Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  When a train finally did come in – often after another two days or more of waiting – the crowd stormed it and clawed their way on board; those with money offered huge bribes for a precious seat. But many of the desperate were trampled and injured as they struggled to get on board.

  For those foreigners remaining in the city, life was becoming increasingly unstable by September, with belligerent crowds out protesting once more on the streets. From her bedroom window at the Astoria, Emmeline Pankhurst could see armed Bolsheviks marching up and down brandishing weapons.57 Concerned for her safety, a group of Russian officers at the hotel had offered to act as her armed bodyguard when she needed to go out, but she had refused; nor would she and Jessie Kenney capitulate to suggestions that they disguise themselves as proletarians, in order to avoid the threat of attack on the streets as despised members of the bourgeoisie. A few precious gifts of English food had arrived for them, care of the British embassy, which they gratefully enjoyed; but while they had been away on a visit to Moscow in August many of the things they had left behind at the hotel were stolen. ‘The sleepless nights and bad food, the emotional strain’ – all were taking their toll, wrote Kenney, and the service at the hotel was getting worse and worse.58

  The truth was, that despite the best of intentions and her energetic commitment, Emmeline Pankhurst’s mission to Russia had been a failure. She had had little or no comprehension of Russia’s women, and many of those with whom she had sought to engage had found her manner patronising. Why should she – an Englishwoman from a position of relative comfort and privilege – preach to women such as they, who had spent their entire lives struggling to survive against political and social oppression of a kind that was way beyond her understanding or experience? When it came down to it, as Florence Harper observed, ‘the women of Russia were too busy revolutionising to bother about being organised’.59 For her own part, Jessie Kenney liked to think that, if nothing else, ‘we did foster hope, and we did all we could to maintain courage and faith’.60 What is more, Pankhurst had done so through considerable physical pain and exhaustion. ‘She was now looking more aged and worn with one struggle after another, and the continual gastric trouble was wearing her down,’ recalled Kenney, and they decided to head back to England. But Emmeline Pankhurst would leave with powerful memories of Petrograd, and especially of Maria Bochkareva, and she would take with her a warning that the situation in Russia was ‘as bad as it can be’. The challenge traditional government in Russia was now having to face from revolutionary politics – which Pankhurst found arbitrary and brutal – offered in her view ‘an object lesson for the democracies of the world’; and a ‘very terrible object lesson’ it was.61

  Ahead of her departure from Petrograd with Pankhurst, Jessie Kenney arranged to have her diary of their visit smuggled out of Russia, having been advised that all uncensored reading matter was routinely confiscated at the border with Sweden at Torneo. On their way out through Finland and Sweden to the boat at Bergen, they once more shared the same train as Lady Muriel Paget.fn6 Florence Harper was on board too, by now ‘so fed up with Russia and black bread and machine-guns and riots and murder and discord’ that she had ‘shaken the mud of Petrograd from her shoes with more pleasure than [she] realized’. On arrival in London, Harper headed straight for her first decent breakfast in seven months: ‘porridge, sole, kippers, bacon and eggs, toast, marmalade and tea’; but that night there was a German air raid.62 She might have escaped revolutionary Petrograd, but she was still in the war zone.

  A few dogged foreign journalists did, however, remain in the city, hanging on for the anticipated big news story of a Bolshevik takeover, holed up in the city’s increasingly rundown hotels. At the Hotel de France, Americans Ernest Poole, William G. Shepherd and Arno Dosch-Fleurot had learned to fend for themselves. The hotel had been hostage to repeated strikes by waiters, cooks and chambermaids; there was refuse, dirt and dust everywhere; the sheets went unwashed and their beds unmade. One day, desperate for something to eat, they found their way down to the hotel’s huge pantry, ‘where from floor to ceiling were piled dirty cups and plates and coffee pots’. They picked out some crockery, washed it and went to the kitchen, where ‘one old cook, who had not gone on strike with the rest, gave us vile black coffee and big chunks of soggy rye bread’, which they carried back to their room.63 Such was the life of the foreign correspondent, they agreed with grim humour. Most couldn’t wait to get out, but others were still arriving, even now.

