Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  The foreign community of Petrograd had had little exposure to Lenin’s ideas and was equally uncomprehending of his true political colours as a Bolshevik. Indeed, such was the general confusion about him that he was often described by foreign residents and journalists alike as an ‘anarchist’, a term they applied willy-nilly to a wide range of political activists.fn1 For Sir George Buchanan, Lenin was but one of yet another ‘fresh batch of anarchists from abroad’ to have arrived recently in the city. Many suspected an affiliation with the Germans: ‘That horrible German agent Lenin’ was back in the city, working ‘day and night to make trouble’, Lady Georgina wrote home, convinced that Lenin brought with him the danger of ‘German intrigues’.5 The Americans weren’t sure what to make of him, either: ‘An ultra-Socialist named Lenin has been doing a great deal of foolish talking and has advised his hearers to kill all people who have property and refuse to divide,’ noted Ambassador Francis, who was already worrying that Kerensky did not have the muscle to deal with him. ‘We are living somewhat in suspense,’ he added in a letter to his son Perry. ‘Lenin’s followers are an unknown quantity.’6

  From the moment he arrived, Lenin was clearly bent on undermining and ousting the Provisional Government. One American who had been on the same train that had brought him into Petrograd from the border at Torneo told YMCA worker Edward Heald that Lenin’s first words as he got off the train had been, ‘Hail to the Civil War.’ ‘God knows what a task the Provisional Government has on hand without adding to the trouble that such a firebrand can create,’ Heald wrote in his diary.7 The accusations of being in the pay of the Germans would certainly stick, for Lenin’s return with a dedicated circle of followers had been facilitated by the Germans on a special ‘sealed’ train that was allowed through wartime Germany to the coast at Sassnitz, from where the group had crossed by boat to Trelleborg and then travelled by train through Sweden and Finland to Petrograd’s Finland Station.8 With word out about Lenin’s imminent arrival on the evening of the 3rd, a considerable crowd of supporters, factory workers and the curious had gathered to meet him. Arno Dosch-Fleurot went along, in the company of ‘an old revolutionary pamphlet-writer’ who had been filling him in on the role of the absent Lenin in the revolutionary movement for the last sixteen years, and on his long-standing grass-roots support in the Vyborg factory quarter, where he had been a political agitator before his arrest in 1898.

  When the passengers descended from the special train, Fleurot had searched for this almost mythical figure – a man not seen in the city since his brief reappearance there in 1905–6, and then only by his closest colleagues in the party. But all Fleurot caught sight of was ‘a small man with Asiatic features’, who had the ‘short, unimpressive figure of a Tartar of the Volga, but with the heavy cheek-bones and more decided slant to the eye common among the Mongols’.9

  Lenin’s personal magnetism was, however, undeniable. The shrill, hectoring voice and those inscrutable Kalmyk eyes clearly stirred the crowd of well-wishers and the official party from the Petrograd Soviet that had greeted him, at a Finland Station festooned with garlands and red banners. Even bigger crowds stood waiting in the darkness outside, with bands playing the Marseillaise and the Internationale, the scene ‘stabbed by piercing beams from the search-lights of the armoured cars’.10 From there, Lenin had been escorted to his new political base in the city – a mansion belonging to Nicholas II’s former lover.

  Across the Troitsky Bridge opposite the British embassy, and within sight of the blue minarets of the city’s only mosque, stood the stylish Style Moderne home of Mathilde Kschessinska, prima ballerina of the Imperial Ballet, for whom the mansion had been specially built in 1904–6. Shortly before the February Revolution, warned that she was in danger, she had abandoned it and fled to France.11 On 4 April, when she looked out of her window on the other side of the river, Meriel Buchanan saw ‘an enormous scarlet flag fluttering above the walls’. The house, she discovered, had ‘been taken over by a group of political exiles who had just arrived from Switzerland’. Shortly after his arrival there, Lenin had emerged onto the balcony to address the waiting crowd. Soon he was making ‘the most incendiary harangues in public’, hurling invective at the Provisional Government while bandying his mantra – ‘Peace, Bread, Land’ – in his new political organ, the newspaper Pravda, which had also established a base at the mansion.12

