That evening the streets of central Petrograd were swarming; many gathered outside the Tauride Palace, where British intelligence officer Denis Garstin, went out among them ‘wandering from group to group asking what they really wanted’; but he could get no clear answer from anyone, bar a lot of shouting of slogans. ‘No one knew. On the contrary they all wanted to know why they’d been called out with their arms and banners and vague complaints.’ Garstin noted anarchist agitators – ‘black hatted black-visaged men’ – among them, trying to incite people to violence and then disappearing.13 With 10,000 or more gathered on the Nevsky, firing inevitably broke out, followed by rioting and then looting, in the frenzied search for alcohol that was now gripping the city.14fn2 Confusion reigned; the streets were ‘all effervescence’, crowded with people who had come out to see what was happening, only to find themselves caught up in indiscriminate firing from all sides. ‘Everybody was asking everybody else what was going on,’ recalled Bertie Stopford. ‘A feeling of panic was in the air,’ wrote US journalist Ernest Poole of the New Republic, who had just arrived, only to be caught up in the thick of what was going on.15
At their apartment on Kirochnaya, near the Tauride Palace, US naval attaché Walter Crosley and his wife Pauline had been sitting in their drawing room when the doorbell rang and a messenger arrived, telling them to ‘put your most valuable small things in a bag and be ready to leave for the Embassy in five minutes’. When Pauline asked why he told her to look out of the window: ‘There they were!!! Hundreds of the worst looking armed men I ever expect to see, coming up our street! The rumors were being confirmed and trouble was upon us.’ She rushed to pack, as the tramping feet of a mob of ‘Anarchists or Leninites’ (she wasn’t sure what they were) came ever closer – the corner on which their home was located had, she recalled, been ‘a very bloody spot’ during the February Revolution. As they hurried to leave by the front door, the street outside had become ‘filled with the dangerous looking creatures and we had to face them as we went out’. When the Crosleys reached the US embassy, members of staff were arriving with reports of fighting in many locations; embassy officials estimated that around 70,000 armed workmen and soldiers were ‘in charge of the city that night’, bolstered by intimidating armed joyriders on trucks and in hijacked private cars.16
Lady Muriel Paget of the Anglo-Russian Hospital had been dining at Prince Yusupov’s palace on the Moika that evening, when ‘suddenly we heard shooting and screaming, and riderless horses dashing by’. Some of the bullets had begun hitting the palace, and her host took his guests into the cellar dining room for safety. Someone from the ARH telephoned to warn Lady Muriel not to try to return there, but she insisted. Bertie Stopford, who had been dining with them, volunteered to accompany her, on condition that she ‘would remember the rules of Revolution – first, to lie on one’s face when shooting was going on, and second, to press against a wall when the mob surged in the streets’.17 As they ventured cautiously down the side streets, they saw crowds on the Nevsky ‘going down into the fire of the soldiers, stepping over the bodies of their dead comrades’. Lady Muriel turned a corner and found herself ‘looking into the mouth of a revolver with a fierce Russian behind it. I pushed the revolver away and laughed at the soldier, who let me pass.’
