In February 1918, with Russian peace negotiations with Germany having ground to a stalemate, the German army had advanced to within one hundred miles of Petrograd. On 11 March the Bolsheviks therefore transferred the seat of government to Moscow and the remaining members of the diplomatic community were evacuated to Vologda, 350 miles south. Many of David Francis’s American colleagues left Russia at this time but, with the departure of Sir George Buchanan, Francis had become dean of the Allied diplomatic corps and was determined to hang on, claiming he did not want ‘to abandon the Russian people, for whom I felt deep sympathy and whom I had assured repeatedly of America’s unselfish interest in their welfare’.6 Phil Jordan was, however, now anxious to leave; after several breakins at other embassies in Petrograd he had come to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks ‘don’t respect foreign embassies any more’.7
On 26 February 1918* the American diplomats left Petrograd by special train for Vologda. Here Francis and Phil settled in surprisingly happily, making themselves at home in a simple but ‘dandy’ (so thought Phil) two-storey wooden house on the main high street where, for the next five months, visitors could enjoy the informal ‘clubhouse atmosphere’ and the stranded diplomats spent their evenings playing poker and smoking cigars. They drank bourbon when they could get it or otherwise ‘plumped for vodka’. They had taken the good old Model T Ford with them and Francis used it to drive around seeking out potential sites for a golf course in the area.8 But in October 1918, with civil war now raging in Russia, Francis fell ill with a severe infection of the gall bladder and had to be evacuated by US cruiser from Murmansk. Phil nursed him through a high fever during an extremely stormy sea crossing.
After recovering at a naval hospital in Scotland, Francis was transferred to London. Shortly after Christmas 1918 the proud Phil Jordan accompanied him as valet to a dinner with King George and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. When they finally returned to the States in February 1919, Phil was again accorded the ultimate accolade – an invitation to the White House. ‘I was born in Hog Alley,’ he later remarked, ‘and I think you know that a kangaroo can jump further than any other animal, but I don’t believe he could jump from Hog Alley to the White House – that was some jump.’9 In 1922 Francis suffered a stroke and never really recovered his health. He died in St Louis in January 1927, having ensured that his sons would take care of the ever-present Phil, who was provided with rent-free accommodation and a small trust fund until his death from cancer in Santa Barbara in 1941.10
With Russia’s withdrawal from the war, the Allied hospitals in Petrograd were closed down. Lady Georgina Buchanan’s British Colony Hospital had already closed in July 1917, partly due to a loss of morale at the erosion of good manners and respect shown for its work by the Russian patients, but also because there were fewer of them – mainly cases of scurvy. Those wounded who remained had, since the revolution, become increasingly obstreperous.11 The committee of the American colony hospital also voted to close its establishment – the only wounded Russian soldiers left, as Pauline Crosley noted, ‘were those wounded fighting amongst themselves’ and it had become ‘too dangerous for the colony women to work there’.12 Their unused supplies were handed over to the Salvation Army to distribute.
The days of the Anglo-Russian Hospital’s usefulness had also come to an end, and in November 1917 the London committee that funded it voted to withdraw its hospital facilities on 1 January 1918. There was, however, the question of ‘what was to happen to the hundreds of pounds worth of beautiful instruments and equipment’ that it contained. Francis Lindley reported that a Red Cross commissioner ‘suggested that it should be made over to the Soviets’, but the administrators were loath to do this, knowing that it would either be purloined or wilfully destroyed. Instead everything was secretly packed up and taken to the Finland Station, and from there sent to Archangel under the protection of a British Armoured Car Division. It eventually arrived back at Red Cross HQ in London, ‘which was better than being left to be wasted by incompetent Soviets’.13 In 1996 the Russians placed a plaque commemorating the ARH at the front entrance of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich’s palace,* which can still be seen today.
The ARH’s founder, Lady Muriel Paget, stubbornly refused to give up on her Russian relief work, however, and remained in Kiev, organising famine relief and running soup kitchens for six thousand people – eventually leaving in February 1918 via Siberia, Japan and the USA. In 1924 she set up the British Subjects in Russia Relief Association to help those still stranded in Russia, many of whom were eventually evacuated to Estonia. Of the many nurses and VADs who worked at the ARH, aside from the well-connected Lady Sybil Grey and Dorothy Seymour, we know virtually nothing of their later lives, though one or two of their memoirs and letters have surfaced, thanks to an extensive search in the course of research for this book.
While the careers of some of the British and American diplomats in Russia have already been written about and their archives survive (if scattered across the UK and USA), we know almost nothing, after they left Petrograd, of the many still-unsung and now long-forgotten expatriates – the nannies and governesses, engineers, businessmen and entrepreneurs, their wives and children – who lived and worked in the capital and wrote so vividly and movingly of their experiences in their diaries and letters home. Some, like Bousfield Swan Lombard, chaplain of the English Church in Petrograd, suffered persecution under the Bolsheviks. Bousfield remained loyally at his post after many in the British community had left, driven by a strong sense of responsibility for the 400 or so fellow nationals still stranded in the city – many of them teachers and governesses who had been in Russia all their lives and had ‘sunk all their savings in some bank’. But Petrograd was such a dispiriting place to be, ‘like a city of the dead’, a place of ‘lawless stagnation’, as he told his wife back home, and he was hugely relieved to finally leave Russia in October 1918 after his release from prison.14 Having lost virtually everything, Bousfield was compensated by the government for his eight years of loyal service in Russia to the measly tune of £50, upon which £43 16s. 7d. was immediately clawed back for the cost of his repatriation to Britain. Bousfield’s and other valuable testimony relating to Petrograd in 1917 is held at the Leeds Russian Archive, which is a treasure trove of memory of the British colonies in Russia from the nineteenth century.
It is hard to be certain exactly how many British, American and French newspaper correspondents (not to mention other foreign reporters) came and went in Petrograd during 1917, as many were not given bylines in their press articles and only a small proportion of them published memoirs. But what is striking is how many there were of them, and how doggedly – cheerfully even – they endured the terrible privations of cold and hunger along with the rest of the population. These journalists often mention each other, in passing, in their own writings, but because of the jobbing nature of their work, always on the move from story to story, virtually nothing has survived of their archives – and, more disappointingly, of the photographs that several of them took.
Arno Dosch-Fleurot spent the rest of his life working as a newspaper correspondent in Europe, and was one of the first reporters to enter Germany at the end of World War I; he tried several times to return to Russia to write on the new Soviet state, but was refused permission. He later married a Russian and lived in Berlin in the 1930s, where he witnessed the rise of Hitler; on the outbreak of World War II, the Nazis arrested him and he was held in detention for fifteen months. For the remainder of his life he was Spanish correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, dying in Madrid in 1951.15 His book Through War to Revolution – poignantly dedicated to ‘The Unknown Russian Soldier over whose tomb burns no flame’ – describing his experiences on the Eastern Front and in Russia, came out in 1931, but is one of many accounts of Petrograd in 1917 that has been too long overlooked.