Conversations were carried on mostly in whispers as if one was afraid of being overheard, although there was nobody near, and the conviction was expressed that things could not go on as they were, that a storm was approaching, although nobody seemed to have a fixed idea whence it would come nor how much damage it would cause.59
‘Everyone from Grand Dukes to one’s sleigh driver all thunder against the regime,’ observed Denis Garstin of the British Propaganda Bureau in Petrograd.60 From the grandest mansion to the shivering bread queues, one topic of conversation prevailed: the Empress’s relationship with Grigory Rasputin. Against all the objections of the imperial family, Nicholas and Alexandra had stubbornly refused to remove him from his favoured position, and had made matters worse by appointing a series of increasingly reactionary ministers. With Nicholas away at army HQ, Alexandra was left alone, alienated from the Russian court and most of her relatives, and relying ever more heavily on their ‘friend’. In her intense isolation she took nobody’s advice seriously, except Rasputin’s. Repeated warnings were sent to Nicholas of the escalating danger to the throne; his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich, begged him to stop his wife from bringing the monarchy into further disrepute by meddling in the affairs of government. ‘You stand on the eve of an era of new troubles,’ he warned. Sir George Buchanan was of the same mind: ‘If the emperor continues to uphold his present reactionary advisers, a revolution is, I fear, inevitable.’61
In this atmosphere of ‘strained suspense’, people were talking openly about the need for a palace coup and for the Empress to be shut up, out of harm’s way, in a nunnery.62 Unrestrained innuendo and gossip about ‘The Dark Powers’ that she and Rasputin represented were the sole topic of conversation in the exclusive clubs, where ‘Grand Dukes played quinze and talked of “saving” Russia.’63 The assassination of Rasputin seemed the only solution – the panacea that would avert crisis and save the monarchy from the brink of disaster.
On the night of 16–17 December 1916 Rasputin went missing. Over at the Mariinsky Theatre, French ambassador Paléologue had been enjoying Smirnova dancing the lead role in Sleeping Beauty that night, and recalled that her ‘leaps, pirouettes and “arabesques” were not more fantastic than the stories which passed from lip to lip’ about plots to remove the Empress and her ‘friend’ from power. ‘We’re back in the days of the Borgias, Ambassador,’ confided an Italian diplomat.64 When Rasputin’s body was fished out of the river a few days later, Alexandra was ruthless in her response, confining Rasputin’s hotheaded young murderers, Prince Felix Yusupov to his estate in the country, and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich to house arrest, while the Russian public celebrated their act of ‘heroism’.
A powerful, fatalistic atmosphere had descended over the city by the end of the year. ‘The approaching cataclysm was already in every mind, and on everybody’s lips,’ recalled Robert Bruce Lockhart.65 The sense of doom was made worse by the blackout of the streets at night, ‘for fear of the Zeppelins’, the darkness broken only by searchlights fanning the sky for them. Russia could not hold out much longer against Germany on the Eastern Front. Fourteen million men had been mobilised since 1914 and losses so far amounted to more than seven million killed, wounded or captured. Yet still the demand for conscripts was insatiable; all over the city – on the Field of Mars, Palace Square and the embankments along the Neva – one could see the constant drilling of column upon column of soldiers and field artillery. Ordinary Russians looked on with increasing indifference; ‘the desperate and embittering old problems of how to get enough to eat reabsorbed their attention’.66
For Leighton Rogers, Petrograd in winter was ‘the weather waste heap of the world’; he had hardly seen the sun since his arrival in October and, when it did emerge, it was gone by 3.00 p.m. ‘We seem to be away up on top of the world shrouded in white mists which swallow its brilliance.’67 As flurries of snow and intense cold set in, everyone wondered how much longer the current explosive situation would prevail, how long it would be before ‘the lines of shivering women, their feet numb and frozen, their trembling fingers clutching their shawls tighter round their heads’ might vent their anger and storm the food shops.68 Everywhere you went there were groups of them:
shuffling, pushing, jostling each other; eager, trembling hands outstretched for their basin of soup, querulous voices asking for just a little more, begging for a bottle of milk to take home to a dying baby, telling long, rambling, pitiful stories of want and misery and cold.69
Wilfully blind to the gathering resentment on the streets, the demi-monde indulged in a last gasp of spending as Christmas approached, partying in the theatres and cabarets and nightclubs of the city:
Through the revolving-doors of the Hotel Astoria passed the same endless procession of women in furs and jewels and men in glittering uniforms. Across the bridges limousines passed to and fro and troikas made music in the streets – the music of sleigh bells and steel runners on the snow … As ever, the streets were thronged, the tramcars crowded to suffocation, the restaurants doing a roaring trade. And everywhere people talked, as they only talk in Russia, the land of endless talk.70
Out across the Neva the squalid, barrack-block tenements of the industrial quarter of the Vyborg Side had seen a major strike by 20,000 metal and armaments workers on 17 October. Ground down by war, disease, unsanitary living conditions, low wages and hunger, they were demanding improved pay and conditions ever more vociferously. ‘Every unusual noise, even the unexpected sound of a factory whistle, was enough to bring them into the streets. The tension was becoming painful. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, was waiting for something to happen.’ In the workers’ quarters, revolutionary talk ‘ran like fire through stubble’ and revolutionary agitators were there to further fan the flames of dissent.71 After a second major strike on 26 October, thousands of workers were locked out. By the 29th, forty-eight factories were in lockdown and 57,000 workers on strike. Fierce clashes with the police continued until these workers were reinstated.72
To many in the diplomatic community, the collapse of Russia seemed imminent and British subjects were already being urged to go home. But although Sir George Buchanan was emphatically predicting revolution, David Francis was of the opinion that this would not happen ‘before the war ends’ or, more likely, ‘soon thereafter’.73 He and his staff celebrated Christmas US-style (on what was 12 December, on the Russian calendar) with ‘turkey and plum pudding’.74 Sir George, meanwhile, had more serious things on his mind. Deciding to make one final attempt to warn the Tsar of the danger of imminent revolution, he set off for the Alexander Palace, fifteen miles south of the city at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘If the Emperor received him sitting down,’ he told Robert Bruce Lockhart before he left, ‘all would be well.’75 When Buchanan arrived on 30 December, the Tsar received him standing. Nevertheless, Buchanan tried hard to persuade him of the seriousness of rising discontent in the city, and urged him to do his utmost to restore confidence in the throne by making social and political concessions before it was too late: ‘it rested with him either to lead Russia to victory and a permanent peace or to revolution and disaster,’ Sir George later wrote. But Nicholas dismissed his concerns and said he was exaggerating.76 Half an hour later a gloomy Buchanan left. He had said his piece and was relieved to ‘have got it off his mind’.77 But his advice had fallen on deaf ears, as he had anticipated. Nicholas had further alienated public opinion recently by appointing the arch-reactionary Alexander Protopopov as Minister of the Interior – a man bent on preserving the autocracy at any cost, and a known associate of Rasputin – an act that, moreover, prompted other ministers to resign en masse in protest.