Caught in the Revolution
Page 15
But ‘grave anxiety’ remained among the diplomatic community as to the future, with the struggle between the new Soviet and the Executive Committee of the Duma intensifying. ‘So successful, in fact, had everything been, so far beyond men’s wildest hopes,’ Walpole noted, ‘that no one could believe that a sharp reverse was not in store.’ Quite simply, ‘it was all too good to be true’. Times correspondent Robert Wilton had been convinced from the start that ‘the institution of the Soviet was tantamount to preparing beforehand the overthrow of any Coalition Government’, and he could see the ‘utter hopelessness’ of the efforts of the moderates in the Duma to institute some form of democratic government.3
Foreign observers all wanted to see how this new power struggle would pan out, and many made their way to the Tauride Palace on Tuesday 28 February to watch history in the making. Troops had been arriving there all day from outlying areas to pledge their allegiance to the revolution, accompanied by endless deputations of workers and civilians. The Shpalernaya was ‘a wild concourse of disorganized troops and populace, all happy and good-natured,’ recalled James Houghteling, ‘a kaleidoscope of soldiers, armed and unarmed, civilians, mounted Cossacks, automobiles full of red-cross nurses and of uniformed students, and trucks packed tight with humanity and bristling with bayonets and red flags’. Amélie de Néry was caught up in the crowd, too: ‘the Christlike heads with fair or auburn beards of muzhiks, clean-shaven faces of soldiers, grimy lambskin coats, fur dresscoats, long-haired hats or student caps – all undulating, swelling or pitching like a sea!’ Amidst these dense crowds were ‘motor-lorries loaded with as many as thirty excited soldiers, motor-cars, batteries of guns, on which children were disporting themselves, patrols of cavalry’.4 Some students were there on horseback; the people called them the ‘black hussars’. Yet more lorries full of joyriding soldiers were arriving every minute and ‘unloading great trucks of provisions into the main entrance of the Tauride Palace, as if the national assembly expected to be besieged’.5
For young New Yorker Leighton Rogers, it was ‘a spectacle never to be forgotten’: ‘a shifting, wavering sea of faces now parting and billowing up against the walls as a new arrest borne in an open truck picked its way to the gates, now washing over the swathe again in eager restlessness. Now silent when some important personage mounted the gate to give instructions, now bursting into a mighty roar as some popular hero sifted through on his way to the halls.’6 James Houghteling saw some captured policemen brought in. ‘It seemed rather decent to give these hated enemies even a drumhead court-martial,’ he thought. Some of them were still wearing their black uniforms, a few were disguised as soldiers and others were dressed as dvorniki (doormen), who had a reputation for being police spies. But ‘the great bulk were broad-shouldered thugs only to be identified as policemen out of uniform’. ‘Some were heavily bandaged and had to be dragged along,’ Houghteling noticed. ‘A few fidgeted nervously and hung back, but most were surprisingly stolid.’ He expected to hear the inevitable volley of shots, but no, these policemen were not summarily shot, but were apparently taken off to ‘some extemporised prison’.7
Visitors accessing the Duma were now expected to produce ‘curious scraps of various paper which served as passes’, as George Bury recalled, and ‘which were inspected by volunteer students and schoolboys’. ‘Inside the courtyard the masses of soldiery and people were more tightly wedged than ever’: it took twenty minutes for him to cross some thirty yards of courtyard and mount the few entrance steps to the Duma portico. There was such a crush at the door that he had difficulty making his way through. By dint of a lot of polite pushing and shoving (‘May I pass, allies?’, ‘Let me through, little brothers’), Bury made his way through to the vast white-pillared Catherine Hall, ‘like a cathedral nave a hundred yards in length’, which was filled with ‘the same mob listening to impassioned speeches delivered from tables and chairs or the steps and balcony leading to the door for the higher tiers of seats in the legislative chamber’. A pitched battle for precedence was taking place; a cacophony of shouting by would-be speakers vying to be heard above the din: ‘soldiers, young officers, frenzied political orators, even an occasional deputy were busy tasting the sweets of “freedom of speech” for the first time for a dozen years past’. Bury sensed the release of long-held feelings repressed since the 1905 Revolution: ‘a little bit of Hyde Park on a Sunday morning in the forgotten days before the war’.8
