Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  In the continuing absence of ‘the arch-revolutionist Lenin’, who was still lying low in Finland, the most compelling figure on the political stage in Petrograd in the autumn of 1917 was undoubtedly Leon Trotsky.46 Although originally a Menshevik, and for a while something of a political dilettante, his organisation of strikes and rallies in the wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905 had marked the beginning of his political ascendancy. Escaping Siberian exile in 1907, he had spent time in France and Spain, before being deported and settling in New York. When the February Revolution broke, he hastily left his apartment in the Bronx to return to Russia, finally throwing in his lot with the Bolsheviks. With the neurotic Lenin still fearful of showing himself, Trotsky was becoming the public face of the Bolshevik leadership. Louise Bryant had found him ‘Marat-like’ when she saw him speak at the Democratic Congress. His fire-and-brimstone manner had been ‘vehement, serpent-like’ and he had ‘swayed the assembly as a strong wind stirs the long grass’. No other speaker had created ‘such an uproar’ as Trotsky, or provoked ‘such hatred at the slightest utterance’ with his violent, ‘stinging words’, while retaining a cool head.47

  On 25 September, Trotsky had underlined his ascendancy when he was elected chair of the Petrograd Soviet, in which the Bolsheviks now had a majority. Arno Dosch-Fleurot had been at the Smolny Institute to witness the meeting, which was held in the large lecture hall of this former girls’ school:

  Except for a small group of workers, the floor was thick with soldiers – big, bearded, blond peasant-soldiers from the north of Russia, who had deserted the Riga front. On the stage were a dozen dark men with keen faces, most of them dressed in black leather breeches and jackets, such as worn by the motor cyclist couriers of the army. Seen over thousands of straw-blond heads, their black hair and black suits were in conspicuous contrast.48

  Black leather had by now become the ubiquitous uniform of the Bolsheviks, Fleurot noted. Trotsky wore it, too – and it would henceforth be his trademark. Like Bryant, Fleurot had witnessed the violence of his invective, when Trotsky told his audience at the Smolny that the Russian Revolution was reaching the point where the French Revolution was ‘when the Jacobins set up the guillotine’. Seeing Trotsky elected that day, Fleurot remembered it as being the moment when he was ‘sure there would be a successful Bolshevik revolution’.49 Leighton Rogers had also noted the power of Trotsky’s rhetoric: ‘This man Trotzky is the king of agitators; he could stir up trouble in a cemetery,’ he wrote, having heard him speak outside the Kschessinska Mansion, where he was alarmed by the ‘wild look in his eyes of a cat with fits’. Trotsky had spoken with ‘the enthusiasm and verbiage of a fanatic unable to keep up with the flight of his ideas and without regard for accuracy’.50 Rogers’s Russian was pretty good and he had no difficulty getting the gist of the familiar, overblown Bolshevik rhetoric spouted by Trotsky. As far as Rogers was concerned, it boiled down to the same strident, rabble-rousing components, which he playfully paraphrased in his diary:

  Comrades, in a few weeks, a week, a few days, we are going to rise from our slavery to the capitalistic Kerensky government, the tool of British and French Imperialists, and tear the power from his hands. We shall do this for you, so that you may be free men as the Revolution meant you to be. You must support the Soviet because we shall give you: first, peace; second, bread; third, land. Yes, we shall take all land from the rich and divide it among the peasants; and we shall reduce the hours of work, my comrades of the factories, to four, at double the wages you now receive. And you will see the criminal of the old regime and of the autocratic Kerensky government punished, along with the property-owning capitalists who have enslaved you and the peasants. So support us, comrades, and add your voices to our war cry of ‘Long Live the international proletariat and the Russian Revolution!’ Workers of the world, unite; you have only your chains to lose!

