26 February 1917. James Houghteling

Non-fiction

Project 1917 is a series of events that took place a hundred years ago as described by those involved. It is composed only of diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers and other documents

We called at noon on Gregory Alexeieff, secretary of the General Committee of the Union of Zemstvos; I presented a letter of introduction from Samuel Harper of the University of Chicago and we had a most satisfactory interview with him. He advises me to read Vinogradoff's "Self-Government of Russia" and promised to send other pamphlets on the war-work of the Union. He will then introduce me to various members of his committee. I expressed particular interest in the financial and industrial end.

The Zemstvo Union has a great stone building six or eight stories high on the Pekrovka, a principal business street; every inch of it is occupied and it is a place to gladden the heart of an American. The atmosphere is absolutely different from that musty file-an-application- and-wait-three-weeks air which oppresses one in the huge ministry buildings in Petrograd. The overhead conveyors for "passing the buck" are entirely lacking. The Union is taking care of all the wounded, is feeding and clothing the armies, operating tanneries, shoe-shops and commisaries, working with and directing the Peasant Co-operative Societies; in short, it is doing three-fourths of the work of the moribund War Office. What is more, it is doing it efficiently and honestly.

The good work of the Union is a thorn in the side of the bureaucracy, as the comparison of results is too discreditable to the government. So the latter interferes on every pretext. A few months ago the Military Governor of Moscow forbade all public meetings of the Union and dissolved a convention of Zemstvo presidents which was discussing the care of the wounded, the boot-supply, and other treasonable subjects. This stupid interference has deprived the government of the support of the last among the landed gentry. It is on a par with tlie recent outrageous arrest of the labor members of the War Industry Committee * in Petrogad.

At Mikhailoff's fur store this evening, I talked with a Belgian who was in Moscow in 1905. He described to me theriots, barricades and miscellaneous murder of that exciting time. The government picked out its most unruly regiments of Cossacks to quell the disturbance, and they shot at everything insight. A man standing next to my informant in a side street leaned out to look up the Tverskaya and exposed his head and one hand; his hand was drilled clean through with a bullet. Lucky it wasn’t his head! The word ''Cossack" originally meant bandit and these fellows live up to their name. Is shouldn't be surprised if the revolution which is coming will begin with a massacre of the Cossacks comparable only to that of the Janissaries, or to Peter the Great's slaughter of the Strelsi.

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All has been quiet on the front since mid-December, and the Tsar has felt his presence at headquarters to be superfluous. Each day he has received news over the direct line in the evening. The Tsar’s snooker room is full of military maps, so that no one, not the children, not the servants and not even the Empress, has dared enter for fear of disturbing them. The keys were last seen with the Tsar. The recent snowstorms and the danger they represent to the supply question in the capital have given Their Majesties great cause for concern.

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Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich

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We went to the Imperial Porcelain Factory, where we bought a few things.

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Boris Pasternak

Ushakovs' chemical plant, Tykhie Gory, Vyatsk guberniya, Russian Empire

Had some difficulties, and a terrible period of melancholy. On finally sitting down to get on with my previously started “prose”, I was struck by something I would now struggle to clearly describe, and driven by this strange mood I began to feverishly churn out something of real significance in verse. I say something, because I cannot for the life of me make out how exactly this new “Poem on One Dear” will work out.

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Leon Trotsky

1/2

Pacifist demonstration in Washington. 1917

America was busily getting ready for war. As ever, the greatest help came from the pacifists. Their vulgar speeches about the advantages of peace as opposed to war invariably ended in a promise to support war if it became “necessary.” It is a well-known axiom that pacifists think of war as an enemy only in time of peace.

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Pablo Picasso

Italy, Roma, Via del Babuino, 9, Hotel de Russie

In Rome of an evening whores ply their trade in automobiles - at walking pace - they accost their clients with smiles and gestures and stop the car to negotiate the price.

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Vladimir Lenin Inessa Armand

Zurich, Switzerland

We have got to come out as strongly and bluntly as possible against the ridiculous pacifism of the French (achieving socialism without revolution, and so on) and the ridiculous belief in democracy.

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Nadezhda Udaltsova

82 apartment, 65, Smolenskiy blvd, Moscow, Russian Empire

We ran with Malevich and filed a transfer request for Moscow, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s impossible to do anything alone but there’s no one else. Exter was sick. There’s some kind of emptiness and solitude, and we’re senselessly beating on the walls, and there’s no one there or left.

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Vladimir Dzhunkovskiy

near Volno, Belorussia, Russian Empire

The most tragic incident occurred in the Kiev Grenadier Regiment, which I was part of not long ago. One of the regiment’s companies staged a mutiny. A bunch of scoundrels led by a volunteer, who managed to escape, snuck up to the dugout where the regiment commander and battalion commander sat, fired several shots through the window, followed by grenades. Mashkovskii, one of the officers, was killed on the spot and another four officers were wounded.

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25 February

Luminaries of the Russian avant-garde perform folk songs

The Lenten festival of Maslenitsa is celebrated in Russia

Stravinsky is commissioned to conduct his Firebird in Rome and Milan

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Death of Rasputin. Murder conspiracy and its consequences

1917. Zombies, drugs, and progress

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-5

in Petrograd

-17

in Moscow