Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  Throughout the afternoon David Francis had received reports from his staff of the dead and wounded on the Liteiny as clashes there continued; many of the newly armed mob were constantly prowling up and down Furshtatskaya outside the US embassy, some on foot and others in motor cars.71 One of Francis’s officials, returning to his apartment from the embassy that evening, had seen no sign of any remaining loyalty to the old regime, ‘but had passed a thousand or more cavalrymen riding quietly toward the Neva and abandoning the streets of the city to the mutineers and revolutionists’. By this time mutiny had spread to the south of the city and the Semenovsky and Izmailovsky Regiments had joined the revolution; by late evening 66,700 men of the imperial army in Petrograd had mutinied. The revolutionaries were now in control of the whole city, except for the Winter Palace, the Admiralty and the General Staff – still guarded by loyal troops, as were the telephone exchange and the telegraph office.72

  By nightfall, the first account of the day’s events – as published in a crude news-sheet headed Izvestiya – had been haphazardly strewn onto the streets from the windows of motor cars. Copies were pounced upon, read and digested, shared and passed around as hungrily as the bread that the people all craved.73 The whole day had been ‘a Revolution carried on by chance’, in the opinion of aviator Bert Hall – ‘no organization, no particular leader, just a city full of hungry people who have stood enough and are ready to die if necessary before they will put up with any more Tsarism’. Only a week previously Hall had met the Tsar at Pskov and received a decoration for his work with the Russian air service. Today, watching ‘that mob of screaming people’, he had thought of the ‘tired, far-away look in the Tsar’s eyes’ when he met him. ‘He must have known that the dry rot had eaten the heart out of things.’74

  Later analyses of events in February would often draw comparisons with the French Revolution of 1789 – the storming of the Kresty prison in particular seeming reminiscent of the fall of the Bastille. Returning late to his wife at their apartment on the Petrograd Side, Philip Chadbourn was reminded of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The whole of Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt – the main arterial road leading into the Petrograd Side from the Troitsky Bridge – was:

  literally choked with a great surging mass of the revolutionists, who had tramped over here from the fighting zone, to proclaim victory and to draw all lukewarm persons to their flaming cause. It was an earnest, serious crowd, devoid of ranting or vandalism; its temper was that of Russian music – strength with pathos, optimism without joy. Gray army trucks throbbed in the midst of it, loaded with soldiers, women, and boys bearing crimson banners. Bayonets were decked with scraps of red bunting, and bonfires lit up pale faces and eager eyes. Now and again a touring car would thread its way nervously through the mob, stopping every hundred yards for a student to make a one-minute speech, or continuing to bore its way while Red Cross nurses threw out handfuls of bulletins. The Socialists got out literature so fast that it seemed as if the pent-up energy and stifled utterances of years were behind their presses; strange scraps of paper such as were never seen before in this city floated freely in the air with the headline, ‘We asked for bread, you gave us lead.’75

  Eventually Chadbourn wormed his way through the crowd at the Troitsky Bridge and took in ‘the glory of the view that lay before [him]’. ‘Over my right shoulder the turrets and castellated walls of Peter and Paul, fortress and prison, threw their grim silhouette against the dying sun, a dynasty gone to rest. To the left the sky was all molten gold and forked with giant tongues of flame; the High Tribunal, Courts of Justice, and jails, instruments of injustice in the Old Order, were making room for the New.’ When he and his wife went to bed that night, ‘the sky from our windows was still bright from the fire. Rifles snapped fitfully, and the yelling of bands of hooligans reached our ears through double panes.’76

  Chester Swinnerton and his colleagues also watched the fires across the river on the Petrograd and Vyborg Sides from their vantage point at the bank: ‘one great red glare on the horizon with a number of smaller ones, while a continuous intermittent popping of guns could be heard’. It reminded him of the Fourth of July back home; ‘people on the street seemed to be in a holiday mood’, but it was a ‘blessing’, he thought, that they had been unable to get hold of much liquor.77

  Returning to his room at the Astoria Hotel, naval officer Oliver Locker Lampson had no doubts: ‘That night Revolution was King, and as no exact news was possible, and the wildest stories were circulated, I opened the double windows of my room and looked out. A rumour as of multitudes cheering arose in one huge roar from the city, and through it came the incessant rattle of shots and the sputtering of maxims. The sky in the east was quite bright and many buildings seemed on fire.’78

