Front row to revolution

A year of popular upheavals has thrown the old order out of joint. A frightening new order is perhaps about to be born from the resentment of the mob. As 1916 turns to 1917, civilised men and women hope for the best but fear the worst.

“The year 1916 was cursed,” Czar Nicholas II is said to have written in his diary. “1917 will surely be better.” The czar was, to put it mildly, mistaken. And Helen Rappaport’s splendid new book, “Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 - A World on the Edge,” charts just how wrong he was. Her eyewitnesses come from the foreign community of Petrograd, whose members watch in horror — or delight, in the case of John Reed, whose unreliable “Ten Days That Shook the World” was to become a definitive chronicle — as their adopted home succumbs to revolution.

The action opens in a city worn out by war. Factory workers shiver in bread lines in the slums while the wealthy continue their glittering social whirl. The expatriate community of St Petersburg (patriotically rechristened Petrograd after the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914) has been established for almost as long as the city itself. In Pushkin’s memorable phrase, it was Peter the Great’s window chopped through to Europe. By the second decade of the 20th century, entrepreneurial foreigners had established cotton and paper mills, shipyards, timber yards, sawmills and steelworks. The expats, as the American journalist Negley Farson observed, “lived like feudal lords.”

The foreigners whose memoirs and letters tell the story of the unfolding crisis are a motley bunch. The American ambassador, David Rowland Francis, a genial former governor of Missouri, does not, in the opinion of the British spy Robert Bruce Lockhart, “know a Left Social Revolutionary from a potato.” Among Francis’s fellow Americans are two doyennes of Petrograd society who have married into the Russian aristocracy: Princess Cantacuzene-Speransky (Julia Grant, a granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant) and Countess Nostitz (the daughter of an Iowa grain elevator worker who made a match with Russia’s military attache while working as an actress in Paris).

The “suave and gossipy” French ambassador, Maurice Paleologue, spends “more time socialising than on diplomatic business.” His British counterpart, Sir George Buchanan, insists on walking to the Russian Foreign Ministry through the running street battles, so impressing the Russian soldiers and sailors that they cease fire and wait respectfully as he passes. Leighton Rogers, an American clerk at the National City Bank’s Petrograd branch, sets out in a similar spirit to deliver 9 million rubles’ worth of treasury notes to a safe-deposit vault. He emerges from the crowds unscathed after dawdling to examine playbills on the way.

Rogers’s insouciance is telling. Like foreigners in Russia before and since, Rappaport’s narrators are a separate caste, above and apart from the troubles engulfing ordinary Russians. As violence breaks out, many take pains to identify themselves as untouchable. The foreigners are in Petrograd but not of it.

“I sit high and see far” is the appropriate Russian aphorism. That outsider’s long view is the book’s strength. After all, these foreigners often have more privileged access to great men and events than the vast majority of Russian witnesses. Ambassadors Paleologue and Buchanan have regular private audiences with the czar, and their diaries offer independent testimony to the autocrat’s weakness. The journalists Florence Harper and Donald Thompson, a Canadian and an American, see more clearly than any of the Russians that revolution is inevitable. “In fact, I was so sure of it,” Harper later wrote, “that I wandered around the town, up and down the Nevsky, watching and waiting for it as I would for a circus parade.” Arthur Ransome, correspondent for The Daily News of London, reports that he is “within a yard” of Kerensky as he confronts his enemies in the Petrograd Soviet: “I saw the sweat come out on his forehead, I watched his mouth change as he faced now one, now another group of his opponents.”

The British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst shows up in Petrograd on a quixotic mission to keep Russia in the war. A young agent of British intelligence named Somerset Maugham arrives with $21,000 in his pocket with an equally hopeless brief to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution.

Rappaport has unearthed plenty of wonderful new material, including the unpublished memoir of Leighton Rogers, discovered in the Library of Congress. Yet there are some odd omissions. The remarkable Project 1917, a Facebook community set up by the journalist and author Mikhail Zygar, is currently publishing the diaries and letters of a cross-section of witnesses to the revolution in the form of social media posts, appearing exactly a century after they were written. Ambassador Paleologue and the novelist Ivan Bunin, for instance, offer parallel accounts of a dinner for an exhibition of Finnish avant-garde painters that is hijacked by the firebrand poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and his drunken fans. This electrifying moment when the self-appointed prophets of the new age defy the artistic establishment of the old is, sadly, overlooked by Rappaport, as are the exploits of Robert Bruce Lockhart, who is involved in a plot to murder Lenin. So is the career of Frederick Thomas, the American son of slaves who becomes one of Russia’s most successful entertainment impresarios. The exploits of Lockhart and Thomas, unfolding in Moscow, don’t fall into the narrow category of revolutionary Petrograd and are therefore excluded.

No matter. By confining herself to foreigners in Russia’s capital, Rappaport takes a necessarily narrow slice of revolutionary history. But the story these witnesses tell is endlessly fascinating.

–New York Times News Service

Owen Matthews’s most recent book is “L’Ombre du Sabre,” a novel set during the conflicts in Chechnya and Ukraine.