The beautiful Tauride Palace had by now been transformed into one great warehouse. ‘Half the great rotunda, which serves as first antechamber, was filled with machine-guns and belts, ammunition boxes, and the like in great piles as if flung in anyhow, together with hundreds of rolls of soldiers’ cloth, and a heap of boots, all in the utmost disorder, balanced on the opposite side by a rampart ten feet high of sacks of flour,’ reported George Bury.9 The Circular Hall was equally piled high with provisions of all kinds, its fine parquet floor ‘strewn with cigarette ends and empty tins and papers and bags and cardboard boxes and even broken bottles’. Hugh Walpole despaired at the ‘dirt and desolation’ he saw, in the midst of which ‘a huge mass of men stirred and coiled and uncoiled like some huge ant-heap’, joined by yet more soldiers ‘tumbling in like puppies or babies with pieces of red cloth tied to their rifles, some singing, some laughing, some dumb with amazement’.10
Within the Tauride Palace the chaotic idealism of the first couple of days of revolution was now giving way to hard bargaining over the form of Russia’s future government. The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies had held its first plenary session that day, in an atmosphere that had been a far cry from the bourgeois restraint of the Duma’s former occupants. Instead, a motley crowd of vociferous factory workers and peasant soldiers, resembling ‘a giant village assembly’, had crammed into a densely packed, hot and smelly room, its tables littered with bread and herring, all of the attendees eager for debate.11 General Knox observed Duma chairman Mikhail Rodzianko in the Catherine Hall urging the mass of soldiers gathered there to ‘go back to their barracks and maintain order, as otherwise they would degenerate into a useless mob’. But Knox noted little sign of organisation or of people working. ‘Soldiers lounged everywhere’; in one room he saw Duma member, Boris Engelhardt, ‘trying to function as Military Commandant’, sitting at a table ‘on which was a huge loaf of half-gnawed black bread’ and trying in vain to ‘make himself heard above the noise of a rabble of soldiers, all spitting and smoking and asking questions’.12
It was already abundantly clear that any power-sharing between two such diametrically opposed groups as the Executive Committee of the Duma and the new Soviet would be extremely fraught. For the members of the Soviet, the former Duma members of the Executive Committee represented the enemy: the old order of capitalists, the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. It was clear to George Bury that the Soviet was rapidly becoming ‘the real master of the situation’; its members had the rifles and the brute force. But for now it was the old guard of the Duma that possessed ‘the self-assurance and the technique of governing’, even as a procession of former tsarist ministers arrived under arrest throughout the day.13
Come the afternoon, a cowed and cadaverous-looking Boris Stürmer, former President of the Council of State, was brought in, his teeth chattering with fear. Alongside Stürmer was Pitirim, the Metropolitan of Petrograd. Claude Anet saw Stürmer arrive, surrounded by soldiers bristling with revolvers – ‘an old man, his cap in his hand, enveloped in a big fur-collared Nicholas cloak reaching to his feet. His face was as white as his long beard; his pale blue eyes were expressionless; he appeared to notice nothing, to have fallen into his second childhood, and advanced, seemingly unconscious of his surroundings, with tottering steps.’14 Metropolitan Pitirim – a close associate of Rasputin’s, who had been found hiding at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery – was still wearing his black gown and gold episcopal cross and seemed ‘prey to the most abject fear’. With his mouth half-open and terrified eyes, he loo
ked like a condemned criminal being led to the scaffold.15 Then former Prime Minister Ivan Goremykin arrived, ‘a Carnival figure’ with his great flamboyant whiskers, and wearing his tsarist order of St Andrew defiantly pinned to his coat like some kind of protective talisman.16 Ivan Shcheglovitov, President of the Imperial Council and former Minister of Justice and a bastion of the old reactionary order, was brought in under arrest at 5.00 p.m., his hands bound.