  ‘Petrograd was flaring like the set-piece of a colossal firework display,’ recalled William J. Gibson. But while the night sky was dramatic, and the atmosphere in the city exhilarating, others such as Major-General Knox were already looking beyond the intoxication of the moment: ‘The prisons were opened, the workmen were armed, the soldiers were without officers, a sovyet [Soviet, a workers’ council] was being set up in opposition to the Temporary Committee chosen from the elected representatives of the people.’ All this was a matter of serious political concern. To Knox’s mind, Petrograd ‘was already on the high road to anarchy’.79

  5

  Easy Access to Vodka ‘Would Have Precipitated a Reign of Terror’

  HEAVY FIRING COULD still be heard across Petrograd for most of Monday night; by Tuesday 28 February the revolutionaries had commandeered large numbers of machine guns and were using captured armoured cars ‘with considerable effect’.1 The many soldiers now aimlessly roaming the streets unsettled everyone. Meriel Buchanan watched from the British embassy as a group of them crossed the Neva from the Petrograd Side; they seemed already to have ‘lost their upright, well-drilled bearing, they looked slovenly and bedraggled, they held themselves badly, slouching along, their collars undone, their caps stuck on at any angle, an odd assortment of weapons tied on to them with bits of rope or string or scarlet tape.’ Some, incongruously, had officers’ swords buckled round their waists, while others had ‘two or three pistols stuck into their pockets or hung round their neck on a bit of string’.2

  It was no wonder that over on the volatile Petrograd Side from which this rabble had come, Philip Chadbourn had become fearful for the safety of his wife and three-week-old baby son and had gratefully accepted an offer to stay with friends on the French Embankment. But there were no cabs to be had; Esther Chadbourn was still weak, and two friends had to assist her in walking into the city, with her husband leading the way with the baby in his arms. As they emerged into the street, his wife took one look at the crowds and the barricades and field artillery and her nerves totally gave way. ‘Each time a shot rang out,’ Philip remembered, ‘she would call ahead to me, “Don’t let them kill my baby, my baby!”, while passers-by stopped and stared at her, their eyes full of tears.’ Once safely installed in their friends’ house, the couple ‘watched the progress of the revolution from the front windows’ commanding the quayside, as one continual procession of motor cars roared past, loudly tooting their horns. On the streets it was the same jubilant crowds as the previous day, trashing the police stations and ‘throwing armfuls of records out of windows onto blazing street bonfires’ with a ‘righteous zest’.3

  Stubborn to the last, Sir George Buchanan, impeccable as ever with his ‘high straight collar and his high straight face’, headed off on foot again that morning to the now effectively defunct Russian Foreign Ministry, intent on paying ‘a farewell visit to Monsieur Pokrovsky’, who had not yet been arrested.4 His staff begged him not to go: there was fighting going on between two rival factions of the Pavlovsky Regiment in the Millionnaya, the street immediately behind the British embassy. Lady Georgina found her husband putting on his overcoat in the hall, ‘rather like a naughty little boy caught in an act of disobedience
’. She remonstrated with him to take the car, but Sir George was insistent: ‘I had much rather walk’; and with that he took up his gloves and stick, ‘with his fur cap set at the rakish angle he always affected’ and, in true British bulldog spirit, headed off. It was only later that his daughter Meriel discovered that as her father had crossed Suvorov Square and headed off down the Millionnaya, ‘word had gone round that the British Ambassador was coming down the street, and . . . with one accord, the soldiers put down their rifles and stood waiting respectfully till that tall grey-haired figure had passed, when they once more renewed their fusillade at each other with undiminished vigour’.5

  Chester Swinnerton and his colleagues at the National City Bank had watched in disbelief as Sir George walked past the bank, ‘surrounded by an admiring throng of the populace, most of them armed to the teeth, and Sir George bowing and smiling as if he were at a court function’.6 Buchanan had found Pokrovsky alone at his ministry, without electricity and with no access to the telegraph. Walking back with Maurice Paléologue, who had also arrived, the two ambassadors had been cheered by a group of students on the Palace Embankment. They insisted on giving Paléologue a lift in an armoured car to the French embassy, during which journey he was harangued by a boisterous student: ‘Pay your respects to the Russian Revolution! The red flag is Russia’s now; do homage to it in the name of France!’7

