In March 1917, the Tsar fell. Within days, Russian political exiles scattered across Europe began packing their bags. The only problem was getting home—and that meant going through London.
The News Arrives
When the February Revolution happened in 1917, one of the key challenges for governments around the world was trying to make sense of it. Russia was a difficult country to understand at the best of times. Under revolutionary conditions, it became almost impossible. Whose reports could be trusted? Which factions would prevail? And what would it all mean for the ongoing war against Germany?
In Britain, the picture was particularly muddled. The wartime government, led by David Lloyd George, hoped desperately that the new Russian administration—whoever that would be—would fight more effectively than the Tsar’s had. On the left of the Labour Party, socialist MPs hoped the revolution might end the war altogether. Both would be disappointed.
London’s Revolutionary Moment
As Robert Service documents in his superb Spies and Commissars, London briefly became the world’s largest centre for Russian political émigrés. The reason was simple geography. Britain’s Royal Navy had penned Germany’s fleet in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, giving the Allies effective control of the North Sea. The only routes back to Russia were either directly to Archangel, or via Scandinavia—both of which required crossing waters patrolled by the Royal Navy and threatened by German U-boats.
“The big Russian revolutionary colonies in Paris, Geneva and Zurich therefore had to cross the English Channel if they aimed to get home. London was turned for the first time into the largest centre for Russian political emigrants. Excitement grew about the chance of a trip to Scandinavia, and the passenger ferries from French ports to Dover were kept busy with Slavic passengers.”
Maxim Litvinov: Bolshevik in the East End
Among those waiting impatiently in London was Maxim Litvinov, a Bolshevik who would later become a key figure in the Soviet government. Litvinov was living in the East End with his wife Ivy, an “East End girl” he had met during Lenin’s first sojourn in London. Service captures his frustration:
“Litvinov felt he had to do something, almost anything, for the revolutionary cause in Russia. His mind was bursting with frustration. While Petrograd was in political ferment, he was stuck hundreds of miles away in London.”
Litvinov met with British socialists who opposed the war effort, including the anti-war Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald. The meeting took place in the House of Commons. MacDonald was courteous but offered nothing concrete—a disappointment to Litvinov, who was hoping for something more.
The libel that MacDonald was a Russian agent would follow him for the rest of his days. In 1924, the Zinoviev Letter—a forgery now believed to have been produced by MI5—helped bring down MacDonald’s first Labour government by suggesting links between the party and the Bolsheviks. In reality, MacDonald had little time for the Communist Party of Great Britain when it was established in 1920.
The Embassy’s Predicament
Litvinov also visited the Russian embassy at Cheshire House, where he was received by the chargé d’affaires, Konstantin Nabokov (uncle of the novelist). Service recounts:
“He was asked why the staff had not yet taken down the portraits of the imperial family. He enjoyed rubbing up the old regime’s officials the wrong way.”
Nabokov, to his credit, behaved with dignity. He had never disguised his sympathy for Russian liberals and hoped to serve the new Provisional Government. But the Provisional Government appointed the former Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov to the London post, and while Sazonov delayed his arrival, Nabokov was left to manage the chaos.
That chaos included issuing visas to revolutionaries who often travelled on false passports. Service notes drily: “Nabokov complained that Litvinov alone had four or five aliases.”
The Albert Hall Rally
On 31st March, the Labour Party held a celebration of the revolution at the Albert Hall. Ten thousand people attended. Ramsay MacDonald was the main speaker. Others on the platform included Israel Zangwill, speaking on behalf of Russian Jewish refugees in London’s East End.
“The audience adopted Russian custom and bared their heads before observing a silence in honour of ‘the countless sacrifices which the Russian people have made to win their freedom.’ It was an occasion that nobody present would forget. The Romanovs were gone and freedom had arrived in Russia.”
There was talk of brotherhood between the British and Russians, “no longer poisoned by the existence of Tsarist despotism.” It was, in retrospect, deeply naive—but it was sincere.
America Enters the War
April brought another seismic shift. On the 6th, the United States declared war on Germany, joining the Allies as an “associate power.” President Wilson presented it as a war to end war, a crusade for democracy.
