Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  When the truck turned up into the Nevsky, it headed for the palace, but at the Ekaterininsky Canal the group was allowed no further and had to get off; there was firing going on up ahead and they were refused entry by armed sailors guarding a barricade under a huge arc-light.35 After some persuasion and the production of their blue passes, they eventually found a Red Guard who allowed them through and up, past a cordon of sailors, to the Red Arch leading into Palace Square, from where all they could hear was the ‘crunching of broken glass spread like a carpet over the cobblestones’, from the many smashed windows of the Winter Palace.’36

  It was then, at around 2.45 a.m., that a sailor suddenly emerged out of the darkness. ‘It’s all over,’ he shouted. ‘They have surrendered.’ Ahead, the Winter Palace – despite the damage to its windows – was lit up ‘as if for a fete’ and the Americans could see people moving about inside. The four of them ‘clambered over the barricades’ behind the guards and sailors and followed them towards the great palace, now ‘streaming with light’, and entered the building through whatever doorway or window they could find.37fn5 The remaining terrified young cadets on guard inside were quickly disarmed and seemed grateful to be allowed to leave unscathed. Waving their blue-sealed passes, the Americans entered and watched groups of sailors mount the stairs and begin a room-by-room search for the members of the Provisional Government, who were soon found in the Malachite Hall upstairs, and were led out under arrest.38 ‘Some of them walked with defiant step and heads held high,’ recalled Beatty. ‘Some were pale, worn, and anxious. One or two seemed utterly crushed and broken.’ The Americans watched in silence as the men were marched away; they were taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress on the opposite side of the Neva. After this the Americans were allowed to go upstairs and take a look for themselves at the council chamber and the ‘shattered rooms’ scarred with bullets, where the silk curtains ‘hung in shreds’.39 Further on they were stopped by a group of suspicious soldiers muttering accusations that they were despised members of the ‘bourgeoisie’. Once again the blue passes saved the day, but not before the men had duly conferred and taken a comradely vote on whether to let them pass.

  As the group made its way through the upstairs rooms, it was clear that some of the insurgents had succumbed to the inevitable urge to go on the rampage and had started battering open the piles of packing cases filled with precious artefacts being readied for evacuation; others wreaked their fury by shattering mirrors, kicking in wall panels, rifling drawers – plundering and breaking whatever they did not loot. Offices were wrecked, their cabinets ransacked and papers scattered everywhere. Rhys Williams and Bryant both noted a concerted effort to stop the looting and saw soldiers exhorting the looters, ‘Comrades, this is the people’s palace. This is our palace. Do not steal from the people.’ Upon which, a few were shamed into giving up their pathetic loot: ‘a blanket, a worn sofa cushion of leather, a wax candle, a coat hanger, the broken handle of a Chinese sword’.40

  For those less close to the action, which essentially had been concentrated up at the Winter Palace, 25 October had passed much like any other day. John Louis Fuller had been at his desk at the National City Bank and had noticed little change, beyond a constant toing and froing of men and motor trucks at the barracks nearby – ‘Just like a ward head quarters in America at election time’.41 True, there had been sporadic bursts of gunfire and skirmishes and a renewed presence of armoured cars on the streets, but everyone had become inured to that. ‘No one stays at home simply because there is street fighting,’ noted Pauline Crosley in a letter that day, and everyone had learned to dodge those parts of the city where they heard shooting. She had held another large dinner party during disturbances only the other evening. But she did admit that things outside were now hotting up: ‘there is some excitement, and as I write the atmosphere is punctuated by all kinds of shots – rifle, pistol, machine guns, field pieces and large guns aboard ship!’42 She had seen and heard the flashes of the field guns from the Peter and Paul Fortress, booming out with live shells, but remained unperturbed. Up at her apartment on the French Embankment she was actually more worried about her precious store of ‘canned fruit, vegetables, condensed milk, cocoa, etc.’, which she had recently received from the States. ‘Nothing really worse than what has happened since we have been here can happen,’ she added confidently.43