But the man all the revolutionaries had been searching for – the notorious Minister of the Interior, Alexander Protopopov, roundly despised as the Empress’s puppet – was not found at his empty apartment, which had earlier been ransacked and relieved of a considerable stash of champagne. Finally, at 11.15 p.m. he shuffled into the Tauride Palace in a shabby fur coat and gave himself up. After two days ‘wandering about the streets, seeking refuge with his friends and being refused by all’, he capitulated, claiming he ‘desired the welfare of [the] country’.17 Having, so it was said, handed over a large map of Petrograd with all the police hiding places marked on it, he was taken off ‘pale and tottering’ to a prison cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress, to join many other representatives of the old regime.18fn1
Chaos continued to prevail all Tuesday at the Tauride, which was now ‘a complete babel of agitations, ambitions, disputes and alliances’, as every kind of committee was created to satisfy the political demands of the many competing factions: ‘committees for provisions, committees for passports, committees for journalists, committees for students, committees for women helpers . . . for social right, for a just Peace, for Women’s Suffrage, for Finnish Independence, for literature and the arts, for the better treatment of prostitutes, for education, for the just division of the land’. The atmosphere in the Catherine Hall became increasingly disorderly in the crush, with many delegates standing and craning to see the presidium, where speakers stood on the table to be seen and heard. ‘The noise grew more and more deafening, the dust floated in hazy clouds. The men had their kettles and they boiled tea, squatting down there, and the shouting and screaming rose and rose like a flood.’19 And throughout the palace, in every room and every committee, over and over again, one heard loud and repeated exhortations to the tovarishchi – the ‘comrades’.20
In this new-found atmosphere of hectic but comradely solidarity, where all were basking in a strange and uneasy new equality and accepting orders from no one, frequent attempts were made by Alexander Kerensky, a prominent member of the Provisional Executive Committee, to appeal to the soldiers and workers gathered there to revert to some kind of military discipline. According to Ambassador Paléologue, the Duma members had been ‘utterly taken aback by the anarchical behaviour of the army’.21 ‘They never imagined a revolution like this,’ he reported, ‘they hoped to direct it and keep it within bounds through the army’, but this was clearly impossible. As Paléologue wrote in his diary that day, ‘The troops recognize no leader now and are spreading terror throughout the city.’ Reluctant to return to their barracks and to their old commanders, many of them had ‘given up their arms to the crowd and were drifting listlessly about the streets watching the progress of the fight’.22
By the end of that day there was even less likelihood of the Executive Committee regaining control of the obstreperous remnants of the army; for in a clear bid for primacy, the Petrograd Soviet had issued Order No. 1 tackling some of the soldiers’ long-standing grievances against the imperial government. All army titles were now abolished, it announced; no officers were to be saluted, and the rank and file were to be addressed by the formal vy and not the informal (and, to them, demeaning) ty. From now on, Russia’s military would take its orders from a plethora of soldiers’ and sailors’ committees reporting to the Soviet – not to the Duma.23
Intense cold descended during the night of 28 February/1 March, with the temperature plummeting to –26 degrees Centigrade, accompanied by a heavy fall of four to six inches of snow. The following morning a grey and gloomy sky cast a pall over the city as snow fell all day, muffling the sporadic sound of shouts and gunfire. The low temperatures transformed the blackened shells of burnt-out buildings with ‘long icicles hanging from the eaves’. Everywhere the smell of burning lingered and ‘paper ash still floated in the air’.24
Florence Harper and Donald Thompson walked up to the American embassy from the Astoria to survey the scene. ‘Except for smashed windows and dead horses lying around the streets, there were no signs of the recent disturbance,’ Harper noted.25 Indeed, anyone who had risen early enough would have been greeted by a ‘soft, immaculate whiteness’ covering the streets and temporarily concealing the debris, spent bullets and bloodstains of five days of violence. Leighton Rogers also went out to take a look:
Shattered glass is greenish on the snow and where not smashed, windows are pierced with neat holes. Doors are splintered and spotted with lead. Buildings have smallpox – wherever a bullet strikes these brick and stucco structures out comes a chunk as big as a plate. The huge clock on the end of the Singer Building – the only modern office building in Petrograd – though still brightly lighted, stopped running a day or so ago in deference to three punctures in its vitals. Here and there lies a horse or an abandoned motor car put out of commission by flying bullets or a collision.26
Overnight, proclamations had been posted exhorting everyone, as ‘citizens’, to play their part in restoring order. Chester Swinnerton was impressed by the extraordinary sangfroid of Russians as they attempted to get back to normal. He and his bank colleagues ‘wandered out to take some pictures’. Up on the Liteiny – the scene of such violence two days before – ‘it was just like a Sunday School Picnic’. But they had barely walked a hundred feet along it when there was ‘a b-rrrrrrrrr – put put put put put – and a machine gun began to rattle from the corner house. We, in company with all those within twenty five yards, ducked into a nearby courtyard.’ Their female Russian companions ‘had a death grip on my arms’, but within a minute were ‘peeking out again’. ‘You absolutely cannot beat the Russian curiosity,’ Swinnerton wrote later, ‘[they] exhibit the most wonderful nonchalance and casualness. Little children will walk calmly thru the firing, laughing and playing as usual.’ He had asked two little boys if it was safe to go on to the Nevsky:
‘Yes. Perfectly safe.’
