patriot, arguing for support of the war until victory was won by the Western
democracies. Here they enjoyed a Russian high tea of fine white bread with
plenty of butter and caviar. The samovar sat simmering all the time on the table
so that they could partake of fresh cups of hot drinks.
On her return to Petrograd, Emmeline found a quickening pace of events
and was warned not to go out when fierce fighting broke out between Cossacks,
loyal to Kerensky, and Bolsheviks, who demanded that the Provisional
Government must go. She watched from her hotel window as armed Bolshevik
soldiers marched by shouting, ‘Down with capitalism’ and ‘Stop the war’.
Emmeline was convinced that Germany was financing such peace propaganda
and was horrified when she heard that Bolsheviks were trying to terrorise
factory workers and to encourage them to go on strike. Despite the political
tension, she refused the offer from a group of aristocratic officers to form a body-
guard to protect her, pointing out that she was not afraid to move among the
people. She also shrugged off the suggestion that she and Jessie should wear
proletarian clothes in order not to attract the attention of bourgeois haters.
More visitors continued to call, including a friend from suffragette days, the
American journalist Rheta Childe Dorr who needed to borrow some money.
Emmeline had none to spare.^22 Botchkareva’s regiment, known as the
‘Battalion of Death’ because of its determination to fight Germans long after
every man had retreated, was something of a novelty to Americans and the
Western world and Rheta wanted to spend two weeks with the battalion, which
she soon did, sleeping and living in their spartan barracks. Emmeline related to
her American friend the story she had been told about the assassination of
Rasputin. The eager journalist swiftly relayed the details back to her home-
land.^23
Emmeline’s frustration at the slow pace of her work was made worse by the
recurrence of gastric trouble and the chronic shortage of edible food.
Nevertheless, she continued to speak at a number of women’s meetings, urging
her listeners to support the Provisional Government and to prevent anarchy;
after all, within a month of taking office, Kerensky had granted women the
right to vote. Her main line of argument, however, that Russian women of all
social classes should join together, free from affiliation to any political party or
creed, was inappropriate in a society where the ending of class privilege was
seen as the key priority and where radical Marxism was flowering. Emmeline
had little sympathy with the dictates of Marxism. As she explained to a
reporter, ‘I have always been astonished at the materialistic aspect of Marxian
Socialism. I cannot think of Socialism without a spiritual background.’^24
Her disillusionment, which was later to turn to a hatred of those who upheld
the philosophies expounded by communist pioneers, like Karl Marx and
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, was deepened when she eventually met Kerensky in
early August in the enormous Winter Palace. It appeared that he had been
asking about Emmeline’s views before she arrived, and hearing that she was crit-
ical of any idea of social reform based on class conflict and class warfare, was
WAR EMISSARY TO RUSSIA