  That evening the head of the British Chancery, Henry James Bruce, had closed the office early to go to the ballet to see The Nutcracker and had arrived there ‘peacefully by tram’, even though he had heard earlier that afternoon that ‘the whole town was in the hands of the Bolsheviks’. Walking back from the theatre, he had thought the streets seemed quiet, until he and his lady companion encountered ‘the Lord’s own holy racket going on round the Winter Palace, where the government were putting up a last stand’. In the midst of this he had spotted the Chancery porter, Mr Havery, who was diligently walking his usual two miles to the Central Post Office, being stopped by a soldier, and heard him respond ‘in his peerless Cockney Russian that he couldn’t help him (the soldier’s) troubles; he had some letters to post, battle or no battle’. Altogether, Bruce’s walk home that evening was ‘a very jumpy business’, he admitted, but he had succeeded in escorting ‘Madame B’ to safety on foot ‘to a machine-gun obligato’.44

  The firing at the Winter Palace had in fact ceased at around 2.30 a.m. and the casualties were very few. Only seven had been killed – two cadets, four sailors and one female soldier; fifty had been wounded. ‘I have never before seen a revolution in which the government put out of office has been defended by armed women and children alone,’ remarked Walter Crosley in disbelief.45 In fact many of the hungry and dispirited cadets and Cossacks inside the palace had abandoned their posts well before the insurgents had even arrived, and most of the Women’s Battalion, terrified by the bombardment, had taken cover in a back room. Stories later circulated about their maltreatment after they surrendered. Countess Nostitz saw them being manhandled out of the palace. ‘Their screams echoed through the square as they fought and struggled in vain. The soldiers shouted with laughter at their efforts to escape, silenced them with the butt of a rifle when they grew too troublesome’, as the women were taken across the river to the Grenadersky Barracks on the Petrograd Side, where they were subjected to ‘a barrage of verbal abuse’ and some were beaten up. Nostitz was right to fear the worst and rang the British embassy, entreating them to ‘send someone to make an official protest against the rape of those unfortunate girls’.46fn6

  A sense of unreality about what had happened in Petrograd persisted on the 26th. Looking out of the British embassy windows, Meriel Buchanan wondered ‘if the thunder of the guns, which had kept us awake, had been for real, for everything looked much as usual. Crowded trams came across the bridge, the pigeons sheltered from the wind on the balustrades of the Marble Palace, and the lovely slender spire of St Peter and St Paul still shone as brightly as ever in a fitful gleam of sunshine.’47 The streets were full of armed workmen and soldiers, but despite a feeling of unrest and uncertainty, ‘the normal life of the town continued as if nothing had happened’. ‘The city itself seems to regard the whole event in the light of a pleasant excitement,’ remarked a Danish Red Cross worker.48

  Curious crowds were gathering outside the Winter Palace simply to stand and stare at its smashed plate-glass windows and its walls pockmarked by machine-gun and rifle fire – ‘like a case of the measles’. Foreign residents noted how relatively minor the damage was, all things considered. ‘We walked around the Winter Palace and saw the marks of the fray,’ wrote Pauline Crosley, ‘but in spite of all the firing we heard and the flashes of the guns we saw, as well as the short distances concerned, we could only see two places where anything larger than a rifle bullet had hit that perfectly enormous building.’ A friend had seen the Bolsheviks open fire on the palace with a field gun – and miss several times.49 In fact, although there were many bullet gouges in the green stucco façad
e and white columns on the south side facing Palace Square, the palace had only been hit by artillery in about three places on the north side facing the Neva. It turned out that the firing from the Peter and Paul Fortress about four hundred yards directly across the river had been inaccurate; according to French diplomat Louis de Robien, the gunners had managed to miss their target ‘with almost every shot, sending their shrapnel either into the water, at their feet, or else to the devil’.50

  Inside the Winter Palace it was a different story: damage from the occupation by the cadets and Women’s Battalion and the subsequent takeover by the Bolsheviks was visible everywhere. Hundreds of muddy footprints had soiled the elegant parquet floors; silk hangings had been torn down and were now being used as bedding. But strangely enough, recalled Julia Cantacuzène-Speransky, ‘the rabble had passed by furniture, paintings, porcelains, and bronzes of great value, and had even looked uncomprehendingly at a vitrine full of ancient Greek jewelry wrought in pure gold’, although they ‘hustled one another to cut leather coverings off seats of modern chairs in anterooms and in the emperor’s sitting room’ to make and patch boots, and to ‘knock down gilded plaster from the walls, sure it must be real gold’. The great Malachite Hall was ‘smashed beyond repair, and infinite damage was done to some of the apartments of ceremony.’51

