Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  Then Harper saw them – a platoon of faraony came galloping into the square, ‘slashing at every side with their sabers’, until suddenly a Cossack leaped forward and ran the officer leading the faraony through with his lancefn1 and he fell dead from his horse. After this ‘the Cossacks yelled and charged the faraony, hacking and swinging with their whips’ until they ‘broke and fled’ in terror.14 ‘You should have seen the crowd,’ wrote another American eyewitness: ‘People kissed and hugged the Cossacks, climbing up on the horses to reach them. Others kissed and embraced the horses, the Cossacks’ boots, stirrups, saddles. They were given cigarettes, money, cigar cases, gloves, anything, everything.’ Thompson’s interpreter, Boris, seemed greatly moved by this moment. The ‘day of days’ had come, he told Thompson: ‘The Cossacks are with the People.’ It was the ‘first time in the history of Russia that a Cossack had disobeyed orders’.15

  According to Harper, about five hundred or so of the mob then detached themselves and started back up the Nevsky ‘carrying a red flag that was bigger than anything we had seen’.16 She and Thompson trailed them back up the street, during which time the crowd was charged three times by the police and they ‘had to turn and run’. Harper was terrified that she might be tripped by the running crowd and get trampled underfoot, but it was the sabres of the police that scared her most. She decided to head back to the Astoria, but as she and Thompson were approaching the Singer Building, they decided they might first take refuge for a while in the US consulate there. A block before, they could see that a crowd had gathered round the window of Pekar’s patisserie – a franchise at the Hotel d’Europe boasting a window of luxury cakes and confectionery (which even Leighton Rogers thought ‘a rash display for these hard times’). The crowd were eyeing the food ‘they couldn’t have’, when suddenly a workman smashed the plate-glass window and grabbed a box of biscuits.17 The noise drew even more people, closely followed by the police, who opened fire.

  Arthur Reinke, an American telephone engineer with Westinghouse, which had offices in the Singer Building, had watched from his balcony in horror as the faraony had ridden into the crowd that had gathered, ‘beating the people down with their nagaikas’, and at how, in response, ‘the people had roared and hooted and threw stones and bottles at the police’. He had wanted to get back to the Hotel d’Europe where he was staying, but the mob outside Pekar’s ‘simply filled the Nevsky from edge to edge . . . tearing down the street towards me, while bayonets were blinking in the distance and bullets flying’. Taking a deep breath, he made a run for it and reckoned, in so doing, that he ‘establish[ed] the engineering department’s record for the hundred-yard dash, making that hotel corner before the mob cut me off’ – only to find the hotel doors bolted. After he had pounded with sufficient force, a porter finally let him in.18 Claude Anet had had the same problem when he got caught in the mob at the Europe: he had found ‘all the doors, carriage-entrances’ and other means of escape nearby firmly closed, ‘as though by a miracle’. With great difficulty he had made his way against the current of people to the safety of a house near the Anichkov Bridge.19

  Boris had not been surprised at the attack on Pekar’s: the café, he told Thompson, was rumoured to be ‘full of German agents and food controllers who met there and decided each day what they would charge for food’, which is why the mob had wreaked vengeance upon it.20 The place was completely wrecked and five people sitting inside had been killed, as well as the workman who had broken the window. The bodies of the dead were quickly carried off; the shop window was boarded up and the ‘clotted snow’ carefully swept away, but the story spread down the Nevsky like ‘quick-silver’ until it reached the Nicholas Station, where the police had again used a concealed machine gun to disperse the angry crowd.21

  The disturbances outside Pekar’s had taken place only a short distance from the Anglo-Russian Hospital, from where the nurses had seen the mob coming down the Nevsky from the Singer Building. The nurses had all been snatching time whenever they could that day to watch the crowds and help deal with some of the wounded who were carried in from the street. Canadian VAD Edith Hegan was struck by the strangeness of the situation: usually at the front their first sight of the wounded had been after the battles, when they were brought to the field hospitals, but here in Petrograd ‘we have only to look from our second-story window to see riots continually in progress and wounded and dying falling everywhere as the police charge the streets from time to time’. She and three of her compatriots went down to the Anichkov Bridge that afternoon to take a closer look, but were severely reprimanded for doing so. Returning to their window seats, they could hear the ‘click of the machine guns which the police had hidden in the houses’.22 Their Russian patients begged them to come away from the windows, as bullets were already hitting the hospital.

