6-12 August 1917

  • By Mark Sutcliffe
  • 12 Aug, 2017
Life at Tobolsk during the first few months was another idyll of domestic calm and undisturbed tranquillity. The ex-Tsar breakfasted, studied, walked, lunched, exercised, dined, taught history to Alexis, and held family reunions in the evening to an extent never possible before. Special religious services were held for the royal family in the town church and they were permitted to leave the house for that purpose. The children prepared and enacted dramatic pieces in French and English. The townspeople showed themselves courteous and sympathetic, frequently sending gifts, particularly fresh food, and saluting the members of the family respectfully or blessing them with the sign of the cross when they appeared at the windows of the Palace. It was only the unending monotony, the drab Siberian monotony, that oppressed, together with the almost complete absence of news.
(Edmund Walsh, 'The Last Days of the Romanovs', The Atlantic, March 1928)

6 August

Memoir of Pierre Gilliard, tutor to the tsar's children
What reasons had the Council of Ministers for transporting the Imperial family to Tobolsk? It is difficult to say definitely. When Kerensky told the Tsar of the proposed transfer he explained the necessity by saying that the Provisional Government had resolved to take energetic measures against the Bolsheviks; this would result in a period of disturbance and armed conflict of which the Imperial family might be the first victims; it was therefore his duty to put them out of danger. It has been claimed in other quarters that it was an act of weakness in face of the Extremists, who, uneasy at seeing in the army the beginnings of a movement in favour of the Tsar, demanded his exile to Siberia. However this may be, the journey of the Imperial family from Tsarskoe Selo to Tobolsk was effected under comfortable conditions and without any noteworthy incidents.
(Sergei Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion , London 1996)

7 August

Diary entry of Louis de Robien, attaché at the French Embassy
We only know a few details about the Imperial family’s journey. The departure from Tsarskoye took place in the early morning … The town of Tobolsk, where the Tsar and his family are to be interned, is a long way from the railway. Rasputin was born near there. The Grand Duchesses are supposed to have told Kerensky that the Empress’s dearest wish is to build a big church there, so that people can pray to God for the martyr … Saint Grischa Rasputin, the patron saint of the tovariches … it’s just what they need. In fact, one had to admit that there is something impressive about the fulfilment of the prophecies of this man who never ceased to foretell that, if he met with a violent death, the Empire would collapse during the month after his disappearance.
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917-1918, London 1969)

9 August

Train 293 for Finland arrived at Udelnaya Station. The driver was Guro Jalava, railywayman, conspirator, committed Marxist. ‘I came to the edge of the platform’, he later recalled, ‘whereat a man strode from among the trees and hoisted himself up into the cab. It was, of course, Lenin, although I hardly recognised him. He was to be my stoker.’ The photograph in the fake passport with which Lenin – ‘Konstantin Petrovich Ivanov’ – travelled has become famous. With a cap perched high on a curly wig, the contours of his beardless mouth unfamiliar, wryly upturned, his deep small eyes are all that is recognisable.
(China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, London 2017)


Letter to the Central Executive Committee of Soviets on behalf of positional soldiers
Comrade Soldiers and Workers,
All of us positional troops ask you as our comrades to explain to us who these Bolsheviks are and what party they belong to because we don’t know them or their opinion. Our provisional government has come out very much against the Bolsheviks. But we, positional soldiers, don’t find any fault with them at all … We are little by little going over entirely to the side of the Bolsheviks. But in order for us to find out exactly about the Bolsheviks, we are turning to you, comrades, as our advisors – explain all this to us.
With respect, all the positional Soldiers, 9 August 1917, Active Army, Sirebrov, Soldier
(Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917, New Haven and London 2001)

10 August

Mistrust between prime minister [Kerensky] and general [Kornilov] was such that Kornilov arrived with a substantial and provocative bodyguard. This was a body of Turkmen fighters from the so-called Savage Division of volunteer soldiers from across the Caucasus … As Kerensky watched in alarm from the Winter Palace, the red-robed warriors came jogging into view down the wide streets, surrounding Kornilov’s car, brandishing scimitars and machine-guns. They took up positions around the palace door like enemies preparing for a parlay.
(China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, London 2017)

