24 August 1917. Vasily Shulgin

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

Vasily Shulgin

near Sandunóvskie Baths, Moscow, Russian Empire

Moscow is now filled with “women of easy virtue” – or, to put it bluntly, prostitutes. They were assailing men on the way to the bathhouse, and the police were doing nothing to stop them.

After repelling the advances of one blue-eyed beauty, I took a steam-bath with great pleasure. But there, too, in the Sandunovsky baths, the general decline in standards was evident. The sheets and seat covers were not snowy-white. I found myself thinking of how in Turkey - in the 16th Century, say - one could be given up to two thousands strokes of the rods as a punishment for providing shabby linen. It would make the unfortunate recipient puff up like a pigeon, but he would survive if he was put into a pit of horse manure.

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✍ Also today

Pierre Pascal

Petrograd, Russian Empire

A great discovery. I read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot from start to finish, unable to tear myself away. There is a character in the book called Myshkin – an idiot, a Christian, meek and kind with human frailties; a young boy, Kolya; a general’s wife - kind-hearted, but excitable woman; and another woman, Nastasya Filippovna, who has been corrupted through no fault of her own. See more

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George Buchanan

4, Dvortsovaya embankment, Petrograd, Russian Empire (British Embassy)

Letter to the Foreign Ministry

"I returned last night from a week's holiday in Finland and saw Tereschenko this morning. I told him that I was greatly disappointed to find that the situation had, if anything, changed for the worse, that hardly any of the disciplinary measures contemplated had been applied, and that the Government seemed to me weaker than ever. On my inquiring whether Kerensky was in agreement with the commander-in- chief on the question of the death See more

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Osip Mandelstam

Alushta, Crimea, Russian Empire

The stream of golden honey poured, so viscous,
slow from the bottle, our hostess had time to murmur:
‘Here, in sad Tauris, where fate has brought us,
we shan’t be too bored’ – glancing over her shoulder. See more

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Nicholas II

Tobolsk, Russian Empire

Alexis only slept a little. During the night he moved in with Alix. His ear was better, and his arm only ached a little now and then. MarieThird daughter of Nicholas II is better. The day became quiet. All morning I walked around the deck. See more

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23 August

Chaliapin visiting highlanders

Krupskaya secretly travels to Lenin to Finland

Sailors send arrested Bolsheviks generous packages

Nightmare before Christmas

Death of Rasputin. Murder conspiracy and its consequences

1916: Year in Review.

+19

in Petrograd

+16

in Moscow