But soon afterwards they got caught up in the mob and were carried along with it for several blocks. They finally got to the hospital at 1.15 a.m., to find that a lot of the wounded from the fighting on the Nevsky had been brought in.18 On his way back up the Nevsky to his hotel, Stopford saw many more being carried away on stretchers. It was here that Arno Dosch-Fleurot had also found himself trapped in ‘the hottest firing that I ever expect to be exposed to’ and had flung himself into the gutter to take shelter. He found himself lying alongside a Russian officer. ‘I asked what was happening,’ he wrote in a despatch to the New York World three days later, to which the man replied: ‘The Russians, my countrymen, are idiots. This is a white night of madness.’19
Such indeed was the madness unleashed that day that by late evening the streets of Petrograd had become ‘a complete and unintelligible chaos’, in the words of New Zealand journalist Harold Williams. It was hot and muggy even this late, and the crowds wandered ‘aimlessly and excitedly’ as lorries and motor cars ‘buzzed about filled with yelling soldiers’.20 Crowds of people were still hanging around at the junction of the Liteiny and the Nevsky late into the night. Officials tried to disperse them: ‘Go home. Comrades go home. There have already been victims.’ But still the crowd lingered. ‘It was a strange sight,’ wrote Williams, ‘this great, silent moving mass in the dusk with the blur of guns, caps and bayonets of the men on lorries and the bent figures of soldiers on artillery horses, all silhouetted against the pale sky.’21
Ernest Poole also stayed out till late: ‘still the crowds, and still the speeches, still the low incessant roar and the trampling of countless feet’. But there was something different: ‘I felt no great mass power here,’ he recalled. It wasn’t the same atmosphere of excitement and cheering, with people singing and shaking hands, as in the February Revolution, a Russian told him. ‘Look at these crowds. They came out only to see what would happen. Now they are through and are going home.’22 As the Nevsky emptied, all that was left were the ambulances taking away the last of the dead and wounded, and a few soldiers loitering and drinking greedily from the water hydrants, ‘while others sat in long lines on the curbs, talking in low voices, most of them smoking cigarettes’.23
Tuesday 4 July dawned grey and heavy. As the morning went on, it became suffocatingly hot and oppressive, with people gathering once more for another ‘day of waiting’. The air of expectancy on the streets was ‘like the first days of the revolution’, recalled Louis de Robien.24 Bessie Beatty also sensed the dramatic change in atmosphere, on her return that morning from a trip to the front, when she emerged from the Nicholas Station ‘to find the mercury rising and the Nevsky of the hour strangely different from that with which I had parted’. ‘Turning into the Nevsky that morning was like opening a telegram,’ she remembered:
I could never be quite certain what I would find there, but the first glance always told the whole story. Nevsky was the revolutionary thermometer. When the City of Peter pursued the calm and normal way, the wood-paved avenue indicated the fact. When the hectic passions of revolt ran high, the temper of the populace was as plainly registered.25
The atmosphere was ominous. There wasn’t a tram in sight and hardly any izvozchiki and the shutters on the shops were fastened tight; ‘in front of the Gostinny Dvor [indoor market] men were out with hammers, nailing boards across the plate glass windows’, in which Beatty noticed fresh bullet-holes. There was no mistaking the signs: ‘The Bolsheviki were taking possession of the city.’26 Indeed, the ranks of the Bolshevik-led protesters were dramatically swelled that morning when several thousand ‘evil-looking’ sailors arrived from Kronstadt on a collection of barges, tugboats and steamers. The presence of the belligerent Kronstadters, armed to the teeth with every weapon they could lay hands on and with their cap ribbons bearing the names of their ships ‘turned inside out, so that they [could not] be identified’, ensured that that day’s street demonstrations became progressively more violent, with machine guns mounted on motor lorries firing indiscriminately into the crowds and people – who ‘shrank away’ in fear, at the sight of the sailors – rushing aimlessly in all directions.27fn3 But the same lack of cohesion and leadership prevailed as the previous day: nobody seemed to know whose side anyone was on, ‘least of all the demonstrators themselves’, as Harold Williams noted.28 The violence was confused and elemental, with those among the disorganised mobs who were armed running around firing, often out of sheer fright, and then beating a retreat at the slightest retaliation.
By the afternoon the Liteiny had become ‘very agitated’, just as it had been ‘in the bad days’ of February, wrote Louis de Robien, the atmosphere made even worse by the influx of sailors from Kronstadt. �
��The road was littered with caps and sticks, lying among the debris of plaster knocked from the walls by the bullets,’ he recalled. Everywhere he walked that afternoon he saw groups of ‘surly unbuttoned men with their rifles slung across their backs, in their hands, or under their arms as though they were out shooting’. There was no organisation to this rabble; ‘they dragged their feet’ and were ‘all mixed up with the women’ and did not want to be regimented or to fight in any disciplined way.
