Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  The recent Decree on Land – and, with it, the dissemination of Lenin’s favourite Marxist dictum that ‘property is theft’, implying that people should steal back that which had been stolen from them – ‘had initiated a stampede’. ‘Private property was at public mercy,’ wrote Leighton Rogers, as the Bolsheviks urged that it be searched out and seized with whatever force was necessary.’22 With looting, robbery and murder becoming the order of the day – and night – it was difficult for those foreign observers who had had a degree of sympathy for the ideals of the February Revolution to hang on to their convictions, when they now saw them betrayed daily by the aberrations of the new Bolshevik dictatorship.23 Even Red Cross official Raymond Robins, who had so eagerly greeted the new dawn of October, telling his wife Margaret that ‘This is the Great Experience’, was beginning to have his doubts. ‘Think of it,’ he wrote to Margaret on 8 November, ‘the most extreme Socialist-Peace-Semi-Anarchist Government in all the world maintaining its control by the bayonet, proscribing all publications except those that favor their program, arresting persons without warrant and holding them for weeks without trial and without charge.’24

  The one ray of hope came when, on 2 December, Trotsky announced that the Bolsheviks had agreed an armistice with the Germans; peace negotiations would begin at Brest-Litovsk on the 9th. Everyone wanted an end to the war and a return to normality, for the next act in the drama was now staring Russia in the face: famine. Next to peace, the one and only topic of conversation – not just among ordinary people on the streets, but in the grandest drawing rooms of Petrograd – was ‘the best way to get hold of a sack of flour or a few eggs’.25 ‘Even the foreign colony, whose members were far better off than the Russians,’ recalled Bessie Beatty, ‘heard the gray wolf howling. We were a hungry lot from morning until night. Most of us developed an appetite such as we had never known. We scraped the plates clean.’26

  Phil Jordan had constantly risked his safety going out in the ambassador’s Ford to distant street markets and outlying villages to try and find food. ‘After living in a wild country like this for 18 months it makes you feel like there is only two decent places to live,’ he told Annie Pulliam, ‘one is heaven the other is America.’27 Just recently, while out shopping, he had been gathering up his purchases ready to leave when ‘about three hundred Bulsheviks rushed in the market with cocked rifles’. One of them told him no one was allowed to buy anything in the market any more because ‘we are going to take it all for our friends’. ‘You get out of here and be dam quick about it. I Said I will not leave this place until my money is returned. he then tol the Clerk to give me my money. they then began . . . shooting to frighten the people and took every thing in the market.’28

  With the quest for food proving such a dangerous and costly exercise among the relatively privileged expatriate community, it was no wonder that when Robbie Stevens, director of the National City Bank, gave a Thanksgiving Dinner on 2 November for all twenty-four of his employees, everyone ‘turned out in all their glad rags’ to enjoy some good food while it was on offer.

  While the ‘gray wolf’ of hunger remained a ‘sleeping serpent’ and had yet to foment further social unrest in Petrograd, the ever-present menace of alcohol was, as Bessie Beatty observed, far more serious.29 All foreign observers had agreed that the tsarist ban on vodka sales had been the one thing that had saved the revolution in February from even worse savagery and violence, inflicted by mobs maddened by drink. But on the night of 23–4 November the revolutionaries finally laid their hands on the untapped alcoholic nirvana languishing in the cellars of the Winter Palace.

  After the palace was taken, it was discovered that the Tsar’s wine cellars were still intact, stashed full of wine, champagne and brandy. Indeed, Petrograd itself still retained more than eight hundred private wine cellars belonging to the clubs and former aristocracy, with one vault alone containing 1.2 million bottles. The alcohol stored in the Winter Palace included priceless bottles of champagne that had ‘lain undisturbed for three hundred years’, according to Bessie Beatty, all of which was valued at something like ‘thirty million rubles’. Once word got out that it was all still sitting there, the Bolsheviks knew that the tovarishchi would come running. The Military Revolutionary Committee pondered what to do. They were badly in need of funds and the best and obvious option would be to sell it, perhaps to the British or Americans.30 A safer option would have been to take it away and dump it wholesale – perhaps in the Neva, before the mob got their hands on it. In the end, the best solution seemed to be simply to send in a contingent of Red Guards ‘whose revolutionary spirit was sufficiently strong to withstand the temptation of the liquor’, to smash the bottles and then pump out all the alcohol, for the cellars would be awash with it.31

