History - St Petersburg - page 403

Along with the loss of its capital political status, St Petersburg also lost its noble
social status. The aristocratic soul gave up the proletarian body. The royal family had
always set the standards for high society, but now the royals were on the run. No Ro-
manov stepped forward to claim the once coveted throne. Nicholas II and his family,
meanwhile, were placed under house arrest in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo
( CLICK HERE ) , before leaving on a one-way trip to Siberia. The breakdown of the old
order made the old elite vulnerable. The tsar's favourite ballerina, Mathilda Kshesin-
skaya, pleaded in vain as her Style Moderne mansion was commandeered by the
Bolsheviks as party headquarters (see CLICK HERE ). The more fortunate families fled
with the few valuables they could carry; the less fortunate who stayed were harassed,
dispossessed and killed eventually.
The revolution began in Petrograd and ended there in March 1921 when Kronshtadt
sailors staged a mutiny. These erstwhile Bolshevik boosters demanded the democracy
they had been promised now that the civil war was won. But Lenin, who had since re-
named his political party 'the Communists', was reluctant to relinquish political
power. The sailors' revolt was brutally suppressed in a full-scale military assault
across the frozen bay, confirming the historical adage that revolutions eat their chil-
dren.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of poet Osip Mandelstam wrote Hope
Against Hope, an incredibly moving memoir about their lives as dissidents
in Stalinist Russia leading up to Osip Mandelstam's death in a transit
camp in 1938. The title is a play on words, as nadezhda means 'hope' in
Russian.
RED PITER
Soviet Second City
Moscow finally reclaimed its coveted ancient title with the caveat that it was now the
world's first communist capital. Petrograd consoled itself as the Soviet second city.
The redesignation of the capital prompted the departure of the bureaucracies: the
government ministries, the military headquarters, the party apparatus, which took with
them a host of loyal servants and servile lackeys. The population dropped by two-
thirds from its prewar count. Economic exchange was reduced to begging and barter-