A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  After a year of industrial peace the war between labour and capital resumed in the summer of 1915 with a series of strikes. To begin with they were mostly minor stoppages over pay and conditions, but they gradually grew into larger political strikes as workers came to understand that the only way to end their economic plight was to end the war and change the government. The main anniversaries in the revolutionary calendar — Bloody Sunday on 9 January, International Women's Day on 23 February and Labour Day on 18 April (I May) — became set dates for strikes and rallies across the country. They

  usually began with calls for bread, but went on to demand an eight-hour day, an end to the war and the overthrow of the Tsar.

  The revolutionary parties played only a secondary role in these strikes. True, some of the biggest and most militant strikes of 1916, at the New Lessner factory in the spring for example, were largely due to the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, whose organization was slowly gaining in strength. Shliapnikov, who returned to Russia in autumn 1916, estimated that the party had as many as 10,000 members at the beginning of 1917, with as many as 3,000 in Petrograd itself. Gorky's apartment on the Kronversky Prospekt was a 'unique central point' of the underground revolutionary organization and Shliapnikov visited it daily for the latest information. The real strike leaders, however, were the skilled and literate workers on the shop-floor, daring young men in their twenties and thirties, such as Kanatchikov, though, unlike him, most of them did not belong to any political party. Although many had seen their real wages rise in the war, they resented the huge war profits of their employers,* and this increasingly defined their sense of class solidarity with the unskilled workers, many of them fresh from the countryside, who followed them into industrial battle.80 Here were those unnamed leaders of the crowd during the February Days in Petrograd. ,

  There had been a time when such working-class heroes would have rallied behind the Menshevik call to join the Labour Group, an adjunct of the War Industries Committees established in the autumn of 1915. Its aim was to bring the strikes to an end by giving the workers' representatives a chance to sit round a table with their employers and voice their grievances. It was a perfect product of that liberal democratic hope, still so fresh in 1915, that a broad front of all classes might steer the nation towards victory and the government towards reform. There was, it is true, a large number of workers still prepared to try the path of conciliation, especially in the big state munitions factories where the Menshevik influence remained strong. But elsewhere barely half the workers bothered to vote for factory delegates to the Labour Group, although this probably had more to do with their general apathy than any conscious adherence to the calls of the Bolsheviks and the SRs for a boycott of the elections. Either way, their lack of enthusiasm proved justified, as the Labour Group failed to extract either of its main demands — a National Workers' Congress and a system of conciliation boards to arbitrate industrial disputes — from a dominant bloc of employers and bureaucrats who were steadily moving away from the idea of making concessions to the working class. With its policy of conciliation discredited in the eyes of the workers, who now turned increasingly

  * The big metal factories of Petrograd, to cite the most extreme example, enjoyed a five-fold increase in profits during the war.

  towards militant strikes, the Labour Group found itself caught in the widening gap between the two sides of the industrial war. No longer able to stop the strikes, it decided to join them during the autumn of 1916 with a slogan calling for a 'provisional revolutionary government'.81

  On 17 October the workers of the New Lessner and Russian Renault factories on the Vyborg side of Petrograd downed tools and took to the streets singing revolutionary songs. As they approached the nearby barracks of the 181st Infantry Regiment, the police set upon them with sabres and whips. The soldiers, who had been watching and cheering on the demonstrators through their barrack fences, came out to defend them, throwing rocks and bricks at the police, and only after a training detachment of mounted Cossacks arrived on the scene was order restored. The military authorities arrested 130 soldiers and removed the mutinous regiment from the capital. But the next day more workers came out in solidarity with them and by 19 October as many as 75,000 workers from 63 factories in all parts of the city had joined the political strike.82

  For the tsarist regime it was an ominous sign of the army's reluctance to control the growing rebellion on the streets. The Petrograd garrison, closest to the sources of revolutionary propaganda, was more reluctant than most. It was filled with older reservists, most of them family men, and wounded evacuees from the Front, perhaps the two most anti-war groups in the entire army, making the regime's decision to rely almost exclusively on it in the event of a revolution all the more ill-conceived. The military authorities clearly had no idea of the soldiers' feelings. The secret police had agents reporting on the political mood in virtually every civilian institution, yet, incredibly, none in the army itself, which was left to the tiny department of army intelligence. Major-General Khabalov, chief of the Petrograd Military District, assured Protopopov that his garrison troops would carry out all commands when he was questioned about their reliability shortly before the February Revolution. He even overruled the Minister of the Interior's recommendation that some unreliable units should be removed from the capital. And yet Colonel Engelhardt, an Octobrist member of the Duma who was soon to replace Khabalov as Military Commissar of the Provisional Government, described the reservists of the Petrograd garrison as nothing less than 'armed mobs'. They were more like 'flammable material than a prop of the regime'. The Rasputin affair, noted Viktor Shklovsky, an instructor in one of the garrison's armoured divisions, had finally broken the soldiers' loyalty to the Tsar. They despised the police — whom they called the 'two-kopeck men' (semishniki) because that is what they were thought to receive for each man they arrested — and all looked forward to the revolution as 'an established fact — everyone knew it would come'.83

