Fisher, Steven. Into Russia’s Cauldron: An American Vision, Undone. The
Newly Revealed Century-Old Eyewitness Journal of Leighton W. Rogers.
Forest Cat Productions, Chicago, IL, 2021. xx + 427 pp. Maps. Illustrations.
Timeline. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $32.50; $22.99; $9.99 (e-book).
The National City Bank of New York opened its Petrograd branch in October
1916, in the former Turkish Embassy on the Palace Embankment. By the
autumn of 1917 the bank had sixty employees in Russia and a second branch,
in Moscow, was planned. National City Bank’s chairman Frank Vanderlip had
been enthusiastic about investment in Russia since the 1900s, when he met
Russia’s modernizing Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte. In Russia, the bank’s
employees were told, ‘the natural resources have hardly been touched. There
are railroads to be built and mines to be opened. This means a wonderful
opportunity for American capital’ (pp. 7–8). In retrospect, National City Bank’s
foray into the Russian market did not come at a propitious time. The events of
Russia’s revolutionary year rapidly derailed the bank’s business. The Moscow
branch opened and closed within a day in November 1917, and its premises
were commandeered by the Moscow Soviet in January 1918. Following the
Bolshevik repudiation of tsarist loans in February 1918 the bank’s staff spent
their time playing cards and ‘finding depositors and persuading them to take
back their money’ (p. 251). National City Bank’s total losses in Russia following
their subsequent withdrawal amounted to $10 million: around 10 per cent of
the bank’s total capital.
Leighton Rogers sailed to Russia in 1916 to help set up the Petrograd branch.
His diary (held in the original by the Library of Congress) has been edited
and annotated by Steven Fisher, who has also worked for Citibank, as it is
now known, in Russia and Ukraine. While there are many published Western
eyewitness accounts of the revolution, Rogers is interesting because he was
not a journalist or a diplomat but rather one of the many non-governmental
actors performing economic roles in Russia during the war. Even before the
revolution Rogers knew he was living through interesting times, and this
presumably motivated his decision (not uncommon amongst wartime visitors
to Russia) to start a diary. Rogers was a reflective writer who often pondered
the purpose and value of his diary. ‘A great journal this — from Constituent
Assemblies to raspberry tarts!’ he wrote in December 1917. ‘I don’t know which
I consider more important’ (p. 283).
Rogers’s attempts to follow politics in Petrograd were hampered by his lack
of Russian (despite the bank’s daily lessons); the difficulty of getting hold of
news (he regarded himself as often two to three days behind); and the many
conflicting rumours that circulated. He recorded his own observations on life
in St Petersburg — the poverty, the crowded public transport, the ubiquity
first of portraits of the tsar, and later of photographs and cheap biographies
of Kerenskii. He praised Woodrow Wilson but was scathing about the US
embassy in Petrograd and about Ambassador David Francis. Surprisingly
we learn relatively little about the work of the bank, perhaps because Rogers
regarded this as more familiar and predictable than his observations about
Russian life and politics. Fisher mentions that the bank’s records are held by
the Russian State Archives (having been seized by the Bolsheviks in 1918). It
would be fascinating to know what additional insight these records shed on the
bank’s activity in 1917.
Fisher’s annotations to the diary are meticulous. He dates undated diary
entries, and identifies characters including other passengers who sailed with
Rogers on the boat to Russia. Each chapter begins with a helpful contextual
summary, though these would at times benefit from more detailed engagement
with the vast literature on the Russian revolutions. The principal sources are
Richard Pipes and Orlando Figes, and some interpretations of events are not
particularly nuanced or current (there is no acknowledgement of revolutionary
organizing in the February revolution for example which Fisher says was
‘spontaneous and exploded like a volcano’).
For Fisher, the fact that citizens of Petrograd flocked to deposit their money
in an American bank in 1917 should have been a warning to the American
bankers about the lack of public faith in Russian institutions. He also highlights
modern parallels to the events Rogers lived through. Citibank re-entered the
Russian market in the 1990s, but when El.tsin defaulted on domestic debt and
declared a moratorium on repaying foreign loans, they suffered losses even
greater than in 1917. This book was published in 2021, before Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, but the accelerated withdrawal of Citibank from the Russian market
since February 2022 further reinforces Fisher’s point: in his closing remarks
he offers Rogers’ experience as a cautionary tale ‘in which smart people don’t
know how to read the signs of impending calamity’ (p. 382).
The impact of Rogers’s experience of war and revolution on his own
thinking make his diary compelling reading. In 1916 Kerenskii was a ‘rabid
socialist’ (p. 71); by the summer of 1917 he was ‘the only man in Russia able
to cope with the situation’ (p. 176). Rogers came to admire Raymond Robins,
the socialist head of the US Red Cross Mission in Russia, for his ‘reason and
common sense’ as well as his grasp of the labour struggle (p. 280). In January
1918 Rogers holidayed with the family of a Russian bank teller in their home
outside Petrograd: he acknowledged that he would never have undertaken such
a visit prior to the revolution. Following his departure from Russia, Rogers was
interviewed by a panel of American diplomats about ‘the Russian problem’. On
the prospects for intervention in Russia’s Civil War, he was sceptical: Russians
hadn’t chosen to support the provisional government against the Bolsheviks,
so he thought it unlikely they would join forces with a foreign invader. As
to whether the US should recognize Lenin’s government, Rogers argued that
no steps to recognize any government should be taken until the Constituent
Assembly had confirmed the will of the people. Fisher agrees with his subject:
for him one of the morals of Rogers’s story is the imperative ‘to provide help to
the Russian people once they have made their own decision and call out their
leadership if it denies its people the right to do so’ (p. 367).
Northumbria University
Charlotte Alston, Professor