  On the afternoon of the 26th two anxious-looking officers who had been acting as instructors to the Women’s Battalion arrived at the British embassy, begging Lady Georgina Buchanan to ‘intervene on their behalf,’ fearing, as Countess Nostitz had, that they were ‘completely at the mercy of the Red Guards and the Kronstadt sailors’.52 At Lady Georgina’s request, Colonel Knox immediately headed over to the Smolny, where he spoke to ‘one or two truculent Commissars and finally persuaded them that their inhuman treatment of these women soldiers would be condemned by England and France’. Shortly afterwards the women were released and escorted to the Finland Station, from where they travelled by train to rejoin their battalion at Levashovo. Before leaving, four of them came to the embassy to thank Knox and asked if they could be transferred to the British army.53 The women were somewhat contemptuous of their assailants at the Winter Palace. ‘As if the Red Guards are soldiers! They do not know how to hold a rifle; they can’t even handle a machine gun’ – a fact they felt was borne out by the number of shots that had gone wide of the palace.54

  On 26 October, Lenin issued a proclamation announcing the creation of a new government. In the spirit of the commissaires of the French Directory, it was named the Council of People’s Commissars, with Lenin as President and Trotsky as Commissar for Foreign Affairs. But this new government did not have the consent of the moderate Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the Petrograd Soviet or the ratification of a Constituent Assembly; until then the government of Russia would devolve to a succession of ad hoc committees with no political legitimacy. Nevertheless, at the congress at the Smolny that evening, Lenin – having spent the entire revolution in a back room, rather than leading from the barricades – finally emerged triumphant.

  ‘My eyes were riveted on the short stocky figure in the thick worn suit, a sheaf of papers in one hand, who walked quickly to the podium and swept the spacious hall with his rather small, penetrating, but merry eyes,’ recalled Albert Rhys Williams. ‘What was the secret of this man who was so hated and loved in equal measure?’ he wondered. Lenin did not have the magnetism or commanding presence of Trotsky.55 In comparison he seemed rather ‘pedestrian’ in his manner on the rostrum; even John Reed thought he looked faintly absurd, in trousers that were much too long for him. Yet here he was, ‘the idol of the mob . . . a strange, popular leader, a leader purely by virtue of intellect’, whereas the mercurial Trotsky was a leader by oratory.56 For Rhys Williams, Lenin’s first appearance on the podium that evening had ‘no more aplomb than a seasoned professor who has appeared daily before his class for months’; he heard a nearby reporter remark that if Lenin ‘were spruced up a bit you would take him for a bourgeois mayor or banker of a small French city’.57 But Lenin’s speech, given in a hoarse voice, in which he called for peace without annexations and reparations and proposed a three-month armistice with Germany, received an ecstatic response and shouts of ‘Long Live Lenin’. The social revolution begun in Russia, Lenin insisted, would soon break out across France, Germany and England. Let the Russian Revolution mark the end of the war! To which voices broke out in a rousing rendition of the Internationale.

  Over-excited by the day’s events, the quartet of Americans did not sleep all night. They sat talking and warming their hands at a bonfire in the courtyard outside; it was 7.00 a.m. before they finally got the tram home. In contrast, the more seasoned foreign residents of Petrograd found it hard to raise any sense of excitement, hope or expectation at this latest change of government. Willem Oudendijk had walked through the city with his wife and ‘found everything quiet’. ‘Thus the second Revolution had been accomplished,’ he wrote later. ‘We did not realize what a great historical day we were living in as we trod our way home through the perfectly tranquil streets filled with apathetic, indifferent looking people.’58

  For a couple of days there had been no news of Kerensky. ‘No one had the remotest idea’ what was going to happen next, recalled Bessie Beatty. ‘Where is Korniloff?fn7 . . . Where are the Cossacks?’ Last and worst of all, ‘Where are the Germans? Rumour was riding a mad steed.’59 In response to the arrest of Kerensky’s ministers and the pre-emptive proclamation of power by the Bolsheviks, the moderates on the left had established their own ‘Committee for Salvation of Country and Revolution’ in order to try and rally anti-Bolshevik groups and ensure that a legitimate government would be voted in by the Constituent Assembly promised for November. By the night of the 27th rumours had begun circulating that Kerensky was on his way with the Cossacks and that they were now at Gatchina, twenty-nine miles to the south. The following day a proclamation was circulated that Kerensky had taken Tsarskoe Selo and would be in Petrograd on the Sunday, 29 October. In response to the news that reinforcements were on their way, and encouraged by the Committee for Salvation to take a stand, early that morning a company of cadets disguised as soldiers of the Semenovsky Regiment, and using false papers and the correct passwords, succeeded in getting past the few Red Guards at the Central Telephone Exchange on Morskaya, while others using the same ruse occupied the Astoria Hotel.60 At the Astoria, Bessie Beatty was surprised by the youth of their leader, ‘a boy officer, a cigarette hanging nonchalantly from the corner of his mouth and a revolver in his hand’, who had ‘lined the Bolshevik guards up against the wall and disarmed them’.61