  In the last week of August, after taking the long sea journey from San Francisco to Yokohama, followed by an eleven-day rail journey from Vladivostok, an English writer slipped into Petrograd on an ambitious – and secret – mission. He had been sent, by the Secret Intelligence Service (now MI6), ‘to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution’, as he later rather grandly put it, ‘and to keep Russia in the war’. It seemed a tall order for one solitary, tubercular, inexperienced British spy, recruited because he knew a bit of Russian from reading Chekhov stories and happened to be related by marriage to Sir William Wiseman, the SIS’s man in New York. His code name was Somerville, and his cover that of a journalist reporting on the situation in Russia for the British press. His real name was Somerset Maugham.

  He had already worked undercover as a British agent in Switzerland in 1915–16 and had been living in New York, when Wiseman recruited him to go to Petrograd to subvert German propagandising for Russia’s withdrawal from the war and to offer support to Kerensky. Maugham arrived in Petrograd on 19 August with a generous $21,000 to cover his expenses for this purpose, and expected to be ‘occupied there presumably till the end of the war’.64 As an aesthete and member of the English literary set, his first view of the Nevsky – after having enjoyed the ‘flamboyance’ of the rue de la Paix and the ‘splendour’ of Fifth Avenue – was a depressing one. He found it ‘dingy and sordid and dilapidated’ and the displays in the shop windows ‘vulgar’, but the diversity of its dense crowds was quite new to him and he found it enthralling: ‘walking along the Nevsky,’ he recalled, ‘you saw the whole gallery of the characters of the great Russian novels so that you could put a name to one after the other’.65

  A personal introduction to Kerensky soon followed, thanks to Maugham’s friendship with Alexandra Kropotkin, daughter of the legendary revolutionary, Prince Peter Kropotkin. ‘I think Kerensky must have supposed that I was more important than I really was,’ Maugham later wrote, ‘for he came to Sasha’s apartment on several occasions and, walking up and down the room, harangued me as though I were at a public meeting for two hours at a time.’66 Maugham quickly installed himself on the expatriate social circuit, meeting Hugh Walpole of the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau and dining with him and other friends – and Kerensky as well – on caviar and vodka, ‘at the expense of two governments’, at the popular Medved restaurant.67 ‘I don’t think that Maugham knew very much about Russia,’ Walpole recalled of him in a later memoir, ‘but his refusal to be hurried into sentimental assumptions, his cynical pretence that “all was anyway for the worst” (he did not himself believe that for a single moment) gave him a poise and calm that some others of us badly needed’.

  There was a quality about Maugham, the literary man and gentleman spy, that professional spies did not have: ‘He watched Russia as we would watch a play, finding the theme, and then intent on observing how the master artist would develop it,’ added Walpole.68 He took time to soak up the culture – attending the ballet and theatre – and catching up on his reading of the Russian classics. He also made sure he mixed with the Allied agents staying at the Europa and the Astoria, returning to his hotel room in the evenings to carefully encrypt messages to his controller, Wiseman, in New York, in which Kerensky was ‘Lane’, Lenin ‘Davis’ and Trotsky ‘Cole’ and the British government took the sobriquet of ‘Eyre & Co.’69fn7

  Eighteen days after Maugham had installed himself discreetly in Petrograd’s Hotel d’Europe, a new pair of American reporters arrived in town. Unlike t
heir pragmatic, experienced compatriots Florence Harper and Donald Thompson, who had arrived without fanfare in February, the charismatic socialist and professional rebel John Reed and his wife, the feminist journalist Louise Bryant, arrived in Petrograd with a reputation for leftist sentiment and brimming with high-minded socialist ideals that were guaranteed to attract attention.

