island, the hospital had become Lady Buchanan’s personal fiefdom after she had set it up on the outbreak of war; her daughter Meriel also worked there as a volunteer nurse.18

  After Russia had entered the war in 1914, the old established expatriate community in Petrograd was augmented by the arrival of a newer, brasher breed of Americans: engineers and entrepreneurs dealing in war materiel, manufactured goods and munitions. American staff at International Harvester (the farm-machinery manufacturer), Westinghouse (for several years involved in the electrification of Petrograd’s trams) and the Singer Sewing Machine Company (which had brought the first machines to Russia in 1865) now rubbed shoulders on the streets of the city with fellow countrymen sent from New York to run the Petrograd branches of the National City Bank and the New York Life Insurance Company, not to mention with American YMCA workers who had set up the Russian equivalent – the Mayak (Lighthouse) – there in 1900. In April 1916 the Petrograd diplomatic community had found itself welcoming a new American ambassador, after the incumbent George Marye had unexpectedly resigned – supposedly due to ill health. The gossip suggested, however, that he had been quietly pushed by the State Department, which had thought him too pro-Russian at a time when the USA was still neutral in the war.

  Marye’s successor was the most unlikely of candidates. A genial Democrat from Kentucky, David Rowland Francis was a self-made millionaire who had made his money in St Louis from grain-dealing and investments in railway companies. He had served as governor of Missouri (1889–93) and had lobbied for St Louis to stage the highly successful Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 – better known as the St Louis World’s Fair – as well as the summer Olympics later that same year. His ambassadorial experience was, however, nil, although in 1914 he had been offered and had declined an ambassadorship in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, the choice of Francis for Petrograd seemed logical: he was a man of proven business acumen, whose primary role would be to renegotiate the US trade treaty with Russia that had been broken off in December 1912 in response to the tsarist government’s anti-Semitic policies. Russia, as Francis well knew, was eager to buy US grain, cotton and armaments.

  On 21 April (NS; 8 OS) 1916 Francis had sailed from Hoboken in New Jersey on the Swedish steamship Oscar II with his private secretary, Arthur Dailey, and his devoted black valet-cum-chauffeur, Philip Jordan. His wife Jane stayed at home in St Louis in the care of the couple’s six sons, due to her poor health and her dread of facing the legendarily freezing Russian winters; Francis had not insisted on her accompanying him, knowing full well that his wife ‘would not like it’ in Petrograd.19 In her absence, and reticent about embracing the social life of the city (like his counterpart Buchanan, he spoke no Russian), Francis reli
ed very heavily on the protective ‘Phil’, as he liked to call him: a man he respected as ‘loyal, honest and efficient and intelligent withal’.20

  Jordan, whose African American origins are unclear, was a small, wiry man who had grown up in Hog Alley – a squalid slum district of Jefferson, Missouri, notorious (much like New York’s Bowery) as a haunt of thieves, prostitutes and drunks. His early life had been spent as a hard drinker and gang member, regularly caught up in street fights. Later he worked on the riverboats along the Missouri, before, in 1889 – and now ostensibly a reformed character – he had been recommended to Francis, the newly elected governor of Missouri. After a brief period working for the subsequent governor, Jordan returned to the Francis family’s grand mansion in St Louis’s prosperous West End in 1902, serving as valet or, as Americans then termed it, ‘body servant’. Here he had seen four US presidents – Cleveland, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson – come and go as visitors, and had been taught to read and write by Mrs Francis, who was considerably more forgiving than her husband of Jordan’s occasional lapses into heavy drinking, and to whom Jordan became devoted.21

  The culture shock awaiting Francis and Jordan – freshly arrived from the balmy American South to cold, wartime Petrograd – was enormous. During their crossing Francis’s Russian interpreter, a young Slavist named Samuel Harper, had done his best to give the inexperienced ambassador ‘a crash course on what he might expect in Russia’. Harper came to the conclusion, on hearing Francis in conversation with some American businessmen heading to Petrograd on the same ship, that he was a ‘very blunt, outpoken American, who believed in speaking his mind regardless of the rules of diplomacy’.22 The contrast with the buttoned-up and immaculately schooled Sir George Buchanan could not have been clearer; the two ambassadors were to have little in common.