  Rogers knew it was ‘bunk’, and admitted in his diary that ‘something in the man stirred me to uneasiness’. ‘He has a large following and is dangerous. These people are easily mesmerized by talk.’ Trotsky was spreading his inflammatory message all over Petrograd, arguing that the Russian people could not save the revolution all the time they were still fighting in the war. They needed peace in order to be free to ‘make war on the bourgeoisie’.51

  In contrast to Trotsky’s vigour, Kerensky was a very sick man. He had for some time been suffering from stomach, lung and kidney trouble and had become increasingly dependent on morphine and brandy to curb not just the physical pain, but also his profound tiredness.52 When Louise Bryant and John Reed finally got a meeting with him at the Winter Palace, he seemed broken. They found him in Nicholas II’s private library, ‘[lying] on a couch with his face buried in his arms, as if he had been suddenly taken ill, or was completely exhausted’. Bryant put much of this weariness down to the fact that Kerensky saw the ‘approaching class struggle’ as a long one, for which he perhaps did not have the stomach or the energy. ‘Remember, this is not a political revolution,’ he told her. ‘It is not like the French revolution. It is an economic revolution.’ It would require a ‘profound revaluation of classes’ and a realignment of Russia’s many different nationalities. ‘Remember, that the French revolution took five years and that France was inhabited by one people,’ he told her, adding that ‘France is the size of one of our provincial districts. No, the Russian revolution is not over – it is just beginning.’53

  Unable to hold out any longer, Kerensky turned, in desperation, to British agent Somerset Maugham, summoning him to the Winter Palace. Maugham had by now sent a coded message to his controller Wiseman in New York that Kerensky’s popularity was plummeting. In his view, the British government would be better advised to support the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks, and invest money in a programme of espionage and propaganda to this end, conducted by Czech secret agents whom he knew in the city. At their meeting at the Winter Palace, Kerensky asked Maugham to memorise a secret message to the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and take it to England, requesting that he urgently send arms and ammunition and that he remove from his post Sir George Buchanan, whom Kerensky disliked. ‘I don’t see how we can go on,’ he had told Maugham. He had to have something positive to tell the army, to keep it in the fight.54

  Maugham left Petrograd that same evening on a British destroyer heading for Oslo. Kerensky’s requests, when he presented them, were summarily rejected by Lloyd George, but Maugham was never able to return to Petrograd to pass on the message. Meanwhile Sir George Buchanan, still doggedly lobbying Kerensky to take an active stand and eradicate Bolshevism before it was too late, had once more been rebuffed. He couldn’t clamp down on the Bolsheviks, Kerensky told him, ‘unless they themselves provoked an armed uprising’, for to do so might spark a counter-revolution.55 Somerset Maugham had understood this crippling inability to take positive action – Kerensky was ‘more afraid of doing the wrong thing than anxious to do the right one,’ he wrote in his later memoirs, ‘and so he did nothing until he was forced into action by others.’56fn6 For Kerensky the appeaser, a reactive response to the coming Bolshevik coup was the only option left to him. Even at this late stage he still believed he could gain the upper hand: ‘I only wish that they would come out,’ he told Sir George, ‘and I will then put them down.’57

  By mid-October there were renewed reports of an increasing hostility towards foreigners in Petrograd. Rumours had been circulating since the beginning of the month of Bolshevik plans to ‘slaughter Americans’ or even initiate ‘a general massacre of the foreigners’ at any time.58 ‘There must be something in the threats,’ Leighton Rogers wrote in his diary, ‘because the Embassy has quietly informed all Americans that there is to be a river-boat at the Quay above the Liteiny Bridge ready to take them aboard in case an outbreak should come . . . prepared to navigate up the river to Lake Ladoga and a shore town on the Murmansk Railway, where passengers can transfer to trains.’ The steamer commandeered by Walter Crosley was ready an
d waiting and provided with navigation maps; in addition, two volunteer guards from the American colony were on board at all times.59 Leighton Rogers and his colleague Fred Sikes had recently taken their turn on duty, bringing with them ‘a can of beans, my alcohol stove, and a thermos bottle of coffee’. Supplied with one ancient Colt .38 with which to defend themselves, they had noted the sheet of instructions telling them to ‘shoot to kill’, should the need arise. They were appalled to find that the good ship ‘Getaway’ – so named by their bank colleague, John Louis Fuller – was not large enough ‘to accommodate half the Americans in Petrograd’ and had no supplies whatsoever of food. At best it might have squeezed 150–200 people on board. Yet, in the dark not far away, Rogers and Sikes could make out ‘one of the largest and most luxurious river steamers, with adequate cabin space for hundreds in an emergency’; it turned out that it had been ‘chartered to the French Embassy’.60