‘Aren’t they shooting there?’
‘Oh yes, some shooting.’
‘Anybody being killed?’
‘Oh, yes, a few have been killed, but it’s perfectly all right there.’27
Late in the evening and into the night of 1–2 March, Florence Harper could still hear a machine gun firing from St Isaac’s Cathedral. It had been going on for the last couple of days, but that night a group of Cossacks stormed the cathedral and found forty police holed up in the basement. Exhausted from days without sleep and being hunted from one house to another, the police made their last stand. The Cossacks killed them then and there, and found six of their machine guns on the roof along with enough ammunition ‘for a month’.28
The revolution was now firmly in the hands of the people, and by Thursday order was at last being restored. Students were enrolled into an ad hoc militia to help keep the peace and patrolled the streets wearing special armbands, accompanied by three or four soldiers under their command. The fires were out; some of the worst criminals who had been set free had been recaptured and secured in prison again. The militia had disarmed many gun-toting civilians during the day, by order of the Duma committee. Drunks were being arrested and numerous signs were posted ‘asking all the comrades to refrain from liquor’.29 Officers who had gone over to the revolution were given back their arms and returned to their regiments to restore discipline. Controls were brought in over armed motor vehicles careering dangerously round the streets. Cars were stopped by rows of militia barricading the road and allowed to pass only if they had official documents – otherwise they were summarily confiscated.30
People were going back to work, huddled into their grea
tcoats against the cold. Shops had reopened and housewives were out searching for food, their shopping bags over their arms. Milkmen were out pulling their sledges loaded with large pots of milk. Most important of all, with a resumption of rail deliveries of flour, limited supplies of freshly baked bread were available once more. Telegraph and telephone lines were restored and the post was being delivered. Workers began to clear the snow, and the streets started to take on their old aspect. Even the boats out of Petrograd were back to their old running order. Everything seemed to indicate an unexpectedly rapid return to normality.
Looking back on events of the past five days, David Francis was impressed, informing the US State Department that it had been ‘the best managed revolution that has ever taken place, for its magnitude’.31 English medical orderly Elsie Bowerman, who had been stranded in the city on her way home from the Eastern Front, remarked in her diary that ‘Revolutions carried out in such a peaceful manner really deserve to succeed.fn2 Today weapons only seem to be in the hands of responsible people.’ ‘Politics have begun this morning again,’ reported an American resident, ‘and we seem to have emerged from a sort of hermetic isolation, when the other side of the river seemed very far away and we only knew of what was happening at the other end of the Petrograd side by hearsay.’32 Out on the Nevsky, Edward Heald followed a great parade of people with banners, who seemed to him ‘joyously, freely, intensely, spiritually happy’. Seeing events unfold in Petrograd at street level, as he had done, had been ‘thrilling and indescribable’, he wrote in his diary. ‘It has been good to be alive these marvellous days.’33 The air of celebration was bolstered by news from Moscow that the struggle there had been brief and ‘an easy victory for the revolutionists’. ‘Normal life was scarcely interrupted for more than one day’ in Russia’s second city, noted one observer, ‘and even less in other cities.’34