Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  Bert Hall, a US aviator attached to the Russian Air Service, was in Petrograd that day and, like Thompson and Harper, his first experience of Russia was proving a baptism of fire. He wrote in his diary of ‘endless mobs of people marching along singing wild songs, throwing bricks into street cars’. He saw workmen carrying placards not just calling for bread, but saying ‘Give us land!’ and ‘Save our souls!’, and at the end of one procession ‘a little girl carrying a tiny banner’ on which was written ‘Feed your children!’ It was, he recalled, ‘the most pathetic thing I ever saw in my life’. Why didn’t the Russians just ‘go ahead and have a revolution and get it over?’ he said to his Russian companion. Ah, but ‘God still loves the Tsar,’ he was told; ‘it would be a misfortune to revolt against a ruler who stood in well with God’. Hall was outraged:

  The common people are hungry; they have been hungry too for a long while. Christ, why doesn’t the Tsar do something about it! What a chance for some wise American organizer! Think of it! All of Russia might go to pot for the want of a little wise management.45

  As the crowds moved up and down the Nevsky all day, people living along it threw open their windows to watch and cheer. The British and Canadian staff at the Anglo-Russian Hospital, as well as their patients, had a ringside view of events from the second-floor windows of their wards. The nurses had been given orders on the 22nd ‘to remain indoors and not to go out on the streets, except to the hospital and back’.46 The ARH had been ‘full of soldiers ready for any emergency’ – thirty men from the Semenovsky Guards regiment had been deployed there to guard them, with three on the front door with fixed bayonets. The staff had been told to prepare to evacuate the premises at very short notice. But this rapidly proved impossible, because of the surge of people coming down the Nevsky.47 ‘They just hurled past,’ recalled Canadian nurse Dorothy Cotton, ‘and the Cossacks riding in the opposite direction to them rode right into them and scattered them.’ A few stray casualties were brought to the hospital for treatment – shot by policemen disguised as soldiers, so it was claimed.48

  Florence Harper and Donald Thompson had been out on the streets since early that morning, ‘trail[ing] the mobs’, though for most of the time they were ‘pushed up and down the Nevsky’ willy-nilly, running, sliding in the snow and often hugging the sides of buildings so as not to get trampled.49 They ended up being virtually carried down to the Kazan Cathedral, a traditional rallying point, where many of the columns of demonstrators had already gathered in the square that fronted it. Some knelt down, bared their heads and prayed, and others gathered in small groups around speakers.50 The reticence of the Cossacks to break up the crowds persisted, so much so that ‘the Prefect of Police’ – so Lady Sybil Grey was told – had driven up to the cathedral in his motor car and had ‘ordered the officer commanding a patrol of Cossacks to charge the people with drawn swords’. The officer had refused: ‘Sir, I cannot give such an order, for the people are only asking for bread.’ On hearing this, the crowd had cheered loudly ‘and were cheered in return by the Cossacks’.51 Thompson and Harper noted this response, too. There was no violence, ‘it was a very good-natured mob’. Except in one respect: they had seen a secret policeman ‘trying to take a picture’ of someone addressing the crowd. He was quickly spotted and set upon, his camera smashed; they would have killed him, had he not been rescued by a mounted faraon. Thompson had been taking photographs himself, ‘using my small camera’, but was ‘careful not to attract attention’. He had noticed how ‘ugly’ some of the police were getting and that many of them were dressed as soldiers or Cossacks.52

  At four in the afternoon Harper and Thompson nearly got themselves trampled outside the Anglo-Russian Hospital on their way back up the Nevsky. The Cossacks had come riding down, ‘laughing and chaffing with the mob’ and giving them ‘a poke with their lances’ if they did not move fast enough. They were riding abreast in tight formation, such that the two journalists couldn’t squeeze by and had to rush into the storm-door of the hospital, but Harper had still received ‘a most awful jab with the butt of a lance’ as a Cossack rode past. He was just a boy of about eighteen, she noticed; he told her to move on, but she refused and so he jabbed her again. ‘That was enough,’ she recalled; she ‘flew across the bridge and back down the Nevsky’, with Thompson in tow.53

  By 8.00 p.m. on Friday most of the demonstrators in central Petrograd had gone home, vowing to return the following morning. This second day of mass demonstrations had seen more workers out on strike than at any other time during the war; and their activity was now becoming violent, turning in particular on the police and mounted faraony. In response, General Khabalov had ensured that many more machine-gun placements were set up in the attics of mansions, hotels, shops, clock and bell towers up and down the Nevsky, and on the roofs of railway stations. He also had infantry and machine gunners in reserve and a huge stockpile of rifles, revolvers and ammunition, which, although designated for the front, had been retained for use in Petrograd, should the need arise, and ‘stored in the various police stations’.54

  The foreign news correspondents in Petrograd caught up in these events, and now realising their growing significance, were all frustratingly hampered by one thing: they could not get the truth of the situation out to their papers in the UK, the US and elsewhere, because of the strict tsarist censorship being applied to all telegraph messages sent from the city. Arno Dosch-Fleurot had written a daily cable about the ‘bread-riots’ and had ‘gone with it to the young officer in charge of the censorship’. And every day the response had been the same: the man had ‘offered me tea but no hope of getting the news out’. When he finally wrote a positive piece ‘about the enthusiasm of the populace for the Cossacks’, his despatch was allowed through.55 For some time Robert Wilton of The Times had been having similar difficulties, reduced to making only vague allusions to the growing discontent in the capital, ‘owing to the disorganization of the food supplies’. Today, Friday, he had written a despatch about the ‘prolonged debates’ going on in the Duma on how to combat the food crisis, confirming that meanwhile the behaviour of the demonstrators had on the whole been ‘devoid of a seditious or vindictive character’. ‘Bread supplies assured,’ he telegraphed, quoting General Khabalov – a positive spin on an escalating situation, written in order to get his report past the censors.56 The word ‘revolution’ was not mentioned.fn3

  Throughout the night of the 24th there were occasional volleys of firing; and yet, astonishingly, the social life of the city continued. The Alexandrinsky Theatre was packed that evening for a performance of Gogol’s The Government Inspector. Indeed, the audience had been ‘in a lively humour at this satire on the political weaknesses of the mid-nineteenth century’. Few seemed willing to believe that a ‘greater drama was at that moment unfolding in real life throughout the capital’.57 Leighton Rogers and several colleagues from the National City Bank had headed out for supper at the Café de la Grave, located in the basement of a building on the Nevsky. En route they had their first experience of the Cossacks, a troop of whom came hurtling at them, ‘galloping at full tilt down the sidewalk . . . shouting like mad, carbines bouncing on their backs, sabres flopping at the horses’ sides, and mean looking steel lances flourishing’. Rogers and his party took one look and ran for their lives. After dining they headed home in the dark; the atmosphere of the city was ‘like a taut wire’. Troops of mounted Cossacks were still out in force, lined up all the way down the Nevsky, ‘compelling pedestrians to walk up the middle of the street between a double row of horses and steel points’. ‘It was hardly a pleasant sensation,’ Rogers recalled. ‘All the way I could feel myself wriggling on one of those lances like a worm on a hook.’ ‘I’ll never fish with live bait again,’ he resolved.58

  In search of a story, Arno Dosch-Fleurot had made ‘a long tour’ that afternoon through the Vyborg Side and had found it ‘thickly policed by infantrymen’. There were a few trams still running, ‘but otherwise the district was omino
usly silent’. The only people on the streets had been those in the familiar bread lines and groups of workers on corners, whose ‘silent gravity’ struck Fleurot as ‘something to reckon with’. Thompson noticed them too when, after dinner at Donon’s, he ventured into the outlying areas until 3.00 a.m.59 Over at the French embassy, First Secretary Charles de Chambrun wrote to his wife, pondering the news he had just heard that a general strike had been declared for the following day. More marches, more protests were coming. But what could a mob ‘without alcohol, without a leader and without a clear objective achieve?’ he wondered. As night fell, Petrograd waited expectantly.60