  Negley Farson contemplated the short distance from there, back across the Neva, to the British embassy, where ‘the best diplomatic corps in Russia was guessing which way the cat was going to jump’, now that Lenin had arrived to stir up the hornets’ nest of political rivalry. Beyond, on Furshtatskaya, the Americans ‘were doing likewise’, ‘and further on the Italians and the French; and further out the whole world – all guessing’.13 At first Lenin seemed like any other political fanatic, and there were plenty of them populating the streets of Petrograd, haranguing people from every corner. But Sir George Buchanan was seriously concerned: the Provisional Government needed to act swiftly and stop Lenin ‘inciting soldiers to desert, to seize the land, and to murder’. That was the simple, brutal message that Lenin had brought with him, as part of his campaign to bring about what Sir George saw as a ‘demoralisation’ in government and Russia’s exit from the war.14

  ‘He is the reddest of the red,’ wrote Claude Anet. ‘This Lenin is what one calls, in the horrible Socialist jargon, a “Defeatist”, that is to say, one of those who prefer defeat to the War.’ Negley Farson was not taken in by assertions of the new arrival’s mythical ‘greatness’. ‘He was not “great” to any but a few people at that time. He was just this undersized new agitator in an old double-breasted blue suit, his hands in his pockets, speaking with an entire absence of that hysterical arm-waving that so characterized all his fellow countrymen.’15 Arthur Ransome thought even less of what he deemed Lenin’s risible methods of political agitation from the Kschessinska Mansion: ‘his proceedings are so exaggerated that they have the air of being comic opera’.

  But his seditious influence was soon felt, as Edward Heald noted, when shortly afterwards he saw a street parade organised by Lenin condemning the war and the government: ‘There is the poison that will destroy the democratic revolution,’ he noted presciently.16 Incitement to violence and anarchy was heard everywhere in the city. ‘You want to get rich: there is money in the banks,’ Louis de Robien heard Lenin exhorting the mob. ‘You want palaces, go where you please . . . You don’t want to walk in the mud: stop those cars! . . . All this belongs to you – it’s your turn – you are the power now.’ De Robien encountered the impact of Lenin’s rabble-rousing in an enormous women’s demonstration on the Nevsky, when he heard them singing ‘blood-thirsty lyrics to the tune of a hymn’: ‘We will pillage! We will cut throats! We will disembowel them!’17

  With the arrival of Lenin, the world beyond Russia finally began to take notice of this new and threatening breed of Bolsheviki – the name had rapidly been gaining currency and it sounded, to journalist William G. Shepherd of Everybody’s Magazine, ‘like all that the world fears’. ‘Bolsheviki! . . . Can’t you see it in the headlines?’ he asked his American readers. ‘It will stick. It will crackle in everybody’s mouth, ear, and brain. Bolsheviki!’18

  Once Lenin was installed, the Kschessinska Mansion, with its team of bullying, incendiary Bolshevist agitators, became a hive of propagandist activity. ‘Hundreds of typewriters and duplicators worked night and day, and before long printing presses were also installed’, running off anti-government proclamations by the thousand. Lenin was far too busy with meetings and politicising to take time out to address the huge crowds that now began gathering daily beneath the balcony on Kronversky Prospekt, hoping to ‘hear the lion roar’.19 Unlike the flamboyant orator Leon Trotsky,fn2 who returned from exile in New York the following month, Lenin was not one for the limelight. He ‘hid himself and allowed his lieutenants to do the work’ and only occasionally deigned to show himself. Nor did he waste time trying to win ov
er those who were hostile to him.20

  At this time Associated Press correspondent Robert Crozier Long was one of the few to be allowed access to the Kschessinska Mansion – a building now approached with some trepidation by terrified local residents, having a reputation as it did for being stashed with machine guns and home to a bomb-making factory. The interior, in line with the depressing ‘democratisation’ – or rather degradation – of the Tauride Palace, was a sorry sight:

  In a handsome white vestibule, with marble statues, were dirty, spitting soldiers who lounged over desks collating reports . . . the fine winter-garden had become headquarters of the propaganda league, and was packed from ceiling to floor with pamphlets; Kshesinskaya’s bedroom, of the oriental luxury of which Petrograd talked, was littered with copies of the incendiary newspaper Pravda; and – worst shame of all – her marble and tile Roman bath, the size of a small room, was half full of cigarette ends, dirty papers and rags.21

