These are but a few conclusions to so many forgotten stories; the last echoes of a generation of lost voices. But if one had to single any one out, there is one voice above all others that strikes a nerve in its own inimitable way: the utterly truthful, ingenuous voice of an obscure African American, Phil Jordan, an unlettered man and political innocent, and a loyal servant of US diplomacy, who lived to tell the tale. His glorious letters, written in his vivid vernacular style, and reflecting an enduring sense of being ‘a stranger in a strange land’, remain the only known published account of the revolution by an African American.22* They provide us with an unforgettable sense of exactly what it was like to be caught, in Petrograd, in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
* New Style; the Bolsheviks finally adopted the Western calendar on 1 February OS, instantly adding thirteen days to make it 14 February.
* Now known as the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace.
* It was also known as BloodStained Russia, German Intrigue, Treason and Revolt in the USA and was premiered under that title in New York in December 1917.
* Some, like Rheta Childe Dorr, lost all their notes and materials, which were confiscated at the border by the Bolsheviks when they left. Dorr had to write the whole of her book, Inside the Russian Revolution, from memory.
† With the Russians at the Front; Somewhere in France; and War As It Really Is. Nothing is known either of the whereabouts of the 75,000 feet of film shot by Lieutenant Norton C. Travis in Petrograd over eighteen days, or whether any of it has survived.
‡ The Axelbank film may also have used footage shot by Lieutenant Travis, among uncredited footage from numerous other cameramen, including Russians, who filmed in Petrograd and whose work was recycled for this film.
§ Fred Sikes rose through the ranks of the NCB, retiring as Vice President, and died in 1958. Chester Swinnerton also stayed with the bank and managed its South American branches; he died in New Hampshire in 1960.
* Fleeting sightings of other African Americans in Russia at the time of the revolution all leave us frustrated at the lack of a paper trail on their lives there. One such is Jim Hercules, one of the possibly four black American ‘Nubian guards’ at the Alexander Palace, who served Nicholas and Alexandra and their family right up until the revolution, and who may well have been stranded in Russia for some time afterwards.
Acknowledgements
I cannot remember exactly when it was that I first started collecting foreign eyewitness accounts of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but my interest mushroomed during my days as a freelance copy editor in the 1990s. At the time, I was handling a lot of history manuscripts and it struck me how much seemed to have been written about the revolution by Russians, but how relatively little I had come across that was said by those many non-Russians who, for various reasons, were stranded in the city that year. I knew there had to be more to the story than just the over-hyped account of the one man, John Reed, who had always seemed to dominate, with his Ten Days that Shook the World.
I also knew there had to be plenty of women, aside from Reed’s partner Louise Bryant, who had watched events unfold. And what about all those other journalists, not to mention the diplomats, businessmen, industrialists, nurses and doctors, aid workers and the wives and children they often took with them? What about the British governesses and nannies who, I knew, were well in evidence in Russia at the time? I was aware that the capital had had a thriving British colony going back to the eighteenth century (as, too, had Moscow) and that the Leeds Russian Archive at my old university held some fascinating material on some of them.
So, beginning with the people I had gathered at the LRA, I began to seek out other lost and forgotten eyewitnesses of Petrograd in 1917, in particular from the American and French diplomatic communities. Along the way I picked up an assortment of other nationalities, and an interest that had begun as something of a hobby grew into a serious pursuit. Ten years ago I realised there might be a book in it. But I had to bide my time, because I knew that the best possible moment for such a book would be the centenary of the revolution in 2017.
In the course of my happy but increasingly obsessive collecting of people who had witnessed the convulsions in Petrograd, many friends – old and newly acquired – helped along the way by offering suggestions, seeking out material for me and helping me track down some of my more stubborn subjects. I am most grateful to all of them, for the many and varied ways in which they contributed to the writing of this book, as follows: my fellow Russianists Doug Smith and Simon Sebag Montefiore for a dialogue on Russia, the Romanovs and much sage advice; my good friend Candace Metz-Longinette Gahring in St Louis for helping me access documents in the Missouri archives and elsewhere; Roger Watson for filling me in on the cameras used by Donald Thompson; Mark Anderson of the Chicago Public Library, a genius at winkling out difficult-to-find articles from old magazines; Ilana Miller for doing likewise in California; Marianne Kouwenhoven for help with tracking down Belgian and Dutch diplomats; Ken Hawkins for kindly sharing his thesis on Arno Dosch-Fleurot; Amy Ballard at the Smithsonian; and Griffith Henniger, Henry Hardy, June Purvis, Jane Wickenden and William Lee for their helpful contributions.
My special thanks must go to Harvey Pitcher, author of Witnesses of the Russian Revolution (John Murray, 1994), who offered valuable advice when I visited him in Norwich and most generously passed on all his research material to me; to Sue Woolmans for checking out material held in the BBC Radio archives and being such a stalwart friend and supporter of my work; to film historian Dr David Mould at Ohio University for sharing both his knowledge of Donald Thompson and an ongoing and stubborn desire to track down Thompson’s lost films; to the stalwart Phil Tomaselli for once again providing scans of sources at the National Archives; to Charles Bangham and Brian Brooks for sharing their family memoir of Edith Kerby; and to John Carter for letting me see his grand father Bousfield Swan Lombard’s letters from Petrograd. I also owe a huge thank-you to my friend David Holohan for his excellent translations of French eyewitness material and for photocopying some hard-to-find sources for me in London. Finally, once more I am deeply grateful to Rudy de Casseres in Finland, a superb Russianist, who read and commented on the text and helped me obtain some important research material in Russian, checking through many issues of the newspaper Novoe vremya for material for me – a task that defeated my eyesight.
In order to offer new insights on the revolution from previously uncited sources, I searched long and hard in forgotten books and online library and archive catalogues and was gratified to uncover a wealth of new material, particularly in US archives. Sadly, I was not able to use it all, but I would like to express my gratitude to the following archives and archivists for the material with which they so promptly and generously provided me: the Falers Library & Special Collections, New York; the Indiana Historical Society; the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Missouri History Museum, St Louis; the Library of Congress; the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, and Harvard University Archives. In California, Ron Basich once more sought out sources for me at the Hoover Institution and arranged for photocopies and scans. In all cases every attempt has been made to contact copyright holders for permission to quote material held in these archives.