  Upon arriving in the Stockholm Express at Petrograd’s Finland Station on 15 April, Francis had headed for the US embassy, only too painfully aware of what awaited him: ‘I had never been in Russia before. I had never been an Ambassador before. My knowledge of Russia up to the time of my appointment had been that of the average intelligent American citizen – unhappily slight and vague.’23 Such disarming candour made it inevitable that his peers in the diplomatic community would view him disparagingly. As Robert Bruce Lockhart put it, ‘Old Francis [did] not know a Left Social Revolutionary from a potato’ but, to his credit, ‘he was as simple and as fearless as a child’. Francis’s kind-hearted, tolerant and well-meaning manner was not, however, admired by some of his more experienced embassy staff, to whom he seemed a ‘hick’ from St Louis with no understanding of Russian politics. Lacking the public-school background and years of assiduous honing in the arts of continental diplomacy that had come so naturally to his colleague Buchanan, Francis seemed ingenuous, to say the least. Arthur Bullard, an unofficial US envoy to Russia, thought him ‘an old fool’; and ‘a stuffed shirt, a dumb head’ was the opinion of Dr Orrin Sage Wightman, who arrived in the city later with a US Red Cross Commission.24 But to the Russians, who saw in America the prospect of lucrative and much-needed commercial relations, the new ambassador was ‘easily the most popular diplomat in Petrograd’.25 Francis, moreover, was socially engaging in a way that his British counterpart was not. He made no bones about his enjoyment of the finest Kentucky bourbon and fat cigars; he chewed plugs of tobacco and was able to ‘ring’ the spittoon at a distance of several feet. Unlike the dithering Buchanan at his games of bridge, Francis’s amiable simplicity did not extend to cards; he was ‘no child at poker’, as Lockhart learned to his cost. Whenever he joined the US ambassador for a game, Francis always cleaned him out.26

  In the summer of 1916 Francis and chauffeur Phil were delighted to finally take delivery of the ambassador’s Model T Ford, specially shipped over from Missouri. They took great pride in riding around in it with ‘a three-foot Stars and Stripes wired to the radiator cap’, which made people wonder ‘whether the breeze of the car’s motion wave[d] the flag or the flag waving ma[de] the Ford go’.27 The US embassy was very well positioned at 34 Furshtatskaya, in a well-to-do district in the centre of the city populated by Russian civil servants and other foreign diplomats. It was also a short walk from the Duma, the tsarist State Assembly housed at the Tauride Palace on Shpalernaya, and beyond it the Smolny Institute, which would become the focus of Bolshevik activities during the October Revolution. Like the British embassy, it was rented from a Russian aristocrat – Count Mikhail Grabbe – and suffered from similar limitations. It was, recalled special attaché James Houghteling, ‘a disappointing two-story affair without dignity of façade, squeezed into the middle of a block with a big apartment building on one side and another modest residence on the other’.28 Its interior was in need of decoration and was poorly furnished, so much so that Francis thought it looked like a ‘warehouse’.29 He soon started looking for better premises but, much like Buchanan, was thwarted in his attempts to find anything that suited while there was a war on.

  Francis’s office – from the balcony of which he could stand and observe the street below – was located on the second floor, along with a bedroom and sitting room. But the rooms were very cramped. The embassy was understaffed and in disarray; far worse, as far as Francis was concerned, the coffee was ‘not very good’, either.30 He liked to entertain and to dine out with fellow Americans, as he missed his large family back in St Louis. US businessmen – especially executives of the National City Bank that had recently set up in Petrograd – were often invited to join him for meals. He also struck up a friendship with the American socialite Julia Grant, a granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant who had married into the Russian aristocracy as Princess Cantacuzène-Speransky (though her friends in the US colony somewhat crassly called her ‘Princess Mike’) and who had a suite at the Hotel d’Europe.fn5 The Princess lavishly entertained Francis, as did other wealthy aristocrats, either in their Petrograd town houses or in private rooms at their favourite hotels.

