1917 Diary

the politicians

January 1. Sunday.

It’s been a grey day, warm and quiet. At 10:30 the girls and I went to mass. After breakfast I took a walk along the park’s edge. Alexei got up and also spent some time in the fresh air. Around 3 o’clock Misha arrived, and we went to the Grand Palace to receive ministers, retinues, unit commanders, and diplomats. By 5:10, we were done. After tea I did some work and answered telegrams. In the evening I read out loud.

It is hard to believe that this diary entry was made by the ruler of a country at war that within two months would be convulsed by revolution, or that everyone mentioned – Nicholas himself, his daughters, his son Alexei, and his younger brother Misha (Grand Duke Michael) – would perish in a year and a half, caught up in a whirlwind beyond their control. Nicholas was, of course, already receiving reports of restlessness among the troops, of their reluctance to fight. He knew perfectly well that strikes, which had largely subsided when the war first started, were once again breaking out all across Russia. Furthermore, he was surely still grieving over the murder of his close confidant, Grigory Rasputin, just a few weeks earlier. But in his diary, written almost as if he were a schoolboy instructed to compose a simple record of each day’s events (without a lot of opinionating or soul searching), life appears calm and orderly. Even in February, by which time store windows were being smashed in Petrograd, he wrote:

February 23. Thursday.

I awoke at 9:30 here in Smolensk. It was cold, clear, and windy. I spent whatever free time I had reading a French book about Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. Arrived in Mogilyov at 3. Was met by General Alexeyev and his staff. Spent an hour with him. The house feels empty without Alexei. I had dinner with all the foreigners and some Russians. The evening was spent writing and drinking tea with the others.

Somehow, this utterly prosaic entry fills me with sadness and pity. The tsar, who is visiting General Headquarters at the front, has not even been told of the strikes and demonstrations that roiled Petrograd that day, evidently because these events were not considered important. I can just see the calm, punctilious, and polite Nicholas reading a book about the great Julius Caesar and missing his son as he drinks tea with his entourage. The only news worth recording is that the weather is “cold, clear, and windy.” There’s a lull at the front, all is calm.

In a matter of days, the monarchy will fall and he will abdicate.

Meanwhile, another participant in the fateful events of 1917, Vladimir Lenin, was also failing to hear the roar of time or sense the forces that were about to topple the Russian monarchy. Since the outbreak of the war in 1914, he had been living in neutral Switzerland, plagued by melancholy and frustrated by the Swiss’s stubborn resistance to revolutionary change.

On January 22 (January 9 according to Russia’s Julian calendar and the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when unarmed demonstrators were gunned down as they marched to deliver a petition to Nicholas in 1905) he gave a speech to young Swiss factory workers. What kind of an audience was this? What were the aspirations of young workers in Switzerland? By then, Lenin no longer harbored illusions that the Swiss would rise up in revolution, but he still could not pass up this propaganda opportunity. He harangued the gathering on the events that had taken place in St. Petersburg twelve years ago to the day. Did young Swiss factory workers know or care about Russia’s problems? In any event, they listened with characteristic Swiss politeness as Lenin tried to explain the situation to them, concluding with the following prediction:

We mustn’t be fooled by the grave-like quiet that prevails in Europe. Europe is on the verge of revolution. Everywhere, the monstrous horrors of the imperialist war and the torments of high prices are spawning a revolutionary mood, and the ruling classes – the bourgeoisie and their stewards, the governments – are going further and further down a blind alley from which no escape whatsoever will be found without great upheaval.

We old men may not live to see the decisive battles of the impending revolution. But it seems to me that I can confidently express the hope that the young people doing such fine work within the socialist movement in Switzerland and across the world will have the good fortune to not just struggle, but to triumph in the impending proletariat revolution.

A grave-like quiet? Lenin did not yet know that the anniversary of Bloody Sunday had brought strikes to many Petrograd factories. And how interesting that Lenin himself did not think he would live to see the “decisive battles of the impending revolution.”

But he had to do something. Lenin was not capable of sitting on his hands, even when there was really nothing for him to do. He was stuck with the task of rallying the not very rally-able Swiss. As the final days of the Romanov dynasty ticked away and more and more factories went on strike, Lenin was working on a plan to conduct political agitation among Swiss leftists, the same Swiss leftists he had been unsuccessfully trying to agitate for several years now. Life was calm and comfortable in Switzerland. The country had preserved its neutrality, and nobody was being sent to rot in the trenches. What use did the Swiss have for world revolution?

