24-30 September 1917
Florence Farmborough at the Russian Front, 1915 (painted from a photograph)
24 September
A newspaper printed a report that the English and French armies, on account
of the disorder in Russia, wished to sever the alliance. I refused to believe
such a thing. In another newspaper I read that the report had been denied. I
read also that the British Army had gained much territory in Mesopotamia.
(Florence Farmborough, Nurse at the Russian Front: A Diary 1914–18, London
1974)
Diary entry of Joshua Butler Wright,
Counselor of the American Embassy, Petrograd
The Kremlin is one of the few things in the world that have not proved
disappointing to me in the realization! We spent almost all day there
today … The icons are extraordinary and on the whole rather pleasing. The
almost idolatrous worship of these people makes us sometimes wonder as to their
real capacity for self-government. The kissing of relics offends all laws of
sanitation.
(Witness to Revolution: The Russian Revolution Diary and Letters of J. Butler
Wright, London 2002)
25 September
Memoir by the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov
The new government will go down in the history of the revolution as the
Government of the civil war. The Soviet declares: ‘We, the workers and the
garrison of Petersburg, refuse to support the Government of bourgeois autocracy
and counter-revolutionary violence. We express the unshakeable conviction that
the new Government will meet with a single response from the entire
revolutionary democracy: “Resign!”’
(N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: a Personal Record, Oxford 1955)
Report in The Manchester
Guardian
The reports of the Democratic Conference transmitted to this country could
not have been more unsatisfactory if they had been deliberately designed to
confound, prejudice and dishearten the English people with regard to Russia.
Whatever be the circumstances responsible, such a state of affairs is gravely
injurious to this country. It poisons Anglo-Russian sympathies, and therefore
Anglo-Russian relations, and, by denying us the materials for judging,
eliminates all calculation from our estimates of the future course of events in
Russia.
(‘The Democratic Conference’, The Manchester Guardian)
26 September
Arthur Ransome headed home by sea on 26 September with a very clear sense of
approaching danger; what he had seen at the congress had convinced him that the
Bolsheviks were preparing the ground to seize power.
(Helen Rappaport, Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd 1917, London 2017)
Diary entry of Louis de Robien,
attaché at the French Embassy
On orders from their governments the Allied ambassadors today took steps to
issue a solemn warning to Kerensky and to convey their anxiety to him. The American
Ambassador alone found an excuse to abstain. Kerensky received them in the
Winter Palace … Sir George Buchanan, the doyen, read them the joint
declaration. Although this was expressed in the most moderate terms — too
moderate, in my opinion — it violently irritated the despot’s vanity, and he
walked out exclaiming: ‘You forget that Russia is a great power!’ The Tsar also
refused to listen to Sir George in similar circumstances: a few weeks later, he
lost the crown!
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917–1918, London 1969)
27 September
A railway strike has dislocated rail-transport throughout Russia. Finland
has proclaimed herself a republic. Strikes and riots are still rampant, while
famine is augmenting the general hardship … Alas! For poor, suffering
Russia. We heard of a party of Social Democrats in Petrograd, who had coined
for themselves the name of Bolshevik — meaning one who forms the majority.
Being such a small party, the name Menshevik [minority] would have been more appropriate!
The members professed to be ‘apostles’ of the doctrine of Communism and
declared that their objectives were to bring peace to Russia by negotiation; to
abolish capitalism; to establish a proletariat dictatorship and to equalise all
classes … It was not difficult for us now to guess the origins and aims of
those suspicious men who for some weeks past had been inspecting Russian Front
Lines and delivering speeches to the troops. It was now quite clear that the
Bolsheviki had started an extensive subversive movement.
(Florence Farmborough, Nurse at the Russian Front: A Diary 1914–18, London
1974)
Report in The Manchester Guardian
Reuter’s Agency states that Commander Locker-Lampson, M.P., who has been in
command of the British armoured-car unit in Russia, arrived in England
yesterday … ‘No one,’ said the Commander, ‘has any right to suppose for a
moment that Russia will not remain loyal to the Allied cause. The Coalition
Government now formed is a fine achievement, and many difficulties will disappear
within the next few months.’
(‘The Russian Outlook’, The Manchester Guardian)
29 September
Diary of Nicholas II
A few days ago Dr Botkin received a note from Kerensky, from which we learnt
that we are allowed to take walks beyond the town. In answer to Botkin’s
question about when these could begin, Pankratov — the wretch — replied that
there could be no question of it now because of some unexplained fear for our
safety. Everyone was very upset by this answer.
(Sergei Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion, London 1996)
30 September 2017
Florence Farmborough (1887–1978) went to Moscow in 1908 to be governess to
the children of a Russian heart surgeon. When war broke out, she trained as a
Red Cross nurse (her parents had presciently named her after Florence
Nightingale) and was assigned to a surgical field unit of the 3rd Russian Army
Corps. The diary she kept of her four years on the Russian front were published
only in 1974, when she was 87. An article in The Times, marking the book’s
publication, described it as an ‘astonishing record [that] survived through the
advances and retreats of trench warfare, through the Bolshevik rampages, a
journey across Siberia and her eventual escape from Russia through
Vladivostok’. Florence clearly felt a strong bond with the Russian army — and
was grateful to be taken on by the Red Cross (‘I would never have been allowed
to work in the British Red Cross’) — but described the changes that occurred in
the summer of 1917 like this: ‘It was an inexplicable transformation. We were
prepared for any hardship and danger at the front. But when our own men wanted
to kill us because we were educated or religious it was much more frightening.’
After returning from Russia she went to Spain and lectured in English at the
University of Luis Vives in Valencia. During the Spanish Civil War she worked
for General Franco, reading daily bulletins broadcast in English by Spanish
National Radio, and in the Battle of Britain she was back in London with the
Women’s Voluntary Service. Quite some life. Her obituary in The Times described
her as ‘a faithful observer and recorder of the bravery and misery, the
day-by-day comments, and the increasing acts of desertion and treachery of the
officers and men of the Tsarist Army during the period of its increasing
breakdown, which played a part in the triumph of the revolutionaries’.