Harold Williams watched an ‘endless procession’ crossing the Troitsky Bridge. ‘I did not notice much enthusiasm,’ he recalled. ‘Most of the soldiers looked rather tired and bored and none could give any intelligible reason for their demonstration.’29 As this crowd marched past the British embassy, ‘rough looking men came up to the windows with rifles and ordered us to shut the windows,’ recalled Lady Georgina Buchanan; they were forced to ‘sit in closed rooms, dying of heat’ all day, her husband having declined the Provisional Government’s offer of a safe refuge.30 Her daughter Meriel saw ‘three thousand of the dreaded Kronstadt sailors’ pass by on their way to the Field of Mars and heading for the Nevsky. ‘Looking at them, one wondered what the fate of Petrograd would be if these ruffians with their unshaven faces, their slouching walk, their utter brutality were to have the town at their mercy.’31
At around two in the afternoon heavy fighting broke out on the Nevsky, when the sailors ‘took possession of some machine guns and swept the thoroughfare from end to end, killing and wounding over a hundred civilians and innocent people’. By now the Nevsky was ‘black with people, massed across from wall to wall’, the low incessant roar of thousands of tramping feet mingling with rifle and machine-gun fire.32 Bessie Beatty was there, watching in horror and wondering whether this was to be the culmination of the whispered prophecy she had heard over and over again since her arrival: ‘The streets of Petrograd will run rivers of blood.’33 By late afternoon the situation had become extremely dangerous. Up at the American embassy on Furshtatskaya, ‘as dangerous a mob as I ever hope to see – composed of half-drunken sailors, mutinous soldiers and armed civilians – paraded through our street, threatening people at the windows, and drinking openly from bottles,’ wrote J. Butler Wright in his diary.34
Leighton Rogers and his colleague, Princeton graduate Fred Sikes, had been working late at the National City Bank when they had heard thundering horses’ hooves outside and had ‘got to the balcony just in time to see a troop of some two hundred Cossacks and three light field guns gallop past, officers in the lead shouting and brandishing sabres’.35 It was a thrilling sight, but they knew that if the government had called in the Cossacksfn4 the trouble was serious. They decided to head for home ‘while the going was good’. Dark thunderclouds were gathering overhead and a rainstorm was coming. They were worried about the precious five pounds of sugar they had just managed to obtain through their Russian cook at the bank; it was in a paper bag and would be ruined if it got wet. For safety’s sake they decided to head home across the open space of the Field of Mars, ‘where we could see what was coming’, but they had barely gone fifty yards when they heard the crack of rifles and a ‘few bullets went zing-g-g over our heads, then a flock of them ripped the air and spurted dust around us’.
There they were, clutching their precious bag of sugar, and the only possible shelter they could see was ‘behind the temporary fence around the huge grave of heroes of the Revolution’. Another volley sent them in a mad dash in that direction, ‘with Fred holding the bag of sugar out ahead as though we were trying to catch up with it’. ‘Crash! went one of the field guns beyond the Summer Garden, and we landed flat in the dust behind the fence, Fred guarding the sugar like a bag of diamonds.’ Eventually they emerged from their place of refuge near the grave as a huge clap of thunder broke overhead and the rain came down. They got home safely with their sugar, noticing how quickly the rain had chased the people from the streets. ‘I am wondering if a high pressure hose or two wouldn’t be more effective in these street brawls than streams of lead,’ pondered Rogers later in his diary.36
Over at the British embassy everyone had been at dinner when the doorman had rushed in to tell them that the Cossacks were charging across nearby Suvorov Square on the Palace Embankment. They had all rushed to the big windows in Sir George’s study overlooking it, to see a crowd of Kronstadt sailors pouring across the square and along the quay on either side and, ‘behind them, sweeping in a cloud of dust across the Champ de Mars, came the Cossacks, some of them standing up in their stirrups to fire at the fleeing figures, others brandishing swords, or bending low in the saddles with long lances held at a wicked slant’.37 As they disappeared from view a sharp volley of firing broke out, followed by the loud report of a field gun, and ‘a moment later three or four riderless horses dashed past’. Apparently the troop of Cossacks that Rogers and Sikes had seen riding along the embankment had been ambushed by demonstrators near the Liteiny Bridge and had ‘surged into Liteiny Street at the gallop’, where it was met by Bolsheviks on a makeshift barricade manned by machine guns, which had cut them to pieces. Bessie Beatty was there and watched in horror as the Cossacks ‘wheeled their horses about and fled but not before half a dozen of them had gone down before the guns’.38 Terrified, riderless horses careered off at a gallop down the side streets.
