It was a divisible city. Indeed, the bridges crossing the Neva could be raised to protect the government from the discontent of the masses in the suburbs. By early 1900 the press began to report on the rise of small gangs of hooligans who distressed respectable passers-by with taunts, obscenities and demands for money. Gangs fought turf wars. Despite the ban on carrying weapons in the street – a measure intended to curb terrorism – uncontrollable mobs of up to a hundred youths swarmed along the Bolshoi Prospekt on the Petersburg Side, smashing shop windows and fighting with knives and knuckledusters. The Narva Gate in the industrial south-west of the city and Harbour Fields on Vasilevsky Island became no-go areas for the bourgeoisie. And, as they began to sense their clout, gangs started to range through Alexandrovsky Park and cross the Neva to rattle the well-to-do who were strolling in Senate Square.25
During the late 1890s there was mounting unrest in Petersburg factories. Some weak or ineffectual concessions were made by employers – the promise in 1897 to restrict the working day to eleven and a half hours, the promise in 1903 of medical treatment for accidents at work – but the lot of the Petersburg worker remained dire. At the Putilov Iron Works, most employees earned less than a rouble a day, and in the textile industry wages were even lower. Lenin, the Marxist revolutionary, recognised that tension in the factories ‘represented the class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo’. He tried to up the ante by somewhat grandiloquently celebrating a large strike by textile workers as the ‘famous St Petersburg industrial war of 1896’. But he also recognised the period as one of ‘confusion . . . and vacillation’ and argued for a cohesive party run by a professional, centralised leadership.26 This would prove to be the beginning of a new end. For two more decades, different groups with different aims would stumble towards revolution, as activists struck and the authorities hit back. Cossacks frequently ruptured student demonstrations and their intervention – such as the one in front of Kazan Cathedral in March 1901 – often resulted in heavy casualties. Assassination continued – the Minister of the Interior, Dmitri Sipyagin, was killed by a revolutionary in April 1902. His replacement was the uncompromising Vyacheslav von Plehve, ‘the enemy of all reform’. When he was blown up just over two years later, ‘Everyone’, according to Cecil Spring Rice, ‘was delighted’.27
During his time in office, von Plehve transformed the Okhrana, the Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order, into a sophisticated secret-police network with a quantity of undercover agents who penetrated terrorist organisations. The Okhrana tapped telephones and practised perlustration, which had been used at least since the reign of Catherine the Great.28 James Buchanan, head of the American Legation in St Petersburg in the 1830S and later President of the United States, had correspondence opened. In the mid-186os, Lord Redesdale had been warned by the wife of the British Ambassador to use the diplomatic bag-her children’s governess had received two letters from different parts of England. Two envelopes arrived. In one, there were two photographs, and in the other, two letters!29 There was a ‘black cabinet’ in the Central Post Office responsible for mail intercepts, despite the fact that perlustration without a specific court order was officially illegal.30
From 1901 to 1907, St Petersburg Security Section HQ was at no. 12 Moika Embankment – the house where Pushkin died. Never independent, like the earlier Third Section or the later Cheka, it was caught in the departmental labyrinths of the capital. The Special Section located on the Fontanka kept a 50,000-and-growing card index of codenamed suspects. Often using women for surveillance because they were less obvious, and drawing many field officers from the ranks of the city’s garrison of 500 mounted gendarmes, the Okhrana also relied heavily on the support of the capital’s 6,000-strong police force. But Okhrana detectives and stakeouts were badly paid, compromising efficiency and inviting bribery. They turned uncommitted revolutionaries with ease,’31 but when they recruited dedicated terrorists as double-agents, matters became complicated. Evno Azeff would organise the ‘murders of Grand Dukes and Ministers, and at the same time . . . betray perpetrators of these crimes and their accomplices to the secret police’.32 Double-agent Azeff planned twenty-eight terrorist attacks on officials and was personally involved in the plan to assassinate von Plehve.33