This created a powerful narrative: a union of liberal powers—Britain, France, a new democratic Russia, and the United States—against the evil despotisms of the Central Powers. The narrative was heavily promoted by Allied propaganda and widely believed. What it obscured was that this liberalism would not extend to colonised peoples. At the Paris Peace Conference, self-determinationSelf-Determination Full Description:Self-Determination became the rallying cry for anti-colonial movements worldwide. While enshrined in the UN Charter, its application was initially fiercely contested. Colonial powers argued it did not apply to their imperial possessions, while independence movements used the UN’s own language to demand the end of empire. Critical Perspective:There is a fundamental tension in the UN’s history regarding this term. While the organization theoretically supported freedom, its most powerful members were often actively fighting brutal wars to suppress self-determination movements in their colonies. The realization of this right was not granted by the UN, but seized by colonized peoples through struggle. would be for Europeans only.
New York’s Reaction
Across the Atlantic, New York had reacted to the Tsar’s fall with wild enthusiasm. The American press, unconstrained by British and French wartime censorship, reported the revolution days before London or Paris. Jewish refugees from the Empire were ecstatic.
But America’s entry into the war divided opinion. The Jewish Forward newspaper approved; the anti-war left was furious. Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, both in New York at the time, were prominent critics of US militarism. Trotsky had been deported from France for his anti-war agitation. Bukharin was a young Bolshevik not shy of challenging Lenin’s writings.
“Trotsky and Bukharin called on socialists in the US to oppose America’s military involvement. Noisy public meetings took place in the cities of the East Coast where anti-war and pro-war activists confronted each other about whether the old government in Washington or the new one in Petrograd merited support.”
Trotsky would soon attempt to return to Russia, only to be detained by British naval authorities in Newfoundland—they knew who he was and what he represented.
The Perilous Journey Home
For those granted permission to travel, the journey itself was dangerous. The first large group sailed from Aberdeen to Bergen on HMS Jupiter. They had been delayed four days in Aberdeen while waiting for a storm to deter German submarines.
“Halfway across the North Sea, the Jupiter had to lurch to port to evade a German submarine. Some later convoys were even less fortunate and one of the ships went down with all on board. It was the same vessel that Litvinov had hoped to take. Only the recent birth of his son had dissuaded him from buying a ticket.”
Litvinov, spared by fatherhood, would eventually make his way back to Russia—but not before his wife Ivy gave birth to their son in London.
The Detainees
Not all revolutionaries were allowed to leave. Georgi Chicharin and Petrov, both anti-war militants, were detained under the Defence of the Realm Act. Chicharin had written articles in Pravda condemning the Allied war effort and was suspected of favouring the German side.
“Without further ado, he was taken to Brixton prison under a defence of the realm order. Petrov was already in custody for agitating amongst British workers against the war. Chicharin and Petrov were recalcitrant prisoners. They interpreted their treatment as yet further proof that the Allied powers would stop at nothing to fight their imperialist war.”
They declined to plead for their release.
Complexity and Contingency
What emerges from Service’s account is a picture of flux and complexity—a moment when nothing was settled, when revolutionaries were still finding their way home, when governments were improvising responses to events they didn’t understand.
This is why books that make things more complicated are valuable. Once we know the narrative of 1917—the February Revolution, the October Revolution, the Civil War—it becomes tempting to be reductionist. To see October as inevitable. To flatten the hopes of March into mere naivety. To forget that for a few months, anything seemed possible.
London’s moment as a revolutionary hub reminds us that the Russian Revolution was not just a Russian story. It was an international story, playing out in embassies and prisons, in Albert Hall rallies and East Coast meeting halls, in the decisions of British cabinet ministers and the narrow escapes of German U-boats.
And it reminds us, too, that history is full of contingencies—Litvinov spared by his son’s birth, Chicharin rotting in Brixton while his comrades made their way home, the ships that made it and the ships that didn’t.
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Transcript
When the February Revolution happened in 1917, one of the key struggles initially—or key challenges initially—for governments around the world was to try to make sense of it. Russia was a difficult country to understand precisely what was happening in it, and countries in revolutionary conditions are notoriously difficult to extract reliable information from. You find it’s difficult to know which side’s story is reliable, and there is all manner of chaos and often danger when one’s ambassadors, attachés and spies are visiting.
So in Great Britain in February 1917, the picture is a little muddled. There are hopes. The wartime government, led by David Lloyd George, hoped that the new administration in Russia, whoever that would be, would be significantly better at fighting. And there were socialist members of parliament and the left of the Labour Party who hoped that it would spell an end to the war itself.
So in this episode of the Explaining History podcast, we’re going to look at what was happening in London and who was trying to benefit from the situation.
Once again, we’re looking at a book we looked at a few weeks ago: Spies and Commissars by Robert Service, one of the more prolific British historians writing about Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia.
Robert Service writes about the moment in London when various émigrés are considering what might happen next once the news of the Tsar’s fall has become widespread. The key figure that Service looks at here is Maxim Litvinov, who later became a Commissar in the new Bolshevik government. And his wife Ivy, an East End girl he had met when he and Lenin’s first sojourn in London were anticipating a rapid collapse of not just the Tsarist but the Provisional Government and the establishment of some kind of socialist future in the former Russian Empire.
Robert Service writes:
“Litvinov felt he had to do something, almost anything, for the revolutionary cause in Russia. His mind was bursting with frustration. While Petrograd was in political ferment, he was stuck hundreds of miles away in London. As a Bolshevik, he regarded the war as an imperialist conflict between two coalitions of greedy capitalists.
“Most Mensheviks and social revolutionaries thought the same. But no socialist organisation in Russia, not even the Bolsheviks, had yet fixed its policy on how to end the war. It would take months before some degree of clarity emerged on this matter.
“In a burst of zeal Litvinov met with British socialists who opposed the Allied war effort. The Labour anti-war MP Ramsay MacDonald received them in the House of Commons. MacDonald naturally did not share the British government’s hope that the fall of the Romanovs would increase Russian combativeness on the Eastern Front. In fact, he was predicting the opposite. But although he was courteous enough, he disappointed Litvinov by providing no notion about what he was going to do about the revolution.”
The libel that MacDonald was a Russian agent followed him around almost for the rest of his days. MacDonald’s first administration, which lasts about eight months in 1924, is brought down in part by the Zinoviev Letter—a forgery produced now by MI5 to indicate that there were strong links between the new Labour government and the Bolsheviks in the now Soviet Union, and that the Labour government would be the opportunity for some kind of socialist takeover in Great Britain of a violent and undemocratic nature.
Of course, MacDonald wasn’t a communist. MacDonald had little time or sympathy for the Communist Party of Great Britain when it was eventually established in 1920. The Labour Party’s existence, in terms of its role within the British state, has always been there to soak up radicalism, to do a little something with it, but to misdirect revolutionary energies. It’s why the British establishment never minded the existence of the Labour Party that much, but it intervenes periodically—whether you’re talking about Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Wilson, or Jeremy Corbyn—to depose leaders that are thought to be straying too far to the left.
“Litvinov called the next day at the Russian embassy at Cheshire House and was received by the chargé d’affaires Konstantin Nabokov. He was asked why the staff had not yet taken down the portraits of the imperial family. He enjoyed rubbing up the old regime’s officials the wrong way. Nabokov stood his ground and behaved with dignity. He’d never disguised his sympathy for Russian liberals and was hoping to receive the trust of Lvov in his cabinet, Prince Lvov being the new interim prime minister of Russia.
“Instead, the provisional government gave the London embassy to the former Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Sazonov, but as Sazonov failed to arrive, Nabokov continued to head the embassy.
“On the 31st of March, the Labour Party held a celebration of the revolutionary events at the Albert Hall. 10,000 people attended and Ramsay MacDonald was the main speaker. Others on the platform included Israel Zangwill, who spoke on behalf of Russian Jewish refugees in London’s East End. The audience adopted Russian custom and bared their heads before observing a silence in honour of ‘the countless sacrifices which the Russian people have made to win their freedom.’ It was an occasion that nobody present would forget. The Romanovs were gone and freedom had arrived in Russia. There was a talk of brotherhood of the Russians and the British no longer poisoned by the existence of Tsarist despotism.”
So there was a lot of naivety. But throughout 1917, particularly after April when America joins the war as an associate power, there is this belief and hope that a union of liberal powers—Britain, France, a new notionally democratic Russia, and the United States of America—can then take on the evil despotisms of the Central Powers. Despotisms which are hammed up a bit for the purposes of wartime propaganda.
Of course, this liberalism, when we get to the Paris Peace Conference, does not extend to colonised peoples. The Wilsonian principles of self-determination would be extended only to European peoples. It was imperative, as far as Clemenceau and Lloyd George were concerned, that this self-determination arc didn’t wind up infecting their empires.
“Most of the revolutionary emigrants in central and western Europe were impatient to return to Russia. The only routes available to them were across the North Sea, either directly to Archangel and onward by train to any number of Russian cities, or to Scandinavia and then by a long railway journey looping over northern Sweden and south to Petrograd.
“Britain’s Royal Navy had penned Germany’s large fleet in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven for the duration of the war. The result was that transportation to Sweden and Norway from the rest of Europe became a British prerogative, and even the French government had to seek authority to send ships eastwards.
“The big Russian revolutionary colonies in Paris, Geneva and Zurich therefore had to cross the English Channel if they aimed to get home. London was turned for the first time into the largest centre for Russian political emigrants. Excitement grew about the chance of a trip to Scandinavia, and the passenger ferries from French ports to Dover were kept busy with Slavic passengers.
“The editorial board of Nashi Slovo, a Russian Marxist anti-war newspaper based in Paris, was stripped bare by the exodus, and the same happened to the émigré Russian press in Switzerland. The place to shape opinion was Petrograd, nowhere else mattered, and the emotional tug on the minds of the émigrés was seldom resistible.
“They knew their physical risks. Although the Royal Navy kept German battleships trapped and inactive, the U-boats were a constant menace. Sneaking out of their ports, they had a licence to sink all allied military and civilian shipping in 1916. A submarine laid a mine that sank the ship carrying Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, on a trip to Russia. There were grievous losses of ships and supplies throughout the year.”
So London has this interesting role as a hub for revolutionaries. Lenin and Trotsky both quite disliked London—they didn’t think it was a place ripe with revolutionary ideas, and they both liked Paris very much. But circumstances dictate that there is a brief moment where London becomes once again flooded with Russian émigrés.
“Yet the hastily invented convoy system protected a lot of commercial traffic across the Atlantic. The Americans were giving political and financial assistance to the Allies short of going to war. The German High Command successfully pressed for a change of policy to allow its forces to attack US shipping.
“The rationale was simple. Germany’s economy was being suffocated by the British naval blockade. Urban consumers had to endure a turnip winter when coffee, sugar and even potatoes ran out. War materials for military production were no longer plentiful. Meanwhile Britain and France were obtaining what they needed from their American friends.
“The Germans gave notice of unrestricted submarine warfare from the 1st of February 1917 and US merchant vessels began to be sunk in March. British intelligence sources discovered that Germany had promised to restore Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to Mexico if the Mexican government would agree to fight America. Washington fell into uproar.
“Until that point it had been impossible for President Woodrow Wilson to gain the support of his Congress to enter the fighting. These isolationist obstacles crumbled when news of the U-boat campaign was printed. On the 6th of April the US announced that it would join the Allies as an associate power in the struggle against Imperial Germany. Wilson intended it to be a war to end war.”
So here we switch to focus on America, away from London and to New York, the second key city we’re going to explore today.
“In New York the fall of the Romanovs had been greeted with wild enthusiasm. The American press, being free from the British and French constraints of wartime censorship, had reported quickly and extensively on the revolution. News of the abdication appeared in the newspapers two days earlier than in London and Paris.
“Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire were ecstatic. The tyrant had been overthrown. Equality of religion and nationality were being proclaimed. Then came the complication of American entry into the war. The Jewish Forward newspaper approved of President Wilson’s decision, whereas the anti-war left was furious.
“Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin were prominent critics of US militarism. Trotsky had been deported from France for his agitation against the war. He was at that time a far left Marxist who was neither a Bolshevik nor a Menshevik, but demanded the installation of a workers government. Bukharin was a young Bolshevik who was not shy of challenging Lenin’s writings on Marxist doctrines.
“Trotsky and Bukharin called on socialists in the US to oppose America’s military involvement. Noisy public meetings took place in the cities of the East Coast where anti-war and pro-war activists confronted each other about whether the old government in Washington or the new one in Petrograd merited support.”
So that’s the context of three key revolutionaries before their return to Russia. All of them are engaged in the complexities of the revolution long before they get home. Trotsky is in New York at the time of the revolution and he’s actually on a ship headed to Russia which is stopped by British naval warships. He’s detained in Newfoundland for a few weeks because they know who he is and they know that he is likely to cause trouble for their Russian ally—and keeping Russia on the Eastern Front fighting is a key British policy.