Resolution of the Conference of Public Figures [representatives of business and industry, the nobility, educated society and former officers, convened in Moscow between 8-10 August]
The time has come openly to admit that the country … is on the verge of ruin. The government, if it realises its duty, must acknowledge that it has led the state on the wrong road, which must be abandoned at once for the sake of saving the country and freedom … The only government is one that cuts itself free of all traces of dependence on committees, soviets and other similar organisations.
(The Russian Revolution 1917-1921, ed. Ronald Kowalski, London 1997)

11 August

Memoir by the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov
I got into a train at one of the stations before Yaroslavl but the train was already overflowing, and in all classes you had to stand up all night. In Yaroslavl, by using my title of Central Ex. Com. member, I penetrated into an almost empty military carriage. I was delighted at my success, but something rather disagreeable happened as a result. I was naïve enough to remove my boots, which were gone when I happened to wake up an hour or two later … In Moscow, astounding the crowd with my stockinged feet, I made my way to the station-master and spent about two hours telephoning to people at random, to see whether some friend could bring a pair of boots to the station for me. This was all quite typical of travelling at this time.
(N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: a Personal Record, Oxford 1955)

12 August

Diary entry of Louis de Robien, attaché at the French Embassy
There is again a certain amount of excitement in the town. Cossack patrols and machine-gun carriers are massed in the Winter Palace square, ready to intervene. During the last few days one has felt that things were going badly again. … One feels it, like one does when one knows that a storm is coming, even though one cannot yet hear the thunder.
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917-1918, London 1969)


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12 August 2017

In a series of three articles for The Atlantic in 1928, the journalist Edmund Walsh looked back on the final days of the Romanovs. One of his key questions was why Kerensky sent the family to Siberia rather than Crimea, where many royalists found safe refuge and from where many eventually escaped. The growing threat of Bolshevism was a major factor later cited by Kerensky: the fear that if he offered them sanctuary there would be further unrest which in turn could lead to calls for the royal family to be put to death: 'I will not be the Marat of the Russian Revolution!' Kerensky had said back in March. So he sent two agents called Vershinin and Makarov to Siberia to select an appropriate location, far from Moscow and the threat of mob violence. They chose Tobolsk, a town of twelve thousand inhabitants, some two thousand miles from Petrograd. The judge who later cross-examined Kerensky at a judicial enquiry into the family's murder, gave little credence to Kerensky's protestations that it was for their own good that Nicholas and Alexandra and their children were sent to Tobolsk; rather it was so that the 'dethroned Autocrat of All the Russias [should] be made to taste the bitterness and dreariness of exile in Siberia, must be made to experience the icy blasts of that House of Dead Souls to which he and his ancestors had banished so many Russians!' And not just the family; with them went forty-six court attendants who had volunteered to accompany them on this dismal journey.
By Mark Sutcliffe 07 Jun, 2018
Week by week blog tracing Russia's revolutionary year of 1917 through personal testimony, diaries, correspondence etc.
By Mark Sutcliffe 18 Dec, 2017
German officers welcoming Soviet delegates at Brest-Litovsk for the Peace Conference. Soviet delegates left to right: Adolph Joffe, Lev Karakhan and Leon Trotsky, the Head of the Soviet Delegation © IWM (Q 70777)
By Mark Sutcliffe 11 Dec, 2017
Looting of wine shops, Ivan Vladimirov, Petrograd 1917
By Mark Sutcliffe 04 Dec, 2017
General Nikolai Dukhonin, last commander of the Tsarist army, killed by revolutionary sailors on 20 November
By Mark Sutcliffe 27 Nov, 2017
Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky)
By Mark Sutcliffe 20 Nov, 2017
The Winter Palace during a spectacular light show to mark the anniversary of the revolution,
as per the Gregorian calendar. 5 November 2017
By Mark Sutcliffe 13 Nov, 2017
Red peasant, soldier and working man to the cossack: ‘Cossack, who are you with? Them or us?’
By Mark Sutcliffe 06 Nov, 2017
Students and soldiers firing across the Moika River at police who are resisting the revolutionaries, 24 October 1917 (© IWM Q69411)
By Mark Sutcliffe 30 Oct, 2017
Revolutionaries remove the remaining relics of the Imperial Regime from the facade of official buildings, Petrograd © IWM (Q 69406)
By Mark Sutcliffe 23 Oct, 2017

