Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  fn3 In the end, Rev. Bousfield Swan Lombard at the British Chaplaincy gave refuge to Countess Freedericksz and her two daughters, under the alias of ‘Mrs Wilson’, Buchanan telling him, ‘you must do it off your own bat’ and that he could not officially sanction it. The women were taken into the British Colony’s Nursing Home. The countess was sworn to secrecy and certain preconditions by Bousfield Lombard, but she and her daughters soon broke all the rules and had to be moved.

  Chapter 6

  fn1 Sybil Grey heard that proof was found in Protopopov’s apartment of ‘plans to open the wine-shops in order to provide an excuse for firing on the people when they were drunk’.

  fn2 In 1912, then aged 22, Bowerman had been a survivor of the Titanic disaster.

  Chapter 7

  fn1 An allusion to the conservative, royalist counter-revolution staged in the rural western French province of the Vendée in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789.

  fn2 A long-serving and accomplished diplomat like Buchanan, Oudendijk had served in Persia and China and was a gifted polyglot. He had previously been Dutch Ambassador to Petrograd during 1907–8.

  fn3 A canticle from the Gospel of St Luke, the opening words meaning ‘Now let thy servant depart in peace’.

  Chapter 8

  fn1 Louise Patouillet was told that a poor woman concierge who had not had the money to bury her recently deceased husband had been delighted to be offered 100 rubles for his corpse to be elevated to that of hero of the revolution in the procession.

  fn2 The official figures gave only sixty-one police killed and wounded, an extremely low estimate.

  fn3 Paleologue noted that the Cossacks had refused to take part in the mass funeral because ‘the figure of Christ was not displayed’, while others complained that the painting red of the coffins was ‘impious’. In order to mollify criticism, the Provisional Government later sent some priests to say prayers over the graves.

  Chapter 9

  fn1 Before the word ‘Bolshevik’ gained currency, many foreign observers referred to Lenin as a ‘Maximalist’, which was in fact a term for a member of the extreme wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

  fn2 Trotsky travelled on the same Norwegian ship – the Kristianiafjod – as William G. Shepherd and the celebrated muck-raking journalist Lincoln Steffens, both of whom had been commissioned by Everybody’s Magazine to go to Petrograd to cover events.

  fn3 The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1918.

  fn4 In the very different social climate of 1931, long before the days of political correctness, Fleurot had no qualms about representing Jordan’s speech as he heard it. For an unedited version of Jordan’s letters that retains his idiosyncratic punctuation and spelling, see Mrs Clinton A. Bliss.

  fn5 Donald Thompson joined her there a couple of weeks later.

  Chapter 10

  fn1 Russian women would have the last laugh in this regard, for they were given the vote immediately after the October Revolution. In Britain only women over thirty were given the vote at war’s end in 1918, and all British women over twenty-one did not get the vote until 1928.

  fn2 A library-cum-information-centre on the Fontanka, where people could read the English newspapers; also a front for SIS undercover work in Petrograd.

  fn3 The American Civil War general and US President, Ulysses S. Grant, visited Russia during a tour of the Ottoman Empire in 1878. He met Alexander II while in St Petersburg that August.

  fn4 Many of these photographs were syndicated in the US press and can be seen in Thompson’s photographic album Blood-Stained Russia.

  Chapter 11

  fn1 Arthur Ransome wrote similarly of the baiting of the bourgeoisie: ‘everyone who wears a collar will be counted an enemy of mankind’.

  fn2 One French resident heard that tobacconists’ shops were a popular target, as too were pharmacies and perfumeries – for their cologne and alcohol, on which the looters got drunk.

  fn3 There are no precise figures on how many sailors from Kronstadt headed into Petrograd that day. Some say a couple of thousand, while other sources estimate up to 20,000.

  fn4 These were eight squadrons of Don Cossacks – the only totally loyal troops on whom the government could still depend.

  fn5 Much like February 1917, the casualty figures cited were entirely arbitrary. Nobody had any idea of the numbers killed on those days and they ranged between four and five hundred, but are likely to have been much higher.