  ‘Things are coming to a pretty pass here,’ British consul Arthur Woodhouse wrote home on 11 October, when he heard that the Bolsheviks had announced they would soon start ‘suppressing’ the bourgeoisie. ‘I confess I should like to be out of it, but this is not the time to show the white feather. I could not ask for leave now, no matter how imminent the danger. There are over 1,000 Britishers here still, and I and my staff may be of use and assistance to them in an emergency. Certain it is, judging by the numbers that still come to the Consulate, we are required here now.’61 David Francis had heard the same rumours that ‘the Bolsheviks had made a list of people whom they intended to kill, and that, while the British Ambassador heads the list, I am not many removes from the top’. ‘I do not believe this,’ he reassured his son back home, ‘and consequently I am not regulating my actions or movement accordingly.’62 The pragmatic Phil was, however, preparing himself for trouble:

  Some days and nights you will See on the Nevsky Prospect ten or twenty thousand marching with black flags and banners reading we are on our way to kill all Americans and all rich people – that includes me and [whoever] has on a White shirt. I will tell the Gov. that they are on the way again to kill us. The Gov will Say all right are you ready. I will say yes I am all ready so the Gov will tell me to load the Pistol and see if She is in working order. he Says that he will get to or three before he goes.63

  Despite so much gathering uncertainty, on 19 October Leighton Rogers and his colleague Fred Sikes were excited at the prospect of moving from their present cold and draughty accommodation to a swanky new flat that was being loaned to them rent-free for the next six months, by an American couple connected to the American International Corporation while they went back to the States. It was beautifully fitted out with ‘fine rugs, handsome furniture, and tapestries and paintings that [were] a delight to the eye’. And there were books, too, and a ‘full-sized Victrola [phonograph] with an extensive library of Gold Seal records’, not to mention a modern bathroom and a cook and two maids to keep the whole thing running. It would be good to escape their present noisy accommodation: ‘no more shall we hear the girl upstairs play “Get Out and Get Under” twenty times in succession, while members of the All-Siberian Salt Miners or whoever the heavy-footed guests are, dance till the ceiling plaster dusts our carpets.’ They had set a date to move in on Sunday 22 October.64

  Rogers did not of course know that about twelve days previously Lenin had crept back into Petrograd, clean-shaven and disguised in a wig and spectacles, and was now holed up in a flat on the Vyborg Side, plotting the final downfall of Kerensky’s government. On the night of 10 October an enervating ten-hour meeting of the twelve members of the Bolshevik Central Committee had been held at which a vote had been carried, by 10–2 (with moderates Kamenev and Zinoviev voting against) for an immediate armed uprising. Lenin was incandescent with impatience; he had been insisting for weeks that the takeover must happen now, but several in the leadership were reluctant to strike too early. The people were worn out; would they respond to yet more upheaval, when simply surviving from day to day was arduous enough? The consensus, upheld by Trotsky who had come to dominate the planning of the uprising in Lenin’s absence, was that they should exercise caution and wait until the 2nd All Russian Congress of Soviets, due to open on 25 October, which would give the coup greater legitimacy.

  This decision was an open secret, and many in the city wished the Bolshevik seizure of power over and done with, ‘to relieve this extraordinary situation’.65 Not least among them was John Reed, who, with Albert Rhys Williams, had resumed his ‘restless search’ for a story after the Democratic Congress, ‘going from the Winter Palace to [the] Smolny, from the US Embassy to Viborg, trying to be everywhere at once, seeking out translators to read the papers, sorting over wildly contradictory statements’. They were, Rhys Williams remembered, ‘like the rest of the capital, wearily, doggedly waiting for something to happen. The suspense was like a fever.’66

  14

  ‘We Woke Up to Find the Town in the Hands of the Bolsheviks’

  ‘THE BOLSHEVIKS HAVE advertised trouble again, this time for the 21 or 22 of this month, Russian style,’ bank clerk John Louis Fuller wrote in his diary on 11 October, but – like his colleagues, Rogers, Sikes and Swinnerton – he didn’t take this latest announcement that seriously. They had heard it all before: ‘every time they have advertised their intentions so widely nothing ever happens.’ This time, however, there was, he admitted, an ominous atmosphere in the city, and the promise of a renewal of disturbances was reiterated a few days later. ‘Trouble is going to come sometime with very little noise,’ Fuller was convinced, ‘and then it will be real trouble.’1

