had already been too many nights of madness in 1917 as the Russian Revolution rocked Petrograd (renamed from St. Petersburg at the onset of World War I to sound less German), and Dosch-Fleurot was just one of the many foreigners there to bear witness. The city was home to a large community of foreign diplomats, journalists, businessmen, spies and relief workers, and author Helen Rappaport has mined their diaries and private letters to chronicle how the Russian Revolution unfolded before the eyes of these expatriates in her new book “Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917—A World on the Edge.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Thanks for watching!

“St. Petersburg was a very Western-looking city with much more contact with Western culture than Moscow,” Rappaport tells HISTORY. In addition to a large British population, thecity was home to a sizable American community that included employees of major corporations such International Harvester, the Singer Sewing Machine Company and Westinghouse. The American presence only grew after the start of World War I as entrepreneurs arrived to sell weapons to the imperial government.

ADVERTISEMENT

Thanks for watching!

ADVERTISEMENT

Thanks for watching!

U.S. diplomat Fred Dearing, who was based in Petrograd in 1917.

As 1917 dawned, Petrograd was a shivering, starving city exhausted by a war that had left more than 7 million Russians dead, wounded or captured. “The whole of the city was beaten down and demoralized by the horrific Russian losses on the Eastern Front,” Rappaport says. An historically frigid winter collided with the red-hot anger to push Petrograd to the edge. Crippling wartime shortages forced women to wait for