Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  After wrecking the foyer of the Astoria, the first place the mob headed for was the kitchen: ‘it was quite a sight to see a soldier with a huge officer’s sword cutting up a tub of butter and passing it out to the people,’ recalled the intrepid Chester Swinnerton, who could not resist leaving the safety of the bank to investigate. In the downstairs hall Leighton Rogers, who joined him, saw ‘a crowd of soldiers were stuffing themselves’ with ‘such food as they had never tasted before and shouting the Marseillaise . . . to the accompaniment of a piano’.24 Foreign residents were fearful for their personal possessions as the intruders, ‘scenting loot in the carpeted corridors and luxurious flats of the hotel’, mounted the stairs.25 One of the looters assured a British journalist who begged them not to loot their rooms, ‘You come up and show us which are the foreigners’ rooms and we won’t go in.’26 When a soldier arrived at the room of another lady resident, she ‘came to him with her hands full of money’. ‘What’s this for?’ he asked. ‘We’re on quite a different job here.’27

  While there may have been a degree of honour among these thieves, ‘the hotel was at their mercy’ and it was decided that ‘the spectacle of a wounded woman might avoid trouble’. And so, as Locker Lampson recalled, ‘they laid the wounded Princess Toumanov on a mattress in the passage and surrounded her with pillows covered in blood’. Soon the crowd ‘came on in yelling parties, gesticulating and arguing, and reached the fourth floor to demand all our arms. The moment they saw the princess they calmed although one drunken civilian let his rifle off over her head.’ The British officers gave up their revolvers and swords and showed the revolutionaries where the telephones were, ‘which were all destroyed’. Once again the situation was contained and, although some small articles of value were taken from the rooms of residents, ‘on the whole the search was orderly’.28

  Once the brief pitched battle on the ground floor of the hotel was over, every stick of furniture and every chandelier had been smashed and the Russian officers hauled off, the mob’s remaining objective was to seek out any alcohol. Having anticipated this, several British officers had gone down to the Astoria’s famous wine cellars to destroy the wine and spirits before the looters got to it. Although some bottles had already been eagerly carried away, the officers, led by Captain Scale and ‘with the help of students and some soldiers intelligent enough to realize the disastrous consequences’ if the mob got its hands on the alcohol, set about ‘smash[ing] bottles until their arms were so weary they could not lift them’, as Florence Harper witnessed. ‘They staved in all the casks of cognac and whiskey until they were literally knee deep in everything from champagne to vodka.’29

  Outside on the square, the crowd knocked the necks off those bottles that they had managed to loot with the butt-ends of their rifles and began drinking the contents, as a constant flow of people continued ‘rushing in and out through the slippery bloodstained doors carrying great piles of paper and records’ to throw on a bonfire in the square.30 Some of the revolutionaries had attempted to remonstrate with their comrades at the sight of large piles of broken bottles and had grabbed what they could and poured it away, urging them not to ‘spoil our fight for freedom by drinking and looting’.31 This spirit of revolutionary purity continued to prevail when later that afternoon Florence Harper saw a man flourishing a bottle of wine outside the Astoria. As he raised it to his mouth, ‘a student came along, snatched it out of his hands, broke it, and said, “Don’t drink! If you do, all our work will be undone.”’ Such admonitions had little effect, however. James Stinton Jones witnessed the inventive ways used by some soldiers to carry away what they did not drink on the spot, outside the Astoria: they ‘poured wine into their top-boots and then wandered away to consume more elsewhere’.32 Everyone agreed it was a mercy that the mob had not been able to lay hands on more from the hotel cellars. ‘This was one time when prohibition was a blessing to Russia,’ wrote Edward Heald – the Astoria’s copious supply being, of course, for the benefit of guests only. Heald, like many other eyewitnesses, was convinced that ‘if vodka could have been found in plenty, the revolution could easily have had a terrible ending’. His compatriot James Houghteling agreed: easy access to vodka ‘unquestionably would have precipitated a reign of terror reminiscent of the French Revolution’.33