  Undeterred by his experience that morning, Sir George ventured forth again in the afternoon with the same unshakeable sangfroid, accompanied by his Head of Chancery, Henry James Bruce, to pay a visit to Russian diplomat Sergey Sazonovfn1 at his hotel on the Nevsky, though he admitted in his later memoirs that ‘the rattle of machine guns overhead was not a pleasant accompaniment’. The experience had terrified Bruce, who, on their return to the embassy, reported how the ‘Old Man’ ‘had refused to turn back or take cover, and had remained perfectly calm, laughing and talking as if nothing had happened’.8

  At the US embassy, David Francis, anxious for the safety of his staff, had ordered the Stars and Stripes to be raised over the building, due to the incessant firing all day and the frequent arrival of mobs asking what the building was and demanding to enter and search it. Other embassies raised their flags too, while down at the US consulate in the Singer Building on the Nevsky, things had become extremely precarious because of sniping from its roof, and the consul, North Winship, had prepared his most valuable archives for immediate evacuation. The consulate, he reported, was under constant threat of attack; indeed, it had ‘been under suspicion since the beginning of the war as being German, the masses believing the Singer Company to be a German corporation’. He had repeatedly had to defend the American eagle on the top of the building, which the mob wanted to tear down, thinking it a German eagle.9

  That day several foreign nationals were caught up in the most dangerous debacle yet, which took place at the Astoria Hotel on St Isaac’s Square. For the last six months, since being commandeered ‘as a luxurious headquarters for the higher officers’, the Astoria, the second-biggest and most modern hotel in Petrograd, had been popularly referred to as the ‘Military Hotel’.10 Every room was crammed with either Allied officers – French, Romanian, Serbian, British and Italian – or Russian officers on leave from the front, many of whom had their wives, mothers and children with them. There were also a few resident foreign journalists, such as the Americans Harper and Thompson.11

  For days everyone had feared an attack on the hotel. Naval attaché Oliver Locker Lampson had already urged that residents avoid the downstairs hall in case of any stray shots from the street, and ordered that Allied officers occupy the basement. He had heard reports that an agent of Protopopov’s had taken refuge in the hotel and that the revolutionaries would ‘inevitably come and search for him’. He was well aware, too, of the predicament of the Russian officers: ‘If the Government won and got here first they might be shot for not having helped: if the Revolutionaries were successful and reached us, then they would be shot for not joining in.’ Eventually it was decided to move all Allied officers upstairs and transfer the Russians below. As anticipated, at around 4.00 a.m. a deputation of soldiers and civilians had arrived, demanding that the Russians billeted there join the revolution. They had been persuaded to disperse on receiving assurance from those officers ‘that they were on leave, that the foreign nationals would observe neutrality and that no one would start shooting from the building’.12

  But four hours later trouble ignited, when a regiment gathered for a parade in St Isaac’s Square. At 9.00 a.m. YMCA worker Edward Heald was heading to his office when, at the corner of Gogol, he saw ‘column after column of soldiers, in martial order, greeted with the shouts of the people assembled in the square’, red flags flying, a band playing and making ‘a brilliant spectacle’. The troops had lined up facing the Astoria Hotel when ‘suddenly there was a tremendous volley and the sidewalks and squares were emptied of people in the twinkling of an eye’ and Heald hurried to safety.13 In his nearby office building he watched from the sixth-floor window as some of the soldiers threw themselves down in front of the cathedral, firing at a machine-gun position on the roof of the Astoria. From inside the hotel, Locker Lampson saw the soldiers dive helplessly into the snow for cover, ‘first a man here and then one there would stop suddenly and remain, black against the white and stretched out quite flat, until soon the place seemed empty except for these dead bodies’.14