  Thirty-year-old Reed, from a well-to-do conventional Portland (Oregon) family, had been something of a playboy and a joker during his years at Harvard. Moving to Greenwich Village, he became a key figure in the bohemian avant-garde, working as a reporter for the radical New York magazine The Masses, where he had earned a reputation for his uncompromising political beliefs, tackling social issues and championing the working-class underdog, as a vigorous supporter of the militant Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World). In 1913, during the Mexican Revolution, he had installed himself with rebel Pancho Villa’s forces, from where his vivid reporting had further built his reputation. Reed’s work for the liberal Metropolitan Magazine had sent him to Europe in 1914. He had wanted to report on the Eastern Front, but although in the summer of 1915 he had managed to get to Petrograd, where he was briefly detained by the authorities, he had been refused permission to operate in the Russian military zone. Back in New York, he continued to produce inflammatory articles criticising the war and America’s involvement in it.70

  In December 1915 in Portland, Reed had met Louise Bryant – an attractive, auburn-haired social reporter and fashion illustrator from Nevada, who was active in the women’s suffrage movement. Soon afterwards she had left her dentist husband and followed Reed to New York, where they had married, after her divorce, the following November. After the February Revolution broke, Reed had been eager to go to Russia and see things for himself, but it was not till August that he had managed to raise the money for his trip, reporting for The Masses and another socialist weekly, the New York Call. Bryant travelled with him, Reed having wangled her accreditation to write for the Metropolitan Magazine and the Bell syndicate. In 1917 the mainstream press still did not acknowledge women war correspondents, and Bryant’s function was therefore, nominally, to report on Russia ‘from a woman’s point of view’.71

  Because of their tight budget, the Reeds found the Petrograd hotels were more than they could afford, so they set themselves up at a freezing cold rented apartment at 23 Troitskaya (where they slept in their overcoats). They were eager to meet Arno Dosch-Fleurot, whose reports from Petrograd they had been following since 1916, and soon hooked up with him and fellow American socialists and journalists Bessie Beatty and Albert Rhys Williams (a former Congregational minister whom Reed had known in Greenwich Village) – both of whom had been in the city since June and who provided valuable introductions, along with the shared services of an interpreter, Alexander Gumberg.

  John Reed’s defining account of the October Revolution would later become the gold standard of eyewitness reporting on revolutionary Russia, but in September 1917 he had arrived in this political cauldron with no knowledge of the language or experience of its culture and politics, and no personal contacts in government, society or the revolutionary movement. To compensate, he had all the brashness, drive and charisma, the literary powers and journalistic flair for taking on such a big, dramatic news story; and he sensed that the story now brewing would be the making of his career. Together, the like-minded Reed, Bryant, Beatty and Rhys Williams joined forces to tell Russia’s story from their own committed socialist perspective, as partisans and tovarishchi, determined to ‘feel its strength – unshackled’ and, hopefully, bear witness to ‘the dawn of a new world’.72

  PART 3

  THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

  13

  ‘For Color and Terror and Grandeur This Makes Mexico Look Pale’

  THANKS TO DELAYS of a week at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in Stockholm, John Reed and Louise Bryant had been travelling for almost a month when they finally arrived, bedraggled and exhausted in Petrograd. They had sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey, on 17 August 1917 (NS), to Kristiania in Norway on a Danish steamer, the United States. Most of the people on board were Scandinavians, but there were a few American businessmen, as well as a contingent of Jewish exiles returning to Russia to live – so they hoped – in freedom at last. From her first-class deck Louise could hear their voices singing revolutionary songs carried up from the steerage deck below.1

  Among the American passengers there was a party of seven young college graduates, who had recently been recruited by the National City Bank to join Leighton Rogers, Chester Swinnerton and others at the Petrograd branch, so that some staff could be transferred to Moscow. Twenty-three-year-old trainee John Louis Fuller of Indianapolis was one of them. He had never been abroad before and had enjoyed the entertaining company of Reed and Bryant on the train from Kristiania to Petrograd, during which he had a ‘good many’ political arguments with them.2 They had all been alarmed by the vigorous pilfering of their luggage when soldiers ordered them off the train at Beloostrov, the last stop before Petrograd’s Finland Station, when everyone had rued the loss of ‘toilet articles, shirts, socks, collars, razors’ that were confiscated as supposed ‘contraband’. Worse, ‘The John Reeds had lost most of their things including their letter of credit’ that had been in Reed’s wallet, which had been stolen too, and Louise had been humiliated by being ‘compelled to strip when they searched her’.3

