Political agitators – Socialist Revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, anarchists – were now out in force among the striking Putilov workers and in other factories across the river in the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides, all of them ‘preaching a general strike as a protest against the government, food-shortage and war’.3 Over dinner with Maurice Paléologue, Grand Duchess Vladimir had told him that she expected ‘the most dire catastrophes’, if Nicholas continued to resist the need for political change. ‘If salvation does not come from above,’ she warned, ‘there will be revolution from below.’4
Paléologue had lately been reading the Philosophical Letters of Petr Chaadaev, the Russian philosopher exiled to Siberia in 1836 for his supposedly seditious writings. Chaadaev had observed that ‘The Russians are one of those nations which seem to exist only to give humanity terrible lessons.’ Paléologue felt that the country was once again living out that prediction. The brief ‘stimulant’ of the Allied mission had already evaporated. ‘The artillery, war-factory and supply and transport departments have fallen back into their old casual and leisurely ways,’ he noted despairingly. The mission’s attempts to galvanise the Russian war effort had been met with the ‘same dead weight of inactivity and indifference, as before’.5 The only thing that cheered him was the prospect of music and dancing at a ‘large and glittering party’ to be held at Princess Radziwill’s on the coming Sunday, the 26th. But he had to admit it was ‘a curious time to arrange a party’, and a dangerous time, too, for the Emperor to have left the capital and gone back to army HQ five hundred miles away – under the false reassurance, from his Minister of the Interior, Protopopov, that the situation was under control.6
For fully three weeks the average daily temperature had been -13.44 degrees Centigrade and there had been heavy falls of snow.7fn1 Walking on the Liteiny Prospekt on the morning of 22 February, Paléologue was struck by ‘the sinister expression on the faces of the poor folk’ who had been standing wearily all night waiting for bread. The public mood was shifting from stoicism to anger; many women were spending forty hours or more a week like this and, in indignation, some of them had thrown stones at the bakers’ windows that day. Others had joined in and some looting had taken place. Cossack patrols were out in force, ‘an evident intimation to the city to keep quiet’, and there were also a lot more soldiers on the streets. ‘The age of the new recruits’, as J. Butler Wright noted, was ‘younger than ever before’.8
Donald Thompson left the Astoria that morning to buy a new pair for boots for his Russian interpreter, Boris – a young wounded soldier, now out of hospital, whom he had requested be assigned to him, as Boris spoke very good English. One of the bakeries near the Astoria was under police guard, after the queues had smashed its windows to try and get at the bread. A besieged milk shop nearby had just put out a sign saying, ‘No more milk’. ‘If you could see these bread lines and see the looks upon the faces of these people as you pass,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘you would hardly believe that this is the Twentieth Century.’9 He was ashamed, he told her, to have to walk past such people while wearing his ‘heavy fur coat’, while they stood in the cold ‘almost in rags’. Groups of striking workers from across the river had made their way into the city, prompting some of the shopkeepers on the Nevsky to close their premises. People on the streets were ‘nervous, jumpy, starting at shadows, waiting for they knew not what’.10
Although the temperature was still -9 degrees, Thursday 23rd dawned gloriously sunny. When he went out that morning Thompson noticed that ‘dozens of machine-guns’ had been mounted on the tops of buildings overnight. Boris, who had been out on a night-time recce on Thompson’s behalf, had come back assuring him that ‘we are going to have a revolution in Russia’.11 Thompson went to the telegraph office to send his wife a message, but the woman on duty told him not to waste his money – ‘nothing was allowed to go out’. Later, with Florence Harper, he was walking near the British embassy and saw a crowd of women gathering at the Field of Mars, the big parade ground located behind it; soon these women were joined by a group of workmen, and then ‘almost as if by magic hundreds and hundreds of students came into view’.12
It was International Women’s Day, an important date in the socialist calendar, established in 1910 by the German Social Democrat Clara Zetkin to promote equal rights for women, and the embattled working women of Petrograd intended that their voices should be heard. Hundreds of them – peasants, factory workers, students, nurses, teachers, wives whose husbands were at the front, and even a few ladies from the upper classes – came out onto the streets. Although some carried banners with traditional suffrage slogans, such as ‘Hail, women fighters for freedom’ and ‘A place for women in the Constituent Assembly’, others bore improvised placards referring to the food crisis: ‘Increase rations for soldiers’ families’, or even more openly revolutionary calls for an end to the war – and the monarchy. But food was, fundamentally, what they all called out for that day: ‘There is no bread,’ they shouted as they marched, ‘our husbands have no work.’13
As columns of women converged on Nevsky and Liteiny Prospekts, more militant female textile workers at five of the major manufacturers on the Vyborg Side had gone on strike that morning. They had then descended on the major metalworks and munitions factories – shouting, banging on doors and pelting the windows with snowballs – to get the men, including those at the crucially important state Arsenal, to come out in sympathy.fn2 By midday 50,000 workers across the river had walked out. Some of them went straight home, but others marched to the Liteiny Bridge to cross over to the Nevsky Prospekt and swell the ranks of the Women’s Day marchers, only to encounter police cordons on the bridge barring their way. The more determined among them had scrambled down onto the frozen river and made their way across the ice instead; others managed to get through the police block at the Troitsky Bridge from the Petrograd Side, only to be forced back by police when they crossed the Neva.
On the Field of Mars, Harper and Thompson watched as several men and women were raised up on the shoulders of others, shouting, ‘Let’s stop talking and act.’ A few of the women began singing the Marseillaise. ‘It was a queer Russian version that one couldn’t quite recognize at first,’ recalled Harper. ‘I have heard the “Marseillaise” sung many times, but that day for the first time I heard it sung as it should be.’ This was because, she asserted, ‘the people there were of the same classes and were singing it for the same reason as the French who first sang it over a hundred years ago.’14 As the crowd moved off, heading for the Nevsky, ‘a tram came swinging round the corner’. They forced it to stop, took the control handle and ‘threw it away in a snowbank’. The same happened to a second, third and fourth tram, ‘until the blocked cars extended all the way along the Sadovaya to the Nevsky Prospekt’.15 One tram full of wounded soldiers in the care of nurses even joined in, as the crowd, now numbering about five hundred, surged forward, still singing the Marseillaise, the women holding boldly to the centre of the Nevsky as the men took to the pavements.
Thompson and Harper found themselves carried along with the tide. Every policeman they passed tried to stop the marchers, but the women just kept on forging ahead, shouting, laughing and singing.16 Walking at the head of the column, Thompson saw a man next to him tie a red flag onto a cane and start waving it in the air. He decided that such a conspicuous position at the head of the marchers was ‘no place for an innocent boy from Kansas’.17 ‘Bullets had a way of hitting innocent bystanders,’ he told Harper, ‘so let’s beat it, while the going is good.’
That day, in response to increasing tension in the city, the commandant of the Petrograd garrison, General Sergey Khabalov, had had posters pasted on walls at every street corner, reassuring the public that ‘There should be no shortage in bread for sale’: if stocks were low in some bakeries, this was because people were buying more than they needed and hoarding it. ‘There is sufficient rye flour in Petrograd,’ the proclamation insisted. ‘The delivery of this
flour continues without interruption.’18 It was clear that the government had run out of excuses for the bread crisis – lack of fuel, heavy snow, rolling stock commandeered for military purposes, shortage of labour – and the people would not be fobbed off any longer. Hunger was rife, fierce and implacable in half a million empty bellies across the working-class factory districts. Times correspondent Robert Wilton was appalled at official dilatoriness in dealing with the shortages: ‘Here was a patent confession of laxity. Whom was it expected to satisfy? The Socialists who had already made up their minds for revolution, or the dissatisfied “man in the street” who did not want revolution, but pined for relief from an incapable Government?’19 An urgent conference of ministers was being held at the Duma that day, the people were told, to settle the food crisis and organise the revictualling of Petrograd. But by now the crowds were convinced that the bakers were deliberately withholding bread from them.
As the day went on, the ranks of women marchers in and around the Nevsky swelled to around 90,000. ‘The singing by this time had become a deep roar,’ recalled Thompson, ‘terrifying, but at the same time fascinating.’ There was ‘fearful excitement everywhere’.20 Once more the Cossacks ‘appeared as if by magic’, as J. Butler Wright observed, their long lances glancing in the sunshine. Thompson watched them time and again attempt to scatter the columns of marching women by charging them at a gallop, brandishing their nagaikas (short whips), but the women merely regrouped, cheering the Cossacks wildly each time they charged.21 When one woman stumbled and fell in front of them, they jumped their horses right over her. People were surprised: these Cossacks weren’t the ‘fierce guardsmen of Tsardom whom the crowds had seen at work in 1905’, when hundreds of protesters had been killed in the Bloody Sunday protest. This time they were quite ‘amiable’, playful even; they seemed eager to capitulate to the mood of the people, and took their hats off and ‘waved them to the crowd’ as they moved them on.22 It turned out that many of the Cossacks were reserves, their reticence about driving the people back compounded by the difficulty some of them had in handling their horses, which were unused to crowds.23 So long as they only asked for bread, the Cossacks told the marchers, they would not be on the receiving end of gunfire. There were, inevitably, many agents provocateurs in their midst, eager to turn the protest into a violent one, but for the most part the crowd remained ‘good tempered’, as Arthur Ransome noted in that day’s despatch to the Daily News. He hoped there would be no serious conflict. ‘The general character of excitement,’ he concluded was, for now, ‘vague and artificial’ and without political focus.24
And so it went on, until six in the evening. As the mob surged to the constant drumbeat calls for khleb (bread), the Cossacks charged and scattered people in all directions, ‘but there was no real trouble’. The police had rounded up anyone who had attempted to stop and give speeches, but protesters had otherwise walked the streets with their red flags all day long and, much to Thompson’s surprise, had not been fired on. But he knew this was not the end of it: ‘I smell trouble,’ he wrote to his wife that evening, ‘and thank God I am here to get the photographs of it.’25
It was left to the tsarist police to finally disperse the crowds, who had largely gone home by 7.00 p.m. as the cold of evening drew in. But public antipathy and violence towards the police was growing, in particular towards the special mounted police on their black stallions, whom people despised as faraony, ‘pharaohs’ – that is, tyrants (an allusion to the ‘tall shaving-brush busbies of black horsehair’ that they wore). ‘Their appearance wiped the smile away,’ noticed Arno Dosch-Fleurot, ‘and when they began really roughing the crowd with their sabres drawn’, he heard ‘the first murmuring of the snarl which only an infuriated mob can produce’.26
Across the river, in the industrial quarters, acts of sporadic violence had erupted throughout the day. On the Petrograd Side at Filippov’s large bakery – a Moscow franchise that supplied many of the bakers in the city daily by rail – the babushki in the bread line had finally lost patience after standing in the cold for hours, only to be told there would be no bread that day.27 They had broken in the front door and raided the place; it was later said that they had ‘found quantities of black bread in the rear storerooms’. Grocery stores nearby had had their windows smashed, too; in another bakery that was stormed, the babushki who had led the assault found white bread rolls ‘meant for the restaurants’. After breaking the bakery’s windows, they took the rolls and sold them off for a quarter of the price to those desperate for bread.28
That evening Harper and Thompson ventured across the Troitsky Bridge to find out what was going on in the industrial districts. They found the street in some places ‘jammed with excited men and women’ and stayed until 11.00 p.m., when Thompson noticed that rather too many people were eyeing Harper’s expensive seal coat. Boris, their translator, advised a speedy exit; he’d overheard some of the women say that ‘she ought to have her face cut to pieces’. ‘Look how she is dressed! Yes, she gets bread but we get nothing.’29 The women clearly had mistaken Harper for a rich Russian. Hurrying back to the Astoria at midnight, the two journalists were stopped several times by police and had their papers checked. They couldn’t help noticing that a ‘great many troops were patrolling the city’ – for that day a disorganised and elemental force had finally been let loose on Petrograd. The flame of revolution had been lit among the hungry marchers on the Nevsky and the strikers across the river. Throughout the night strike-committees in the Petrograd and Vyborg Sides were plotting to seize the moment. Revolution – ‘so long talked of, dreaded, fought against, planned for, longed for, died for’ – had come at last, ‘like a thief in the night, none expecting it, none recognizing it’.30