Still, Lenin needed an outlet for his energy and the only one available to him was agitating this placid people and devising a plan of action for Swiss revolutionaries. He described his plan it in a letter to his lover, Inessa Armand:

I would like to share with you my thoughts about the following plan. My outline of the tasks facing Swiss leftists is being circulated in both German and French. On this point, I have a plan: to found a small publishing house and produce leaflets, pamphlets, and small brochures to elaborate on these tasks.

Approximately six weeks remained before Lenin would arrive in Petrograd and begin fighting for power.

Alexander Kerensky, the energetic and popular lawyer who would later wind up heading the Provisional Government, had a different view of the situation. Kerensky had already spent many years defending political prisoners and had been an on-again-off-again member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. He was firmly committed to revolution and the stirring speeches he delivered as a member of the State Duma were extremely popular. As time went on, he was making increasingly strong statements:

You, gentlemen, talk about “revolution” as if it were some sort of anti-government actions, actions that destroy the state, while all of world history shows that revolution has been a way to save a state, sometimes the only means of doing so.

The empress is purported to have said:

Kerensky should be hung.

Kerensky was not hung, although at one point in 1916 this outspoken Duma member was banned from speaking out on the floor of that institution. Before long, however, he again found himself at the podium, accusing members of the autocracy of violating the law:

There’s only one way to fight violators of the law – to physically remove them.

When the outraged Duma chairman asked him to clarify his meaning, Kerensky fearlessly stated that he was referring to actions like Brutus’s assassination of Julius Caesar – the murder of a tyrant.

We can only imagine the envy Vladimir Lenin must have felt toward Kerensky, whose stage was the State Duma, which meant the entire country, and beyond, since his speeches were published in newspapers across the world.

A few months remained before Kerensky’s meteoric rise to the head of the Provisional Government – and less than a year to his downfall.

the entrepreneurs

By early 1917, virtually everyone in Russia was voicing the opinion that the country was “spinning out of control” and that catastrophe was inevitable. Then again, these predictions were nothing new: “the end” had been near since at least 1905, so few took this doom and gloom seriously. Or did they?

Although the country’s strength was being sapped by a brutal war, in some ways the situation seemed to be gradually improving. While 1915 was marred by setback upon setback in the realms of the military (devastating defeats at the front), the economy (industry was in chaos, fuel supplies were short, and the rail system was overwhelmed), and politics (the tsar and Duma were locked in a heated confrontation), 1917 started out with hopeful signs.

At the front, the successful Brusilov Offensive of mid-1916, a Russian battlefield victory in the wake of 1915’s string of defeats, offered a ray of hope. Furthermore, on the Western Front, the protracted Battles of Verdun and the Somme had yielded no clear results (other than millions of lives lost), and the fact that all was “quiet on the Western Front” was bad news for Germany. The German Empire was struggling to keep up with two fronts, which meant that with each passing month, the prospects of victory for Russia, England, and France grew brighter. The Russian economy was also improving, as the state put systems in place to reduce chaos and smooth the flow of supplies to the army.

The political situation, on the other hand, was only growing worse. The crisis that began the summer of 1915, when the Duma demanded the creation of a “responsible ministry” (one that would answer to the Duma rather than the tsar), was still festering, and the standoff between the tsar and the Duma was growing increasingly bitter.

In the autumn of 1916, the liberal Duma member Pavel Milyukov made a famous speech cataloguing the government’s missteps that featured the rhetorical refrain, “Is this stupidity or treason?” He probably did not actually believe that the government was full of traitors and spies, but he certainly did believe that it was poorly run. In this, he was not alone. It was hard enough for the Duma to come to terms with a tsar who refused to make any concessions, and Rasputin’s murder in December, which provoked open rejoicing in the Duma, further exacerbated relations.

Nevertheless, life went on. Whatever the Duma members may have made of the situation, Russia, war or no war, seemed to be moving in the right direction.

What were the country’s richest people up to in early 1917? As before, they were busy running their factories and banks, but not only.

The previous year, on February 27, 1916, the brothers Sergei and Stepan Ryabushinsky, members of a wealthy clan of Old Believers, had established the Moscow Automobile Factory. Did they have the slightest inkling that in exactly one year a revolution would turn Russia upside down and ultimately deprive them not only of this factory (which, under the Soviet government became the famous ZIL auto plant) but all their other holdings as well, including their remarkable art collection? The brothers themselves were forced to emigrate. Later, Stalin gave the spectacular house the architect Fyodor Shekhtel had built for Stepan to Maxim Gorky when the writer returned to the Soviet Union from Western Europe. Gorky spent his final years in this home, surrounded by NKVD spies.

For now, however, the brothers were busy running their new automotive plant, along with the textile, lumber, and other businesses they had inherited from their father.

The oldest Ryabushinsky brother, Pavel, spent the first months of 1917 in Crimea recovering from tuberculosis, a disease that had killed one of his brothers. An active philanthropist, like his brothers, Pavel was more focused on the family’s banking businesses than manufacturing. Before the war he had been planning to finance the exploration and extraction of radioactive materials in Russia. How might that effort have changed the course of history had the revolution not interrupted it?

Pavel was also politically active. He was a member of the centrist Union of October 17 (also known as the Octobrist Party, and founded in support of Tsar Nicholas’s 1905 October Manifesto, which granted certain concessions in the wake of that year’s unrest) before moving farther to the left and joining the Party of Peaceful Renovation. He bankrolled two newspapers, both of which were shut down by the authorities, and tried, without much success, to organize prominent businessmen as a political force. He assumed that his time recuperating in Crimea was just a temporary hiatus from his efforts to steer Russia toward democracy and moderation. Instead, he lived out his remaining seven years in France.

Another millionaire, Alexei Putilov, seemed to be well positioned to weather any storm. He owned huge factories and headed one of Russia’s largest banks. On top of that he had developed close relationships with many of the men who ran the Russian government, which never hurts. Still, he seems to have sensed that this was not enough to protect him. He had already seen how a strike at his Petrograd ironworks precipitated the Revolution of 1905. Now he would witness how another strike by his workers in February 1917 became part of the growing movement that wound up toppling the tsar.

As early as 1915 Putilov had told the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, that “Russia’s administrative mechanism must be fundamentally restructured.” He could see that the autocracy’s days were numbered and revolution was inevitable and the disastrous consequences this would bring, because “from bourgeois revolution we will immediately move to a worker revolution, and soon thereafter a peasant revolution. Then horrific anarchy will begin, endless anarchy… ten years of anarchy… We will see a return to the times of Pugachyov, and perhaps worse.”*

In early 1917, Putilov was a busy man. Besides running his businesses, he was a member of the Special Council, a government body charged with stabilizing the economy. He could see that Russia’s economy was improving, but he also knew how deeply dissatisfied the workers at his factories were. In less than a year his businesses would be confiscated by the Soviet government and he himself would wind up in China, then Paris, and his family would escape over the frozen Gulf of Finland. How surprised was he when his dire predictions came to pass?

Mikhail Tereshchenko, owner of a number of sugar refineries, was one prominent businessman who could hardly wait for the regime to fall. Although he did run the business he had inherited from his father and joined the boards of a number of banks, he also immersed himself in learning languages, both ancient and modern, was trained as a lawyer, and even taught at Moscow University (although he resigned his position there in protest when the rector was dismissed by the authorities). Tereshchenko published marvelous books, built an outstanding art collection, and owned what is now known as “the Tereshchenko diamond,” one of the largest diamonds ever found. Business seems to have bored him – literature, art, philanthropy, and politics were his passions.

In late 1916, Tereshchenko and other prominent businessmen joined forces with Alexander Guchkov, leader of the Octobrist Party. According to some accounts, they conceived a plot to overthrow Nicholas, although it is hard to know whether the “Guchkov Plot” was ever anything more than talk (it never resulted in action). In any event, within two months Guchkov and Tereshchenko were both ministers in the Provisional Government that took over after the fall of the tsarist regime. A few months later, of course, they were cast out of their ministerial posts and sent into emigration.

