By 11.00 a.m. it was clear that the capital was in the thick of a revolution, for by then disturbances had assumed ‘formidable proportions’, shifting away from the Nevsky and focusing on the northern end of the Liteiny, around the District Court – one and a half blocks away from the US embassy on Furshtatskaya, and closer as well to the British embassy on the Palace Embankment.8 Although David Francis would be at his desk all day Monday, trying to make sense of the turbulent events of the last few days in a long despatch to Washington – and hampered by the loss of the phone line, which had been vandalised – Sir George Buchanan had insisted at 11.30 a.m. on taking his usual morning drive with his French colleague Paléologue to the Russian Foreign Ministry.9 Both men had been extremely blunt with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nikolay Pokrovsky, as Buchanan reported later in a ciphered telegram to London. It was an ‘act of madness to prorogue the Duma at a moment like the present’, Buchanan had told him, for doing so would make it impossible to contain the revolt. Pokrovsky’s assurance that a ‘military dictator’ would be appointed, and troops sent by Nicholas from the front to ‘quell the mutiny’, only alarmed the two ambassadors further. Yet again, they wearily concluded, Nicholas had failed to choose the path of conciliation and political concession. Such draconian, repressive policies – of which the reactionary Protopopov was the chief architect – would do nothing, Buchanan argued, but inflame the situation and bring Russia ‘face to face with revolution’ at what was now a decisive stage in the war.10 Paléologue shared Buchanan’s gloom, reflecting on his own country’s turbulent history: ‘In 1789, 1830 and 1848, three French dynasties were overthrown because they were too late in realizing the significance and strength of the movement against them.’11
Events had, in fact, taken a decisive turn in the early hours of Monday 27 February when the army, as many had predicted, began mutinying. At 3.00 a.m. in his room at the Hotel de France, Arno Dosch-Fleurot had heard ‘lively rifle fire’ nearby. He got dressed to go and investigate, but the roads were closed and he couldn’t get through. He could tell, however, that the firing was coming from the Volynsky Regiment’s barracks near the junction of the Moika River and Ekaterininsky Canal. Overnight, and following the example of the Pavlovskys, some of the Volynskys, who had been ordered to fire on the crowds on Sunday, had decided to mutiny.12 When the soldiers lined up for duty, some of them turned on their commanding officer and shot him dead. They were unable, however, to persuade the rest of the regiment to join them, and so they headed off to incite other regiments, picking up a rabble of civilian supporters along the way. Maurice Paléologue had been dressing when, at around 8.30, he had heard a ‘prolonged din’ coming from the direction of the Liteiny Bridge. He saw a regiment of men approaching a disorderly mob of people crossing from the Vyborg Side and anticipated a ‘violent collision’, but instead ‘the two bodies coalesced’. ‘The army was fraternizing with revolt.’13 Already a point had been reached that morning from which there would be no turning back.
The coming together of troops and revolutionists gathered rapid speed as the Volynsky mutineers headed to the depot battalion of the Preobrazhensky and Lithuanian Regiments, as well as the 6th Engineer Battalion – all located close to their own barracks, and most of whom soon joined them, the last-named even bringing their marching band. By the end of the day the commanders of a battalion of the Preobrazhensky and a battalion of the Volynsky had been killed by their men, as well as numerous other officers. The desertion of the Preobrazhenskys from their barracks near the Winter Palace was particularly damaging, for they were the finest of the old guards regiments, legendary as the ‘chief pride and protection of the Russian monarchy’ and, like the Cossacks, they had until now been a bulwark of imperial authority.14 Donald Thompson had got caught up among the triumphant mutinying troops as he crossed the Field of Mars on his way to the US embassy that morning: ‘Soldiers were firing volleys into the air with their rifles . . . Instead of treating me as an enemy, several of them threw their arms about me and kissed me.’ He had his camera and started taking photographs; they were all eager to pose for him, and nobody took any notice when he stopped to photograph the corpses of ‘twenty-two officers who had been killed’ in the mutiny earlier that morning.15fn2
In those first few hours most of the rebellious soldiers appeared disorientated and numbed by the momentous decision they had made, and for some time they had no sense of where to go and what to do, other than incite other regiments to join them. One group forced their way past a training detachment of the Moskovsky Regiment guarding the Liteiny Bridge and marched to the Moskovsky’s barracks on Sampsonievksy on the Vyborg Side. Here, a portion of the regiment was eventually persuaded to join them in the afternoon, accompanied by motor lorries full to the brim with looted rifles; meanwhile the better-disciplined Bicycle Battalion, the only armed unit in the city, resisted all inducements to join in.16 Elsewhere, such was the euphoria among the rebellious troops that many simply walked around shouting, cheering and arguing among themselves ‘like schoolboys broken out of school’. For a while leadership, as such, of the mobs of soldiers and civilians devolved to acts of spontaneous bravado or rabble-rousing on street corners. But one objective was clear: the mutineers had to arm themselves.