It was Von Plehve who promoted the ex-revolutionary Sergei Zubatov to head political investigation in St Petersburg. Astutely understanding that revolutionaries could not succeed in their struggle without the proletariat, Zubatov suggested infiltrating groups of workers and persuading them that the resolution to their problems lay in the amelioration of the existing system. Attempting to establish self-help groups under police supervision, he sought aid from a religious teacher who could speak simply in a language the working masses could understand. Father Gapon was a vain and disturbed Orthodox priest with dangerously unorthodox ideas. From a lowly family in the Ukraine, his life before he arrived in St Petersburg was marked by an unsuccessful marriage and bouts of depression and erratic behaviour. But he harboured ‘a genuine concern for the poor’ and possessed the charisma to control them. Zubatov’s scheme for monitored labour organisations never took off, but soon Gapon had developed a plan of his own. He understood that revolutionaries could not easily influence the masses because they had to work from the shadows, whereas a priest’s purpose was to make himself heard. Gapon could develop a direct and open relationship and so, in the summer of 1903, he opened a clubhouse in Vyborg for labourers and set up an association the following spring, which he called the Assembly of the Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St Petersburg. In their clubhouse, workers could relax or participate in classes, attend lectures and even sing in a choir. Gapon started to invite the most intelligent among them to his home for nicotine-charged, beer-fuelled discussions, which ranged widely over a host of Russian grievances: freedom of speech, the need for universal education, equality before the law, the abolition of the land redemption tax, an eight-hour day, a minimum wage and the protection of labour by the law.
Gapon’s initiative was so successful that workers in other neighbourhoods clamoured for a clubhouse of their own, and one was soon opened in an old inn near the Putilov Iron Works in Narva. Another followed on Vasilevsky Island. With the crudity of his arguments, his rapid speech and touching stammer, Gapon forged a simple, tight bond with the workers. As Christmas 1904 approached, more clubhouses opened and parties were planned for the children. When a small group of workers at the Putilov plant were unfairly dismissed, Gapon put the weight of his Assembly behind the call to strike. Russia was at war, so Putilov’s important contribution to military hardware made a strike highly undesirable. After a meeting at the Vasilevsky clubhouse on Sunday 2 January 1905, the sacked workers decided to confront the management. On Monday 3rd, the director promised that if everybody returned to work, he would investigate the problem. Too little too late. On Tuesday 4th the strike spread, and the following day Gapon was calling for a general strike. He warned the city governor and urged him not to deploy the Cossacks.34
Epiphany, with its annual Blessing of the Waters, was on 5 January and, in 1905, the celebration was marred by a discharge of live ammunition during the gun salute by the horse artillery. Shrapnel went over the heads of the dignitaries, struck the roof of the pavilion, wounded a policeman and shattered some windows, penetrating the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace, where the court and diplomatic body were assembled. The ‘accident’ was attributed to carelessness – a shotted cartridge had been left in the breach of a gun after target practice. That was the official explanation, but rumours suggested it was an attempt on the tsar’s life.35
Gapon sought an interview with von Plehve’s successor, Peter Sviatopolk-Mirsky, to insist on how serious the situation had become. Refused an audience on Thursday 6th, Gapon decided to organise a group of workers who would march to the tsar that coming Sunday and petition him, demanding solutions for those grievances that his Assembly had discussed.36 When he appeared before the workers dres
sed in a cassock, his eyes bristling, Gapon was incendiary. According to the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, the priest declared that ‘factory inspectors were in the pockets of the capitalists’. He read from the petition, ‘We are impoverished, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated. We are not even recognised as human beings . . . O sire . . . We have reached that frightful moment when death is better than the prolongation of our unbearable sufferings.’ His audience went wild. Gapon urged them to swear – despite his protestations about the peaceful nature of the march – to come armed on Sunday. ‘We swear,’ exclaimed the crowd. Gapon issued a threat: ‘If the Tsar does not satisfy our demands there will be no Tsar.’ The thundering echo of the workers rattled the walls of the clubhouse: ‘No Tsar.’37
