Douglas Smith

The war against the burzhui that erupted in February 1917 fitted with how Russia’s lower classes interpreted the freedom that came with the revolution. Freedom was understood as something the Russians call vólia, total license and the right to act as one sees fit, unrestrained from any larger authority. In the popular mind, freedom had been won not for all of Russia but for “the people,” the poor and the marginalized; it had been wrested from the hands of the tsar and all burzhui, and so any attempts to limit their “freedom” justified stopping and silencing the burzhui as the enemies of the revolution and the people.

Almost from the beginning of the war, Russia’s lack of arms and ammunition was apparent. The shortages became so severe that soldiers were sent to the front with no guns and ordered to look for them among the dead. A full quarter of the troops did not even have boots.

In the summer of 1914 Russia entered a period of unprecedented savagery and bloodshed from which it would not exit until 1921, following four years of world war, two revolutions, and three more years of civil war and famine that claimed the lives of more than ten million people

“I noticed in Petrograd an undercurrent of nervousness, a feverish desire to have a good time,” he wrote, “and I had the impression that people were spending money as quickly as they could because they did not know what was going to happen next.”

“This is our Rus’,” he wrote then in his diary. “The thirst for self-destruction, atavism.”

To little Yelena Sheremetev the revolution meant there would be no more going out to play in the garden or visiting friends. Bored, she and her brothers spent the days reading Sherlock Holmes and the detective stories of Allan Pinkerton.