  In this former late-imperial splendour Lenin was gathering around him ‘all the hot-heads of the revolution’, Maurice Paléologue noted in his diary. In his view, the Bolshevik leader was a combination of ‘utopian dreamer and fanatic, prophet and metaphysician, blind to any idea of the impossible or the absurd, a stranger to all feelings of justice or mercy, violent, Machiavellian and crazy with vanity’. Paléologue thought him ‘all the more dangerous because he is said to be pure-minded, temperate and ascetic. Such as I see him in my mind’s eye, he is a compound of Savanorola and Marat, Blanqui and Bakunin.’ Donald Thompson shared this alarmist view of Lenin and saw only one logical solution. ‘The best thing for Russia to do,’ he wrote to his wife ‘is to kill Lenine’ or at least ‘arrest him and put him in prison’. ‘If they don’t I expect to write you a letter, some day, that this cur is in control of things here.’

  The ‘innocent boy’ from Kansas had it in one.22

  In early April the celebration of the Russian Orthodox Easter had, all too briefly, shut out the seditious new language of revolution and brought a transitory return to the old days of imperial Russia, the churches conducting mass with all the usual opulent Orthodox splendour and ceremony. Across the city on the Saturday night the bells had begun ringing at midnight, and churches had been packed for the vigil lasting until till 3.30 a.m. on Easter Sunday. Great torches could be seen burning on the four corners of the roof of St Isaac’s Cathedral and the whole city was lit up for miles. Louis de Robien noted how ‘the great onion domes of the Church of the Resurrection, all gold in the reflection of the light from the stained-glass windows below, glowed in the sky . . . All the bells were ringing. The cannon of the Fortress were firing salvos.’ For a short while, it seemed as though the events of the last few weeks had been ‘like a bad dream’. It was, he wrote, ‘the Russia of old, rising again with Christ’.23

  The worshippers in church seemed as devout as ever; Edward Heald thought there was ‘a new spirit abroad of released hope and a touching show of brotherhood’.24 At the Kazan Cathedral, Maurice Paléologue had seen ‘the same scenes as in the days of tsarism, the same majesty and magnificence, the same display of liturgical pomp’. If anything, the levels of piety were even more intense – expressed in a huge wave of emotion when the priest announced ‘Khristos Voskres!’ – Christ is Risen!25 The arrival of spring soon afterwards added to this feeling of renewal. With the chestnut trees in bloom, the ice floes on the Neva beginning to break up, the gold cupolas gleaming in the spring sunshine, and people and street traders out enjoying the thaw, there came a resurgence of hope. There also came most welcome news from America.

  It took J. Butler Wright and his colleagues at the US embassy two hours working with four code books to decipher the formal statement telegraphed to them from Washington that President Wilson had declared war on Germany on 6 April (24 March OS; the embassy received the news two days later). The embassy staff had been receiving anxious calls meanwhile from reporters, members of the Allied mission and ‘news-hungry Americans’, before it finally summoned them to the embassy to hear the ambassador formally announce just after midnight that America had entered the war. Everyone in the embassy was enormously relieved; the last few days had been a terrible strain. The response in the Russian press was, as Wright recalled, ‘positively inspiring’.26 Several American naval and military officers based in Petrograd immediately came to the embassy and asked to be allowed to go home and enlist. And there was a ready supply of former Russian officers who had lost their posts – some of whom had been in hiding since the revolution – and who now ‘haunted’ the office of military attaché William J. Judson, ‘wishing to go to America’. ‘Theirs was an awful lot,’ Judson admitted, for ‘if their own men or the Bolsheviks did not end up killing them’, and America did not offer sanctuary, ‘suicide seem[ed] their only recourse’.27

  The pressures on the US government and its Petrograd embassy to wave a magic wand over the Russian war effort were, inevitably, enormous: ‘all look to us to lend money, muzzle the socialists, straighten out the Trans-Siberian, and generally “buck up” this government – which is going to be a colossal job,’ wrote Wright in his diary.28 The logistical problems alone were legion, notably on the Trans-Siberian Railway, where a chaotic congestion of cars, rolling stock and food and military supplies stranded at Vladivostok was urgently in need of resolution in order to get the system running. A contingent of American and Canadian railroad men were now en route to Russia, headed by John F. Stevens, one of the builders of the Panama Canal, to attempt to bring order to the chaos.