With that in mind, at around 10.00 a.m. a group descended on the Old Arsenal at the top of the Liteiny at the junction of Shpalernaya, which housed both the Artillery Department and a small-arms factory. This group smashed in the gates and killed the elderly colonel in charge.17 British military attaché Major-General Sir Alfred Knox had been in the building, conferring with Russian colleagues, when he had seen ‘a great disorderly mass of soldiery, stretching right across the wide street and both pavements’. They had no officer in charge, but were led instead by ‘a diminutive but immensely dignified student’.18 Knox and his colleagues crowded round the windows to watch what would happen. There was an ‘uncanny silence’; then the sound of the windows and door on the ground floor being smashed in. As firing broke out, the crowd surged through, killing and wounding several of those on duty. In a mad frenzy rifles, revolvers, swords, daggers, ammunition and machine guns – whatever came to hand – were eagerly looted by soldiers and civilians alike. Looking over the banisters, Knox could see them snatching the swords of Artillery Department officers as they left the building, while ‘a few hooligans were going through the pockets of coats left in the vestibule’. They even broke the glass of display cases to remove rifles – even though these were ‘specimens of the armament of other nations that were without ammunition and would be of no use to them’.19
Outside on the Liteiny, by around 11.00 a.m. others had turned their attention to the hated bastions of tsarism – the nearby District Court and Palace of Justice, together with an adjoining remand prison. The prison was quickly burst open; its mainly criminal inmates awaiting trial were set free and handed weapons as they left, and the prison was set on fire. The District Court was torched, too, thus destroying all the criminal records contained within – a symbolic act that was also clearly to the advantage of all those freed convicts.20 The ensuing conflagration, however, not only destroyed police records, but also valuable historical archives dating back to the reign of Catherine the Great; and when the fire-engine crews arrived, the mob prevented them from tackling the blaze. French newspaperman Claude Anet saw how ‘an elderly man, fastidiously dressed, was wringing his hands’ at the sight of the building now ‘vomiting flames’. ‘Don’t you realize that all the Court records, archives of value beyond price, are perishing in the flames?’ he cried, to which a rough voice from the crowd answered him: ‘Don’t worry! We shall be able to divide your houses and land among the people without the help of any of your precious archives!’ – a response that was greeted with ‘a roar of delight’.21
Over at the US embassy, where he was meeting Ambassador Francis (who seemed to him ‘very cool and collected’), Donald Thompson had got word that it was all happening down on the Liteiny. He hurried the
re with Boris and Florence Harper, to find ‘a mob of about a million people, it seemed to me; and this mob was out for blood’, armed ‘with every weapon you can think of’.22 He started taking surreptitious photographs with his small camera, nervous of being mistaken for a police spy, and noticed an English photographer for the Daily Mirrorfn3 and Claude Anet doing likewise. Anet had run back to his hotel room to get his camera and had been taking photographs from behind a car on the Liteiny, when he was spotted and quickly found himself pinned against a wall by three bayonets. As the soldiers harangued him, a young female student had joined them and ‘began to denounce me fiercely’. He told them he was a Frenchman, a journalist. Did they want to see his papers? ‘Take the films,’ he said to them ‘and leave me the camera. I am your ally.’ Things were getting extremely ugly when someone sprang forward, snatched the camera from Anet’s hands and made off with it. He was dismayed at having lost ‘a valuable Goerz lens’.23
Thompson did not fare well, either. He found himself virtually transfixed by the vortex of violence on the Liteiny, with people all around him running about screaming, ‘Kill the police!’ – when suddenly he himself was arrested and hauled off to the police station. He showed them his US press pass, but he and Boris were locked in a suffocating small cell with about twenty others, the sound of rifle- and machine-gun fire all around, shouts and screams and the ‘smashing of doors and the crashing of glass’ – ‘a roar such as I never heard before in my life,’ he recalled. And there they languished while Boris tried to convince the police that the ‘Amerikansky’ was genuine. It wasn’t long before the mob broke into the police station, smashed the lock to his cell and the next thing he and Boris knew, ‘people were throwing their arms around Boris and me and kissing us, saying that we were free’. In the front office, as he made his way out, he ‘found a sight beyond description’: ‘Women were down on their knees hacking the bodies of the police to pieces.’ He saw one woman ‘trying to tear somebody’s face with her bare fingers’.24