  The Petrograd garrison was not the only unreliable part of the army. In many units on the Northern and Western Fronts, and even more so in the

  army garrisons in the rear, the discipline of the troops was rapidly breaking down. Soldiers were increasingly refusing to take up attacking positions, fraternizing with the enemy, and rejecting the authority of their officers, whom, as peasants eager to return to their farms, they now saw more clearly than ever as their old class enemies, the landowners, in uniform. Only on the Southwestern Front, a thousand miles from the revolutionary capital, were there whole army units upon which the tsarist regime could readily rely. But even there Brusilov, the Front commander, regularly received unsigned letters from his men warning him 'that they did not want any more fighting, and that if peace was not concluded shortly, I should be killed'.84

  As they entered the third and by far the coldest winter of the war, the morale of the soldiers took a sudden turn for the worse. It was no longer a crisis of supplies: if anything, the supply of clothes and munitions had improved since the previous year, thanks to the increase of domestic production and orders from abroad, although the food situation remained as grim as ever. It was now more a crisis of authority, of utter despair and exhaustion: the soldiers could see no end to the slaughter while the present regime remained in command. As one soldier wrote to his wife in November 1916:

  Everyone pretends that the war will end soon, that the longed-for peace will arrive, but that is only to keep their spirits up. People are so worn out and destroyed, they have suffered so much, that it's all they can do to stop their hearts from breaking and to keep themselves from losing their mind . . . Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I don't understand the mood of the men and it only seems to me like this because I myself am exhausted and have come to realise in the past few days that I may lose my own mind in all this chaos . . . Liulya, I have written all this to you so that you may understand what sort of a man you love.85

  Part Three

  RUSSIA IN REVOLUTION (FEBRUARY 1917-M
ARCH 1918)

  8 Glorious February

  i The Power of the Streets

  It all began with bread. For several weeks the bakeries in Petrograd had been running out, especially in the workers' districts, and long bread queues were beginning to appear. The problem was not shortage of supplies. According to Balk, the city's governor, there was enough flour in the warehouses to feed the population for at least a week when what had started as a series of bread riots turned into a revolution. True, the shops were not full. This was the end of the war's third winter and there was a general feeling of austerity. Buns, pies, cakes and biscuits were no longer baked. 'The shops are not carrying such a full line of articles and provisions,' an Englishman wrote home on 13 February. 'Restaurants no longer have the big fine pastries, owing to the scarcity of sugar.' This, moreover, was the coldest winter Russia had experienced for several years. In Petrograd the average February temperature was fifteen degrees below zero. 'It's as cold here as in Lapland,' Gorky wrote to Ekaterina on the 4th. Arctic frosts and blizzards had brought the railways to a virtual standstill. Factories closed. Thousands of laid-off workers milled around the streets.1

  It was this that turned the supply problem into a crisis. Because of the breakdown of the transport system, Petrograd was starved of regular supplies of flour and fuel. For want of the one or the other, bakeries were frequently forced to close. Women would queue all night for a loaf of bread, only to be told in the early hours of the morning that there would be none for sale that day. This constant interruption to the bread supply naturally gave rise to rumours in the queues. People said that 'speculators' and 'capitalists' — which in the xenophobic wartime atmosphere usually meant German or Jewish merchants — were deliberately forcing up the bread prices by withholding stocks. Many people blamed the government (wasn't it also full of Germans?). Even educated liberals were inclined to see the shortages as the evil doing of a treasonable government. On 19 February the Petrograd authorities announced that rationing would start from I March. Rumours spread that there would soon be no bread stocks at all and the unemployed would be left to starve. In the panic buying that followed the shelves were laid bare, scuffles broke out, and several bakeries had their windows smashed.2

  On Thursday, 23 February, the temperature in Petrograd rose to a spring-like minus five degrees. People emerged from their winter hibernation to enjoy the sun and join in the hunt for food. Nevsky Prospekt was crowded with shoppers. The mild weather was set to continue until 3 March — by which time the tsarist regime would have collapsed. Not for the first time in Russian history the weather was to play a decisive role.

  February 23rd was International Women's Day, an important date in the socialist calendar, and towards noon huge crowds of women began to march towards the city centre to protest for equal rights. Balk described the crowds as 'ladies from society, lots more peasant women, student girls and, compared with the earlier demonstrations, not many workers'. Photographs show the women were in good humour as they marched along the Nevsky Prospekt.