  The night the Red Guards went in, Bessie Beatty thought ‘the whole populace was going to be killed’, for she heard the constant sounds of what she thought were rifles going off. But no, it was the sound of the ‘popping of thousands of corks’ up at the Winter Palace.32 Inevitably, the men sent in to wreak this destruction could not resist the lure of rare vintage Tokay from the reign of Catherine the Great, and happily proceeded to drink away ‘the inheritance of Nicholas Romanov’.33 Armed sailors were sent in to try to restore order – but a large crowd of drunken men was wreaking havoc by then, lurching around ankle-deep in the wine from the broken bottles, and would not be dispersed. Shooting and fighting broke out. Finally three companies of fire engines were sent to turn their hoses on the cellars – flooding them and smashing many more of the wine bottles in the process. Several who were too drunk to escape were drowned or froze to death in the ice-cold river water from the hoses.34 Leighton Rogers heard tell of a soldier on a tram bemoaning the fact that ‘sixty-three of his comrades had died in the carousal in the Winter Palace wine cellar, shot by their fellows in quarrels or too drunk to swim the flood created by fire engines’; upon which, a woman sitting across the aisle from him ‘raised her eyes piously and sighed, “sixty-three, thank God”’.35

  News spread fast across Petrograd about the rich pickings to be had up at the Winter Palace. Soon everyone was joining in, recalled Meriel Buchanan: ‘Crowds, eager for a little booty, arrived on the scene. Soldiers in motor lorries drove up, and went away again with cases full of priceless wine. Men and women, with their bags and baskets heavy with bottles, could be seen selling them to passers-by in the streets. Even the children had their share of the booty, and could be met staggering under the weight of a magnum of champagne, or a bottle of valuable liqueur.’36 For days the sour reek of alcohol hung over the Winter Palace.fn2 Even as far along the embankment as the British embassy the air was redolent with it. Soldiers and sailors lay dead-drunk in the snow, which was stained red, not with blood this time, but with wine. ‘In some places the crowds scooped it up in their hands, trying to get the last drop of flavour out of it, fighting each other for the remains,’ recalled Meriel Buchanan; others lay down in the gutters trying to drink the wine that ran there from so many broken bottles.37

  But the pillaging and the deaths did not stop at the Winter Palace; alcohol-lust caught fire among the Red Guards, as well as soldiers and sailors filling the city, and many went on the rampage, breaking into private wine cellars and drinking themselves into a bestial stupor. The English Club soon succumbed, as too did Yeliseev’s emporium on the corner of the Nevsky, a favourite of the foreign diplomatic community. The only way that Contant’s restaurant managed to protect its wine cellar was by ‘installing twenty or so hefty chaps provided with rifles, machine-guns and grenades, whom it pays, feeds, and supplies with drink in abundance’. (By Christmas, Contant’s would be the only restaurant still able to serve wine.)38 Russian friends of the Buchanans started arriving at the British embassy because soldiers had broken into their homes and ‘were not only drinking all their wine, but were breaking up the furniture, and, being too drunk to know what they were doing, were indulging in promiscuous shooting’.39 One night Phil Jordan ha
d heard an ‘awful thumping’ and breaking of glass three doors down from the embassy, and went out to discover that eight or nine soldiers had battered their way into a wine store and had ‘all got as drunk as they could’. The temperature was 18–20 degrees below zero, and yet ‘the next morning the Street for one block was full of drunken Soldiers Some Sleeping in the Snow Just as you could in bed’. ‘And Mrs Francis think,’ he added. ‘No law not a policeman or any one to say Stop.’40

  ‘The whole of Petrograd is drunk,’ admitted the newly appointed People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, in a moment of exasperation.41 ‘Night after night came the sounds of bedlam,’ wrote Leighton Rogers, as the drinking continued: ‘talking, laughing, shouts, groans, flashes of light in the darkness, glimmerings of candles, shots and frantic stumbling about . . . the entire city seemed to have caught the carousel fever.’42 From the British embassy, Meriel Buchanan could hear the pandemonium broken by ‘interminable choruses of Russian folk songs’. A thriving trade in stolen booze soon sprang up, with some of the fine vintage wines still bearing the imperial crest being resold by looters. Even members of the British and American colonies admitted to buying some of it. Louis de Robien noted how some particularly enterprising fraudsters had been selling bottles of ‘champagne’ from the Winter Palace that they had secretly emptied of their original contents during their binges and replaced with ‘water from the Neva’. The Bolshevik government meanwhile continued to try and destroy wine stores before the mob got to them: in the Duma cellars 36,000 bottles of brandy were smashed; three million rubles-worth of champagne was destroyed elsewhere. There was, however, one unforeseen consequence of the job of the official bottle-smashers: even if they piously refrained from drinking any of the wine themselves, they became hopelessly inebriated from all the fumes.43