The Liteiny was by now a scene of ‘indescribable confusion’, ablaze from the fires at the District Court and Palace of Justice, the air thick with the crackle of random shooting. An abandoned, overturned tram was being used as a platform from which a succession of speakers attempted to harangue the mob, but Louis de Robien recalled how it was ‘impossible to make head or tail of the disorderly ebb and flow of all these panic-stricken people running in every direction’.25 After the stampede on the New Arsenal, three field guns – which no one knew how to operate – had been dragged out from the gun factory, along with trench mortars and a considerable stock of ammunition, and placed at a hastily made barricade of piles of crates, carts, tables and office furniture in front of the District Court, which commanded the whole length of the Liteiny down to the Nevsky. This was backed up by machine guns on the brow of the Liteiny Bridge behind them, in case any loyal tsarist troops should arrive from the northern side.26 When a group of still-loyal Semenovskys did arrive, there was a pitched battle between them and a company of Volynsky mutineers – watched by groups of civilians huddled into side passages and doorways, many of them women and children tempted out by the ‘spirit of curiosity’, and who then took enormous risks, ‘walking out calmly under a lively fire to drag back the wounded’.27 James Houghteling saw the wounded being carried off as fast as they fell, leaving behind ‘long trails of fresh blood’ in the snow. He was astonished to see how, in between bouts of fighting, civilians scuttled back and forth across the Liteiny, intent on carrying on shopping as normal, even lining up outside the bakeries and dispersing only when they heard machine-gun fire. To many of the bewildered civilian population, the events swirling around them were unreal, ‘as though they were watching some melodrama in one of their cinematographs’.28
Such was the abandon with which weapons looted from army barracks, the arsenal, prisons and police stations were handed out to all and sundry that crowds of civilians, workers and soldiers were soon parading round gleefully, brandishing them and firing off at random, as British mechanical engineer James Stinton Jones encountered:
Here would be a hooligan with an officer’s sword fastened over his overcoat, a rifle in one hand and a revolver in the other; there a small boy with a large butcher’s knife on his shoulder. Close by a workman would be seen awkwardly holding an officer’s sword in one hand and a bayonet in the other. One man had two revolvers, another a rifle in one hand and a tram-line cleaner in the other. A student with two rifles and a belt of machine-gun bullets round his waist was walking beside another with a bayonet tied to the end of a stick. A drunken soldier had only the barrel of a rifle remaining, the stock having been broken off in forcing an entry into some shop.29
Arthur Reinke of Westinghouse was alarmed by how freely weapons and ammunition were given to children: ‘It was an interesting . . . sight to see a young Russian boy of fifteen clumsily handling a gun and trying to fit a cartridge in place. Children walked about with huge cavalry sabers. Self-appointed student guards often were seen armed with Turkish sabers or Japanese swords with wonderfully carved handles.’ ‘Even street urchins seemed to have picked up revolvers, and were blazing away at stray pigeons,’ noted another.30
There was no safe haven for any officers seen walking the streets that day who did not immediately surrender their weapons, when challenged. Even women were on the attack; nurse Edith Hegan saw ‘one fierce officer, covered with decorations and looking very much annoyed, try to saunter down the Nevsky, pursued by a crowd of women who stripped him of his arms. His sword fell to a gray-haired woman who shrieked apparently uncomplimentary Russian epithets at him as she contemptuously bent the sword over her knee, broke it in two, and lightly tossed it into the canal.’31
By midday the rabble of weapon-toting civilians in and around the Liteiny had been joined by 25,000 soldiers from the Volynsky, Preobrazhensky, Litovsky, Keksgolmsky and Sapper Regiments. Arno Dosch-Fleurot recalled the dense crowd jamming the street for a quarter of a mile, ‘carried on by its own faith in itself’.32 Everywhere, amidst the mighty roar of revolutionary excitement, the singing and cheering and shouting, the fighting colour of scarlet was in evidence – in crude revolutionary banners, in rosettes and armbands and in red ribbons tied to the barrels of rifles.