  They had all been working flat out at the National City Bank since the recent transfer of twelve of their staff to the Moscow branch, each of them doing the work of four. That Saturday evening, 21 October, had found Fuller working late, one of the last to leave the bank. It was pitch-dark except for his desk lamp: ‘If I didn’t know there were a couple of soldiers standing guard up in front I’d think I was the only living soul around.’2 They had run out of kerosene, which meant that during the day-long power cuts they had to struggle to see what they were doing, but once the light began fading, it was too difficult to continue working after 4.00 p.m. In the end, the 21st had passed quietly; Fuller had gone for his regular Russian lesson, and then in search of cherry jam to feed his insatiably sweet tooth; after much trudging around, he came home with seventeen pounds of it and some precious but horribly expensive English milk chocolate. But the jam would have to be eked out slowly, bearing in mind yet more imminent reductions in the bread and tea rations with which to enjoy it. They had all been trying to get hold of eggs, their ration cards entitling them to just one per week. Leighton Rogers had joked that such was the scarcity of eggs that even the hens had now gone on strike. ‘Soon we may learn the answer to the question that has puzzled philosophers for centuries: “Which came first, the hen or the egg?” – by learning which will come last.’3

  Like everyone else at the bank, Rogers had been watching the streets for signs of trouble, but was hopeful that the Provisional Government was merely biding its time and would nip the Bolshevik threat in the bud. While his friend Fuller had been preoccupied by his search for jam that Saturday, Rogers had been out watching parades on the streets – a token show of strength, first by young military cadets from the officers’ training school, and then by one of the Petrograd Women’s Battalions: ‘In new, regulation Russian uniform, with long, belted coats, grey Astrakhan hats tilted at the proper angle and bayoneted rifles held at left shoulder arms, they moved up the street with the full arm swing of the Russian infantryman.’ Rogers was impressed, especially when the women started singing. They reminded him of the Valkyries.4

  The following day, the city remained tense but quiet, although there had been a huge gathering of around 10,000 people at the Cirque Moderne, a huge concert hall north of the Neva that had become a popular venue for political rallies; and at the People’s House, another rallying point, Trotsky had
given one of his usual lurid speeches, to a crowd who listened with almost religious fervour. The curious ventured out on the streets that Sunday to see what might happen, but the day passed off without disturbance, despite the presence on every corner, as Leighton Rogers noted, of political agitators who ‘spoke in frenzied haste and moved on’.5 Having postponed the move to their new flat for three days, in order for this latest promised explosion of revolutionary violence to be over and done with, he and Sikes had finally decided on a date: Wednesday 25 October. They were very soon rueing that decision.

  ‘They’ve begun it; they’re at it now as I write,’ Rogers scribbled excitedly in his journal for 25 October. ‘Machine-guns and rifles are snarling and barking all over the city. Sounds like a huge corn-popper. – And we picked this afternoon to move!’

  Having left work early that morning to pack up the last of their things, the two colleagues had noticed ‘an electric feeling in the air, as if the nerves of a million and a half people were taut’. But after three days of false alarms they had ‘paid little attention to it’, until they went outside to try and find three droshkies to convey their belongings to their new address and found the streets full of people, hurrying, ‘almost running, towards the river and particularly towards the Palace Bridge’. They assumed this was because it was going to be raised, as it had been during the last few days, to keep pro-Bolshevik workers and soldiers on the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides out of the city centre. But they needed to cross that bridge to get to their new apartment, and by the time they had managed to corral three droshkies and haggle frantically with their drivers on an extortionate price of ten rubles eachfn1 to move their trunks, ‘the roadways were black with people swarming towards the Palace Bridge’.6 The droshkies were almost carried along by the mob as they set off in that direction. In the struggle to keep the three vehicles containing all their worldly possessions together (worsened by the fact that one of the drivers was dead-drunk), Rogers and Sikes didn’t make it to the bridge in time: guards deployed across the road clubbed at the horses with their guns and forced them back.7 The square in front of the bridge was now seething: