When things quietened down, people rushed to help the wounded. Philip Chadbourn saw ‘two young workmen in high boots and black reefers’ who were ‘lying on their backs, with blood running from their mouths’. ‘As I stood over them and looked into their unseeing eyes, a woman stooped, peered into their faces, shuddered and said, “What a shame! Boys, only boys!”’50 Nearby, ‘six men wearing green students’ caps’ passed, who were ‘bearing over their heads in the street a corpse on a sign-board’. Others stopped a passing limousine; they made the two occupants get out, placed wounded civilians inside and ordered the chauffeur to take them to the hospital. Chadbourn saw the same thing happen ‘with two private sleighs’. Elsewhere, the wounded and dead were carried away by the crowd; others were left lying in huddles until horse-drawn and motor ambulances came along and picked them up.
With its 180 beds full of wounded from the front, the ARH could offer little other than first aid to a dozen or so victims who were brought in rapidly, many of them dying almost as soon as they arrived, as Edith Hegan recalled.51 She and her fellow nurses did what they could for the wounded, ‘but at night the authorities took them away, except two or three who were too near death to be moved’. Eighteen more wounded were carried into the city Duma a short way down the Nevsky from the ARH, which students had helped turn into a makeshift Red Cross station. All afternoon Lady Sybil Grey saw the motor ambulances pass by unceasingly up and down the street. In a single hospital three hundred wounded were taken in. There were another sixty at the Mariinsky Hospital on the Liteiny and more than one hundred at the Obukhov Hospital on the Fontanka.52
In the early evening the ‘most sanguinary episode in the Revolution’, as Robert Wilton later described it, had occurred at Znamensky Square, where a dense mass of people from the Nevsky had converged with another crowd coming up Ligovskaya, the major thoroughfare to the south of the square.53 ‘Local police leaders on horseback rode among the crowd ordering them home,’ recalled Dr Joseph Clare, pastor of the American Church,fn4 who witnessed the scene. ‘The people knew the soldiers were on their side and refused to move.’ Lined up in front of a hotel facing the square were men from the 1st and 2nd training detachments of the Volynsky Regiment. When their commander ordered them to disperse the crowd, the soldiers begged the crowds to move on, so they would not have to use their weapons, but the people refused to budge. Angrily the officer had one of the reluctant soldiers arrested for insubordination and again ordered his men to fire. ‘They shot in the air, and the officer got mad, making each individual fire into the mob,’ recalled Clare. Finally he raised his own pistol and started firing into the crowd. Then ‘suddenly came the rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun. The people could hardly believe their ears, but there was no doubting the evidence of eyes as they saw people falling.’54 Robert Wilton saw it, too: the Maxim gun placed on the roof of a nearby building – probably the one Donald Thompson had seen the previous day – had opened fire on the crowd. But this time something extraordinary happened: the troop of Cossacks positioned in the square had turned and fired at the gunners on the house tops. ‘It was a veritable pandemonium,’ Wilton recalled, as ‘with a great howl of rage’ the crowd scattered behind buildings and into courtyards, from where some of them began firing at the military and police. Forty or so were killed and hundreds wounded.55
The ‘fratricidal roar’ of fighting continued to echo across the Nevsky until dark, with small, independent groups of people constantly looking for trouble, some of them armed; the mob was ‘on the qui vive with excitement’, Philip Chadbourn recalled, but with the city such a sprawl and the streets so wide, incidents often took place disconnected from each other and it took time before word was transmitted in respect of what was going on where.56 As one American noticed, it was the ‘queerest sensation’ that day ‘to find it so quiet in certain sections, and the next minute to round a corner and find an ambulance picking up the dead and wounded’.57 Arthur Ransome had telegraphed that he had ‘scuttled’ round a street corner to get out of the way of machine-gun fire, only to find ‘four men peacefully scraping ice from pavements with hoes’.58 The truth was that, with so much random firing, no one knew who was friend or foe and it was a difficult and dangerous news story for any journalist to follow.
Exhausted though she was, Florence Harper’s professional instincts had kept her out until early evening: ‘It was too exciting in the streets.’ Back at the Astoria, she had overheard a fat Chicago shoe salesman bewailing the fact that he would never ‘have his wild tales of running six blocks from the mobs and the fighting’ believed, when he ‘sat over a stein of beer, surrounded by a few congenial souls in his favourite café in Chicago’. ‘They will just call me a liar!’ he wailed. He found himself stranded at the Astoria, it being too dangerous to go back to his hotel at the Nicholas Station, and he would spend the next three days there repeating his tale of miraculous survival. ‘I hope his friends in Chicago did believe him,’ Harper later wrote, because – like herself and Thompson and many other foreign observers that day – ‘he was there and in it all.’59
None of them, however, knew exactly how many had been killed on Sunday: Robert Wilton thought two hundred at least; others, like Harper and Thompson, had noted the dead and wounded at particular points of conflict – some the victims of machine guns and crossfire in and around the Nevsky and Znamensky Square, others ridden down by the faraony or killed from falling under the horses of the Cossacks. But the casualties had been carried off in all directions: to hospitals, to temporary dressing points, to the morgues or simply back home by friends and relatives. Nobody was counting. However many died, the evidence of the day’s violence was everywhere to be seen, as Robert Wilton noted: ‘I saw hundreds of empty cartridge cases littering the snow, which was deluged in blood.’60
After dark, when the crowds had cleared from the Nevsky, the soldiers involved in the shootings at Znamensky Square and on the Nevsky had returned to their barracks, angry and upset that they had been forced to fire on the crowds. Robert Wilton had walked to the British embassy to call on a shocked Sir George Buchanan, who had just managed to get the last train back to Petrograd from his brief holiday in Finland, to find himself in the midst of a revolution. ‘I was walking through the Summer Garden when the bullets began to whiz over my head,’ Wilton remembered.61 One hundred of the Pavlovsky guards in their nearby barracks on the Field of Mars, hearing how earlier in the day members of the 4th Company had been ordered to open fire on crowds near the junction of the Sadovaya and the Nevsky, had decided to take action. The police, they were convinced, had been ‘provoking bloodshed’.62 These men had set out for the Nevsky with a few rifles and ammunition, intent on dissuading their comrades from shooting on demonstrators, when they were confronted by mounted faraony. Firing broke out, but the soldiers had soon run out of ammunition and were forced back to their barracks, where they gave themselves up. The nineteen ringleaders were arrested and were incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress; the rest were confined to barracks. There was an immediate clampdown on news of the mutiny, but soon word was out.63
That evening, actress Paulette Pax headed back to the Mikhailovsky Theatre, wondering if the scheduled performance of L’Idée de Françoise would go ahead. When she arrived she found her fellow actors all extremely upset and full of stories of the day’s atrocities. They had no stomach for farce that evening, and the auditorium was practically empty. But the rule was that a performance would only be cancelled if the audience numbered fewer than seven. Pax groaned when the box office rose above that low bar; but, to their credit, the actors took to the stage and performed the play ‘as though to a full house’.64
Two members of that small audience were British embassy official Hugh Walpole and Arno Dosch-Fleurot, who thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Stella Arbenina, an Englishwoman married to Baron Meyendorff, was there, too. Everything had been ‘perfectly quiet’ on the streets when she had arrived, and she had sent her coachman and horses home, not wanting to keep the
m waiting in the cold for two hours. On entering the theatre, she had been dismayed to find that although the French plays usually filled the auditorium to capacity, there were only about fifty people present and all of them ‘looking as out of place and apologetic as ourselves’. Quite the worst moment, though, came during the interval, when any Russian officers present in the audience were obliged, by tradition, to stand and face the imperial box, an ‘act of empty homage’ to an absent tsar.65
At the Mariinsky Theatre – a venue usually filled to bursting – a performance of the ballet La Source had also played to a half-empty auditorium. Down on the Fontanka, the much-anticipated party at Princess Radziwill’s palace went ahead as planned, although the carriages bringing guests had been refused entry to the Nevsky and had had to go the long way round. Charles de Chambrun and Claude Anet were there and noted how preoccupied the guests were, though everybody ‘tr[ied] to dance in spite of it’. Anet watched as Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich took to the dance floor; was he witnessing this scion of the Russian aristocracy dancing ‘his last tango’, he wondered? Bertie Stopford was also present, soaking up one last gasp of old-style imperial decadence; he stuck it out till 4.00 a.m., when Prince Radziwill sent him home to his hotel in his own car, as ‘occasional bullets still whistled up and down’.66
Maurice Paléologue was exhausted, having spent the whole day ‘literally besieged by anxious members of the French colony’ wanting to get out of Petrograd. He went out to dinner with a friend that evening rather than attend the Radziwill party. But on his way home he passed the palace and saw a long line of cars and carriages waiting outside. The party was still in full swing, but he was not tempted to join it. As he noted in his diary that night, Sénac de Meilhan, historian of the French Revolution, had written that there had also been ‘plenty of gaiety in Paris on the night of the 5th October, 1789!’67
As late-night partygoers made their way home there was a terrible eeriness about the city. Stella Arbenina had noticed it after leaving the Mikhailovsky Theatre. Normally the square outside would be full of activity – coaches, sledges and motor cars waiting to take theatregoers home, and a ‘gay crowd of people wrapped in furs’. But that night the square had been ‘completely empty’; there was not a taxi or sledge to be had, and she had been obliged to walk home in the moonlight and the intense cold. ‘Every now and then we heard a distant shot far away, but the streets we walked through were completely deserted.’ The silence was ominous and made the ‘creaking of the snow under our feet seem disproportionately loud’. Petrograd seemed like a dead city.
Claude Anet noticed the same false air of ‘tranquillity’. Petrograd was ‘deserted, lugubrious, hardly lighted at all’. Cordons of troops were still out, guarding the Nevsky at barricades at every intersection. Here and there groups of Cossacks could be seen patrolling in the snow, enveloped by white steam rising from their horses’ backs. It was like passing through one great military camp, recalled Anet.68 Norman Armour, who had stayed late at the Radziwill party, noticed it too as he walked back to his apartment overlooking the Neva: ‘I felt I might have been back in the days of the Crimean War,’ he recalled. It was bitterly cold and ‘the sentries in the streets had built fires and had stacked their guns near them, just as you see in old paintings in the Hermitage’.69 The only illumination came from the powerful beam of a searchlight mounted on the spire of the Admiralty tower, raking up and down the deserted Nevsky, which ‘stretched ahead a broad streak of ghastly white’ under its glare.70
Over at the state Duma in the Tauride Palace, frantic meetings had been taking place all day. Frustrated at the continuing lack of a response from the Tsar, Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko had seized the initiative and telegraphed him at Stavka about the gravity of the situation, warning that anarchy reigned in the capital, that food, fuel and transport supplies were in chaos and – in an attempt to galvanise him – asserting that the government was ‘paralyzed’. It was perhaps an overstatement and it ran counter to General Khabalov’s messages to Nicholas, which had sought to assure the Tsar that everything was under control. Rodzianko was insistent, however, that in order to defuse the dangerous situation it was essential that a new government in which the people had confidence be formed immediately. Fearful of a coup within the Duma, Prime Minister Golitsyn had stepped in and pre-empted Rodzianko by proroguing it, instead of the Duma waiting for Nicholas’s reply. (Nicholas, as it turned out, had decided no answer was necessary.) Rodzianko was outraged: the Duma was the constituted authority of Russia, he insisted; its prorogation was a violation of Russian law. He urged his colleagues to rally round and defend it, and a temporary committee was hurriedly organised.71
Revolution had now been articulated politically: in the seat of government, by some of the guards regiments, and by the once fiercely loyal Cossacks. The workers, outraged at the indiscriminate firing on the crowds that weekend, had formed their own militias and spent that Sunday night plotting not only to continue the strike and demonstrations, but also to seize weapons and turn the protest movement into nothing less than an armed uprising. ‘Since one o’clock today it has been a bloody Sunday for Russia,’ Donald Thompson wrote to his wife when he was finally back at the Astoria that evening. He had been out walking the freezing cold streets till 3.30 a.m., flashing his US passport to get through the barricades and returning at regular intervals to warm up, before he finally sat down. Wherever he had gone that evening he had encountered ‘ugly looking mobs’. He had heard the rumours of mutiny among some of the troops. ‘If this spreads to other regiments, Russia will be a republic in a few more hours,’ he told her.72 Everything now depended on how the disaffected troops – in particular the Pavlovsky, Volynsky and Preobrazhensky Regiments – would respond on Monday. ‘I wish you would send me some sugar,’ he added. ‘I also need some quinine and aspirin tablets.’ He wasn’t feeling well. But, as things turned out, he wouldn’t have a chance to write again for the next three days.
4
‘A Revolution Carried on by Chance’
ALL THROUGH SUNDAY, Leighton Rogers and his colleagues from the National City Bank had been stranded at their office on Palace Embankment, it being too dangerous for them to leave the building and go back to their various lodgings. They had sat there all afternoon and evening, ‘listening to the crackling rifles, the ripping machine-guns, and wondering what it all meant.’ To them ‘it sounded worse than it really was’, Rogers concluded; but they took no risks and kept the lights off. When it got so dark that they couldn’t see, they had to stop reading and writing letters, by which time it had all got too much for Chester Swinnerton. Known to his colleagues as the ‘Count’, for the flamboyant twirly moustache that matched his bravado, Harvard graduate Swinnerton got to his feet and proclaimed with a theatrical gesture that they were ‘a great bunch of Americans’ and shouldn’t be afraid of a ‘little shooting’. ‘What’s the use of sitting here all night?’ he asked, ‘a bullet can come through the window and pick you off as well as it can in the street. I’m not going to stay; I’m going to walk home, the firing be damned, and sleep in a good bed. Good night.’1
With that, Swinnerton donned his hat, coat and galoshes and slammed the door. He hadn’t gone far when he encountered a ‘little insignificant cuss’, holding in his hand ‘a pistol big enough for a real man. It wasn’t one of our nice little snub nose revolvers, but a real pistol, and in his hands it didn’t appeal to me in the least’. Realising he had encountered the new revolutionary everyman, of whom there were many now prowling the streets with weapons they hardly knew how to handle – and seeing a mob of fifty more or so in the distance, firing at random – Swinnerton decided to ‘beat it back to the bank’. His colleagues heard a burst of rifle and machine-gun fire as Swinnerton came rushing back in through the door. ‘Well, I guess I won’t go home after all,’ he said sheepishly. ‘It’s cold there and warm here.’2
That night, after sharing out the few cigars and cigarettes they had left, they all bedded down as
best they could under their heavy greatcoats. The incongruity of their sumptuous situation – sleeping on ornate gold couches under cut-glass chandeliers, in what had been the former Turkish embassy’s big Moorish reception room – was hardly conducive to a restful night.3fn1 They would spend the whole of Monday there, too, living on black bread, cabbage soup and tea. Occasionally one or other of them would dash outside to see ‘if there was anything to be seen’ and, upon discovering that indeed there was – far too much for comfort, in fact – would dash back in again.4
During the weekend’s disturbances US ambassador David Francis had wisely taken note of official advice and stayed indoors. At his request, the embassy had been provided with an eighteen-man guard of soldiers, but he had been apprehensive that their ‘fidelity’ was of an ‘uncertain quality’.5 He was worried, too, about the risks being taken by his staff, some of whom had been hovering outside on the pavement rubber-necking what was going on. He ordered them to come inside and lock the gates.6 It was just as well, for events on what would become known as ‘Red Monday’ crowded thick and fast, in such a dislocated and unpredictable fashion that there was great danger of being caught in the crossfire.
It had been a huge shock to Meriel Buchanan, arriving back in Petrograd at eight o’clock that morning from a visit to friends in the country, to find there were no trams and no droshkies at the station to transport her and her luggage to the British embassy. She was forcibly struck by how Petrograd had been dramatically – irretrievably – transformed in her absence: ‘In the bleak, gray light of that early morning the town looked inexpressibly desolate and deserted, the bare, ugly street leading up from the station, with the dirty stucco houses on either side, seemed, after the snow-white peace of the country, somehow the very acme of dreariness.’7 But that wasn’t all: there was an air of dread and suspense about the city that made her anxious parents glad to have her back. She spent most of that morning shut up and ‘forbidden to go out . . . sitting on the big staircase of the Embassy gleaning what information [she] could from the various people who came and went’.
Caught in the Revolution Page 10