24 Stopford, 103. A document in The National Archives, KV2/2398, reveals the details of Stopford’s original trip to Russia in 1916 and implies that he did some unofficial spying/snooping for Buchanan. In Russia he was well acquainted with the bisexual Felix Yusupov (the NA document alludes to Stopford’s homosexuality in a veiled comment about him being ‘a moral eccentric’). Stopford also had considerable experience in buying artworks from Fabergé for Cartier in Paris. In July 1917 he managed to get into Grand Duchess Vladimir’s palace unseen, rescue the best of her jewels from the safe and get them safely out of Russia; of these, her tiara was eventually bought by King George V and is still worn by Queen Elizabeth II. In 1918 Stopford was prosecuted for homosexual offences and jailed for a year in Wormwood Scrubs, after which he settled in Paris. For further details on his life – much of which remains sketchy – see Clarke, Hidden Treasures of the Romanovs.
25 Thompson, 60–1.
26 Some later accounts of the February Revolution deny the presence of machine guns, but far too many eyewitnesses testify to their presence on rooftops. See, for example, John Pollock’s account, ‘The Russian Revolution’, written from first-hand experience, which claims that Protopopov ‘had the roofs at every important street corner garrisoned by police with machine-guns’ and goes on to observe that the revolution had succeeded thanks to this misjudgement: ‘Had they been properly posted in the streets at strategic points and a sound scheme of cooperation arranged among the police and gendarmes, some fifty thousand in strength, they could have swept every living thing from the streets: placed in dormer windows and behind parapets, the mitrailleuses were extremely difficult to train on their objective’; 1070–1. Sir George Bury’s ‘Report’ also contains numerous references to the deployment of machine guns.
27 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 252; Gordon, Russian Year, 101, 102.
28 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 263; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 276; Joseph Fuhrman, ed., The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999, 692.
29 Thompson, 62.
30 Pax, Journal d’une comédienne française, 11–12.
31 Ransome, Despatch 50, 25 February, 11.00 p.m.
32 Reinke, ‘My Experiences in the Russian Revolution’, 9.
33 Butler Wright’s report to Francis, 10/23 March 1917, is included in Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 113.
34 Thompson, 63.
35 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 22–3.
36 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 265.
37 Ibid., 267.
38 Gordon, Russian Year, 105.
39 Thompson, 64.
40 See Patouillet, 1:59–60.
41 Keeling, Bolshevism: Mr Keeling’s Five Years in Russia, 76.
42 Harper, 37; Patouillet, 1:162.
43 Anon., The Nine Days’, 215.
44 Whether Thompson was actually able to grab any successful shots of the street fighting seems unlikely, as none were included in his collection of photographs of the revolution published as BloodStained Russia in 1918. He did manage to catch some static shots of bodies in morgues and of the funerals of the victims, but his major photographic coup came in May/June with his extensive coverage of Emmeline Pankhurst’s visits to Maria Bochkareva and the Women’s Death Battalion, which was widely reproduced in the Western press.
45 Thompson, 64, 67; Harper, 37–8.
46 Harper, 39–40; Thompson, 69–70.
47 Dorothy Cotton, letter of 4 March OS – though within the letter she reverts to NS; Grey, ‘Sidelights on the Russian Revolution’, 363; Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 109, which claims that 100 people were killed during this incident alone.
48 Poutiatine, War and Revolution, 47–8; Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Window’, 557.
49 Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Window’, 558.
50 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 24.
51 Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Window’, 558.
52 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 268; Grey, ‘Sidelights on the Russian Revolution’, 364; Anet, 16.
53 ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ – Robert Wilton’s report for The Times, 16 March (NS) – his first major despatch to get through and be published in the UK; see also Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 110.
54 Clare, ‘Eye witness of the Revolution’, n.p.
55 Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 110; Markovitch, La Révolution russe, 24; Anon., ‘The Nine Days’, 215; Hasegawa, February Revolution, 268–9.
56 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 24.
57 Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 3.
58 Ransome, Despatch 52.
59 Harper, 41–2.
60 Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 109; see also Wilton’s report in The Times, 16 March 1917.
61 Wilton in The Times, 16 March 1917; Lady Georgina Buchanan, ‘From the Petrograd Embassy’, 19.
62 Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 109.
63 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 272–3.
64 Pax, Journal d’une comédienne française, 16–18.
65 Fleurot, 124–5; Arbenina, Through Terror to Freedom, 34.
66 Anet, 11; Stopford, 108.
67 Paléologue, 811; Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 57. In an uncanny parallel with Petrograd 1917, a demonstration by Frenchwomen on that same date in 1789, over the high price of bread and escalating hunger in Paris, had led to a mass march on the palace at Versailles.
68 Arbenina, Through Terror to Freedom, 34–5; Anet, 15.
69 Armour, ‘Recollections’, 5.
70 Rogers, ‘Account of the March Revolution’, 11; Anet, 11; Chambrun, Lettres à Marie, 57.
71 Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 47–9; Wilton, Russia’s Agony, 112; Hasegawa, February Revolution, 275.
72 Thompson, 72, 73.
4 ‘A Revolution Carried on by Chance’
1 Rogers 3:7, 48.
2 Swinnerton, ‘Letter from Petrograd’, 4; Rogers 3:7, 46–7.
3 For descriptions of the bank, see Fuller, ‘Journal of John L. H. Fuller’, 9–10, and letter to his brother of 19 [6] September, in Fuller, ‘Letters and Diaries’, 20.
4 Rogers, 3:7, 46–7.
5 Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 89.
6 Marcosson, ‘The Seven Days’, 262.
7 Petrograd, 96.
8 Ibid., 97; Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 24.
9 Butler Wright report, in Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 115.
10 Mission, 63; Paléologue, 814–15.
11 Paléologue, 816.
12 Fleurot, ‘In Petrograd during the Seven Days’, 260; Fleurot, 126; see also Hasegawa, February Revolution, 278–81.
13 Paléologue, 813.
14 Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 52.
15 Thompson, 78.
16 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 286.
17 Marcosson, ‘The Seven Days’, 35; Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 52; Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole, 458.
18 Knox, With the Russian Army, 553–4; as Sir George Buchanan observed in a ciphered telegram to the Foreign Office: ‘The danger is that men have no proper leaders. I saw about 3000 to-day with only single young officer’. FO report, 12/27 March, 299, The National Archives.
19 Knox, With the Russian Army, 554–5; Stinton Jones, 107–8.
20 Stinton Jones, 108–9.
21 Gordon, Russian Year, 110; Anet, 23.
22 Thompson, 81.
23 Anet, 19–20.
24 Thompson, 81–2.
25 Paléologue, 814; Gordon, Russian Year, 110; Robien, 12.
26 Anet, 22; Butler Wright report to Francis in Cockfield, Dollars and Diplomacy, 114–15.
27 Wharton, ‘Russian Ides of March’, 24.
28 Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole, 454.
29 Stinton Jones, 120.
30 Reinke, ‘My Experiences in the Russian Revolution’, 11; Gordon, Russian Year, 109.
31 Hegan, ‘Russian Revolution from a Hospital Window’, 558–9.
32 Fleurot, 130.
33 Stinton Jones, 131.
34 See Poutiatine, War and Revolution, 50–1; Marcosson, Rebirth of Russia, 56; Fleurot, ‘In Petrograd during the Seven Days’, 262.
35 Knox, With the Russian Army, 554–5; see also Stinton Jones, 107–8.
36 Gibson, Wild Career, 127.