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

by Orlando Figes

  Much of the crowds' destructive violence was directed against the institutions of the police regime. Armed crowds attacked police stations, setting fire to the buildings and making sure to destroy the police records. Sometimes the contents of the buildings were burned in bonfires on the streets. Gorky, who was charged with the seizure of the Police Headquarters on Kronversky Prospekt, arrived to find it vandalized and most of its records taken or destroyed. Court buildings were similarly targeted by the crowd. Gorky found a crowd of people watching the Palace of Justice go up in flames:

  The roof had already fallen in, the fire crackled between the walls, and red and yellow wisps like wool were creeping out of the windows, throwing a sheaf of paper ashes into the black sky of the night. No one made any attempt to extinguish the fire ... A tall stooping man in a shaggy sheepskin hat was walking about like a sentinel. He stopped and asked in a dull voice: 'Well — it means that all justice is to be abolished, doesn't it? Punishments all done away with, is that it?' No one answered him.

  Last but not least the crowd turned its destructive anger on the prisons, bashing down the gates, opening the cells, and, together with the released prisoners, vandalizing and sometimes burning down the buildings. The destruction of the prisons had a powerful symbolic significance for the revolutionary crowd: it was a sign that the old regime was dead, that the longed-for days of liberty — 'prisonless and crimeless' — were about to come.16

  No prison was more symbolic than the Peter and Paul Fortress. The crowds were convinced that the fortress was still full of 'politicals', heroes of the revolutionary struggle languishing in its dark and dingy cells: that, after all, was the well-established myth of the revolutionaries' propaganda. There were also rumours that the fortress was being used as a military base by the tsarist military forces (Balk did propose this). On the 28th a huge and angry crowd threatened to storm this 'Russian Bastille'. They brought up lorries with heavy mounted guns ready to fire at its thick stone walls. The fortress commandant telephoned the Duma appealing for help, and Shulgin (for the Duma) and Skobelev (for the Soviet) were sent to negotiate with him. They returned to report that the prison was completely empty — apart from the nineteen mutinous soldiers of the Pavlovsky Regiment who had been imprisoned in it on the 26th — and proposed to calm the crowds by allowing them to send representatives to inspect its cells. But even this was not sufficient to convince the crowds that the fortress was 'for the revolution'. Some of the mutinous soldiers accused Shulgin of

  working for the counter-revolution. There was some fighting between them and the fortress guards. And then, finally, the red flag was raised above this bastion of the old regime.17

  * * * The crowds displayed extraordinary levels of self-organization and solidarity during all these actions. 'The entire civil population felt itself to be in one camp against the enemy — the police and the military,' Sukhanov wrote. 'Strangers passing by conversed with each other, asking questions and talking about the news, about clashes with and the diversionary movements of the enemy.' The London Times was equally impressed. 'The astounding, and to the stranger unacquainted with the Russian character almost uncanny, orderliness and good nature of the crowds are perhaps the most striking feature of this great Russian Revolution.' People wore red armbands, or tied red ribbons in their buttonholes, to display their support for the revolution. Not to do so was to invite persecution as a 'counter-revolutionary'. Bonfires were lit throughout the city so that people could warm themselves during the long hours of street-fighting. Residents fed the revolutionaries from their kitchens, and allowed them to sleep — in so far as anyone slept — on their floors. Cafe and restaurant owners fed the soldiers and workers free of charge, or placed boxes outside for passers-by to contribute towards their meals. One cafe displayed the following sign:

  FELLOW-CITIZENS! In honour of the great days of freedom, I bid you all welcome. Come inside, and eat and drink to your hearts' content.

  Shopkeepers turned their shops into bases for the soldiers, and into shelters for the people when the police were firing in the streets. Cab-men declared that they would take 'only the leaders of the revolution'. Students and children ran about with errands — and veteran soldiers obeyed their commands. All sorts of people volunteered to help the doctors deal with the wounded. It was as if the people on the streets had suddenly become united by a vast network of invisible threads; and it was this that secured their victory.18

  The tsarist authorities assumed that the crowds must have been organized by the socialist parties; but, although their rank and file were present in the crowds, the socialist leaders were quite unprepared to take on this role and, if anything, followed the people. The street generated its own leaders: students, workers and NCOs, like Linde or Kirpichnikov, whose names, for the most part, have remained hidden from the history books. During the first weeks after February their portraits were displayed in shop windows — often with the heading 'Heroes of the Revolution'. There was one of Kirpichnikov in the windows of the Avantso store.19 But then these people's leaders faded out of view and were forgotten.

  Part of this extraordinary crowd cohesion may be explained by geography. There was, for a start, a long-established spatial-cultural code of street demonstrations in the capital with a number of clear points of orientation for the crowd (e.g. the Kazan Cathedral and the Tauride Palace) which stretched back to the student demonstrations of 1899. Petrograd's industrial suburbs, moreover, were physically separated from the affluent governmental downtown by a series of canals and rivers. Marching into the centre thus became an expression of working-class solidarity and self-assertion, a means for the workers to claim the streets as 'theirs'. This may help to explain some of the carnival aspects of the revolutionary crowd: the celebratory vandalism and destruction of symbols of state power and authority, wealth and privilege; the acts of mockery and humiliation, of verbal abuse and threatening behaviour, often ending in wanton acts of violence, which the crowds performed, as if they were some sport, against the well dressed and the well-to-do; the self-assertive body language and dress of the soldiers (wearing their caps back to front, or tilted to one side, or wearing their coats and tunics unbuttoned, contrary to military regulations); women wearing men's clothes (soldiers' headgear, boots and breeches), as if by reversing the sexual codes of dress they were also overturning the social order; and the sexual acts, from kissing and fondling to full intercourse, which people openly performed on the streets in the euphoria of the February Days.20

  And yet, contrary to Soviet myth, the crowds were far from solidly proletarian, although it is true that the workers took the lead and tended to do much of the street-fighting. Balk described the February Days as a general uprising of the people. Harold Williams of the Daily Chronicle thought the crowds on the 24th were 'mostly women and boys' with only a 'sprinkling of workmen'. Robert Wilton of The Times reported that on the 26th the fine weather had 'brought everybody out of doors' and that 'crowds of all ages and conditions' had made their way to the Nevsky Prospekt.21

  Most of the people on the streets were not 'revolutionaries' at all but simply spectators or the in-between types who wavered between acting and spectating. They would cheer the mutinous soldiers as they sped past in their cars, or when a police sniper was thrown from the roofs. They would gather in small groups around the dead bodies and horses, which at this time were still something of a novelty (soon they would become accustomed to them and would walk past them with indifference). They would wear red ribbons, wave red flags and declare their sympathy for 'the revolution'. But they rarely took a part in the fighting themselves, and would usually scatter when the firing began. This is the psychology of the crowds', wrote one witness:

  everything they see is both fascinating and terrifying. They stare, and they stare, and then suddenly — they run away. Look, here is a well-dressed

  gentleman, fat with short legs, standing on the corner. The crowd suddenly runs behind the building — and he follows them, running as fast
as his little legs allow, his fat belly shaking, and he clearly out of breath. He runs a few yards, looks back at the scene again, and then runs on.