  The cadets – some of whom had been captured at the Winter Palace on the 25th and set free – certainly did not lack courage, but without reinforcements and with very limited supplies of ammunition, and even less sign of proper organisation or leadership, they could not hold out for long. Beatty and Rhys Williams had no difficulty – as ‘Amerikanskie tovarishchi’ – getting into the Telephone Exchange two blocks from the Astoria to see for themselves. The cadets seemed to Beatty ‘mere children in this business of war’ and were building barricades of ‘boxes and boards’ supplemented with logs from a nearby woodpile to defend their position. Rhys Williams thought they seemed confident of the imminent arrival of Kerensky’s troops.62 From inside the building, he and Beatty watched them take up positions behind the woodpile barricade and a couple of motor trucks, as a ‘gale of bullets’ came from an attacking force of Red Guards and sailors.

  Soon the cadets had retreated to a back room, where they had ‘thrown down their guns and were waiting for the end’.63 In a pantry, Beatty found ‘a boy officer with a huge breadknife, trying to cut the buttons from his coat with hands that trembled so they made a long job of it’. Another was desperately trying to tear off his identifying epaulettes. She could not miss the irony: ‘suddenly the thing for which these boys had striven – the coveted gold braid and brass buttons of an officer’s uniform, symbol of t
heir superiority – had become their curse’. She realised that at that point ‘any one of them would have given the last thing he possessed on earth for the suit of a common working-man’. In a corridor she found Rhys Williams confronted by a desperate cadet officer, who was pleading with the American to let him have his coat so that he could try and make his escape in disguise. She saw the anguish in the boy’s eyes, but it was clear that Rhys Williams, as a devout socialist, was gripped by a moral dilemma. He had won the respect and confidence of the Russian workers during his time in Petrograd: ‘If I give him my coat they will recognize it and think me a traitor.’ He couldn’t bring himself to do it, and yet both he and Beatty recognised that ‘the whole tragic situation was done up in the plight of this one feeble human being trying to save his life’.64

  In the afternoon the building was stormed. As the cadets were taken away by Red Guards and sailors loudly ‘shouting for vengeance’, Rhys Williams appealed to them not to ‘sully the ideals of your Revolution’ by yielding to the temptation to kill them. In their memoirs, Rhys Williams and Beatty remained silent on the fate of the cadets but, as John Reed noted, although most of those from the Telephone Exchange ‘went free’, ‘a few . . . in their panic tried to flee over the roofs, or to hide in the attic, and were found and hurled into the street’.65

  All that day Reed had been listening to the ‘volleys, single shots, and the shrill clatter of machine-guns [that] could be heard, far and near’, as groups of cadets engaged in skirmishes with Red Guards across the city.66 They also came under siege at two of their bases: the Alexandrovsky Military Academy on the Moika, and the Vladimirsky Military School on Grebetskaya on the Petrograd Side. Those at the Vladimirsky had put up stiff resistance and managed to repel two armoured cars with machine guns, but then the Bolsheviks brought up three field guns and began bombarding them. ‘Great holes were torn in the walls of the school,’ wrote Reed; the cadets put up a frantic defence as ‘shouting waves of Red Guards, assaulting, crumpled under the withering blast’.67 The firing did not let up until 2.30 p.m. when the cadets were forced to put up a white flag. ‘With a rush and a shout,’ Reed saw soldiers and Red Guards pour into the school, ‘through windows, doors and holes in the wall’. Five of the cadets were savagely beaten and bayoneted to death, and the remaining two hundred who surrendered were taken away to the Peter and Paul Fortress. En route another eight cadets were set upon by a mob of Red Guards and murdered.68 The Vladimirsky itself was almost reduced to rubble by the Bolshevik bombardment.