  Other foreign visitors, in the main British and French socialists and labour leaders, had been arriving since mid-March to see the changes that revolution had wrought on Russia. British Labour Party representatives James O’Grady and Will Thorne were among the first. They were ‘honest decent working men,’ admitted embassy official Francis Lindley, but ‘they had nothing in common with the intellectual theorists with whom they argued hour after hour. After one of these bouts they would come into my room and refresh themselves with whisky and soda – giving vent to the most abusive description of their opposite numbers. “A lot of b-dy s-ds my dear chap”,’ said Thorne, of their revolutionary hosts. Meanwhile the Russian socialist press condemned the British delegates as ‘hirelings of an Imperialist Government and not representing Labour at all’.29

  The most prominent Western socialist – and a member of the French War Cabinet – was Albert Thomas, who arrived on 9 April on the same train as a group of exiles returning from France, England and Switzerland. A large crowd had turned out to greet him, headed by the meticulous Paléologue in ambassador’s tailcoat and top hat (eclipsing a rather shabby revolutionary guard of honour). ‘Now we see the revolution in all its grandeur and beauty!’ an enthusiastic Thomas exclaimed to Paléologue as he stepped from the train.30 The jovial Frenchman – more ‘commercial traveller’ than sophisticated politician, in both appearance and manner – was accommodated at the Hotel d’Europe, where he ‘trie[d] in vain to act the fierce socialist by eating his wing of pullet from the end of his knife’, while Paléologue rued the fact that he was obliged to entertain him at the French embassy with one of his last good bottles of burgundy. Despite Thomas’s open endorsement of the revolution, the Russians remained unimpressed by him; as far as they were concerned, he too was a phoney – a ‘Socialist traitor’, a ‘bourgeois’ come to represent ‘pro-war capitalism’.31

  For his own part, Thomas confided to his old friend Julia Grant (now married to a Russian prince and known as Princess Cantacuzène-Speransky) that the Russian socialists were ‘not socialists at all, but what we call in France Anarchists and Communards’.32 But there was also another purpose to his mission, and it was one that Paléologue had been expecting. Thomas brought with him a letter from the French government relieving him of his post as ambassador and recalling him to Paris, because ‘your position of favour with the Emperor would make it more difficult for you to carry on your duties under the present government,’ Thomas explain
ed.33 Paléologue took the news with his characteristic equanimity, although he resented it coming from the upstart Thomas. He was profoundly concerned about Russia’s continuing participation in the war, convinced that it was essential to bolster support for Milyukov and the moderates in the Provisional Government. Thomas, however, supported Kerensky as the only man ‘capable of establishing, with the aid of the Soviet, a government worthy of our [i. e. Allied] confidence’. Knowing full well that the Soviet was campaigning for a Russian withdrawal, Paléologue telegraphed Paris warning that it was more than likely that she would soon defect from the war.34

  Until now, Ambassador Francis and his aide J. Butler Wright had remained relatively optimistic about Russia’s post-revolutionary political future, but an incident on the night of 9 April had confirmed how volatile the Petrograd mobs still were. Francis had been entertaining guests that Sunday evening when Phil Jordan hurried in with a message warning that a mob waving black anarchist flags was on its way to attack the ‘American imperialists’ at the embassy. They had apparently been incited to do so in protest at the recent conviction and sentence to death of the American trade-union organiser and political activist Thomas J. Mooney, after a rigged trial in which he had been accused of involvement in a bomb plot during a San Francisco labour rally.fn3 Preparing for his own dramatic Last Stand, Francis immediately instructed Jordan to load his revolver and bring it to him as he waited for a detachment of government militia to come and defend them. Francis vowed to shoot anyone who tried to get inside his embassy, but as things turned out, the mob never got that far and was dispersed soon after setting off. (Exaggerated stories were later circulated that Francis had single-handedly seen them off, which amused him greatly: ‘Everyone seemed to prefer the more sensational story, so I suppose I shall have to resign myself to this heroic role,’ he later wrote.) Phil was intensely relieved: the ambassador ‘had never fired a gun in his life, so far as I know, and I knew if he fired at that crowd, it would probably be the end of both of us’.35