  Many of these onlookers were young children. Little boys delighted in playing with the guns that were left lying in the streets. They made sport of throwing cartridges into the bonfires and watching them explode. Dozens of people were accidentally killed. Stinton Jones, an English journalist, witnessed the following scene:

  One little boy of about twelve years of age had secured an automatic pistol and, together with a large number of soldiers, was warming himself at one of these fires. Suddenly he pulled the trigger and one of the soldiers fell dead. This so alarmed the boy, who had no idea of the mechanism of the deadly weapon he held, that he kept the trigger pulled back and the automatic pistol proceeded to empty itself. It contained seven bullets, and it was not until they were all discharged that the boy released his hold of the trigger. The result was that three soldiers were killed, and four seriously injured.22

  From the 27th the nature of the crowds grew much darker. The soldier element dramatically increased, along with the level of violence, as a result of the mutiny. So did the criminal element, and the level of criminality, as a result of the opening of the jails. Both had the effect, as Jones put it:

  of clearing the streets of the more serious-minded and nervous citizens. The mobs presented a strange, almost grotesque appearance. Soldiers, workmen, students, hooligans and freed criminals wandered aimlessly about in detached companies, all armed, but with a strange variety of weapons. 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 tramline 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. A steady, quiet business man grasped a large rifle and a formidable belt of cartridges.

  Some 8,000 prisoners were liberated on the 27th, the vast majority of them common criminals. They had a vested interest — and took the lead — in the destruction of the police stations, along with their records, the Palace of Justice, the court buildings and the prisons. And they were to blame for much of the crime which took over the streets from this time. 'Tonight the city reverberates with the most terrifying noises: broken glass, screams, and gunshots,' wrote the Director of the Hermitage in the early hours of the 28th. Armed gangs looted shops and liquor stores. They broke into the houses of the well-to-do and robbed and raped their inhabitants. Well-dressed passers-by were mugged in the streets. Even wearing spectacles or a white starched collar was enough to mark one out as a burzhooi. A retired professor, who had been a Populist for nearly fifty years, came on to the streets on the evening of the 27th to celebrate the 'victory of the revolution' and immediately had his glasses smashed and his gold watch stolen by the very 'people' he had sought to liberate. This was clearly not the bloodless victory of liberty, equality and fraternity which the democratic intelligentsia had so long hoped for — and which they later mythologized as the 'Glorious February Revolution' — but more like a Russian peasant riot, 'senseless and merciless', as Pushkin had predicted, which sought to destroy all signs of privilege. The idea that the February Days were a 'bloodless revolution' — and that the violence of the crowd did not really take off until October — was a liberal myth. The democratic leaders of 1917 needed it to legitimize their own fragile power. In fact many more people were killed by the crowd in February than in the Bolsheviks' October coup. The February Revolution in Helsingfors and Kronstadt was especially violent, with hundreds of naval officers killed gruesomely by the sailors. According to the official figures of the Provisional Government, 1,443 people were killed or wounded in Petrograd alone. But a friend of Prince Lvov's told Claude Anet, the French journalist, that the true figure was up to 1,500 people killed and about 6,000 people wounded.23

  Gorky took a dim view of all this violence and destruction. On the 28th Sukhanov found him in a gloomy mood:

  For an hour by the clock he snarled and grumbled at the chaos, the disorder, the excesses, at the displays of political ignorance, at the girls driving around the city, God knows where, in God knows whose cars — and forecast that the movement would probably collapse in ruin worthy of our Asiatic savagery.

  It seemed to Gorky that all this was just 'chaos' and not a 'revolution at all. The next day he wrote to Ekaterina:

  Too many people are falsely according a revolutionary character to what in fact is no more than a lack of discipline and organization on the part of the crowd... There is much more here of an absurd than a heroic nature. Looting has started. What will happen? I don't know... Much blood will be spilled, much more than ever has been spilled before.24

  These, of course, as Sukhanov noted, 'were the impressions of a man of letters', of a man who hated violence in all its forms. Many people today might be similarly inclined to condemn the 'needless killing' of the crowds. That certainly has been the recent trend among conservative historians of both the Russian and the French Revolutions.25 But one may prefer Sukhanov's view:

  that the excesses, the man-in-the-street's stupidity, vulgarity, and cowardice, the muddles, the motor cars, the girls — all this was only what the revolution could not in any circumstances avoid, and without which nothing similar had ever happened anywhere.26

  This is not to condone the violence but to understand it as the almost unavoidable reaction of a people angry and with much to avenge. It is to recognize that all social revolutions are bound by their nature to spill blood; and that to condemn them for doing so is tantamount to saying that any form of social protest which might end in violence is morally wrong. Of course there are distinctions that need to be made: the blood spilled by the people on the streets is different from the blood spilled by parties, movements, or armies, claiming to be acting in their name; and it must be analysed and judged in different ways.