  As Christmas 1917 approached, life in Petrograd had never seemed more arbitrary, more dangerous. ‘The Bolsheviks are nominally at the head of affairs,’ wrote Denis Garstin, ‘but in reality it’s mob law – in which the mob is there but not the law. Trotsky and Lenin, hating the bourgeoisie more and more every day, issue new edicts destroying everything, repudiating debts, marriages, murders, alliances, enemy crimes – oh, they’re having a great time.’44 ‘I am afraid of an intoxicated Russian with a gun,’ admitted Pauline Crosley who, having opted to remain in Petrograd with her husband, avoided going out as much as possible, in common with most of her friends. Other foreigners who had decided not to leave, such as Paulette Pax, who was determined to fulfil her contract at the Mikhailovsky Theatre, ‘for the prestige of France’, stayed at home. But she found it hard to endure the endless days shut up in her apartment with her windows shuttered and, finally, took a chance and went out – simply to escape ‘the stifling sense of entombment’.45

  But there was little worth venturing out for, as yet another squalid winter drew in: a frozen Neva and snowbound streets; empty ‘churches where nobody prayed’; few functioning trams, and those there were bursting to capacity; half the shops closed and shuttered; prolonged power cuts – made worse by serious shortages of coal, wood, kerosene and candles; bread made of straw; butter and eggs almost unheard of. And all the time the purchasing power of the ruble continued to plummet. ‘Comparisons with former prices are beyond the arithmetical capacity of my brain,’ Pauline Crosley wrote. ‘I simply know that I would rather walk than to pay forty roubles (about $4.00 in our money just now) to an izvozchik for a 15 minute ride.’ What more could she tell her family back home? ‘In general the news is: Petrograd is still here; a part of Moscow is no longer there; many handsome estates are no longer anywhere; the Bolsheviki are everywhere.’46 And now the banks were on strike. ‘All business is running on momentum and nearing the point of immobility,’ wrote Leighton Rogers on 29 November. ‘So we drag along, hoping each day that the following one will disclose an improvement in the situation; but we have been hoping this for eight months now, and it has grown steadily worse.’47

  At the beginning of December, Sir George Buchanan fell ill yet again. ‘My doctor tells me that I am at the end of my tether,’ he admitted. He was forced to agree that he must leave Russia. With the opening of the Brest-Litovsk peace conference on 9 December he had finally, reluctantly, given up all hope for Russia. It was clear to him that the war was ‘more hated than even the tsar had been’, and for the British mission in Petrograd to continue trying to keep Russia in it was futile.48 His colleague David Francis, meanwhile, was adamant: ‘I am willing to swallow pride, sacrifice dignity and with discretion do all necessary to prevent Russia from becoming an ally of Germany.’ But it was too late; on 7 December Phil was writing to Mrs Francis: ‘do you know that at the present time that Petrograd is . . . full of Germans [released POWs] Struting around the Streets as proud as peacocks. All the Russian people are quite happy that the Germans are here. They Say that when the Germans do take Petrograd that we Shall have some kind of law and order to live under.’49

  On 12 December by the Russian calendar, the British, American and other remaining foreigners shut out the grim realities of starving Petrograd to celebrate Christmas – for by the European, Gregorian calendar it was 25 December. ‘In the midst of war and revolution,’ Bessie Beatty remembered, ‘we not only celebrated Christmas, but we celebrated it twice.’ And to her ‘sunshine-fed California soul’, that Christmas ‘stepped ready-made from a fairy tale’.50 Muddy Petrograd, made even more mournful by the tattered exteriors of the neglected and bullet-marked stucco buildings, was now transformed by the breathtaking beauty of a winter that came ‘toppling out of the heavens’, with snow piling up ‘in billows on roofs and chimneys, and the icycles hang[ing] like crystal fringes from the woodwork’.