8 October  
Letter from Lenin to the Bolshevik Comrades attending the Regional Congress of the Soviets of the Northern Region
Comrades, Our revolution is passing through a highly critical period … A gigantic task is being imposed upon the responsible leaders of our Party, failure to perform which will involve the danger of a total collapse of the internationalist proletarian movement. The situation is such that verily, procrastination is like unto death … In the vicinity of Petrograd and in Petrograd itself — that is where the insurrection can, and must, be decided on and effected … The fleet, Kronstadt, Viborg, Reval, can and must advance on Petrograd; they must smash the Kornilov regiments, rouse both the capitals, start a mass agitation for a government which will immediately give the land to the peasants and immediately make proposals for peace, and must overthrow Kerensky’s government and establish such a government. Verily, procrastination is like unto death.  
(V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin, The Russian Revolution: Writings and Speeches from the February Revolution to the October Revolution, 1917, London 1938)


9 October  
Report in The Times
The Maximalist [Bolshevik], M. Trotsky, President of the Petrograd Soviet, made a violent attack on the Government, describing it as irresponsible and assailing its bourgeois elements, ‘who,’ he continued, ‘by their attitude are causing insurrection among the peasants, increasing disorganisation and trying to render the Constituent Assembly abortive.’ ‘The Maximalists,’ he declared, ‘cannot work with the Government or with the Preliminary Parliament, which I am leaving in order to say to the workmen, soldiers, and peasants that Petrograd, the Revolution, and the people are in danger.’ The Maximalists then left the Chamber, shouting, ‘Long live a democratic and honourable peace! Long live the Constituent Assembly!’  
(‘Opening of Preliminary Parliament’, The Times)


10 October  
As Sukhanov left his home for the Soviet on the morning of the 10th, his wife Galina Flakserman eyed nasty skies and made him promise not to try to return that night, but to stay at his office … Unlike her diarist husband, who was previously an independent and had recently joined the Menshevik left, Galina Flakserman was a long-time Bolshevik activist, on the staff of Izvestia. Unbeknownst to him, she had quietly informed her comrades that comings and goings at her roomy, many-entranced apartment would be unlikely to draw attention. Thus, with her husband out of the way, the Bolshevik CC came visiting. At least twelve of the twenty-one-committee were there … There entered a clean-shaven, bespectacled, grey-haired man, ‘every bit like a Lutheran minister’, Alexandra Kollontai remembered. The CC stared at the newcomer. Absent-mindedly, he doffed his wig like a hat, to reveal a familiar bald pate. Lenin had arrived.  
(China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, London 2017)

Memoir by the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov
Oh, the novel jokes of the merry muse of History! This supreme and decisive session took place in my own home … without my knowledge … For such a cardinal session not only did people come from Moscow, but the Lord of Hosts himself, with his henchman, crept out of the underground. Lenin appeared in a wig, but without his beard. Zinoviev appeared with a beard, but without his shock of hair. The meeting went on for about ten hours, until about 3 o’clock in the morning … However, I don’t actually know much about the exact course of this meeting, or even about its outcome. It’s clear that the question of an uprising was put … It was decided to begin the uprising as quickly as possible, depending on circumstances but not on the Congress.  
(N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: a Personal Record, Oxford 1955)