By Friday 7th the city was strikebound, and – afraid of stirring up further unrest – the authorities decided to leave Father Gapon at large. The priest sent the petition to the typist, ordering multiple copies. One would be carried by him and handed to the tsar. Another went out on Reuters’ news agency despatch a little before midnight. By then Gapon was off on a tour of the Assembly branches, stirring up the workers into a frenzy of suicidal support. The Guardian correspondent noted that Gapon spoke of ‘the possibility of his own death or the butchery of his followers’.38 Meanwhile the commander of the guards, General Vasilchikov, met his officers, instructing them – when the time came to repulse the workers from the centre of the city. On the evening of Saturday 8 January, the streets were ominously deserted. During the night, troops from Pskov and Revel arrived. There would be twenty-one battalions of infantry, twenty-three squadrons of cavalry and hundreds of Cossacks ready to welcome the workers as they marched to petition the tsar.39
It was a bracing January Sunday – a kind of new-dawn day – as workers carrying icons and even portraits of their venerated ‘father’, Tsar Nicholas II, began to assemble at points in the outlying areas of the poorer parts of town. Workers, wives and children started to move along the right bank of the Neva from Okhta. Others assembled on the Vyborg Side and crossed the short bridge onto Petersburg Island, where they were blocked by a barricade in Troitskaya Square. The official plea was – as Biely put it in his novel, Petersburg – ‘oh, Russian people! Don’t let the crowd of shadows in from the islands!’40 Detachments of the Pavlovsky and Grenadier Guards were in place to make sure they did not. An officer ordered the petitioners – their numbers augmented by a second march streaming down Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt – to stop. The marchers pulled open their coats to prove they were unarmed, but those at the front were pushed forward by eager protesters piling into the rear. A bugle sounded. A volley of shot shattered the deadlock. The cavalry charged. Sabres flashed and wriggled through the crowd like silverfish. Two more rounds were fired and fifty lay dead, while the groans of the wounded mocked the optimism of Father Gapon’s plan.
The Minister of Finance, Count Vladimir Kokovtsov, was sorting papers in his study at about 10 a.m. when he heard rifle fire coming from the direction of the Police Bridge over the Moika. A group of marchers, pushing down the Nevsky, hurling stones and bottles at soldiers, had been ambushed by troops advancing along Bolshaya Morskaya. The soldiers advanced. The crowd retreated, then regrouped and pressed onwards. Kokovtsov was eager to investigate, but the dvornik informed him that the front door to his building had been locked on the orders of the police.41
The imperial standard was flying over the Winter Palace, suggesting that the tsar – in fact at Tsarskoe Selo – was in residence. A fourth group of protesters assembled in the northern part of Vasilevsky Island and marched down the lines, only to be blocked by soldiers at the bridges across the Neva. More petitioners advanced across the ice and, for all the barricades, fusillades and skirmishes, protesters made it into the troop-infested sweep of Palace Square to lend support to Father Gapon’s ominous declaration to the tsar: ‘We have only two roads open to us: one leading to freedom and happiness, the other to the grave.’42
By two o’clock, Prince Vasilchikov decided that the incursion had lasted long enough and gave orders to clear the area – by firing, if necessary. Bugles sounded. Shots rang out. Children who had merely clambered into trees to get a better view were hit by stray bullets.43 The cavalry were sent to disperse the crowd in the Alexandrovsky Garden that led through to Senate Square, and Cossacks were despatched to clear the Nevsky Prospekt. That was where Nijinsky, coming from the Imperial Ballet School, was swept up into the crowd, which propelled him towards a Cossack baton charge. A cudgel came down hard on the skull of the dancer – something that did little for the mental stability of najinka, ‘the tender one’. Nijinsky fingered the blood streaming down his face and wriggled away through the crush of protesters.44
Massacre in Palace Square on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 1905.
Kokovtsov managed to get out by mid-afternoon and noted that the demonstration had been effectively broken up. There were stragglers rioting and looting, but Gapon – still intending to press on to revolution – was in hiding. The official figure was kept low, but the toll of dead or badly wounded on ‘Bloody Sunday’ was close to 1,000 – the foreign press had ‘thousands’. As with the numbers of those who perished while building the city, an accurate figure is difficult to determine.45 In any case, statistics only tell so much. The tension, hope and despair of Bloody Sunday the march, the massacre – survive in Dmitri Shostakovich’s IIth symphony, ‘The Year 1905’.