  From the outset, Phil Jordan had a strong sense of responsibility for ‘The Governor’, as everyone had customarily addressed Francis since his years in the post in Missouri. He acted as the ambassador’s minder whenever Francis ventured forth on the streets of Petrograd, and together they proceeded to muddle through the difficulties of becoming acquainted with all things Russian, notably its cuisine. As Francis told his son Perry: ‘Phil and I are still trying to get along with the Russian cook whom he is having great difficulty in instructing how to prepare a meal in the American way, as she does not understand a word of English, and he can’t speak a word of Russian.’31 Help was soon at hand in the guise of an acquaintance Francis had made on the ship to Russia: Madame Matilda de Cram, a Russian returning to Petrograd, who lived nearby and became a regular visitor at the embassy, volunteering also to teach Francis French and Jordan Russian. Francis’s friendship with Madame de Cram, which included taking her to the races on his day off, was conducted much to the consternation of his staff and of Allied counter-intelligence, who had her marked as a German spy, out to seduce the gullible new ambassador.32fn6

  Nevertheless, thanks to Madame de Cram, the resourceful Jordan soon had adequate Russian to go shopping unaided, claiming that ‘I’m making out pretty well since I learned the language.’ So resourceful was he that Jordan was soon finding kitchen utensils and furnishings for the embassy, including a decent-sized dining table that could seat twenty.33 Having found their feet, Francis dispensed with the Russian cook and thereafter Jordan prepared his breakfast, until they managed to engage a ‘negro cook who is very black, a West India negro named Green’. Since his arrival, Jordan had been greatly struck by how ‘few negroes’ there were in Petrograd, and ‘none like our negroes’.34 Francis noticed, too, explaining to his wife that Phil, who was ‘relatively pale skinned’ and was ‘almost white enough to pass for a white man’, did not go out on the streets with the Trinidadian cook because he was ‘so black’.35 Jordan and Green seemed to spend most of their time ‘scheming to get food’, a
nd somehow or other conjured dishes for the ambassador’s table despite the extreme shortages, for, armed with his pidgin Russian, Jordan turned out to be ‘fearless about roaming the streets and haggled at the markets, mixing in with the multicultural, polyglot crowd’.36fn7 There was no doubting how much Francis missed his American luxuries: he waited months for the case of hams and bacon that he had ordered from New York to get to Russia, and even longer for two cases of Scotch whisky shipped from London that still hadn’t arrived, come October.37

  The resourceful Phil Jordan had rapidly become ‘invaluable’ in all matters relating to the day-to-day running of the embassy.38 As embassy official Fred Dearing noted in his diary: ‘One sees in the instant that Phil is somebody. No one could be less obtrusive, but definitely somebody.’39 He was close at hand to assist Francis when, to celebrate the Fourth of July, Francis had bravely mounted a successful reception for over one hundred guests. ‘I engaged a first class orchestra of nine pieces,’ he told Jane, and ‘thanks to Phil we had a delicious punch in addition to the tea served from the samovar which we had recently bought. We had caviar sandwiches, tomato sandwiches, and what appeared to be unknown to the Russians, we had delicious ices.’40 The members of Petrograd’s American colony had greatly welcomed such a party and its culinary treats, but getting himself known on the snobbish Russian and diplomatic social circuit was quite another matter for the new ambassador. Francis admitted to Jane in July that ‘I have made comparatively few social acquaintances among the Russians.’41 He eschewed the genteel tea and cocktail parties of the British embassy and the incestuous chit-chat of the continental diplomatic corps, preferring a good game of poker. They in turn were somewhat disdainful of his diplomatic dinners. Sir George Buchanan, a man tainted by the social snobbery and racial prejudice of his generation and class, dreaded invitations from Francis. If asked to dine at the American embassy, Buchanan would lament, ‘Ah, we’re going to have a bad supper . . . cooked by a Negro.’42 And on most such occasions there was no orchestra, merely the loyal Phil, who as general factotum wound up the gramophone behind a screen, in between serving the guests.43