At the time of the October 1917 Russian Revolution there were thousands of European citizens, mostly British and French, living and working in Russia. Ranging from governesses and tutors to engineers, industrialists and their families, these men and women found themselves unwittingly caught up in the conflict and changes unfolding around them. While some, including the subject of this post, later published their recollections of the period, the stories and fate of these ‘expats’ do not feature prominently in narratives of the revolution.  

A detailed eyewitness account by a woman named Mary Field sheds light on the experience of being both a foreigner and a woman in Petrograd in the months immediately after the revolution. Published in the June 1919 edition of The Englishwoman, a journal originally established to ‘promote the Enfranchisement of Women’, Field’s article covers everything from the difficulties of finding food to the imprisonment of her brother by the Red Guard in August 1918.

Milk queue at Sytnyi Market in Petrograd, 1920s (Image from the Bain Collection, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

From Field’s account we can assume that she was part of a family of textile mill owners in the country, an industry that attracted many British industrialists and engineers to Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Field refers to herself as the mistress of the house and, indeed, the main focus of the article is her daily struggle in managing her household and carrying out the necessary tasks associated with this role, such as preparing for a trip to the market amid shortages and rationing.

I carried a market basket, several small linen bags – as the sellers would probably have no paper – and a milk-can, in the forlorn hope of getting a pint of milk, liberally diluted with bad water, at a price not exceeding eight shillings the pint.

Field also conveys a sense of what it was like to be a woman in the city during this time:

Of course we never ventured out after dark – and it is dark indoors by three o’clock in November and December. There were many tales of women rash enough to do so who had been stripped of their clothes and allowed to return home dressed only in a shift.

While some of Field’s observations and complaints may seem trivial when compared to the far greater struggles of many less fortunate than herself, her account must be read in the context of the changes she had experienced following the revolution:

Looking out over the city, I realised suddenly that everything was different… The change had come gradually, but even a new-comer could not fail to remark the grass growing in the streets, the absence of traffic, how slowly the solitary cart with its child-driver crept over the unmended cobble-stones, how the pedestrians hobbled along, their ankles swollen out of all shape, their fingers bandaged, thin and anxious-looking…

However, Field herself notes that ‘…all these troubles were small compared to our horror when one night a party of Red Guards came and carried off my brother.’ Touching upon wider political changes, Field writes that her brother was arrested ‘…the night after the assassination of [Moisei] Uritski, the wounding of Lenin and the attack on the British Consulate’. She is describing the beginning of the ‘Red Terror’, a campaign of mass killings, torture and oppression by the Bolsheviks, which began in response to an assassination attempt on Lenin and the murder of Uritski, a commissar in the Bolshevik Secret Police or ‘Cheka’, in August 1918.

Guards at the grave of Moisei Uritski. Petrograd. The banner reads: ‘Death to the bourgeois and their helpers. Long live the Red Terror.’ September 1918. (Image from: Wikimedia Commons)

As Field notes, ‘that night the Red Guard were arresting all Englishmen and Frenchmen, all men with German names, all officers of the old (Imperial) army…’ Like many other British male citizens living in Petrograd at the time, Field’s brother was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Describing her attempts to bring food and blankets to the prison, Field remarks that so many of her acquaintances were waiting at the prison for news of their loved ones that ‘it might have been an English gathering’.

                           
Peter and Paul Fortress. (Photo by Alex Florstein from Wikimedia Commons)

Then, ‘as suddenly as he had been arrested’, Field’s brother was released. The family left Russia shortly after on a ‘refugee train’, taking with them the few belongings they could hurriedly gather together and likely never to return.   

Katie McElvanney, CDA PhD student

References and further reading

Mary Field, ‘Petrograd, 1918’, The Englishwoman, No. 126 (June 1919). P.P.1103.bag.

For a list of memoirs and first-hand accounts by Westerners resident in Russia at the time of the revolution, see Jonathan D. Smele (comp., ed. & annot.), The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921: An Annotated Bibliography (London; New York, 2003). YC.2005.b.2224