  Back inside the wrecked foyer of the Astoria, in sight of the potted palms still standing, incongruously, in their brass pots, ‘the revolving doors were spinning round in a pool of blood’. The great plate-glass windows were ‘jaggedly shattered and gaping’, causing the expensive curtains to make ‘a torn and draggled track in the snow outside’. ‘The furniture was grotesquely dismembered and upset, papers, books and even stationery were strewn half-burnt everywhere.’ The hotel tea room and the big restaurant were also a scene of utter devastation. ‘Bodies were littered about, and the wounded crying piteously.’34 James Houghteling went with an American colleague to inspect the damage and was bemused to discover ‘in one room where the furniture was a pile of kindling wood and even the electric brackets had been torn away . . . large framed photographs of the Tsar, the Tsarina and the Tsarevich hanging on the walls perfectly undisturbed’.35

  Upstairs, residents remained cowering and hungry all day in their barricaded rooms, until eventually the women and children were allowed to be taken away to safety in convoys of military and embassy cars. Some of them took refuge in the Italian embassy across St Isaac’s Square, others at the Hotel d’Angleterre next door. Florence Harper tried to get something to eat at the Angleterre, but found its dining room packed with people – Romanians, Russians, Serbs, French, English, Japanese – ‘every allied nation, every neutral nation’ – all ‘scrambling and fighting for food’. She went back to the Astoria to try her luck there, but found the same scene: hundreds of people waiting to get cabbage soup and some kind of game, which she labelled ‘roast crow’. It was unsafe to eat any vegetables, even when there were any, because of the danger of dysentery, so she stuck to tinned sardines and Dutch cheese. ‘Someone had found some ship’s biscuits’, which they shared, and had ‘bribed the waiter for some cocoa’.36

  Later that evening any Allied officers who wished to leave the hotel were allowed to do so and were cheered by the lingering crowd as they departed. But many decided to stay – ‘not from choice, but from necessity, because all the Petrograd hotels were full’. Such in fact was the accommodation crisis that by nightfall some of the British officers came back: ‘I might just as well be blown up as freeze to death,’ one of them told Harper, for rumours had persisted all day that the Astoria would be destroyed – ‘they were going to blow it up with dynamite’.37

  For hours after the attack on the Astoria ‘drunken soldiers littered the sidewalks’. Amid the huge piles of broken glass, furniture and books from the hotel, women ‘went around gathering bits of broken plates, or anything they could lay their hands on’. ‘The souvenir hunters were busy,’ noted Florence Harper, but through it all ‘the mob was the best natured mob I have ever seen’. However, for ‘days and days afterward there was a reek of wine’ in the locality of the hotel that she found ‘sickening’, and broken glass underfoot everywhere in the square. This, plus the burnt-out remains of the bonfires, transformed the once-beautiful St Isaac’s Square into ‘a desolate sight’.38 Shutters replaced the broken windows of the Astoria and, for its embattled guests, making do in rooms now riddled with bullets, there was no electric lighting and no heating, either. ‘It was rather like inhabiting a monastery in the war zone,’ recalled British intelligence officer Denis Garstin.39

  Looting had in fact been in evidence all over the city that Tuesday, much of it the work of many of the eight thousand criminals liberated from the city’s jails. English governess Louisette Andrews recalled seeing people – predominantly soldiers and sailors – running down the streets with strings of looted sausages draped around their necks, or clutching legs of lamb and armfuls of fur coats. But the most sought-after looted items, she recalled, were expensi
ve watches: ‘they were the one thing the mob all went for’, and soon there was ‘not a watch to be had in any jewellers’ shop’ in Petrograd.40

  Burglary, sexual assault, mugging and acts of drunken violence were all on the increase. As nurse Edith Hegan wrote in her diary: ‘It seems to have been a terrible mistake to turn loose the convicted prisoners, for they have gone quite mad with blood lust and are leading the mob into all sorts of depredations.’ There was, she noted with alarm, a ‘deadly fixedness of purpose in the crowd to-day, as if it had crystallized its own desires’.41 What she and other foreigners witnessed was the ugly face of stikhiya – the elemental spontaneity of anarchy in its most destructive, primeval form. An impulse long latent beneath the surface of civilised Russian society, stikhiya had from time to time found its explosive expression among the peasantry as a ‘primitive force of the oppressed classes, to which any political articulation remained alien’; and now, in Petrograd, it was being unleashed on its age-old class enemies.42