  Against such a backdrop, Beatty wrote, even Christmas 1917 was magical, ‘however empty the shops or troubled the people’.51 The American Red Cross Mission held a lunch for American correspondents on Christmas Day; a crackling fire was lit and a decorated tree took pride of place. ‘We pulled down the blinds and shut out war and revolution, while we laughed merrily over the Russian conception of mince pie.’ At their palatial new fourteen-roomed apartment Fred Sikes and Leighton Rogers ‘put out a mighty good meal’ for some of their bank colleagues, recalled John Louis Fuller: roast goose, vegetables, a ‘five layer cake’, plus wine – some of it from the Winter Palace and bought on the black market. But the ‘best was to come on Christmas night’ at a party for the entire American colony, laid on at the National City Bank.52 Bessie Beatty deemed it ‘a triumph, taxing all the ingenuity of a clever woman and half a dozen resourceful men’, explaining that ‘the miracle of providing food for two hundred people with Petrograd’s cupboard stripped almost bare was a real achievement’. The presiding genius of this ‘conjuring trick’ had been Mildred Farwell, Petrograd correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, married to a member of the Red Cross Mission, who organised the obtaining of ‘baking powder from Vladivostok, six thousand versts away, to make American layer cakes. The eggs came from Pskoff, up near the Russian front. The Ambassador’s pantry was robbed of its white flour. And the turkeys came from heaven knows where.’53fn3

  That night, recalled Beatty, the old Turkish embassy ‘took on all its former glory’, decked out in flags and with its huge gilded mirrors reflecting ‘a whirling company of women in shimmering frocks and men whose evening clothes had not been out of their creases for many a day’. ‘Our plain, bare old counters, only used to having money handed across them were covered with good things to eat,’ John Louis Fuller wrote in his journal. ‘White bread sandwiches, turkey, chicken salad, cranberries, jam cakes of all kinds and apple pies . . . another counter held the punch bowl made of about ten different kinds of wine.’ Needless to say, ‘before the party was more than half over [it] had all been consumed’. Everyone had a riotous time till 3.00 a.m., dancing to a balalaika band and a twelve-piece orchestra playing the one-step and American ragtime. A Russian guest who was an opera singer entertained with a marvellous rendition of th
e ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. Leighton Rogers waltzed around, ‘bumping ambassadors at every step and causing a great jingling of brass-work among the generals present with all their decorations’, but he was a poor dancer and gave it up as a bad job.54

  Over at the British embassy, Christmas night had been rather low-key in comparison, marked by the official farewell for Sir George Buchanan. The Allied Naval and Military Missions were invited, plus one hundred members of staff of the embassy and some Russian friends. It would be the last party held by the British diplomatic community in Petrograd. Luckily there had been no power cut that evening, ‘so the crystal chandeliers blazed with light as they had done in the past’ and, although he was very unwell, Sir George was there, standing ‘at the top of the staircase receiving the guests as they came up, and with his monocle which dangled down from his neck and broad ribbon, look[ing] as much an Ambassador as any Ambassador can look’. Embassy official William Gerhardie recorded the characteristic diffidence with which Sir George responded to a rousing chorus of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ at supper, insisting that he was ‘neither jolly nor good’ and that ‘all he could say of himself was that he was a “fellow”’.55

  Meriel Buchanan never forgot that last sad party:

  Although the ballroom was stacked with tins of bully beef and other provisions, although every officer there had a loaded pistol in his pocket, and there were rifles and cartridge cases hidden in the Chancery, we tried to forget the desolate streets and the threat of constant danger. We played the piano and sang songs, we drank champagne and laughed to hide the sadness in all our hearts.56

  Two days after these happy Christmas celebrations, the Bolsheviks put all of the foreign banks in Petrograd under direct state control and sent armed detachments of Red Guards to occupy them. That morning, 14 December, a ‘loud commotion and raised voices erupted in the downstairs main entrance’ of the National City Bank. The next thing Leighton Rogers and John Louis Fuller knew, ‘metal-shod footwear thumped on the marble stairs as a squad of Bolshevik soldiers clattered into our banking rooms’. The men were led by a ‘strutting little red-head in officer’s uniform, black leather boots and all’, who banged a long blue revolver on the counter, ‘flourished a grimy document, and announced that by order of the People’s Commissars he was seizing the bank and closing it’. The staff were ordered to hand over all keys, and their ledgers too were to be confiscated.fn4 Despite their lack of Russian, the desk clerks got the gist of ‘Red’s’ message (as Rogers nicknamed him) and closed up their ledgers and handed them over as the soldiers ‘echeloned along the counter and rested their rifles on it, bayonets bristling’.57 By now the manager, Steve, had emerged from his office to discover that his bank belonged to the Russian people, and to be told by ‘Red’: