Two days after these happy Christmas celebrations, the Bolsheviks put all of the foreign banks in Petrograd under direct state control and sent armed detachments of Red Guards to occupy them. That morning, 14 December, a ‘loud commotion and raised voices erupted in the downstairs main entrance’ of the National City Bank. The next thing Leighton Rogers and John Louis Fuller knew, ‘metal-shod footwear thumped on the marble stairs as a squad of Bolshevik soldiers clattered into our banking rooms’. The men were led by a ‘strutting little red-head in officer’s uniform, black leather boots and all’, who banged a long blue revolver on the counter, ‘flourished a grimy document, and announced that by order of the People’s Commissars he was seizing the bank and closing it’. The staff were ordered to hand over all keys, and their ledgers too were to be confiscated.* Despite their lack of Russian, the desk clerks got the gist of ‘Red’s’ message (as Rogers nicknamed him) and closed up their ledgers and handed them over as the soldiers ‘echeloned along the counter and rested their rifles on it, bayonets bristling’.57 By now the manager, Steve, had emerged from his office to discover that his bank belonged to the Russian people, and to be told by ‘Red’:
You will have to go with me to the State bank … In your automobile.
‘I haven’t got one,’ Steve protested.
‘You’re a bank Director – you must have an automobile.’
Fortunately Steve’s Russian was good and he proceeded to explain in no uncertain terms that ‘this was an American bank and Americans were democratic, unpretentious people who didn’t always furnish their bank Directors with automobiles’.58 Having pondered this, Red announced that all of the bank’s cash would be confiscated. Unfortunately, with the State Bank closed, they only had a few thousand rubles in the tills at the time. Red was visibly disappointed. It turned out that it was a prearranged given that any Bolshevik units sent to ‘nationalise’ business institutions were allowed to divide between themselves whatever cash they found there. ‘On the assumption that an American bank would be piled to the rafters with loose cash a lottery had been organized, with the winning squad drawing the American assignment.’ Red was furious: ‘What kind of a bank is this, anyway?’ he shouted. ‘No automobile for the Director and hardly any money in the cash-drawer … I’ll have to explain to them’ – upon which he informed his men that the lack of cash was due to the trickery of the devious Americans, ‘which just proved that we were dangerous people, the worst enemies the proletariat could possibly have’. ‘Weren’t we bankers,’ he shouted, ‘and didn’t that make us capitalists; and weren’t we foreigners, and therefore international capitalists? There wasn’t any lower order of the human race, he said, in admonishing his men to keep close watch on us.’59
After taking the keys to the safe and strong boxes and informing the clerks that they were all under house arrest, Red carted Steve off to the State Bank to release more funds. Meanwhile about a dozen ‘soldati’ stayed on guard in the hall, ‘sitting on our gold furniture’, Fuller remembered, gorging on the bank’s precious supply of bread, and lying down to take a nap on the period sofas and chairs. The young bank clerks sat there disconsolately until someone remembered the gramophone they had used for the Christmas party, brought it in and began playing American ragtime. One by one the Bolsheviks guarding them left their posts and gathered round to listen. When Red returned hours later with Steve, ‘that’s the way he found us,’ recalled Rogers, ‘with a couple of Russian Guards trying to dance to the Amerikansky capitalistical music’.60 Red’s occupation of the bank lasted well into the New Year; Rogers recalled him strutting around ‘like a kingpin’: it was ‘the great moment of his life and he [was] making the most of it’. Such was his dictatorial behaviour, however, that Rogers feared Red was getting ‘a bit Napoleonic’.61
Similar peremptory Bolshevik takeovers were made of British businesses across the city. Mechanical engineer James Stinton Jones had returned in September to wind up his business affairs and transfer his money to London, but had been very uneasy at the ‘prison atmosphere’ that he had found in Petrograd. The bank holding his money had now been taken over by Bolsheviks, but he demanded – and managed to get – 500 rubles (about £50) from his account. It was not enough, however, to pay the staff at his office and workshop, whom he was forced to sack. Then one morning the Bolsheviks came and demanded the keys to his workshop and stores, containing £20,000 worth of machinery and equipment. They returned soon afterwards for the keys to his flat:
‘What do you want?’ I asked …
‘Hand over the key of your flat to Comrade ——, the bearer of this letter.’
‘What do you mean? It is evening, it is cold, what am I supposed to do?’
‘That is your business.’ Then, looking at the coat rack, he enquired, ‘Is that your cloak and galoshes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Take them.’
I turned to go into the room and he asked me where I was going.
‘I am going to the bedroom to get the photograph of my mother.’
Again pointing to my coat, he said: ‘Get your coat and galoshes.’ As I gave the key to him, I was left with only the clothes I was wearing.
Stinton Jones returned to England after having spent most of the last thirteen years in Russia, taking with him only those clothes and what remained of the 500 rubles.62
During her final two weeks in Petrograd, Meriel Buchanan found it very hard not to cry. In leaving Russia, she felt as if she was ‘deserting somebody I had loved very dearly, and abandoning them to die in utter misery. Day after day I went to say goodbye to one more building, to one more place which had become dear and familiar: the Kazan Cathedral on the Nevsky … the Alexander column in the Winter Palace square; the beautiful equestrian statue of Peter the Great by Falconet.’63 She felt far more pain at leaving the city than at making choices about which possessions to pack in the one small trunk allotted her. Her heavy white Russian shuba lined with grey squirrel and with a fox-fur collar, her ornate court dress and train of silver brocade had to be left; her Siamese cat, too. The embassy silver was sent on by sea from Archangel, but much of the beautiful furniture collected by her parents during their long years in diplomatic service in Europe – the antique Dutch cabinet, French Empire chairs, Marie Antoinette’s writing table, the Aubusson carpet – all had to be left behind.64 The day before their departure she walked ‘rather sadly through the desolate silent streets of the town which had become, after so many years, almost a home to me, and which I felt I would never see again’. It was intensely cold, with an icy wind blowing from the river, the snow piled high by the roadsides. In an empty St Isaac’s Cathedral she lit a candle at the icon of the Miraculous Mother of St George. That evening she dined at the Military Club on the Millionnaya with Colonel Knox and other military attachés who would be leaving Petrograd with them.65
Her father was equally melancholy: ‘Why is it that Russia casts over all who know her such an indefinable mystic spell that, even when her wayward children have turned their capital into a pandemonium, we are sorry to leave it?’ he asked in his diary.66 On Tuesday 26 December 1918, at 7.45 a.m., the Buchanans left the embassy in the darkness of another power cut, making their way downstairs by the light of a flickering kerosene lamp, past the portraits on the landing of Queen Victoria, King Edward and Queen Alexandra, King George and Queen Mary. Their sobbing Russian maids saw them into their car, which jerked off slowly through piled-up banks of snow to the bleak and freezing Finland Station, where they were waved off by a few diplomatic colleagues and members of the British colony. A bribe of two bottles of finest embassy brandy had secured them a sleeping car to themselves.