  This raggle-taggle army bent on retribution continued to patrol the streets, armed with every kind of imaginable weapon. There was still a great deal of random firing – into the air ‘or as best amuses them . . . shooting at every thing and every body’.43 And all this despite printed leaflets being distributed, exhorting people not to fire guns ‘promiscuously’ and to save their ammunition – ‘for the time is coming when it will be needed’.44 Self-appointed bands of vigilantes, some of them released criminals disguised as soldiers, now instituted random and often violent house-to-house searches: not just for police still evading capture, but also for any hidden supplies, especially of weapons, alcohol and food. Homes abandoned by their terrified owners – particularly members of the aristocracy – were a prime target, the mob helping themselves, with aimless compulsion, to the finest but most useless furniture and furnishings, china and glass. Nervous citizens barricaded themselves in their homes; any refusal to admit search teams led to doors being battered down and occupants who resisted being ruthlessly shot: young and old, women and children.

  General Count Gustave Stackelberg – a Russian-Estonian nobleman and former counsellor to Nicholas II – was shot and killed in front of his wife when his home on Millionnaya was stormed, but not before he had put up fierce resistance and killed several of his assailants with his revolver. Leighton Rogers and his colleagues at the National City Bank had seen Stackelberg (as they later discovered) come running outside onto the Palace Embankment, firing several shots before cowering behind a lamp post. He didn’t last long: ‘a bullet cleaned the top of his head right off,’ recalled Swinnerton.45 Yet in the midst of this, as Swinnerton noticed, ‘about a hundred yards away a soldier and his sweetheart were sitting on the parapet and chinning [chattering] away as if they hadn’t a care in the world’. Stackelberg’s body was left there in the middle of road, where it was trampled by passing mounted patrols. When Swinnerton and his colleagues returned home from work that night, it had been stripped of most of its uniform – ‘for souvenirs’, Rogers supposed. It was later tossed into the Neva, or rather onto it, for it landed on the river’s frozen surface and was left to languish there.46

  With such rampant hatred of the old order being demonstrated on the streets, it was inevitable that some members of the Russian aristocracy would appeal to Sir George Buchanan and other ambassadors for sanctuary. This put Sir George in a difficult position, as he could only extend his protection to those who were British subjects.fn2 When their home was looted and destroyed by the mob, the daughters of Count Vladimir Freedericksz, minister of the Imperial Court who was away with the Tsar at Stavka, had begged the British embassy to take them and their sick mother in. They were refused, supposedly due to ‘the social vanity’ of Lady Buchanan, who had complained, ‘I don’t know why I should take in the Countess Fredericks when she never once asked me to her house or to her box at the Opera.’47fn3 In contrast, Ambassador Francis had sent out his Second Secretary Norman Armour ‘to brave the bullets’, specifically to invite the US national Countess Nostitz, who lived three blocks away, to ‘take up quarters at the Embassy that [she] might be under the protection of the American flag’. Nostitz was touched by his offer, but preferred to remain with her Russian husband and trust to her luck.48

  Although entry into private homes by revolutionists was frequently violent and terrifying, it occasionally resulted in a more conciliatory turn of events, as Ella Woodhouse, daughter of the British consul, remembered of the moment when a group came to their apartment, demanding admission to search:

  Father invited them into the dining room, where we were having tea by the light of one or two candles, the electricity was off. They all sat down. I do not remember whether they were actually offered tea, but I retain the picture of the tense circle, round the long table in the dark room, lit only by flickering candles, the boys sitting awkwardly as father began explaining very politely, that they were welcome to search the place, but that they would then be violating diplomatic immunity, which he was sure they must know was a serious offence in a civilized country. This approach led to a general discussion on the aims of the Great Revolution. Gradually they relaxed and all joined in. The discussion continued for quite a long time. Then, with expressions of mutual goodwill, they went away.49

  But there was no such politesse for wine and provision shop owners. J. Butler Wright reported that they were ‘either forced to open their establishments, or the shops themselves were broken into’, although there was some attempt to keep control of the situation and ‘ensure that goods were distributed fairly and shop owners paid’. James Houghteling was delighted to learn that his cook had ‘bought from soldiers at ridiculously low prices all sorts of supplies, bolts of cloth, flour etc., which were taken from government stores that had been refusing them to the people for months’.50 Some of the premises that were searched revealed surprises: a cache of thousands of rifles and ammunition was found in a store in a butcher’s shop, probably hidden there by the police. When the crowd broke into the house of one police officer, ‘they found a whole shop-full of everything, flour (of which we have been able to get none), cognac, herrings,’ reported his English neighbour.51 A dyer’s and cleaner’s that had been boarded up for months contained piles of hams, long thought unobtainable. Endless hoards of flour and sugar (which the government had claimed were exhausted, but had been stockpiled for bribery) were unearthed, ‘for the most part in the private residences of police officers’ – so many, in fact, that this reinforced the widespread public conviction that the police had been ‘systematically using their opportunities to corner food-supplies in their districts’. Arthur Ransome reported that ‘some policemen had even been keeping live hens in their room’.52

  The relentless search for policemen continued throughout Tuesday. In a last-ditch attempt to evade capture, some of them adopted an unconvincing disguise as women, as James Stinton Jones related. The bigger men ‘hardly did justice to the fair sex’ and their identity was ‘invariably betrayed by their general bearing and size’. He noticed one of them – ‘a man, standing fully six feet, and broad-shouldered, and his general bearing and walk was certainly anything but feminine’. He was quickly spotted by the crowd, who ‘stopped him and took off his hat, which came away with a long wig and the thick veil, leaving a very coarse-featured masculine face with a heavy moustache. He immediately fell on his knees and begged for mercy, but the crowd dispatched him without further ado.’ Down near the canal Amélie de Néry saw twelve bodies of policemen that had been stripped naked and left lying there.53 Not long afterwards she came upon another sinister sight:

  a flat sledge on which a naked body had been thrown and covered with a white sheet, the legs hanging over the sides a little and the naked feet dragging along in the snow. A bulge in the sheet covering the chest suggested its head had been cut off. Patches of blood spattered this miserable bundle. It was probably the mortal remains of some policeman or other being taken off to a mortuary somewhere.54

  Jam
es Stinton Jones saw the ‘horrible appearance of the snow’ after a policeman had literally been torn ‘limb from limb’ on the street by an enraged mob. He also was told of some police officers caught in their homes being tied to their divans or sofas, ‘covered with kerosene and then set alight’. Dorothy Seymour heard tell of a local police chief being tied up and thrown on the bonfire outside his police station. Leighton Rogers was shocked to discover that a policeman who had shot a soldier on the corner outside their apartment ‘was promptly bayoneted and beheaded, much to the horror of our little servant girl who chanced to be passing’. Once discovered, individual policemen manning guns on rooftops could never hold out for long, and ‘with an exultant shout, one by one, forced to the edge at bayonet point, they crashed to the street below to be spit upon and reviled by the gathering crowd’.55

  6

  ‘Good to be Alive These Marvelous Days’

  REPORTING ON EVENTS to the Foreign Office at the end of March 1917, Hugh Walpole concluded that ‘On the whole, it may be truthfully said that, so far as Petrograd was concerned, by the Tuesday evening the revolution was over.’1 The tsarist government was finished; the Arsenal – last rallying point of the old regime – had finally surrendered at 4.00 p.m. when the rebels had threatened to turn the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress onto it. The whole of the army in Petrograd had now thrown in its lot with the revolutionaries, including the elite naval unit – the Guard Equipage commanded by Grand Duke Kirill – the Cadet Corps and 350 officers of the General Staff College; finally even the garrison that had guarded the imperial family at Tsarskoe Selo had joined them.2