  fn6 One fellow newspaper correspondent apparently even claimed excitedly to Ambassador Francis that Thompson was ‘taking pictures of the fight on the Nevsky with a gun in each hand and loaded down with ammunition’.

  fn7 A waiter in a cheap diner.

  fn8 In parallel with the duality of the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government both vying for political control, the Militia that replaced the old Tsarist police force was composed of two rival bodies: the city militia controlled by the Petrograd City Duma, established to serve everyone along democratic principles; and the autonomous workers’ militia, formed to serve only the interests of the working classes and the objectives of the revolution.

  fn9 Around £20 ($29) and £120 ($172) respectively in today’s money.

  Chapter 12

  fn1 At the end of April 1918 they were transferred 365 miles south-west to a house in Ekaterinburg, where, on the night of 16–17 July, the entire family was brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks.

  fn2 The Mission also brought its own official film cameraman, Lieutenant Norton C.Travis, an experienced freelancer for Pathé, Fox and Universal. Like Donald Thompson, he was out filming in the thick of it: ‘I could have ground all day at scenes of the populace looting stores, factories and residences. Freedom simply meant helping themselves to everything they wanted,’ he later wrote. Like Thompson, Travis also filmed the Women’s Death Battalion at the front, and spent most of his time in Russia filming near Minsk.

  fn3 The bonds sold were for small amounts of twenty rubles ($4). Around four billion rubles ($1 billion) were raised.

  fn4 Robins’s sister Elizabeth was well known in Britain as an actress notable for playing Ibsen, a writer and an ardent suffragette. She was also closely acquainted with Emmeline Pankhurst and Jessie Kenney.

  fn5 Kornilov admitted this was what had stymied his march on Petrograd, to US diplomat De Whitt Clinton Poole when he met him in southern Russia in 1918.

  fn6 On their return, Pankhurst and Kenney spoke about their ‘Russian Mission’ at two big meetings held at London’s Queen’s Hall on 7 and 14 November.

  fn7 Maugham’s impressions of Petrograd in 1917 would later be immortalised in his 1928 collection of stories Ashenden, which include a withering portrait of the frigidly correct Sir George Buchanan, as Sir Herbert Witherspoon.

  Chapter 13

  fn1 Leighton Rogers did not think much of Reed, as he noted in his diary: ‘This young man . . . has been milling around Petrograd playing revolutionary. I’ve seen him riding in trucks tossing out Red handbills and posing conspicuously beside speakers at Bolshevik street corner meetings . . . It burns me up to see this arrogant poseur aiding the Bolsheviks on the grounds that the “American proletariat” is supporting them in their separate peace . . . When I think of the good young Americans who will have to bear the brunt of the massive German attack that is surely coming in France . . . of how many of them will be killed, my blood boils at the thought of John Reed.’

  fn2 In 1917 the exchange rate was about eleven rubles to the dollar.

  fn3 Ransome missed the October Revolution, arriving back in Petrograd on Christmas Day (NS; 12 December OS). Times correspondent Robert Wilton missed it too, leaving in mid-September. With Wilton’s departure there was no Times correspondent in Petrograd to cover events in October when they broke.

  fn4 One of the positives of the removal of the tsarist ban on public meetings was the revival in Russia of the Salvation Army, with proselytisers from Finland returning to the city after Easter 191
7 and holding a series of large public meetings. But it didn’t last for long; the Soviet government banned the Salvation Army in 1923.

  fn5 One night John Reed was held up and robbed, but after managing to explain in a few Russian words that he was an ‘American and a socialist’, his possessions were ‘promptly returned, his hand cordially shaken and he was sent off rejoicing’.

  fn6 As John Reed had perceptively observed of Kerensky: ‘Life is hideously swift for compromisers here.’