Like so many of their fellow wealthy Russians, they wound up in France, where they continued to be active in politics, business, and philanthropy, but no longer to the benefit of the native land they had longed to save.

the artists

Artists usually have greater insight into events and trends than most other people. The impending tectonic shifts that were about to upend Russia had long been sensed by the poets and artists of the Silver Age, for whom a major theme was the gathering storm. (Yet in the case of the social realist writer Maxim Gorky, he could hardly have guessed back in 1901, when he heralded the upheavals with the famous line, “Let the storm burst forth stronger!” that the winds of change would sweep him into the confiscated Ryabushinsky mansion.)

Of course, even among writers and artists, not everyone had a clear sense of what lay ahead. In January 1917 the journal New Life («Новая жизнь») invited writers to share their thoughts on “The World War and Russia’s Creative Forces.” Several of them made dreary predictions and lamented that European culture was collapsing before their eyes.

Ivan Bunin, who sensed the oncoming catastrophe with every fiber of his soul, wrote that “Informed by life and personal artistic experience, my conclusions are rather pessimistic. Fundamental elements of the national psychology sharply conflict with what is practical, sober, and constructive.” (This theme would dominate his writing for the rest of his life.)

Ivan Novikov, a writer considered “modernist” at the time who would be primarily known throughout the Soviet period for his rather realistic novels about Pushkin and later become a successful functionary within the Soviet literary establishment, opined that “Europe’s armored fist doesn’t scare the Russian people.”

Mikhail Artsybashev, who shocked his contemporaries with writings about “the problem of sex,” particularly with his novel Sanin, which was considered borderline pornographic, felt confident that everything would be fine in Russia. In his view, “decay had penetrated no deeper than life’s surface.” Six years later, Artsybashev applied to the Soviet authorities for permission to go to Warsaw for medical treatment. There, he was given Polish citizenship (his mother was Polish) and announced that it was impossible to live in Soviet Russia.

The literary scholar Semyon Vengerov, author of the Critical and Biographical Dictionary of Russian Writers and other outstanding works, also believed that everything would turn out well in the end. In addition to many years of scholarly research, Vengerov had been socially active fighting censorship after some of his books were banned. He had also been fired from a teaching position at the university and struggled to overcome anti-Semitism (even though he had converted to Christianity in his youth, many still saw him as a Jew trespassing in the field of Russian literature). As far as the prospects for change were concerned, he had high hopes and believed that the “disruption caused by the war would yield good results.” Vengerov, who died in 1920, would not live to see the full effect of these “good results,” or to know that his son would be shot in 1938, or to learn of the fate of his distant relative, the renowned poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in a labor camp.

Whatever gifts of insight artists may or may not have had, the arts lived on. February 10, 1917, saw the first (and, as it turned out, only) performance of Verdi’s Don Carlos at the Bolshoi Theater, with the operatic superstar Fyodor Shalyapin in the role of King Phillip II. Based on a play by Friedrich Schiller, the opera might have seemed of little relevance to 1917 Russia – who cared about the amorous torments of sixteenth-century European royalty? But this product of the freethinking minds of Schiller and Verdi was more than mere melodrama: it was the story of an outdated and corrupt system incapable of change that was crushing what was vital and true, an aspect of the story that surely resonated with some of the audience.

Shalyapin was, of course, brilliant. All the proceeds – 42,600 rubles, a huge sum – was donated to charity. This, incidentally, did little to improve relations between the singer and the theater’s other performers. Shalyapin’s arrogant manner and exorbitant fees (1,500-2,000 rubles for a single performance) were a source of extreme irritation for his colleagues. The brilliant singer was not much of a diplomat: in March the Mariinsky Theater chorus refused to sing Shalyapin’s own composition, “Song of the Revolution”; in April, soldiers from the Petrograd regiment publicly complained when the singer failed to show up for a concert in honor of seven who had died during the February Revolution; and the Bolshoi’s prompter filed a grievance against Shalyapin alleging “verbal insults” during the performance of Don Carlos. Shalyapin reputedly commented to the artist Konstantin Korovin, “I don’t understand. Revolution. It’s an improvement, but it ends up making things worse.” He also ultimately wound up emigrating.

