Petrograd, for all its privations and its growing atmosphere of social disaffection, still provided ‘the perfect life of dissipation’ for those unrepentant sybarites craving excitement and self-indulgence.47 Nicholas II might have introduced a ban on vodka sales in 1914 to control the legendary drunkenness of Russia’s largely peasant, conscript army, but if you had the right money you could still be served fine wines, champagne, whisky and other hard liquor in the cabinets privés of the best restaurants and hotels in the city.48* In former years the Hotel de France and Hotel d’Angleterre had enjoyed the patronage of the French and English colonies, but during the war it was the Astoria that gained precedence. It had been built in 1912 on the eastern side of St Isaac’s Square at the corner of Bolshaya Morskaya and Voznesenskaya, to cater to tourists coming to St Petersburg for the 1913 Romanov Tercentenary; and it was named by its Swedish architect, Fredrik Lidvall, in honour of the renowned New York hoteliers, the Astor brothers.
Such had been its popularity with British visitors that the Astoria had set up a bureau to deal specifically with their needs and boasted a ‘gigantic map of the London tube system and a large library of English books from Chaucer to D. H. Lawrence’.49 With ‘ten elevators, an electric light system for calling servants, city telephone lines, an automated vacuuming system, steam-driven central heating, as well as 350 rooms soundproofed with cork insulation’, the hotel also had a grand restaurant that catered for up to two hundred people, a Winter Garden atrium and Art Nouveau banqueting hall.50 Its French restaurant had become a place of welcome retreat for war-weary Russian officers home from the front, as well as for Allied attachés, embassy officials and expatriates – a magnet, too, for discreet high-class prostitutes. Although its rival, the Hotel d’Europe, which also offered a roof garden and luxurious glass-domed restaurant, was a favourite haunt of Ambassador Francis, most new foreign arrivals in the city headed for the Astoria. Such, however, had been the influx of visiting military men that by the end of 1916 the hotel had lost much of its pre-war glamour, so much so that Italian-born restaurant manager Joseph Vecchi felt it had become ‘a kind of glorified barracks’.51
Vecchi rued the severe shortages that prevented him from providing the kind of grand dinners that even a year ago he had still been able to conjure up for private parties. For food supplies to Petrograd had, by the end of 1916, shrunk to about one-third of what was needed. A severe lack of manpower on the land had affected output, with so many peasants conscripted into the army; but many of the shortages were artificial, caused by profiteering and the breakdown in the national railway system. At depots and supply centres in the food-producing south, flour and other food supplies lay stranded and rotting, for lack of rolling stock to bring them by rail to Russia’s hungry cities in the north. There was still plenty of food available out in the provinces, as many foreign visitors testified, and hard-pressed housewives often made gruelling journeys out of the city in attempts to buy butter, eggs, meat and fish from the local peasantry. By now stories were rife in Petrograd about the deliberate stockpiling of flour, meat and sugar by speculators in order to push the prices ever higher. Even the moneyed classes could no longer obtain white bread, but they could certainly still lay their hands on fine food when they wanted to have a party, as National City Bank employee Leighton Rogers noted with amazement, when invited that winter to the house of a Russian acquaintance for ‘just a little family affair’:
The huge buffet in a reception room looked as though a food warehouse had burst open – pickled fish, sardines, anchovies, smelts, herrings, smoked eel, smoked salmon; bowls of caviar, entire hams, tongue, sausage, chicken, paté-de-fois-gras; red cheese, yellow cheese, white cheese, blue cheese; innumerable salads; basket of celery, pickles and olives; sauces – pink, yellow, lavender. All this and much more was piled in three great tiers, with an immobile cascade of fruits in the centre, and flanked by rows of vodka and kummel carafes.52
It turned out that this bacchanalian feast was merely the zakuski, or hors d’oeuvres, preceding a full sit-down dinner of salmon, roast venison and pheasant, followed by ice-cream bombe and yet more fruit and cheeses, served with wines from claret to burgundy and champagne. At the end of the dinner, as a special treat, Rogers’s Russian host had produced the ultimate treat for his American guests: ‘two packets of Beeman’s Pepsin chewing gum’.53
Beyond the doors of this and other comfortable private mansions ‘Russia lay like a prostrate Mars, starving to death,’ wrote Negley Farson, who till now had led an unrepentant sybaritic life in the clubs and restaurants of the city.54 But even he had become disenchanted with staying up all night on binges with his expatriate friends and cronies, enjoying champagne and crayfish in the company of prostitutes in the cabinets privés at the Villa Rodé – a restaurant near the Stroganovsky Bridge that was patronised by Grigory Rasputin, the Tsar’s and Tsaritsa’s controversial spiritual guru and adviser. All the fashionable restaurants were feeling the pinch – including Contant’s, haunt of the Dutch ambassador Willem Oudendijk (later known as William Oudendyk); and the Café Donon, a favourite of US embassy official J. Butler Wright. The old expatriate life at the New English Club had also ‘dwindled to nothing’: ‘Its beefsteak dinners had vanished forever’ by the end of 1916, as Farson recalled.55
Most basic foodstuffs, like milk and potatoes, had quadrupled in price since the outbreak of war; other crucial commodities such as bread, cheese, butter, meat and fish were as much as five times more expensive. Ella Woodhouse, daughter of the British consul, recalled that ‘we had to keep a maid, whose only job was to stand in queues for milk, for bread, or whatever else there was to be had’.56 As winter set in, the queues got ever longer and more resentful, with ‘more and more talk of inefficiency and corruption in high places’. Official wastage and mismanagement of food and fuel supplies (with only wood and no coal available) were on a colossal scale; corruption among Russian officials was rife. Petrograd felt like a city under siege: no one had the appetite for self-indulgence any longer. ‘The Roman Holiday atmosphere of the Hotel Astoria was gone. Fear had now taken its place.’57 In his daily walks along the Embankment, Sir George Buchanan was appalled by the long queues for food. ‘When the hard winter weather sets in these lines will become inflammable material,’ he wrote in November 1916. At the US embassy, Fred Dearing had much the same sense of foreboding: ‘The air is thick with talk of catastrophe,’ he wrote in his journal.58
For those in big business – the textile mills, copper factories, munitions works – the profits continued to mount, while for their workers the spectre of famine seemed ever more present. ‘An air of deep despondency already by then hung over the capital,’ recalled Willem Oudendijk. ‘It was clear that the war put too heavy a strain on the country’s economic life … Cabs had practically disappeared and tramcars rumbled along, packed to overflowing.’ The muddy streets were shabby and the shops depleted. The Russians to whom he spoke put it all down to the rottenness of the bureaucratic system: