Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, 1917

Selected as a Book of the Year in The Telegraph and Evening Standard

Petrograd, for all its privations and its growing atmosphere of social disaffection, still provided ‘the perfect life of dissipation’ for those unrepentant sybarites craving excitement and self-indulgence. Nicholas II might have introduced a ban on vodka sales in 1914 to control the legendary drunkenness of Russia’s largely peasant, conscript army, but if you had the right money you could still be served fine wines, champagne, whisky and other hard liquor in the cabinets privés of the best restaurants and hotels in the city.

Between the first revolution in February 1917 and Lenin's Bolshevik coup in October, Petrograd (the former St Petersburg) was in turmoil.

Foreign visitors who filled hotels, bars and embassies often enjoying the kind of largesse unimaginable to the starving and desperate home population, were nevertheless acutely aware of the chaos breaking out on their doorsteps.

Among them were journalists, diplomats, businessmen, governesses and volunteer nurses. Many kept diaries and wrote letters home: from an English nurse who had already survived the sinking of the Titanic; to the black valet of the US Ambassador, far from his native Deep South; to suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, who had come to Petrograd to inspect the indomitable Women's Death Battalion led by Maria Bochkareava.

Drawing upon a rich trove of material and through eye-witness accounts left by foreign nationals who saw the drama unfold, Helen Rappaport takes us right up to the action - to see, feel and hear the Revolution as it happened.