Another genius of the time was Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had been rehearsing Lermontov’s play Masquerade at Petrograd’s Alexandrinsky Theater for six years. The brilliant set designer Alexander Golovin had produced a mise-en-scène of stunning opulence for the play – the stage glowed with gold and candles that reflected in antique mirrors, all designed to convey a subtle sense of eeriness rather than splendor. Meyerhold produced a haunting and gloomy play that was more about hopelessness and despair than jealousy and infidelity. Rather than the Othelloesque Arbenin, who kills the wife he believes has been unfaithful to him, the focal point winds up being a character named simply “Mysterious Stranger” – a cruel avenger and instigator of intrigues. “The Stranger arrived at the grand masquerade called life in a mask, holding under his domino cloak a large supply of replacement masks,” Meyerhold wrote.

The play premiered on February 25. Unrest had already broken out in the city, and some theatergoers had to take circuitous routes to the Alexandrinsky to avoid parts of Petrograd where gunfights were underway. Masquerade was performed just a few times before being shut down as inappropriately opulent for a time of revolution, and because it was perceived as out of step with the times. In fact, the gloomy, mystical Masquerade fit the moment perfectly, however hard that may have been to see for those caught up in it.

Decades later, scorned and alone, the poet Anna Akhmatova remembered the production in her epic “Poem without a Hero,” recalling the strange and startling actors in Middle Eastern dress who appeared on stage, a whim of Meyerhold’s that had nothing to do with the original. These “blackamoors” romped around the stage performing little pantomimes between the scenes and announced the intermissions. As Akhmatova wrote in “Poem without a Hero”:

Nevertheless, the reckoning draws near –
You see, there, through the heavy blizzard,
Meyerhold’s blackamoors
Are again beginning their antics.

Yuri Yuryev, who played Arbenin, went on to become a famous tragic actor, extolled by the Soviet authorities. A recipient of the Stalin Prize and many other honors, he lived to 1948. He was far more fortunate than Meyerhold himself, who was imprisoned and tortured during Stalin’s Terror and forced to make a false confession, which he recanted before his execution in 1940.

By coincidence, but a very fitting one, it was in January 1917 that a collection of short stories by Bunin was published whose centerpiece was his most famous story, “The Gentleman from San Francisco” (written in 1915).

The eponymous gentleman visits Italy with his wife and daughter and unexpectedly dies there. The coffin carrying his body is being transported back to the States in the hold of a ship with the ominous name “Atlantis.” On board, the passengers party, feast, and dance with no thought for the cold ocean waves that beat against the ship’s hull, or the body of a man beneath decks who had given no thought to death and presumed he had many years left to live.

In the very depths, in the under-water womb of the Atlantis, were the thirty-thousand-pound masses of boilers and all sorts of other machinery – dully glittering with steel, hissing out stream and exuding oil and boiling water – of that kitchen, made red hot from infernal furnaces underneath, wherein was brewing the motion of the ship. Forces, fearful in their concentration, were bubbling, were being transmitted to its very keel, into an endlessly long catacomb, into a tunnel, illuminated by electricity, wherein slowly, with an inexorability that was crushing to the human soul, the gigantean shaft was revolving within its oily couch, like a living monster that had stretched itself out in this tunnel.

Meanwhile, amidship the Atlantis, its warm and luxurious cabins, its dining halls and ball rooms, poured forth radiance and joyousness. They were humming with the voices of a well-dressed gathering, were sweetly odorous with fresh flowers, and they sang with the strains of the stringed orchestra. And again, among this glitter of lights, silks, diamonds and bared feminine shoulders, the supple pair of hired lovers writhed and at intervals came together among this throng: the sinfully-modest, very pretty young woman, with eye-lashes cast down, with a chaste coiffure, and the well-built young man, with black hair that seemed to be pasted on, his face pale from powder, shod in the most elegant of patent-leather foot-gear, clad in a tight-fitting dress coat with long tails – an Adonis who resembled a huge leech. And none knew that, for a long time, this pair had grown weary of languishing dissemblingly in their blissful torment to the sounds of the shamelessly-sad music – nor that far, far below, at the bottom of the black hold, stood a tarred coffin, in close proximity to the sombre and sultry depths of the ship that was toilsomely overpowering the darkness, the ocean, the snow storm…

Bunin translation by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, edited and updated.