To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [158]
Some of those prowar trade unionists flexed their muscles in a small but telling confrontation at the Scottish port of Aberdeen at the beginning of the summer of 1917. The Leeds conference had picked representatives to go to Russia as a show of solidarity, but when the delegates boarded a ship for the journey, they found an unexpected complication. On hand were two leaders of the right-leaning National Sailors' and Firemen's Union—one, its president, was a stalwart of Milner's British Workers' League—who informed them that the ship's crew would not sail unless they disembarked. With several thousand of its members dead from German U-boat attacks, the union was not in the antiwar camp. After a brief standoff, the delegates were escorted down the gangplank.
On the dock, however, these same union leaders warmly welcomed two passengers also heading for Russia: Jessie Kenney, a longtime suffragette, and Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst had asked Lloyd George for permission to "explain to the Russian people the opinions as to the war and the conditions of peace held by us as patriotic British women," and the prime minister enthusiastically agreed. The Russian army might be faltering, but it was still tying down hundreds of thousands of German troops who would otherwise be in France and Belgium. Pankhurst, he hoped, could buck up the spirits of war-minded Russians and woo some of those tempted by revolution, for she had indisputable credentials as a rebel and troublemaker and was well known in Russia, where her autobiography had been translated and widely read.
When Pankhurst arrived in Petrograd, the moderate Provisional Government was still in precarious control, but the Bolsheviks, bolstered by the arrival of their leaders from Switzerland after the trip in the sealed train, were gaining strength. Red flags flew everywhere, and even the staff of the deluxe hotel where she was staying, the Astoria, went on strike while she was there. "I came to Petrograd with a prayer from the English nation to the Russian nation," she told local journalists between speeches to patriotic women's groups, "that you may continue the war on which depends the fate of civilisation and freedom."
One Russian especially caught her attention—and was quickly given star treatment in Christabel's newspaper back in England: 25-year-old Maria Bochkareva. The Tsar had given her special permission to enlist in the army, where Bochkareva had fought in a combat unit, bayoneted a German soldier to death, and been wounded several times. She smoked, drank, and swore, punched back at anyone who harassed her, and in a language where many words change with the speaker's gender, used the male forms. One observer described her as "a big peasant woman, strong as a horse, rough of manner, eating with her fingers by choice, unlettered, but of much native intelligence."
A staunch proponent of fighting the Germans, Bochkareva had recently formed a "Women's Battalion of Death." Its recruits shaved their heads, slept on bare boards during training, endured the same corporal punishment as male Russian soldiers, and sported a skull-and-crossbones insignia. She enforced strict discipline and succeeded in inspiring the battalion to overrun some German trenches, a rare act in this year of Russian military collapse. For Russians determined to stay in the war she was—like Emmeline Pankhurst in England—an unexpected poster girl, for her patriotism trumped her role as a militantly assertive woman. To right-wingers in a country riven by class conflict, she was that always treasured rarity: a working-class hero who was on their side.
As Bochkareva led her troops on parade in Petrograd's St. Isaac's Square, supporters threw flowers, an army band played, and a Russian Orthodox bishop blessed the skull-and-crossbones flag. The battalion marched in review, cheering robustly, past Pankhurst, who was dressed in an immaculate white linen suit, black bonnet, and gloves. "The creation of