11 October  
British Consul Arthur Woodhouse in a letter home
Things are coming to a pretty pass here. I confess I should like to be out of it, but this is not the time to show the white feather. I could not ask for leave now, no matter how imminent the danger. There are over 1,000 Britishers here still, and I and my staff may be of use and assistance to them in an emergency.  
(Helen Rappaport, Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd 1917, London 2017)

Memoir of Fedor Raskolnikov, naval cadet at Kronstadt
The proximity of a proletarian rising in Russia, as prologue to the world socialist revolution, became the subject of all our discussions in prison … Even behind bars, in a stuffy, stagnant cell, we felt instinctively that the superficial calm that outwardly seemed to prevail presaged an approaching storm … At last, on October 11, my turn [for release] came … Stepping out of the prison on to the Vyborg-Side embankment and breathing in deeply the cool evening breeze that blew from the river, I felt that joyous sense of freedom which is known only to those who have learnt to value it while behind bards. I took a tram at the Finland Station and quickly reached Smolny … In the mood of the delegates to the Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region which was taking place at that time .. an unusual elation, an extreme animation was noticeable … They told me straightaway that the CC had decided on armed insurrection. But there was a group of comrades, headed by Zinoviev and Kamenev, who did not agree with this decision and regarded a rising a premature and doomed to defeat.  
(F.F. Raskolnikov, Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917, New York 1982, first published 1925)


12 October  
Sir George Buchanan, British Ambassador to Russia
On [Kerensky] expressing the fear that there was a strong anti-Russian feeling both in England and France, I said that though the British public was ready to make allowances for her difficulties, it was but natural that they should, after the fall of Riga, have abandoned all hope of her continuing to take an active part in the war … Bolshevism was at the root of all the evils from which Russia was suffering, and if he would but eradicate it he would go down to history, not only as the leading figure of the revolution, but as the saviour of his country. Kerensky admitted the truth of what I had said, but contended that he could not do this unless the Bolsheviks themselves provoked the intervention of the Government by an armed uprising.  
(Sir George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, London 1923)


13 October  
Diary entry of Louis de Robien, attaché at the French Embassy
Kerensky is becoming more and more unpopular, in spite of certain grotesque demonstrations such as this one: the inhabitants of a district in Central Russia have asked him to take over the supreme religious power, and want to make him into a kind of Pope as well as a dictator, whereas even the Tsar was really neither one nor the other. Nobody takes him seriously, except in the Embassy. A rather amusing sonnet about him has appeared, dedicated to the beds in the Winter Palace, and complaining that they are reserved for hysteria cases … for Alexander Feodorovich (Kerensky’s first names) and then Alexandra Feodorovna (the Empress).  
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917–1918, London 1969)


14 October 2017
The BBC2 semi-dramatisation of how the Bolsheviks took power, shown this week, was a curious thing. Talking heads in the form of Figes, Mieville, Rappaport, Sebag-Montefiore, Tariq Ali, Martin Amis and others were interspersed with moody reconstructions of late-night meetings, and dramatic moments such as Lenin’s unbearded return to the Bolshevik CC (cf Sukhanov above). The programme felt rather staged and unconvincing, with a lot of agonised expressions and fist-clenching by Lenin, but the reviewers liked it. Odd, though, that Eisenstein’s storming of the Winter Palace is rolled out every time, with a brief disclaimer that it’s a work of fiction and yet somehow presented as historical footage. There’s a sense of directorial sleight of hand, as if the rather prosaic taking of the palace desperately needs a re-write. In some supra-historical way, Eisenstein’s version has become the accepted version. John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World , currently being serialised on Radio 4, is also presented with tremendous vigour, and properly so as the book is nothing if not dramatic. Historical truth, though, is often as elusive in a book that was originally published — in 1919 — with an introduction by Lenin. ‘Reed was not’, writes one reviewer, ‘an ideal observer. He knew little Russian, his grasp of events was sometimes shaky, and his facts were often suspect.’ Still, that puts him in good company, and Reed is undoubtedly a good read.


 

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