  Disturbances continued up and down the Nevsky until early evening. At around 6.00 p.m. Arno Dosch-Fleurot had been out near the Singer Building with a British military adviser, when they had both had to dive for cover as a squad of faraony, their sabres drawn, came charging round the corner into the Nevsky on the pavement, striking at the mob with the edge of their blades in an attempt to drive them off the street.23 But all their efforts failed: there were now two or three thousand people on the Nevsky – a ‘running mob’ – and Fleurot saw the faraony bayonet several demonstrators. From the window of his room in the Hotel d’Europe as he dressed for a concert, British socialite Bertie Stopfordfn2 had seen ‘all the well-dressed Nevski crowd running for their lives down the Michail Street [Mikhailovskaya], and a stampede of motor-cars and sledges – to escape from the machine-guns which never stopped firing’.24 He saw ‘a well-dressed lady run over by an automobile, a sledge turn over and the driver thrown into the air and killed. The poorer-looking people crouched against the walls; many others, principally men, lay flat in the snow. Lots of children were trampled on, and people knocked down by the sledges or by the rush of the crowd.’

  Thompson, Harper and Boris, too, were still out on the streets and constantly having to dive for cover.25 Boris was sure that some of the rounds the troops had fired had been blanks or that they had fired into the air – otherwise there would have been far more people killed. It was the police manning machine guns on the roofs of buildings who had done most of the killing.26 The demonstrators had responded with every kind of weapon they could lay their hands on: revolvers, home-made bombs or missiles – bottles, rocks, metal, even lumps of snow. Some had hand-grenades that had found their way back from the Eastern Front. And all day long they had continued to urge the troops to come over to their side.27

  At Russian-army HQ (Stavka) at Mogilev nearly five hundred miles away, Nicholas II had received news of the violent turn of events in Petrograd, although Protopopov had failed to transmit the true gravity of the situation to him. Thinking firmer measures by police and troops were all that were needed, Nicholas had therefore not seen the necessity of returning to Petrograd, instead telegraphing Khabalov and ordering him to ‘quell by tomorrow the disturbances in the capital which are inexcusable in view of the difficulties of the war with Germany and Austria’. His wife had written, dismissing the day’s events as no more than the workers blowing off steam, ‘a hooligan movement’, ‘young boys and girls running about and screaming that they have no bread, only to excite’. Had it been very cold, she felt, ‘they would probably stay indoors’.28 Besides, Alexandra had far more serious things to think about: three of her five children, Alexey, Tatiana and Olga, were down with the measles.

  Seeking some light relief from the day’s traumatic events, Florence Harper and Donald Thompson went that evening to the Mikhailovsky premiere of a French farce, L’Idée de Françoise, accompanied by the US vice consul. Thompson found it a bore and left early with Boris, to walk the streets of the factory districts, where he ‘found things more exciting’.29 French embassy attaché Louis de Robien was also at the premiere, but the imperial boxes were empty and the grand dukes absent. One of the
company, actress Paulette Pax,fn3 had found the whole performance unnerving – particularly the audience, with its ‘profusion of jewels and sumptuous outfits’ – bearing in mind what had been going on outside all day. She felt that none of them had taken much notice of the play: their minds were elsewhere, their applause half-hearted. ‘What we were doing was ridiculous,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘performing a comedy at such a time made no sense.’30

  Arthur Ransome had not, however, considered the situation so serious when he wrote his despatch that night, noting how most of the crowd (‘including many women’) had been out simply to watch other people make trouble. The ‘general feeling’ had been one of ‘rather precarious excitement like a bank holiday with thunder in the air’, he suggested, emphasising the ‘extremely good relations between crowd and Cossacks’. The objective of the disturbances had been ‘vague’. Arthur Reinke thought much the same: that night he had found the highways jammed with people who, in the face of extreme provocation by the police, had remained ‘merely curious’.31 But the imposition of a curfew saw them all hurrying to their homes by 11.00 p.m., leaving ‘long rows of ugly-looking Cossacks on their ponies drawn at intervals across the street’ and large splotches of blood visible on the white snow, bearing ‘mute witness’ to what had happened that day.32 J. Butler Wright never forgot ‘the pervading smell’ on the Nevsky late that afternoon; it came from ‘the disinfectants and first-aid remedies administered to those who had been shot down’.33