  Chapter 14

  fn1 $110 at the October 1917 exchange rate, which had increased from 6.20 rubles to the dollar in January, to eleven rubles to the dollar.

  fn2 Figures vary considerably. The guard may have been a couple of thousand initially, but many deserted their posts in the hours that followed.

  fn3 Bochkareva, having recovered from her wounds in hospital in Petrograd, had gone to Moscow to try and get the Women’s Battalion there to go with her to defend Riga. In 1919 Bochkareva was arrested by the Bolsheviks, accused of being ‘on enemy of the people.’ She was shot on 16 May 1920.

  fn4 The charge was actually a blank one, though a myth was subsequently perpetuated that the shots had been live.

  fn5 John Reed’s more dramatic version of the ‘storming of the Winter Palace’ (it wasn’t) would become the stuff of legend, immortalised in Eisenstein’s equally hagiographic 1928 film October.

  fn6 The most reliable sources suggest there were three cases of rape and one suicide.

  fn7 Kornilov escaped from jail on 6 November and went south to join anti-Bolshevik Cossack forces in the Don region. He went on to command a volunteer unit against Bolshevik forces, but was killed in April 1918 in the Kuban region of southern Russia.

  fn8 Sir George Buchanan noted with some distaste, however, that while guarding the embassy the cadets had purloined some of its whisky and wine and had drunk themselves stupid and been sick.

  fn9 Settling in France, Kerensky became embroiled in émigré politics and regularly criticised the new Soviet government from exile. He subsequently lived in Berlin and Paris, before settling in the USA in 1940, where he wrote his memoirs and broadcast regularly on Russian affairs. He died in New York in 1970.

  Chapter 15

  fn1 When the Constituent Assembly finally met at 4.00 p.m. on 3 January 1918, it lasted precisely twelve hours. It was dispersed by Lenin at 4.00 a.m. the next day.

  fn2 What was left of the Winter Palace wine collection was eventually removed to Kronstadt, where loyal sailors smashed it up.

  fn3 Beatty makes no mention of whether her socialist colleagues Reed, Bryant and Rhys Williams joined in on any of the American colony’s Christmas festivities, and their own memoirs are silent on the subject.

  fn4 According to Rogers, the National City Bank of New York was the first American financial or business institution to be taken over by the Bolshevik government.

  fn5 British chaplain Bousfield Swan Lombard wrote to his wife that he was ‘pretty certain that Georgie Porgie only got away just in time’ and that had he remained in Petrograd he would have been arrested by the Bolsheviks, as was the Romanian minister, Count Diamandi, early in the new year.

  Postscript

  fn1 New Style; the Bolsheviks finally adopted the Western calendar on 1 February OS, instantly adding 13 days to make it 14 February.

  fn2 Now known as the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace.

  fn3 It was also known as Blood-Stained Russia, German Intrigue, Treason and Revolt in the USA and was premiered under that title in New York in December 1917.

  fn4 Some, like Rheta Childe Dorr, lost all their notes and materials, which were confiscated at the border by the Bolsheviks when they left. Dorr had to write the whole of her book, Inside the Russian Revolution, from memory.

  fn5 With the Russians at the Front; Somewhere in France; and War As It Really Is. Nothing is known either of the whereabouts of the 75,000 feet of film shot by Lieutenant Norton C. Travis in Petrograd over eighteen days, or whether any of it has survived.

  fn6 The Axelbank film may also have used footage shot by Lieutenant Travis, among uncredited footage from numerous other cameramen, including Russians, who filmed in Petrograd and whose work was recycled for this film.

  fn7 Fred Sikes rose through the ranks of the NCB, retiring as Vice President, and died in 1958. Chester Swinnerton also stayed with the bank and managed its South American branches; he died in New Hampshire in 1960.

  fn8 Fleeting sightings of other African Americans in Russia at the time of the revolution all leave us frustrated at the lack of a paper trail on their lives there. One such is Jim Hercules, one of the possibly four black American ‘Nubian guards’ at the Alexander Palace, who served Nicholas and Alexandra and their family right up until the revolution, and who may well have been stranded in Russia for some time afterwards.