  But in the afternoon the mood began to change. Women textile workers from the Vyborg district had come out on strike that morning in protest against the shortages of bread. Joined by their menfolk from the neighbouring metal works, they had marched towards the city centre, drawing in workers from other factories on the way, and in some cases forcing them out, with shouts of 'Bread!' and 'Down with the Tsar!' By the end of the afternoon, some 100,000 workers had come out on strike. There were clashes with the police as the workers tried to cross the Liteiny Bridge, linking the Vyborg side with the city centre. Most of the workers, having been forced back, dispersed and went home, some of them looting shops on the way. But several thousand crossed on the ice and marched towards the Nevsky Prospekt, where they joined the women with cries of 'Bread!' The thickest crowds were around the city Duma. Balk's Cossacks could not clear them and even showed an unwillingness to do so: they would ride up to the women, only to stop short and retreat. Later it emerged that most of the Cossacks were reserves without experience of dealing with crowds, and with horses that were new to the city streets. By some oversight they had not been supplied with their usual whips. It was to prove a fatal mistake by the authorities. For this show of weakness by the Cossacks emboldened the workers over the coming days.3

  The following morning saw bright sunshine. Workers held factory meetings throughout the city and, urged on by socialist agitators, resolved to march again to the centre. Many armed themselves with knives, spanners, hammers and pieces of iron, partly to fight their way through the squadrons of Cossacks and police who had been brought in overnight to bar their way, and partly to help them loot the well-stocked food shops of the affluent downtown areas. The expedition had the feel of a hungry workers' army going off to war. 'Comrades,' urged one factory agitator, 'if we cannot get a loaf of bread for ourselves in a righteous way, then we must do everything: we must go ahead and solve our problem by force . . . Comrades, arm yourselves with everything

  possible — bolts, screws, rocks, and go out of the factory and start smashing the first shops you find.'

  By mid-morning about 150,000 workers had taken to the streets. They made their way to the bridges connecting the industrial suburbs with the city's administrative centre. Some of them smashed windows, looted shops and overturned trams and carriages. At the Liteiny Bridge a crowd of 40,000 Vyborg workers overran a small brigade of Cossacks, who were clearly unprepared for them. 'But nobody told me there would be a revolution!', a policeman was heard to say as he saw the vast army of workers approach. On the Troitsky Bridge the workers fought their way past mounted police by throwing rocks and ice. The huge crowds converged on the Nevsky Prospekt. The mounted Cossacks were unable to disperse them: they would ride across the street and on to the pavements, forcing the demonstrators to run in all directions; but as soon as they stopped the crowds would reassemble and begin to approach the troops, offering them bread and calling out to them. By this stage, the crowds of workers had been swollen with students, shopkeepers, bank clerks, cabbies, children, well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, who were either sympathizers or just spectators. Balk described the crowds on Nevsky Prospekt as 'consisting of the ordinary people'. There was a holiday mood on the streets, no doubt partly because of the fine weather. One witness compared it to 'an enormous circus'. Arthur Ransome, then the correspondent for the Daily News, described the feeling on that day as one of 'rather precarious excitement like a Bank Holiday with thunder in the air'. There was a huge rally on Znamenskaya Square. The equestrian statue of Alexander III, an awesome monument to the principles of autocracy, was conquered by the revolutionary orators. Few in the vast crowd could hear what they were saying, but this did not matter. The people knew what they wanted to hear, and the mere sight of this brave act of free speech — performed from the top of such a monument and in full view of the police — was enough to confirm it in their minds: a revolution was taking place. Later that evening, after the crowds had finally dispersed, the police found the word 'HIPPOPOTAMUS' — the popular nickname for the statue — engraved in large letters on its plinth.4

  Emboldened by the absence of vigorous repressive measures, even larger crowds came out on to the streets the following day, Saturday 25 February, in what was virtually a general strike. All the city's major factories ceased to operate, as some 200,000 workers joined the demonstrations. Newspapers failed to appear. Trams and cabs were hard to find. Many shops and restaurants closed their doors. All sorts of people joined the ranks of marching workers heading into the centre of the city. Balk thought the movement 'bore the character of a people's uprising'. Compared to the previous two days, the demonstrations now had a more political flavour. Red flags and banners began to appear, and their

  slogans were calling not so much for 'Bread!' as for the overthrow of the autocracy. 'Down with the Tsar!' and 'Down with the War!' were now their main demands.

  Once again there were clashes with police as the demonstrators tried to cros
s the bridges connecting the suburbs with the centre of the city. At the Liteiny Bridge the chief of police, Shalfeev, made a last desperate bid to halt the marchers by charging headlong into the crowd. The marchers parted to the sides and then closed ranks to surround Shalfeev, who tried to force his way out by lashing out on all sides with his whip. But the demonstrators dragged him off his horse. One of the workers beat him on the ground with a piece of wood, while another, taking Shalfeev's revolver, shot him in the heart. None of the Cossacks defending the bridge attempted to intervene.

  Increasingly this became the pattern — violent clashes with the police combined with efforts to win over the soldiers — as the crowds took over the city centre. The police were 'theirs' — hated agents of the regime. The people called them 'pharaohs' (much as some today might call the police 'pigs') and they had no doubts that the police would fight to the end.* The soldiers, by contrast, were seen as 'ours' — peasants and workers in uniforms — and it was hoped that, if they were ordered to use force against the crowds, they would be as likely to come over to the people's side. Once it became clear that this was so — from the soldiers' hesitation to disperse the demonstrators, from the expressions on the soldiers' faces, and from the odd wink by a soldier to the crowd — the initiative passed to the people's side. It was a crucial psychological moment in the revolution.