Overnight the levels of disquiet in Petrograd rose considerably, as rumours spread about the introduction of a ‘bread ticket system’. Resentment was further fuelled by the fact that the bread was being released for sale at times when people were at work and could not go out to queue to buy it. On Friday 24 February things took an inevitable, violent turn: more bakers’ shops were attacked and destroyed, and as Arthur Ransome reported to the Daily News, such was the desperation for food now that people even ‘seized bread from those who had succeeded in buying it’.31
It was another bright and sunny morning, and a five-degree rise in the temperature to -4.5 degrees had encouraged huge crowds to come out of doors and gather again on the Nevsky.32 Anticipating an escalation in protests, General Khabalov had posted further proclamations overnight announcing that ‘all gatherings on the streets are absolutely forbidden’ and warning that he had commanded his troops ‘to use their arms freely and to stop at nothing in maintaining order’.33 An American working at the consulate in the Singer Building heard people talking of seeing ‘armoured street cars mounted with searchlights’ patrolling the city for several nights now, with ‘many machine guns sticking out of the portholes’. ‘All the police stations are full of machine guns, with soldiers dressed as policemen to handle them,’ he was told. ‘Rot,’ said someone else, ‘the soldier-boys won’t shoot at their own people.’34
The seething sense of resentment made itself felt especially on the few overcrowded trams that were still running. Many were already out of commission and stood idle and empty, with ‘no one to repair them and no new ones’; others had been derailed and even overturned by the crowds.35 Everyone on the streets that morning seemed ‘sure now of having a spectacle’, as Arno Dosch-Fleurot noted. He was out among them near the Kazan Cathedral. Green student caps were conspicuous everywhere, and one of the students told him that ‘the universities had gone on strike in sympathy with the bread demonstration’.36 The shops were open, however, and the city still had ‘a certain effervescence’, with most people on foot and less willing to move on, when ordered by the police, than they had been the previous day.37
People were crossing the Neva all morning from the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides, where a succession of excited factory meetings
had been held. Most of the workers there had gone on strike and had been urged to arm themselves with ‘bolts, screws, rocks’, even lumps of ice, and go out and ‘start smashing the first shops you find’.38 En route to the Liteiny Bridge, strikers had once more targeted the bakeries; scuffles had broken out, followed by looting. The route across the bridge was again blocked by soldiers and Cossacks, though the latter refused to charge the strikers when ordered to do so. Once again the strikers resorted to the ice – around five thousand of them – to cross to the city centre.39 From the windows of their Chancellery, French diplomats Louis de Robien and Charles de Chambrun saw them making their way over the Neva ‘like a chain of black ants’ ‘in Indian file’, as they weaved in and out of ‘conglomerated blocks of ice and thick snow’. The Cossacks on the other side watched them, galloping up and down the embankment, ‘very picturesque on their little horses’ and brandishing lances and carbines; but they did not venture on to the ice to stop the strikers.40
By midday there were about 36,800 people marching on the streets of central Petrograd.41 The trams had come to a standstill and, with the roads impassable, the izvozchiki (droshky drivers) had given up and taken their horses home. The crowds continued to push and shove their way forward, squeezing past and even under the bellies of the Cossacks’ horses when they tried to bar their way. French resident Amélie de Néry sensed a difference between these protesters and the ‘elated and mystical’ ones of 1905, whose marching had had the air of a religious ceremonial. These 1917 crowds were realists, she noted. ‘Two years of war had hardened them far more than a century of tranquillity and peace could have done.’42 As they progressed, the crowds were ‘met by a good deal of bullying and harrying by police and troops’ – again without the use of lethal weapons.’43 The Cossack squadrons caracoling over the snow on their wiry little horses continued to surprise with their restraint, even as more and more red flags appeared among the columns of marchers. Whenever they halted, ‘the men and women gathered about them and invited them to join them’. ‘You’re ours,’ they shouted at them, as the Cossacks smiled and parted to let them through. ‘You are not going to fire on us, Brothers! We only want bread!’ Times reporter Robert Wilton heard them say to the armed troops they encountered. ‘No, we are hungry like yourselves,’ replied the Cossacks.44
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