That Sunday evening there was a benefit performance at the Mariinsky for the ballerina Olga Preobrajenskaya. While the performance went ahead without a hitch, rumours of insurrection rippled through the audience and the theatre began to empty. Karsavina remembered walking home afterwards with her brother and finding the streets strangely ‘quiet and empty’. Across the globe, however, the headlines shocked readers, and Kokovtsov – in the process of negotiating loans with Paris and Berlin – faced the difficult task of reviving the market’s faith in Nicholas II’s Russia. Although the capital swiftly returned to a semblance of normality, a new pitch of protest and suppression had been registered.46 Spring Rice wrote to Mrs Roosevelt that there was a consensus among courtiers and diplomats that Bloody Sunday had been an inevitable and very good lesson – but one that fell on deaf ears. The emperor played with the baby tsarevich ‘and will hear nothing but baby talk. If you come with disagreeable truths, he listens but says nothing. His ideas, if he has any, are to maintain the autocracy undiminished and to continue the war until he has gained the “mastery of the Pacific”.’47
While St Petersburg’s theatre world remained largely unruffled by the massacre, it was disturbed by a revolutionary dancer. There was – in certain circles – considerable discomfort with classical ballet. Tolstoy thought it a ‘lewd performance’. Chekhov understood nothing about the medium, but could vouch that ‘the ballerinas stink like horses’ backstage.48 The young Alexander Benois declared in Mir Istkusstva that ‘fairies have been the ruin of ballet’.49 The American dancer Isadora Duncan, who thought ballet ‘false, absurd and outside the domain of art’,50 arrived in St Petersburg on 12. December 1904 and gave a benefit for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children the following day. Diaghilev and Fokine were in the audience, and the impresario claimed that Duncan was ‘the foundation’ of all Fokine’s later creations.51 Duncan’s presentation proved so popular that she gave another performance on the 16th and then left for Germany. When she returned to Petersburg and Moscow the following year, she expressed discomfort at dancing for the rich while strike action and potential revolution rocked the city. The late-January dates for her return suggest that Duncan was fabricating her account, when she claimed that she was welcomed – as her train arrived – by a mass funeral procession for the dead from Bloody Sunday. If, however, the authorities buried the dead discreetly, a few at a time in the deserted hours before dawn, then it is possible that the dancer may have witnessed ‘men laden and bent under their loads – coffins – one after another’, a city going t
o its grave.52
Meanwhile, workers were bewildered. It seemed almost as if Gapon had led them into a trap. No one could understand why the authorities would massacre peaceful protesters wanting to petition the tsar. The answer lay in the stupefying indifference of an emperor who eventually consented to meet a deputation of carefully selected workers at Tsarskoe Selo in late February, for tea and sympathy and empty gestures, while the suffering capital intensified its efforts to obtain justice.53 For most of 1905, St Petersburg was in a state of upheaval as revolutionaries, students, workers and professional unions consolidated their attack on autocracy. Doctors who treated the victims of Bloody Sunday were politicised in the process. There was turmoil at the Conservatoire, and Rimsky-Korsakov refused to teach in a building ringed by policemen. After thirty-five years as a professor, he was fired.54 Support erupted in other higher-education establishments and resulted in closures for the remainder of the academic year. Engineers, lawyers, technicians and writers formed unions – a useful tactic, as professional meetings were the only public assemblies tolerated by the government. A bomb plot to hit the commemoration service for Alexander II in the Peter and Paul Cathedral on 1 March was thwarted when the bomb-maker blew himself up in his hotel room and the new head of the Okhrana, General Gerasimov, tumbled twenty suspects.55 Mrs Roosevelt was informed by Spring Rice that ‘anarchy is growing and incidents abound. It would be difficult to give an idea of the disintegration which is taking place. It is like a great animal dead and rotting, with jackals tugging at its tough hide . . . Autocracy has lived by fear and seems to have destroyed every other feeling – now it is by fear that Autocracy is being attacked.’56 Street violence – muggings, knife attacks and brawls – increased after Bloody Sunday. Hooligans invaded the Nevsky Prospekt on balmy spring evenings and, armed with iron bars, spat contemptuously into the faces of the fashionable. The young Nabokov kept a knuckleduster in his pockets.57
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