Phil Jordan had hurried over from nearby Furshtatskaya and had seen it all, too, and soon afterwards wrote excitedly to Mrs Francis in St Louis:
The Cossacks and Soldiers had a terrible fight just one block from the embassy. The Cossacks as you know always fight on horseback. They made a charge on the soldiers who was in the middle of the street with machine guns and cannons. My oh my what a slaughter. After 30 minutes of fighting [I] counted in a half a block 28 dead horses. When the Cossacks made their charge the soldiers began to pump the machine guns and you could see men and horses falling on all sides.39
Half an hour later, when US ambassador David Francis visited the scene in the pouring rain, ‘the street was literally and actually running with blood’ and ‘bodies were scattered for four blocks’. Louis de Robien also ventured out from his embassy later that evening to be greeted by ‘a heartrending sight’: ‘dead horses, their skins taut and shining from the shower that had just fallen, lay in the wet roadway between the pools of water, some of which were tinged with red’. De Robien counted twelve of them in the road between Shpalernaya and Sergievskaya, but there were other dead horses further down towards Nevsky. People had already gathered round them and were stealing their bridles and saddles.40 Around thirty horses were killed that day and ten Cossacks. But, as one gloomy Cossack told Leighton Rogers, ‘We can get more men . . . but such horses – no.’ Another reporter saw a big, burly cab driver weeping over the dead horses. ‘The loss of 12 good horses was too much for an izvoschik’s heart to bear.’41 As for the numbers killed and wounded during those days in July, official figures published by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets talked of four hundred, but the central first-aid services in Petrograd estimated in excess of seven hundred, and on 6 July Novoe vremya claimed that more than one thousand were killed during the riots of 2 and 3 July alone.42fn5
That evening ‘we went to bed wondering what would happen next,’ wrote Lady Georgina Buchanan to her family in England. ‘All night there was shooting so sleep was nearly impossible.’43 She was grateful to be safely tucked up in her bed, but over at the American embassy, when the guns and cannons had begun roaring again around midnight, the irrepressible Phil Jordan had ‘jumped out of bed and rushed to the Winter Palace Bridge’ [the Palace Bridge] to see what was going on:
The Bolscheviks had Started to come on this Side of the town and the Soldiers was waiting for them at the foot of the bridge. Just as they was about on the middle of the bridge the soldiers opened fire with machine Guns and cannons. it was one grand Sight. the Sky was full of the prettiest fire works you Ever saw. you know during a Revolution or any kind of fighting every body has to lay flat
on your Stomach. I was laying flat behind the man that was pumping the machine Gun.44
Later, when Francis was dictating his own version of events in a letter to Jane, musing on when he might return home, he observed that Phil rather hoped they would not leave too soon, as he had told him, ‘we are having so many revolutions here now that it is too interesting for us to think of leaving’.45
Violent torrential rain all night kept most people off the streets and it persisted all through Wednesday 5 July. Shops were closed, no trams were running and only a few izvozchiki were in evidence. Bertie Stopford heard that all the bridges were to be raised to cut off the revolutionary strongholds in the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides. The Bolsheviks were to be ‘polished off’ tonight, he was reliably informed, for the government was determined to bring things under control, with the help of troops ordered back from the front by Kerensky, who was also returning to Petrograd.46 Everyone was now expecting him to single-handedly bring the city back from the brink of catastrophe. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks were in control of the Peter and Paul Fortress and were directing operations, in so far as there was any coherent plan, from their stronghold at the Kschessinska Mansion.
Caught in the Revolution Page 24