Rather than relying on semi-hypothetical, semi-ironical case studies, the course presenters should just give each boss a copy of Helen Rappaport's Caught in the Revolution. There they would find examples of contrarians, crises and pressure to burn. Rappaport is a gifted and successful historian, but she may nonetheless have missed her vocation. Caught in the Revolution is not just history, but a how-not-to manual for putative leaders.

Let me explain. Rappaport's book chronicles and appraises the ways in which expatriates caught in Petrograd (as St Petersburg was then called) reacted to the two Russian revolutions there in 1917. Her cast ranges from pompous pedants through brave journalists, selfless nurses, arrogant suffragettes, wily factotums, bewildered bankers to deeply incompetent spies. Rappaport's assortment of talent is eclectic and eccentric enough to be worthy of any advanced executive management training.

To save the trainers from having to read an entire book, we might distil 10 lessons about coping with crises. Readers seeking a different slant on the revolutions are advised to turn to one vivid true-believer account (John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World), a scintillating air-brushing (Leon Trotsky's three-volume history) or a current exercise (the 1917 Project, which offers a daily, firsthand comment on what was going on exactly a century ago).

The Bolsheviks condensed their entire political program into a three-word promise: "peace, bread, land". A more lyrical version of the same sentiment was scrawled on banners early in the revolution: "we asked for bread, but you gave us lead". The Bolsheviks' concision was admirable, despite the fact that their ambitions proved spurious. They appreciated that there was no market for sentimental claptrap about making Russia great again.

Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky were, however, upstaged in both pithiness and compassion by a little girl carrying a tiny banner in the first wave of Petrograd demonstrations. Her slogan, addressed to the tsar, read: "feed your children". That little girl ranks with the man holding a carry bag standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square as a mute but deeply eloquent witness to history.

In Petrograd, that counsel applied even when observers were obliged to freeze in snow and ice, head down, as bullets whizzed overhead. Cold, soggy discretion remained the better part of valour. Hugging walls was also advised; hiding in doorways worked well, too.

One foreigner who dared to ignore the advice and walk down the middle of the Nevsky Prospect was prodded with the steel tips of Cossack lances. He resolved never to fish with live bait again. As for encounters with young boys with neither training nor scruples, brandishing large stolen revolvers, crossing the street after handing over your wallet seemed to be the better part of prudence.

The Petrograd police were the most loathed lackeys of the old state apparatus. They were accordingly hunted down, shot, bashed to death, burned alive, pushed off rooftops or jammed through holes in the ice on the river. One woman tore off a policeman's face with her bare hands. If you needed to seek help from agents of the state, Cossack soldiers seemed a better bet, notwithstanding those lances and their short whips.

The police themselves had reason to mistrust the old regime. When he was arrested, the reviled interior minister tried to suck up by handing over a map of police hiding places around the city.

The revolutions began with endless queues of impoverished women queuing for meagre amounts of adulterated bread. Foreigners always enjoyed more to eat, but complained incessantly about having much less than they felt entitled to. One woman survived the Petrograd summer on an imported diet of hardtack, caviar and sardines. I suppose many of the major food groups were there.

Arthur Ransome (who later wrote Swallows and Amazons) swore that "if I ever get home, my sole interest will be gluttony".

Rappaport includes a shocking story of a woman on a tram who accused a well-dressed fellow passenger of stealing 50 roubles from her purse. After protesting his innocence, the other passenger offered to give the woman money out of his own pocket. Revolutionaries on the tram took him out and shot him, whether because he was affluent, apparently insincere or too eager to please.

The woman then found her missing notes, which had slipped down a hole inside the lining of her purse. Duly affronted, the servants of the revolution shot her, too.

Expatriates worried that a revolt fuelled by alcohol as well as rage would provoke a reign of terror, with drunks looting, killing and burning all over the city. A few revolutionaries did get drunk on the fumes after smashing casks of cognac and whiskey at the Astoria hotel. When they occupied the Winter Palace, distracted insurgents scooped wine from broken bottles up in their hands or lay down in the gutter to drink the dregs.

One befuddled revolutionary knocked off a few imperial bottles of rye whiskey laid down for a visit by General Ulysses S. Grant in 1878. Others, possibly having already taken drink, ignored collections of ancient Greek jewellery wrought in pure gold in order to rip the leather coverings off Palace chairs to patch their boots.

The critical adversaries of revolution, the tsar in February, like the provisional government in November, just seemed worn out. Revolution requires its leaders to be tireless, sleepless and nerveless. During his final days in power, the tsar seemed pale, distant and as out of touch in conversations as in governing. While the interim head of government, Alexander Kerensky, fretted about his lungs, kidneys and stomach, Lenin and Trotsky bothered themselves only with how to win.

One of Rappaport's journalists despaired of "apathy when apathy could only result in destruction". The fundamental importance of exhaustion in the taking of major decisions warrants a book in its own right.

Rappaport finds room for some silly bourgeois women. The wife of the British ambassador refused refuge to a countess because that noble had never invited her to her box at the opera. A female journalist on her way to Petrograd had to buy six extra train seats to accommodate her luggage.

Offsetting that affectation are wonderful scenes of selfless courage, beginning with the revolution itself on International Women's Day, with a crowd of shouting, laughing, singing, marching, working-class women. Rappaport also reminds her readers of the recruitment rules for the women's death battalions. On arrival, all the women's personal property was confiscated, except their bras.

When he turned up in Petrograd, English writer-cum-spy Somerset Maugham strolled along the Nevsky and "saw the whole gallery of the characters of the great Russian novels, so that you could put a name to one after the other". I wonder: there were probably more Raskolnikovs and Karamazovs out on the street than Prince Myshkins or Pierre Bezukhovs. The point for training, though, is Maugham's technique. He was said to have watched events as though they were a play, finding the theme, intent on observing how the principals developed the plot.

When one foreigner tried to use the telephone at the Russian parliament, he was accosted by three women. They announced themselves to be the "telephone committee", self-appointed, ludicrously proprietorial and determined that the telephones be reserved for "public affairs". Even amid revolution, the habits of bureaucracy could not be denied.

Mark Thomas is a Canberra-based writer.

Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, 1917, by Helen Rappaport, is published by Windmill Books (February 2017).