“Nearly all the Russian political refugees in America, regardless of this dispute, were as keen as their comrades in Europe to get back home without delay. In the United Kingdom, the ultimate permission to travel across the North Sea rested with the cabinet.
“The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, dallied for some weeks before allowing the anarchist Peter Kropotkin and the Marxists Georgi Plekhanov and Grigori Aleksinsky to make the trip. Kropotkin, Plekhanov and Aleksinsky were picked for having advocated the cause of the Allies. Anti-war militants denounced this as favouritism, and the Mensheviks Ivan Maisky and Georgi Chicharin formed a repatriation committee with themselves as chairman and secretary.
“They visited the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Home Office to argue the case for a passage to Russia. After a month of frustration, they called on Nabokov at Cheshire House where they were pleased to discover that he was under instructions from Petrograd to assist with all requests by emigrants to leave Britain.
“Nabokov duly issued the visas, but because of the risk of German U-boat attack, only to men. Now protest ensued from female revolutionaries living in Whitechapel. Nabokov later shuddered at the memory: ‘God knows they can make a noise.’
“The chargé’s job was not made any easier by the political immigrants’ habit of using false passports. Nabokov complained that Litvinov alone had four or five aliases.”
So even when the embassy tried to be helpful, it was not that easy a process to issue visas.
“The first large group of applicants obtained tickets to sail from Aberdeen to Bergen on HMS Jupiter. Having taken the train from King’s Cross Station in high spirits, they then had to sit around in Aberdeen for four days.”
Aberdeen at that point is an extremely northerly small town, a port based largely on fishing—the oil wouldn’t be discovered for another 70 odd years. So it’s a really remote, grey, cold outpost.
“The ship’s captain announced that this would be a normal procedure. He was waiting for the storm to brew up and curtail the German submarine patrols. He was also a little too optimistic. Halfway across the North Sea, the Jupiter had to lurch to port to evade a German submarine.
“Some later convoys were even less fortunate and one of the ships went down with all on board. It was the same vessel that Litvinov had hoped to take. Only the recent birth of his son had dissuaded him from buying a ticket.
“The anti-war activists did not thank the British for helping them. One of them, Georgi Chicharin, went around saying that Lloyd George was discriminating against them in the issuance of travel documents. This is untrue, at least for those setting out from the United Kingdom. Nabokov, as chargé, had indeed cooperated with Chicharin, although nobody would have known this from Chicharin’s journalism. His tirades against the Allies could only aggravate the difficulties of British diplomacy in Petrograd.
“What is more, Chicharin was unusual in being in no hurry to depart for Russia. His presence in London became an annoyance and the British cabinet was to lose patience with him in August on learning how he had written articles in Pravda that virtually condemned the Allied war effort. He was also suspected of favouring the German side. Without further ado, he was taken to Brixton prison under a Defence of the Realm order.
“Petrov was already in custody for agitating amongst British workers against the war. Chicharin and Petrov were recalcitrant prisoners. They interpreted their treatment as yet further proof that the Allied powers would stop at nothing to fight their imperialist war. They declined to make a special plea to the Lloyd George cabinet for their release.”
So, I think that there is a really rich hub of ideas here. It adds to our picture of the Russian Revolution by placing it in its international context and presenting the fact that the revolution—even this liberal stage of the revolution—was a set of complex dilemmas for the Allied powers to navigate. It was the question of who returns to Russia and why and under what circumstances. Questions about what Russia’s embassy can and should do. And questions about what the expectations that the revolution has for Russia really should present a picture of flux and complexity in this moment.
That’s why I like books that make things more complicated, in essence. I think once we know the narrative of the Russian Revolution and of the revolutionary year of 1917, it can become tempting to become reductionist. And I think this is a good antidote to that.
OK, I’m going to leave you there. Visitors over on Patreon, you really should join us. That’s where I’m posting all of these podcasts now advert free. There’s a little bit of free content there as well. I do a little video most days, just with my thoughts about mainly about Iran at the moment, but about other stuff as well. Come and join us.
I’ll be doing an announcement about our next masterclass on Nazi Germany. It’s coming up in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned for tomorrow and I will update you then. And we’ve got a great interview happening on Friday. If any of you heard my interview last year on Hollywood and McCarthyism with the brilliant Dennis Broe, we’re talking again. This time about Vegas, the mob and other related seedy stuff. So check us out on Friday.
All the best. Bye bye.
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