Living capital cities
are always full of foreigners and always have been. Occasionally, a sclerotic
regime has tried to keep them out – of Lhasa, for example – but most regimes
need them as diplomats, bankers, businessmen, engineers, skilled technicians, doctors,
translators, chefs, nannies, tutors, entertainers …
St Petersburg and
Petrograd (as it was from 1914) was full of foreigners – indeed, bringing in foreigners had been
government policy from the time of Peter the Great. All that the outbreak of
World War One did was to empty the city of Germans (except for the spies) and
replenish their ranks with additional Allied personnel. So when Petrograd led
Russia into Revolution, not just once but twice in 1917, there were plenty of
foreigners around to observe what went on and Helen Rappaport bases herself on
the records left by a relatively small cast of American, British and French
foreigners in Petrograd. She has produced a highly readable book though rather unbalanced.
Foreigners from neutral countries – and there were many in the First World War
including Russia’s near- neighbours Denmark and Sweden – were well-represented in
Russia working for Red Cross or similar relief organisations and they may have
had a different perspective on events in Russia to those involved in
the Allied cause. There were also at least some more working class foreigners
than those to be found here. Rappaport offers a view from the middle and upper
classes.
She has researched thoroughly
and I think that her narrative of the February Revolution which brought down
the unloved and unmourned Romanovs is very strong. For those at the time this
was the Revolution and what came
after in October was a coup.
But her lack of
sympathy for the Bolsheviks does lead to some carelessness. She produces “property
is theft” as a “favourite Marxist dictum” (page 308) when of course it is the catch-phrase
of a nineteenth century French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Lenin in 1917
did not speak of property as theft but urged the expropriation of the
expropriators using the more striking phrase “Loot the looters!” In an economy and administration which had literally
ground to a halt, the call to loot the looters was about the only means
available to the government to bring about any kind of redistribution of wealth,
whether from landlord to peasant or private owner to state. Even then, it could
not solve the problem of hunger which bulks large in Rappaport’s narrative. The
Romanovs could not feed Petrograd, the Provisional Government could not, nor
could the Bolsheviks. Many starved and between 1917 – 21 the population plunged
as those who could, left.
Again, she makes another
small slip, saying that the Bolsheviks finally adopted the Western calendar on
13 February 1918, instantly adding 13 days (page 326). In fact, in Bolshevik controlled
areas, 31 January 1918 was followed by 14 February which would otherwise have
been 1 February. I have a postcard from a Danish traveller in Siberia writing
home on the 14th to say cheerfully that for the first time it’s the same date in both
Russia and Denmark.
I do think there is
more material around than Rappaport has discovered and she recognises this in
soliciting access to fresh sources (page 340). There is, for example, material
written on the back of postcards since
Russia’s postal service did function right through 1917 almost without interruption
– even in Petrograd and even if unreliable. Lots of mail did not arrive at its
destination and lots was delayed. Between the collapse of Imperial mail censorship and the imposition of Bolshevik censorship, there was a space in which people probably felt much freer to write about what they saw and what they were thinking, though the legacy of censorship probably still cast its shadow
