“Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 – A World on the Edge”, by Helen Rappaport

464 pages, St. Martin’s Press, ISBN-13: 978-1250056641

Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 – A World on the Edge by Helen Rappaport is the painstaking result of 20 years of trawling through foreigners’ accounts of the Russian Revolution, from the first conflict of February 1917 through to the final revolutionary spasm in October of 1917. Some are well-known versions – such as John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World – while most others are forgotten memoirs published soon after 1917; many of her sources are nothing more than bundles of letters held in obscure library archives. As the capital of the Russian Empire Petrograd had always been a cosmopolitan city where wealthy foreigners could lead lives of great ease and luxury. When World War I broke out in 1914 life became a bit more constrained but still quite comfortable for most foreigners, chiefly British and American diplomats, journalists, bankers, and other businessmen who had come to Russia to take advantage of its extraordinary and largely untapped natural resources. Many brought their families with them and had lived contentedly for years. When chaos erupted they had to scramble for their lives, trapped inside a country that was suddenly at war with itself. Fortunately, most of these people survived the Revolution and returned to the West, where many wrote memoirs and popular press articles that vividly described what they had seen. Rappaport’s sources, then, are varied to say the least: diplomats, nannies, businessmen, Red Cross nurses, aid workers, journalists and spies:

• There was Emmeline Pankhurst, who stopped campaigning for women’s votes in Britain as soon as the war broke out; after touring Britain to urge women to support the war effort, she hastened to Petrograd in June 1917 with Prime Minister Lloyd George’s backing to try to block Russia’s leftwing revolutionaries from bringing Russia out of the war with Germany.
• There was New York journalist Rheta Childe Dorr, an intrepid correspondent who described in breathless prose a once-powerful country losing a foreign war, millions being forcibly conscripted to an unpopular cause, massive flows of internally displaced populations, widespread malnutrition and disease and a vacuum where the government should be.
• There was the writer Somerset Maugham, who went to the Russian capital as a British spy and sent encrypted messages to his London controllers in which Lenin was “Davis”, Trotsky was “Cole” and Alexander Kerensky, the self-important leader of the provisional government, was “Lane”. Like Pankhurst, Maugham was working to support Kerensky and subvert German propaganda encouraging Russia to give up.
• There was Douglas Thompson, an American photographer who covered the collapse of the Tsar and his government with the frenzied excitement of a photojournalist knowing he was at the scene of momentous events; after another day of watching crowds searching for bread while Cossack horsemen scattered them in all directions, Thompson wrote to his wife: “I smell trouble and thank God I am here to get the photographs of it”.

Revolutions are always an amalgam of conformity and confusion, in which the tipping point (when power shifts) often seems banal at the moment it happens: away from the epicenter, life (at least initially) goes on as before: the trams still run, parents take children to school, people queue in line for rations, and so on, and Rappaport’s account give a vivid account of this complexity. As a kind of “you are there” account of the Russian Revolution, Caught in the Revolution lacks any kind of sophisticated analysis of the big issues that divided Russia’s politicians and their impassioned supporters; this is unsurprising as the British, American and French members of the expat community in Petrograd were hostile to the Bolsheviks (as well they should have been) and the other Russian rebels (sadly; imagine how the world would be today if a democratic revolution had succeeded) and wanted the mighty Russian steamroller to continue to tie down the Kaiser’s armies in the east. Whether they were enthusiasts, sceptics or critics of the revolution, most reporters in Petrograd in 1917 were merely eyewitnesses, albeit often with a talent for powerful description. Rappaport chooses their graphic accounts brilliantly.