  Out on the Petrograd Side, a restless Donald Thompson was still in search of a story with Boris at 2.00 a.m., when he finally came face-to-face with the first hideous manifestation of mob violence. Marching towards them came a rowdy group of about sixty people, ‘who had taken two heads and jammed them on poles and were carrying them down the middle of the street’. They were the heads of policemen, so Boris said. Thompson had seen enough red for one day: red flags, red blotches on the snow; and now severed heads. They saw more bodies on their way back to the Astoria, and Thompson later discovered that ‘a great many policemen were killed or seriously wounded’ by mobs in the Vyborg and Petrograd Sides.34 All through Saturday night there was a great deal of screaming and yelling and incessant firing in those districts, as the violent scenario continued to unravel. For Philip Chadbourn, that day had been a point of significant and perhaps optimistic transition – ‘the blank between the reels’ – separating ‘the black misery and injustice of the first reel’ and the ‘red revolt and bright heroics of the second’.35

  There was an ominous stillness in the city on the beautiful, cloudless sunny Sunday morning that followed; but overnight General Khabalov had resolved that draconian measures would have to be taken to keep the situation under control. New placards posted across the city announced that all workers would have to return to work by Tuesday 28th or those who had applied for deferments of their military service would be sent straight to the front. All street gatherings of more than three people were forbidden. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers that had gone on from midnight till 5.00 a.m., Khabalov had given assurances that 30,000 soldiers, backed up by artillery and armoured cars, would be on the streets, with orders to take decisive action against the demonstrators.36

  Overnight the drawbridges across the Neva had all been raised and the remaining fixed bridges were heavily guarded by armoured cars and machine guns. Though the crowds took to the ice once more, there were now so many that it took a long time for them to cross. There were fewer Cossacks about that morning, but a lot more police on patrol, and troops were manning all the bridges intersecting the Nevsky with the Ekaterininsky Canal and the Moika and Fontanka Rivers, and also on guard outside the railway stations. By late morning many of these positions were being reinforced with machine-gun posts. The Red Cross was in evidence, too, positioning horse-drawn ambulances in side streets in anticipation of the inevitable resumption of violence.37 This time Khabalov was taking no chances and had ensured that most of the troops on the Nevsky were training detachments from the guards regiments, brought in from the military academies. They were all heavily armed with rifles and bayonets – the authorities assuming that, as NCOs, these men would be less reluctant to shoot, if ordered to do so.38

  It seemed as though the whole city was out of doors that morning, and on foot – for there were no trams or cabs. People seemed determined to get to church as usual or simply enjoy the fine weather for a promenade along the Nevsky. Couples were pushing their babies in prams, just like any ordinary Sunday; children were skating on the ice rink in the Admiralty Gardens. It seemed to Donald Thompson, as he left the Astoria with Florence Harper, ‘that all the children in Petrograd were out’.39

  Most of the shops and cafés facing the Nevsky were closed, however, and a lot of them had their shutters down or had been hastily boarded up.40 The city seemed ‘violated’, thought Louise Patouillet, who was unnerved by the changes that the disturbances had already wrought. Overnight, and despite the families out walking in such a seemingly carefree manner, the atmosphere had crystallised into something darker, edgier. Revolution was ‘in the air you breathed’, noted an English visitor. What organisation there was remained impromptu, of a ‘hand-to-mouth character’.41 The Russian government had warned foreign nationals not to go out, but Thompson and Harper were unable to resist the temptation to mingle with the crowds on the Nevsky once more with Boris, although, as Harper recalled, ‘neither of us liked the look of the situation’. People were desperate for news, and groups formed round anyone who had any to tell.42 The one predominating topic of conversation – aside from debate about how many had already been killed or injured, heard time and time again by foreign eyewitnesses during the revolution – was that much of the firing on civilians had been done by faraony disguised as soldiers or even as Cossacks. People were sure of this because the faraony rode ‘large, fine animals’, and the Cossacks’ horses were ‘very small and shaggy and generally unkempt looking’. They could tell the difference.43