  US ambassador David Francis was wary of the Reeds when they first presented themselves at his embassy. They had arrived with a letter of introduction from a federal official in New York, requesting that Francis offer any help he could in their assignment to study social conditions in Petrograd. Francis might well have had sight of the contents of Reed’s stolen wallet, which was miraculously ‘returned’ to the US consulate (though minus the 500 rubles in cash it contained) soon afterwards, possibly having been pickpocketed to order, so that Reed’s credentials could be checked.4 Either way, once he had ascertained that Reed had been ‘cordially welcomed by the Bolsheviks whom he apparently advised of his coming’, Francis was on his guard. ‘I naturally regarded Mr Reed as a suspicious character and had him watched and his record and acts investigated,’ he recalled. These suspicions seemed to be confirmed when a few days later Reed turned up at a mass meeting to protest at the arrest in the USA, and the forthcoming trial on a conspiracy charge, of a Russo-American anarchist named Alexander Berkman.5 Leighton Rogers had seen the posters plastered on billboards around the city announcing meetings to protest at this punishment of ‘Brother Berkman in the Capitalistic Oligarchy of the United States’; such violent sloganeering, and the fact that Reed supported it, was more than enough to alarm Francis and his staff.6

  Not long after his arrival, Reed wrote to an old friend that he had ‘more stuff than I can write’. ‘We are in the middle of things, and believe me it’s thrilling. There is so much dramatic to write that I don’t know where to begin.’ Petrograd had already seized his imagination, Reed told him: ‘For color and terror and grandeur this makes Mexico look pale.’ He was full of questions and restless to ‘see everything at once’, as his friend Albert Rhys Williams recalled, but was hampered by having only the barest smattering of Russian. It did not take him long to overcome this; with the help of his interpreter, Alexander Gumberg, he had soon mastered enough of the language to be able to work out the essentials.7 Rhys Williams helped Reed get to know the city and introduced him and Bryant to his many Russian contacts – taking them on a walking tour of all the major places linked to recent events, describing to them the demonstrations and riots he had witnessed earlier in the year and together discussing what path the endgame of revolution might take from here.

  Reed wanted to know who was the most impressive speaker: Lenin or Trotsky? Even as a committed and well-informed socialist, he had been in ignorance of the elusive Bolshevik leader until the US press had finally begun picking up on Lenin after the July Days, and he was eager to see him.8 Rhys Williams was sure that revolutio
nary Russia would be Reed’s coming of age, just as it had been his own: ‘The Revolution was not something you could play around with. You could not take it up and then drop it. It was something that seized hold of you, shook you, and possessed you.’ The Bolsheviks were working for the kind of social justice that both men believed in, and they wanted it ‘more passionately than any other group’. They saw the coming battle as a straightforward class war: ‘No one shall eat cake until everyone has bread,’ urged Rhys Williams. Such lofty ideals were wonderful in principle, from a safe distance, but as they would soon discover, revolutionary practice in Petrograd was quite another matter.9

  Interception of inflammatory remarks by Reed, suggesting that if the Bolsheviks gained control the ‘very first thing they would do would be to kick out all the Embassies and all those connected with them’, suggested to Ambassador Francis that Reed openly supported the overthrow of Kerensky’s government.10 Reed and Bryant had already been predicting ‘trouble in a couple of weeks when the combined soviets hold their meeting here’, as John Louis Fuller noted. On the journey from America, Fuller had ‘heard them prophesying many things that haven’t come true so perhaps this is another of their false alarms’.11 To most of the Americans who encountered him in Petrograd, the headstrong and outspoken Reed appeared provocative, but also politically blinkered – foolish even.12fn1 His seemed a very limited and politically naive view of Petrograd to those expatriates who had lived there for many years. Russia, for the impressionable Reed and Bryant, was very much a political adventure, a chance to witness a socialist experiment in the making, but having arrived ‘on the crest of a counter-revolution’, at the tail end of the Kornilov affair, they soon were experiencing the full impact of a city under political and economic siege.13