  3

  ‘Like a Bank Holiday with Thunder in the Air’

  ‘OH THIS INTERMINABLE Russian winter with its white roofs for so many long months and its slippery roads,’ French resident Louise Patouillet wrote ruefully in her diary, by now long accustomed to the kind of low grey sky that greeted the city with a new fall of snow on Saturday 25 February.1 Leighton Rogers, in contrast, struck an excited note in his own journal: ‘What a day! The general strike is on, all right, and trouble has begun.’ That morning, on their way to the bank, he and his colleagues had ‘found the streets thick with police, both a-foot and mounted; no factories working, and the Nevsky a long line of closed shops, with here and there a boarded up door or window.’ He had heard rumours that the first person had been killed the previous night when trying to break into a bread shop; the people on the streets seemed on the lookout for excitement, ‘like a crowd at a great country fair’, but Rogers ‘hated to think of what one shot would do.’2

  Had he known the extent to which the strikers were now arming themselves for an inevitable street fight with the police, Rogers might have been even more alarmed. Across the city, embassies and legations were being warned by telephone not to allow their staff to go out. Yet that day the somewhat foolhardy Rogers had set off from the National City Bank with ‘nine million roubles worth of short term Treasury Notes’ to get them ‘stowed away’ in a safe-deposit vault at the Volga-Kama Bank ahead of Sunday closing. He put the notes – the equivalent of $3 million – in his jacket pocket and headed off from the bank, which was housed in the former Turkish embassy on Palace Embankment. But the streets were so choked with crowds that he had been forced to go the long way round. Outside the Mikhailovsky Theatre he stopped for a while to study the poster for the latest French season; the next thing he knew, a colleague from the bank came running after him shouting, ‘Where the hell have you been?? . . . We’ve been phoning all over the city for you!’ When they had called the Volga-Kama Bank they had discovered Rogers hadn’t yet arrived; they were worried that something had happened to him, for they had been tipped off ‘that a revolution ha[d] started’.3

  Violent protest was certainly the intention of the workers over in the factory districts that morning, as they gathered for a huge march on the city. This time they had ensured that they wore plenty of padding under their thick coats, in order to ward off blows from the lead-tipped nagaiki used by the faraony. Some even crafted metal plates to wear under their hats, to protect them from blows, and filled their pockets with whatever metal projectiles and weapons they could lay hands on in their factories.4 At noon the crowds began their descent on the Nevsky, but the faraony were ready for them at the Liteiny Bridge. As the crowd surged forward to try and cross it, the faraony charged them; but though the crowd parted to let them through, it quickly closed once again in a pincer movement around the commanding officer, pulling him from his horse. Someone grabbed the officer’s revolver and shot him dead, while another beat at him in a rage with a piece of wood.5 It was the first defining act of violence against the police that day.

  On the south side of Petrograd the powerful Putilov workforce had joined the strike and, as the day went on, the strike spread inexorably across the city, bringing out everyone, from shop workers to waitresses, to cooks and maids and cab drivers; key workers in the supply of the city’s electricity, gas and water and the tram drivers were also out in force. A few bread shops had been open, but by early afternoon were forced to close, and striking postal workers and printers had ensured that there were no mail deliveries and no newspapers. The strikers’ numbers were swelled by at least 15,000 striking students, as fifteen different columns of marchers converged on the Nevsky. But no one knows exactly how many strikers surged through the streets of Petrograd that day – official figures vary from 240,000 to 305,000.6