Events gained even greater momentum when the revolution went mobile. The major Military Garage in Petrograd was broken into and all the motor cars and some armoured trucks were taken.33 Private garages of the wealthy everywhere across the city were forced open, and their motor cars and swanky limousines summarily confiscated. These vehicles were promptly draped in red banners and driven madly up and down the Liteiny and elsewhere – often by inexperienced drivers who were delirious with the thrill of speed – crammed with soldiers with bayoneted rifles thrust out of the windows. Some cars had machine guns poking out of their smashed rear windows; armed rebels even lay along the car bonnets; but the most familiar form of revolutionary joyriding – and one vividly remembered by many eyewitnesses – was that of men riding shotgun, lying along the wide running boards of motor cars, their rifles at the ready. They would become the poster-boys of the revolution as, in the hours to come, these armoured motor cars and trucks played an important role in disseminating news of events. ‘Thunder[ing] back and forth through doubtful streets . . . they carried conviction of force.’ It was the presence of these cars and trucks that accounted for the rapid control of the city,’ in the opinion of American journalist Isaac Marcosson, covering events for Everybody’s Magazine. ‘It could not have been done afoot.’34
The liberation of prisoners from the remand prison next to the District Court was but one of many assaults on the city’s jails that day. The prisons were, along with the police, the primary targets of popular fury against the old regime. At around midday Major-General Knox had seen ‘a stream of troops . . . crossing the bridge to liberate the prisoners in the Krestovsky prison’.35 Known as The Kresty (meaning ‘crosses’, from its layout), this prison of solitary
confinement and its adjoining women’s prison had been built in 1893 on the northern bank of the Neva near the Finland Station to accommodate up to one thousand prisoners, but by 1917 was overcrowded, with more than double that number. It took surprisingly little effort for a small mob of fewer than one hundred to force its way in, shooting the commandant and liberating the inmates – political and criminal alike.
William J. Gibson, a Canadian who lived on the Vyborg Side, saw the first to be released: ‘Two men and a woman . . . walking towards me dazedly and holding hands as if blind. They wore coarse prison clothes, and the tears streamed down their cheeks. Although not old, all three were practically white-haired. They were political prisoners, and had been in close solitary confinement since 1905.’36 The trauma of such sudden and unexpected release, when all hope had long gone, was clear to see in the faces of many other ‘pale and trembling’ politicals, as they emerged from their long incarceration ‘looking very ill’. Having been confined in windowless cells, they were blinded by the daylight. Others were so weak they had to be carried outside, where they ‘grovelled on the ground and kissed the feet of their comrades who had liberated them’. A few were so overwhelmed that they simply sat down in the snow and wept. Perhaps the most emotive release came at the transportation prison behind the Nicholas Station on Znamensky Square, where, during tsarist rule, every Wednesday morning those condemned to Siberian exile – including the novelist Fyodor Dostoievsky in 1849 – were despatched by rail, chained together by the wrist in groups of 100–150.37
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