  By midday the approaches to the Nevsky had become blocked with dense crowds flooding in from all sides of the city and attempting to converge there. Thompson and Harper headed for the Medved (‘The Bear’) – a popular French restaurant on Bolshaya Konyushennaya near the Singer Building – for a midday lunch before the restaurant’s limited supply of bread ran out. Thompson was well prepared for possible action and had his ‘gyroscopic camera’ concealed in a bag so that he could take photographs.44 After leaving the restaurant and walking back down to the Nevsky they could see a mob, waving red flags and singing the Marseillaise, gathering lower down near the Anichkov Bridge. ‘Those poor devils are going to get it,’ Thompson warned, and as they turned to take shelter they heard a roar and saw ‘fifty mounted police dressed as soldiers’ charge the mob and drive them down the side street.

  But no sooner had this crowd been moved on than another one gathered on the bridge. A student clambered up on one of the equestrian statues and started waving a red flag and making a speech; Thompson stopped to get a picture and watched as the mob moved off and straight into the ‘snarl of a deadly machine gun and the spit of rifles’. He had seen the police pulling a machine gun into the middle of the tram-tracks. ‘Volley after volley rang out,’ recalled Harper. ‘The dead were thick; the wounded were screaming as they were trampled down.’ Soon everyone was prostrate, hugging the pavement or lying in the snow – Thompson and Harper included. It felt as though ‘hell itself had broken loose on the Nevsky’, for they were under fire ‘from every point’, bar the shops behind them. Bullets were also coming at them from machine guns on the roofs of buildings and ‘sweeping all around’.45

  Thompson managed to take a few photographs before he and Harper got up and made a run for it. They smashed their way through the window of a glove shop to take cover, closely followed by about ten or fifteen others, many of them bleeding. Right in front of their eyes they had seen a little girl hit in the throat by gunfire, and a well-dressed woman standing near them had collap
sed with a scream as her knee was shattered by a bullet. After crawling back out into the street, Thompson and Harper were once more thrown to the ground by rifle fire coming from the police on the Anichkov Bridge. All around people lay dead and dying in the snow – Thompson counted twelve dead soldiers, Harper noted far more women and children than men: thirty dead in all. The two reporters lay there in the snow for more than an hour, numb with cold, but too frightened to move. Harper ‘had a vague idea that I was freezing to death’; she wanted to cry. And then the ambulances appeared and started collecting the dead and wounded and they decided this was fortuitous: they could pretend they were wounded and be picked up and taken to safety.46

  The nurses at the Anglo-Russian Hospital had also seen the fighting in which Thompson and Harper had been caught up, a short distance from the Anichkov Bridge. VAD Dorothy Cotton had been reliably informed that there would be a renewal of disturbances by 3.00 p.m. and, just as predicted, at around 2.45 they were all watching from the windows when a company of Pavlovsky guards, lined up at the major junction of Sadovaya with the Nevsky (just west of the Anichkov Bridge), were ordered to clear the street. Lady Sybil Grey had seen how they ‘lay down in the snow and fired a volley into the people’, who all fell onto their faces.47 Then a machine gun opened fire from a rooftop and ‘swept the street in every direction’, as people tried to crawl away on their stomachs. Others ‘rushed where they could. They darted into side streets, pressed against the walls of houses, hid prone behind heaps of snow or behind streetcar posts.’ It had all been ‘a case of quite unnecessary provocation on the part of the police’, she recalled.

  Many people had taken refuge in the doorway of the hospital, noticed Edith Hegan.48 She could not help being impressed by the Cossacks, galloping up and down the Nevsky like ‘a tawny streak’ trying to clear the crowds. She saw one of them charge at a man who seemed to be leading the crowd, and how he ‘described an arc in the air with his sword. I saw the sword descend, and while I held my breath in horror it neatly sliced off the top of the man’s hat.’ The man had not seemed to be ‘in the least frightened’ and had ‘walked calmly on, while the crowd cheered them both impartially’. Not so long ago, she added, ‘that Cossack would have sliced off the man’s head’.49