Thompson, Donald (1885–1947). American war photographer and cinematographer from Kansas, in Petrograd January–July 1917.
Walpole, Hugh (1884–1941). New Zealand-born journalist and novelist; Red Cross worker in Russia when war broke out. Returned to Petrograd as head of the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau 1916–17 with Harold Williams and Denis Garstin.
Wightman, Orrin Sage (1873–1965). American doctor, served in US Army Medical Corps during World War I; in 1917 a member of American Red Cross medical mission to Russia.
Williams, Harold (1876–1928). New Zealand-born journalist, linguist and ardent Russophile. Petrograd correspondent for the Daily Chronicle and official at the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau with Hugh Walpole and Denis Garstin. Fiercely anti-Bolshevik, he fled Petrograd with his Russian wife and became foreign editor of The Times.
Wilton, Robert (1868–1925). British journalist; European correspondent of New York Herald 1889–1903, then Times Special Correspondent in Petrograd. Returned to journalism in Paris after leaving Russia.
Winship, North (1885–1968). American diplomat; consul-general in Petrograd and many consulate posts thereafter; retired as US ambassador to South Africa 1949.
Woodhouse, Arthur (1867–1961). English diplomat; British consul at Petrograd 1907–18.
Woodhouse, Ella (1896–1969). Daughter of British consul in Petrograd, Arthur Woodhouse.
Wright, J. [ Joshua] Butler (1877–1939). American diplomat; replaced Fred Dearing as counsellor at the US embassy in Petrograd October 1916. Later served as an ambassador in Hungary, Uruguay, Czechoslovakia and Cuba.
Author’s Note
In Russia in 1917 the old-style Julian calendar, running thirteen days behind the Western Gregorian calendar, was still in use, a fact that creates endless confusion and frustration for historian and reader alike. Many of the foreign eyewitnesses resident in Petrograd* found it confusing, too, and although living for some time in Russia, chose to ignore the Julian calendar, dating their diaries and letters home to the UK, USA and elsewhere by the Gregorian one. Some occasionally noted both dates, but most did not; others, like Jessie Kenney, struggled to maintain both dates in their diaries – and ended up in a total muddle.
In order to spare the reader considerable pain on this score, and because this book tells the story of the February and October Revolutions in Russia as they happened, by the Russian calendar (and not as March/November, by the Western calendar), all dates of letters, diaries and reports quoted in the text that were written in Russia at the time events were taking place, have been converted to the Russian old-style (OS) calendar, in order to fit the chronology of the book. The original Gregorian (NS) dates are clear to see in the original sources referred to in the notes, though in some cases, to avoid confusion, especially where an event occurred outside Russia, both dates are given.
Many of the eyewitnesses used widely diverging spelling styles for Russian names and places. In addition, Philip Jordan had his own extremely idiosyncratic style of punctuation, capitalisation and spelling, which has been deliberately preserved in order to convey the immediacy and excitement of his narrative. In order to spare the reader the endless repetition of [sic], these spellings, and any other spelling oddities in eyewitness accounts, have been retained as given, and explained where necessary.
* St Petersburg had been renamed Petrograd on the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914.
PROLOGUE
‘The Air is Thick with Talk of Catastrophe’
Petrograd was a brooding, beleaguered city that last desperate winter before the revolution broke; a snowbound city of ice-locked canals and looming squares. Its fine wide streets and elegant palaces of pink granite and coloured stucco fronted by rows of airy columns and arches no longer exuded a sense of imperial grandeur but, rather, a sense of decay. Everywhere you went amid the forbidding architecture of this ‘city for giants’ you could hear the ‘swish of the wind, and the tinkling of many, many bells of all sizes and tones’, rounded off by the ‘compelling boom of the great bell of St Isaac which comes from nowhere and envelops everything’.1 In the grip of winter, with its broad vistas laid open to the arctic cold blowing in across the Gulf of Finland, Russia’s capital had always assumed a chilly, haunting beauty on the grand scale that was peculiarly its own. But now, three years into the war, it was overflowing with thousands of refugees – Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians and Jews – who had fled the fighting on the Eastern Front. The capital was subdued and discouraged, and a ‘malign, disturbing atmosphere’ hung over it.2 The winter of 1916–17 was also marked by a new and ominous fixture on the landscape: the long silent queues of downcast women huddling in the cold, waiting interminably for bread, milk, meat – whatever they could lay their hands on. Petrograd was weary of war. Petrograd was hungry.
Such had become the daily grinding hardship for the majority of the Russian population at large; and yet, despite the visible and crippling wartime shortages and the anguish of deprivation etched on the faces of its inhabitants, the city sheltered a large and diverse foreign community who were still thriving. The city might be Russian, but big international industry was still humming across the River Neva in the working-class districts of Vasilievsky Island, the Vyborg Side and beyond – where the great cotton and paper mills, shipyards, timber yards, sawmills and steelworks were still being run largely by British owners and managers,* many of whom had lived in Russia for decades. The vast red-brick Thornton’s woollen mill – one of the biggest in Russia, founded in the 1880s – employed three thousand workers and was owned by three brothers from Yorkshire. Then there was the Nevsky Thread Manufacturing Company (established by Coats of Paisley, Scotland); the Neva Stearin Soap and Candle Works, run by William Miller & Co. of Leith, who also owned a brewery in the city; and Egerton Hubbard & Co.’s cotton mills and printing works.
A host of specialist stores in the city catered to the needs of such privileged expatriates, along with the wealthy Russian aristocracy. Even in 1916 you could still window-shop in front of the big shining plate-glass windows of the French and English luxury stores along the Nevsky Prospekt: Petrograd’s equivalent of Bond Street. Here the French dressmakers, tailors and glovers – such as Brisac, couturier to the Empress, and Brocard the French perfumier, who also supplied the imperial family – continued to enjoy the patronage of the rich. At the English Shop (better known by its French rendering as the ‘Magasin Anglais’) you could buy the best Harris tweeds and English soap and enjoy the store’s ‘demure English provincialism’, fancying yourself ‘in the High Street in Chester, or Leicester, or Truro, or Canterbury’.3 Druce’s imported British goods and Maples furniture from the Tottenham Court Road; Watkins & Co., the English bookseller, was patronised by many in the British colony; other foreign expatriates could catch up with the news back home by stopping off at Wolff’s bookshop, which sold magazines and newspapers in seven different languages. Everywhere, still, in Petrograd, ‘there was not a single shop of importance but displayed boldly lettered notices: “English spoken”, “Ici on parle Francais” [and, until the outbreak of war], “Man spricht Deutsch”’.4 French was still the lingua franca of the Russian aristocracy and bureaucracy, the Journal de St-Pétersbourg being the semi-official organ of the Russian Foreign Office and much in demand during wartime, with so many French diplomats and military attachés in the city. But English had even greater exclusivity, as the language of the ‘higher circles of the Court’ and the imperial family.5