  According to Donald Thompson, who was in the hotel at the time, some hothead or policeman hidden somewhere on the top floor of the Astoria had opened fire, enraging the crowd outside who had gathered to watch the parade. Woken from an exhausted sleep by the shooting, Thompson had grabbed his camera, broken out a windowpane and begun photographing the mob rushing across the square and stampeding the hotel. During the ensuing fusillade a Russian female guest ran into his room screaming that the police were firing from the roof. He warned her to keep away from the window, but ‘[i]nstead, she pulled aside the curtain to look out. She was shot through the throat.’ Thompson ‘carried her back to the bathroom where she died about fifteen minutes later’. He was furious: ‘I lost a lot of my film, thanks to this woman’s damn foolishness.’ Soon afterwards, hearing shots being fired inside the hotel, he hurriedly pinned an American flag to his door and hoped for the best.15

  Locker Lampson, meanwhile, had identified where he thought the firing was coming from: ‘no sound came from the room, except the smack of striking bullets’. He rammed the door in and found two terrified women in their nightdresses – Princess Tumanova and her mother. There was blood everywhere and he got them out of the room to administer first aid.16 According to Canadian eyewitness George Bury, the revolutionaries had quickly ‘brought up a couple of armoured motors with three machine-guns apiece’ and had opened ‘a furious cannonade upon the position on the roof of the Astoria from where the shots had come’, the bullets instead ‘ripping into the suite of General Prince Tumanov located just below it’. One of the women had been wounded in the neck and was later taken to the Anglo-Russian Hospital.17

  By now the hotel had been stormed by ‘a howling, raging mob, armed to the teeth’, which sacked the ground floor, ‘killed some Russian officers, and surged up the staircase, shooting up the lift and in every direction,’ as Sybil Grey recalled.18 Glass was showered everywhere as the hotel’s huge plate-glass windows were shattered by gunfire. Florence Harper was terrified as the mob ‘spread over the ground floor like rats’. ‘Everyone was panic-stricken’; the only ones who kept their heads, as she recalled, were the ‘British officers attached to the General Staff’. With smoke pouring out of the elevator-shaft and down the stairway, pandemonium reigned. ‘Terrified women were rushing around, some of them fully dressed, some only half dressed, begging to be saved.’ ‘The coolest woman in the hotel,’ she noted, ‘was an Englishwoman who was found sitting on her trunk, which was packed, smoking a cigarette . . . ready for any emergency that might take place.’19

  Fearful f
or the safety of the women and children, the British officers ‘formed a guard in front of them’, calling on the mob to fall back or they ‘would protect them to the last man’.20 Two of them, General Poole and a Lieutenant Urmston who spoke good Russian, tried to hold the rabble back on the stairs and reason with them: ‘if they intended to kill everybody in [the hotel] at least they should allow the officers to remove the women and children first’. There was an ominous pause, recalled Harper, after which ‘a big, burly soldier reached down in his pocket, pulled out a package of the vilest kind of cigarettes’, handed one to General Poole and invited him to share a smoke. The lieutenant lit a match, ‘held it to the general’s cigarette, then to the soldier’s, and then blew it out, explaining to the soldier that it was bad luck to light three cigarettes with one match. That appealed to the soldier, who, like all Russians, was very superstitious’; the gesture seemed to defuse the situation.21 Times correspondent Robert Wilton was convinced that ‘the coolness and pluck of the British and French officers alone prevented the wholescale murder of Russian Generals, ladies, and children’ at the Astoria that day, and that the ‘Allied uniforms inspired sufficient respect to contain the violence’. On seeing the British uniforms in particular, Sybil Grey noticed, some of the crowd even ‘took off their hats and said, “English officers! Forgive us, we do not wish to bother you,” and passed on in the most courteous manner possible to do more destruction to the hotel and its inmates’.22

  They remained intent, however, on laying hands on the Russian officers inside. ‘What are you going to do with them?’ called out the wife of one: ‘Shoot some of them outside and arrest the others,’ cried their spokesman laconically. ‘They asked for it.’ Some of the Russian officers resisted, including the old general in charge, and were shot on the spot; others came forward willingly, hands in the air, shouting, ‘We’re for you’, and were allowed to keep their swords and arms. Yet others were dragged to the square outside. James Stinton Jones saw some of them being summarily shot in the courtyard of the empty German embassy on the other side of St Isaac’s Square.23