‘For heaven’s sake, don’t send us any essays on the Russian soul,” her editor told the New York journalist Rheta Childe Dorr before she left for Petrograd in May 1917. “Everybody else has done that. Go to Russia and do a job of reporting.” It was brilliant advice and in Petrograd 1917 journalists had a story no intrepid correspondent could fail to be excited by: 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.

By the time Dorr arrived in the Russian capital, the tsar had already been forced to abdicate. Two other north Americans, Florence Harper, a Canadian reporter, and Douglas Thompson, a US photographer, had covered the collapse of his authority with the frenzied excitement of journalists knowing they were 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.”

With the centenary of Russia’s great convulsion soon to be on us, Helen Rappaport has produced one of what will be a wave of articles and books to mark the February and October revolutions. It is, she says, the painstaking result of 20 years of trawling through foreigners’ accounts. Some are well-known versions, such as John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World. Others are forgotten memoirs published soon after 1917. Many of her sources are bundles of letters held in obscure library archives.

They are from diplomats, nannies, businessmen, Red Cross nurses, aid workers, journalists and spies. There was Emmeline Pankhurst, who stopped campaigning for women’s votes as soon as the first world 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 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.

More to the left was Arthur Ransome, who was to return to Russia in 1919 to write sympathetic pieces for the Manchester Guardian. In 1917, he was working for the Daily News. Racked by dysentery and the spartan conditions of life in a chaotic city, he went home for a rest and a spot of fishing in September 1917 and missed the October revolution, even though he was convinced the Bolsheviks were preparing to seize power. Earlier in May, he had complained in a letter to his mother: “You can’t imagine how sick I am of it all. At the same time things here keep happening so fast that I am equally pulled towards not risking being away … I’d give my eyes to get out of Petrograd … Petrograd undiluted would turn the sanest man crazy.”

Vivid account … Helen Rappaport. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

His accounts, as well as those of the lively non-journalistic sources Rappaport uses, give an authentic sense of months of chaos, marked by surging crowds, looted bakeries and outbreaks of gunfire, some seemingly random and some viciously aimed. In between come intervals of apparent upper-class normality, with champagne receptions at the embassies and trips to fancy shops. Foreigners spent an inordinate amount of time at the ballet, just as they did in Moscow in the more settled environment of the cold war.

We get a sense of surging crowds, looted bakeries and gunfire – interspersed with champagne receptions at the embassy

Even Reed, the great enthusiast of revolution, had tickets for the Mariinsky for the evening after Trotsky sent Red Guards to occupy the Central Telegraph Office in Petrograd, the precursor to the storming of the Winter Palace a day later. Fortunately, Reed sniffed out that something was afoot as he and three other American journalists strolled through the streets. “The whole town is out tonight – all but the prostitutes,” Reed remarked. He and his friends had the sense to abandon the trip to the ballet and head instead to Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny Institute. There, after midnight, they clambered on to a lorry full of soldiers and sailors and got to the Winter Palace just after its guards had surrendered.

Revolutionary change is always an amalgam of confusion, in which the tipping point, when power shifts, often seems banal at the moment it happens. Away from the epicentre, life – at least initially – goes on as before. The trams still run. Parents take children to school.

Rappaport’s sources give a vivid account of this complexity. Yet her book lacks two things. The first is sophisticated analysis of the big issues that divided Russia’s politicians and their impassioned supporters. Unsurprisingly, as representatives of a privileged elite, the British, American and French members of the expat community in Petrograd whose memoirs and diaries Rappaport quotes, as well as most of the foreign reporters, were hostile to the Bolsheviks and the other Russian advocates of radical change. Rappaport’s own views instinctively reflect her sources’ attitudes, so that her writing lacks impartiality, let alone curiosity as to why so many Petrograders wanted revolution, beyond the broad-brush point that tens of thousands were hungry and impoverished. Instead, she uses rightwing tabloid cliches about “Bolsheviks and anarchists whipping up protests”, “the worst Bolshevik-led troublemakers in the garrison”, “feverish meetings inflamed by speeches from Trotsky”, “familiar overblown Bolshevik rhetoric” and “how difficult it would be, once stirred, to bring this violent rabble under control”.

The second problem is the lack of Russian voices in the book. Rappaport makes no pretence that hers is anything but an account of foreigners’ experiences in someone else’s revolution. Nevertheless, a few chapters on what Russians were thinking would have provided an alternative to the parade of outsiders’ prejudice she offers. It is not, of course, her fault that most of her sources were not Russian-speakers and therefore unable to listen to Russians talking about the misery of class oppression and their hopes of revolution. During the cold war and since, it became customary for most embassies, foreign media organisations and businesses to insist that their representatives in Russia learned the language before they went or while they were there; in 1917, that was not the case. For top diplomats, at least until that year, it did not matter much that the British and French ambassadors in Petrograd spoke no Russian, since the court language was French and ministers also spoke German or English.

Whether they were enthusiasts, sceptics or critics of the revolution, most reporters in Petrograd in 1917 were not participants with tongues and ears but merely eyewitnesses, albeit often with a talent for powerful description. Rappaport chooses their graphic accounts brilliantly. What today’s editors like to call the backstory is the bit that evades her.

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