  The crowd violence of the February Days was not orchestrated by any revolutionary party or movement. It was by and large a spontaneous reaction to the bloody repressions of the 26th, and an expression of the people's long-felt hatred for the old regime. Symbols of the old state power were destroyed. Tsarist statues were smashed or beheaded. A movie camera filmed a group of laughing workers throwing the stone head of Alexander II into the air like a football. Police stations, court houses and prisons were attacked. The crowd exacted a violent revenge against the officials of the old regime. Policemen were hunted down, lynched and killed brutally. Sorokin watched a crowd of soldiers beating one policeman with the butts of their revolvers and kicking him in the head with their heels. Another was thrown on to the street from a fourth-floor window, and when his body thumped, lifeless, on to the ground, people rushed to stamp on it and beat it with sticks.

  Once it became clear that any further resistance was doomed to failure, many of these policemen tried to give themselves up to the Tauride Palace, where the Duma and the Soviet were struggling to restore order, in the belief

  that it would be better to be imprisoned by the new government than to be the victim of this 'mob law' on the streets. Others tried to escape the capital, knowing that their chances of survival would be better in the provinces. Two burly policemen were discovered heading for the Finland Station dressed in women's clothes. Only their large size and awkward gait, and the heavy police boots under their skirts, betrayed their identity to the crowd.27

  ii Reluctant Revolutionaries

  'The revolution found us, the party members, fast asleep, just like the Foolish Virgins in the Gospel,' recalled Sergei Mstislavsky, one of the SR leaders, in 1922. Much the same could be said for all the revolutionary par
ties in the capital. 'There were no authoritative leaders on the spot in any of the parties,' Sukhanov recalled. 'They were all in exile, in prison, or abroad.' Lenin and Martov were in Zurich, Trotsky in New York, Chernov in Paris. Tsereteli, Dan and Gots were in Siberia. Cut off from the pulse of the capital, the leaders failed to sense what Mstislavsky called 'the approaching storm in the ever mounting waves of the February disturbances'. Having spent their whole lives waiting for the revolution, they failed to recognize it when it came. Lenin himself had predicted in January that 'we older men perhaps will not live to see the coming revolution'. Even as late as 26 February, Shliapnikov, the leading Bolshevik in Petrograd, had told a meeting of socialists in Kerensky's flat: 'There is no and will be no revolution. We have to prepare for a long period of reaction.'28 In the absence of the major party leaders, the task of leading the revolution fell on to the shoulders of the secondary ones. They were not just second-ranking but also second-rate. Shliapnikov was an experienced trade unionist and party worker underground. But as a politician, in Sukhanov's words, he 'was quite incapable of grasping the essence' of the situation that had been created. His ideas were 'cliches of ancient party resolutions'. Not much more could be said of the Mensheviks in the capital. Chkheidze, the 'Papa' of the revolution, was an amiable and competent but sleepy-headed Georgian, who, in the words of Sukhanov, could not have been 'less suited to be a working-class or party leader, and he never led anyone anywhere'. Skobelev, a Duma deputy from Baku, was a provincial intellectual, designed on a small-town rather than a national scale. As for Sukhanov, he was on the fringes of all the party factions, being much too undecided to declare his views. Like all too many of the socialist leaders, he was always inclined to look at politics as an intellectual rather than as a politician. Trotsky described him as 'a conscientious observer rather than a statesman, a journalist rather than a revolutionist, a rationaliser rather than a journalist — he was capable of standing by a revolutionary conception only