  The impromptu bread protests of two days ago had now expanded into a political movement, coloured by more and more acts of violence and looting. On the Liteiny, Amélie de Néry saw a young boy who had helped to loot a small Jewish shop stand there offering six dozen stolen mother-of-pearl buttons for a ruble. An insignificant act of theft, perhaps, but for de Néry it signalled a worrying change in public attitudes brought on by the protests – a lack of distinction between ‘yours’ and ‘mine’. Perhaps tomorrow, she wondered, ‘a more serious collapse in moral values would be unleashed’.7 For the time being, though, there was still no outward sign of a systematic organised revolt; the movement remained inchoate, leaderless. ‘Is it a riot? Is it a revolution?’ asked Claude Anet, Petrograd correspondent of Le Petit Parisien, who – like the other foreign journalists in town – had had no luck in telegraphing the news back to his paper in Paris.8

  Bitter cold prevailed once more, but with all the trams stopped and many shops closed there was little traffic on the streets, enabling the crowds to mill on the Nevsky, ‘eddying up and down in anxious curiosity’ and gathering in knots on street corners. Leighton Rogers recalled a ‘curious, smiling, determined crowd’, but he also sensed something else: that it was ‘dangerous’.9 Troops were out in force at the natural gathering points at major intersections along the two-mile stretch of the Nevsky, from the Winter Palace at its northern end, down past the Kazan Cathedral to Znamensky Square and, on its south side, the Nicholas Station. Like the Cossacks, the troops seemed unwilling to exert force, and the crowds appeared hopeful that they had won them over.

  But everything changed in the afternoon when the troops and faraony were ordered to clear the crowds. The whole of the Nevsky was one seething mass of people as the police pushed at them, striking with sabres, while the Cossacks charged and swashbuckled. Inevitably people fell and in the melee were trampled by horses or by each other, as the crowd swelled and surged, all the way down to the popular meeting point at Znamensky Square. Here Donald Thompson had seen police mounting a machine gun on the balcony of a house at eleven that morning; a confrontation was clearly brewing.10 After lunch he and Harper had walked back down there to observe the enormous gathering of workers, strikers, students and even some middle-class and professional people pressing together in front of the ugly equestrian statue of Alexander III. Many had taken their hats off and were shouting, ‘Give us bread and we will go back and work.’ As elsewhere, the troops hung back, and the Cossacks seemed to be taking an interest in the speeches. The women in the crowd were as bold as the previous day, approaching them and placing ‘coaxing hands’ on their rifles. ‘Put them down!’ they pleaded. ‘Think of your own mothers and sweethearts and wives!’ Others fell on their knees: ‘We are your sisters, workers like yourselves. Do you mean to bayonet us?’11

  One speaker after another leaped up on the statue’s plinth to harangue the crowd, which became uglier as time went on. Around 2.00 p.m. Thompson saw a well-dressed man in furs enter the square in a sleigh, shouting at the crowd to let him through, only to be ‘dragged out of his sleigh and beaten’. Thompson saw him run to take refuge in an abandoned tram nearby – but a group of workers followed him and one of them, armed with a ‘small iron bar’, proceeded in an outburst of rage to beat the man’s head ‘to a pulp’. This ‘seemed to give the mob a taste for blood’, for as they surged forward some of them started smashing the windows of those shops not already protected with iron shutters. Some of these protesters, however, were actually police in disguise. Thompson recognised
one of them: a member of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, who lived at his hotel, now dressed as a workman and pushing soldiers off the pavement as though he were ‘an anarchist of the worst type’. Boris, his interpreter, assured him this was so: the Okhrana were known to be ‘mingling with the mob’ and trying to incite them into attacking the soldiers’.12

  By late afternoon Harper – having already walked the best part of ten miles around the city that day – announced that she was exhausted and was going back to the hotel. Thompson, however, persuaded her to stay a little longer. They hung back in a side street and watched. Every now and again the Cossacks galloped through the square to clear the crowds, but it was futile: ‘they would re-form again, like water after the passage of a boat’.13 Harper and Thompson were both watching – she back in the direction of the Nevsky, he in the square – when at about 4.00 p.m. Thompson heard a loud explosion. Someone had thrown a grenade or bomb from the roof of the Nicholas Station; Thompson saw the crowd instinctively raise their hands in the air, indicating that they were unarmed. Shortly afterwards another explosion followed as the Cossacks struggled to control the crowd.