18 September 1917. W. Somerset Maugham

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

W. Somerset Maugham

Hotel "Evropeyskaya", 1, Mikhailovskaya street, Petrograd, Russian Empire

I often see brooding over the crowd on the Nevsky an extraordinary, a horrifying figure. It seems hardly human. It is a little misshapen dwarf, perched strangely on a tiny seat at the top of a stout pole high enough to bring him above the heads of the passers-by; and the pole is upheld by a sturdy peasant who collects the alms of the charitable. The dwarf sits on his perch like a monstrous bird and the effect is increased by some thing birdlike in his head, but the strange thing is that the head is finely shaped, the head of a young man, with a great hooked nose and a bold mouth.

The eyes are large, rather close together, and they stare with an unwinking fixity. The temples are hollow, the cheeks wan and sunk. The strange beauty of the features is more than commonly striking because in Russia as a rule features are indistinct and flat. It is the head of a Roman of the Empire in a sculpture gallery. There is some thing sinister in the immobility of the creature, watching the crowd with the intentness of a bird of prey and yet seeing nothing, and that fierce bold mouth is curved into the shadow of a sardonic smile. There is something terrifying in the aloof ness of the creature, contemptuous and yet indifferent, malicious and yet tolerant. It is like the spirit of irony watching the human race. The people pass to and fro and they put into the peasant’s box kopecks and stamps and notes.

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The revolution didn’t change anything for us, the bohemians. It might as well have never happened. Some new cafes opened, “Pitersk” on Kyznetsky St and the “Poets’ Cafe” on Nastas’insky St. By then we’d stopped wearing yellow jackets, but, as always, continued to think up oddball ideas. Not that anyone was really paying attention. See more

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Alexander Parvus

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Kerensky’s government was dying to get its hands on me. They never failed to use anything they found to discredit me, even if it were the most trifling detail. All of the secret services of Europe were on my trail: Russia, Romania, England, France, Italy… My house in Copenhagen was surrounded by agents from these nations, who tracked each and every step I took. See more

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Mstislav Dobuzhinsky

"The Calendar of the Russian Revolution" comes out of print with drawings in two colours

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John Reed

Liflyandskaya guberniya, Riga, Russian Empire

Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts–but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorky… See more

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Lev Urusov

Petrograd, Russian Republic

As is now well known, the crisis was resolved by the amalgamation of five ministries into the Directory. At the same time, the Council of Workers’ Deputies decided to call an all-Russian democratic congress, along the lines of the Moscow congress, which will pronounce on the forms and make up of government.

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Nikita Okunev

Moscow, Russian Republic

Purishkevich is released from the Vyborg solitary prison. He hasn't been charged with anything.

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Yuri Gotye

Moscow, Russian Republic

The “Provisional Government” has discontinued classes in all institutions of higher education in both capitals, i.e. in 75% of Russia’s institutions of higher education. Perhaps this is because “student housing” canceled these classes? See more

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Nicholas II

Tobolsk, Russian Republic

Telegrams arrive here twice a day; many of them are composed so obscurely that it is difficult to understand them. Evidently, in Petrograd, there is great confusion. Again there has been a change in the staff of the government. See more

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Edvard Munch

works on «Corn Harvest»

Ekely estate, Norway

Ernest Hemingway

cottage Pinehurst, North Carolina, USA

Dear Dad!

I came in here [to Mrs. J. S. Dilworth’s Pinehurst Cottage] last night from Walloon to get the mail and some more clothes. There will be about 60 bushel of marketable potatoes the way it looks now. Those 60 bu. however will be very good. You see there are strips of very good ones and then a lot of little nubbins. See more

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17 September

The Extraordinary Commission interrogates the Chairman of the State Duma

The Romanovs experience problems with plumbing at their home

Vladimir Lvov is pronounced insane

Map of the Royal dynasties of Europe

Romanovs dangerous liaisons

+10

in Petrograd

in Moscow