Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  At the Krestovsky, as at the District Court, all the prison records were removed and burned in a huge bonfire in the prison yard and the building then set on fire. At the House of Preliminary Detention on Shpalernaya, 958 prisoners were set free; others from the Litovsky prison near the Mariinsky Theatre were liberated the following day. All of the political prisoners were cheered; those who had been imprisoned for a criminal offence in some cases ‘were thrashed and told they would forfeit their lives if they were caught again’.38 There were, however, some prisoners who could not be reached, as Bousfield Swan Lombard noted, ‘because in many cases the inmates of prisons were locked in underground cells and in the confusion the keys were lost’; with the prisons then being set on fire, ‘most of them were roasted alive before it was possible to liberate them’. Those who did emerge had ‘hardly anything on, in the way of clothes’. The crowd took pity on these ‘wrecks of humanity’ and they were ‘accommodated with the most amazing assortment of garments. Little men were dressed up in very long trousers and an enormous man might be seen struggling into a coat and waistcoat much too small.’39

  Throughout that terrifying day in Petrograd many observers became alarmed by the increasing anarchy and violence of the mob. It might later be asserted – indeed, it became one of the abiding myths of events in February– that this was a ‘benign revolution’,fn4 but that was not the impression of the many foreign nationals who witnessed it. ‘It was like watching some savage beast that had broken out of its cage,’ recalled Negley Farson; there would be a price to pay for the release of the more hardened criminals, bestialised by brutal prison conditions, who proceeded to incite the crowds to violence, arson and mass looting, creating an extremely volatile atmosphere.40 As of that Monday, it became dangerous for any foreign national to venture onto the street without wearing some token of sympathy with the revolution – a red ribbon or armband of some kind; James Stinton Jones took the precaution of wearing a small Union Jack in his buttonhole; another English couple sewed them to their coat sleeves.

  Stinton Jones also wisely tuned into the mood of whichever crowd he found himself in: ‘As I roamed about I would find myself in one mob shouting: “Long Live the Czar”, and then in another mob shouting: “Long Live the Revolution.” Whichever one I happened to be in I shouted with them.’41 Walking to the Duma, Isaac Marcosson encountered ‘trucks bristling with guns’. Despite the fact that he had deliberately put on an English trenchcoat and cap, ‘the number of young boys with revolvers who looked me over made me feel it was a very easy time in which to be killed’. He was quite sure that ‘my continued existence depended on the sanity of any one of thirty or forty very excited men and boys on each truck’.42 Soon permits would be required for everything. ‘I was given a sheaf of papers all covered with stamps and signatures,’ recalled one British officer, ‘permission to wear a sword – permission to carry a revolver and an identity card which said that I was heart and soul in favour of the new regime!’43

  As Donald Thompson had already learned that morning, foreigners were constantly being stopped and challenged on the streets for being policemen or spies, and some were killed if they could not produce proof of identity quickly enough. ‘Walking from my house to the Embassy was no joke,’ recalled British embassy official Francis Lindley:

  Seething crowds of youths brandishing knives and swords and letting off pistols in the air were not made more pleasant by the fact that I could talk very little of their language. Had one of them said I was a German, I should have been done for before I could explain. For it was rather surprising that in the first days of the Revolution anti-German feeling was vocal and several of my patriotic friends with German names were murdered.44

  That day ‘anybody could have a gun for the asking’, and with so many untrained and inexperienced people now in possession of them and not ‘hav[ing] a care as to which way the gun was pointing when they tried it out for the first time’, such indiscriminate firing inevitably led to many innocent bystanders being killed and wounded.45 Some accidents were the result of sheer bravado: drunks and hooligans firing at random, others showing off to their girlfriends about how to load and fire their weapons. ‘Little boys also delighted in picking up dropped cartridges and throwing them into the fires which were burning outside the police-stations,’ recalled James Stinton Jones, the resulting explosions causing mayhem and injury. He witnessed one particularly chilling incident involving a boy of about twelve, who was brandishing an automatic pistol while warming himself by a brazier with a group of soldiers:

  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.46

  At 1.00 p.m. on Monday, nurse Dorothy Seymour noted in her diary that the men of the Semenovsky Regiment guarding the Anglo-Russian Hospital had ‘opened the door and walked out to join the revolutionists without a word to us’.47 Fighting had been going on all day around the hospital, recalled Edith Hegan, ‘machine guns very busy’ from nearby rooftops and ‘all kinds of unexpected places’, the bullets ‘throwing up a little shower of snow as they hit the pavement’. Bousfield Swan Lombard, who had made his way to the ARH to see how the staff were doing, found when he got there that ‘all the windows were shattered’. He was ‘most impressed and very proud to find the British nurses at their posts’. They had ensured that their patients were safely lying under their beds, ‘and there they stood, each by her bed, calmly accepting the broken windows and the howling mob outside as an everyday occurrence’.48

  All day long, people had flocked into the hospital from the street, trying to escape the shooting, and a steady stream of mixed casualties of soldiers and civilians was taken in. Although Dorothy Seymour and four other nurses did manage to get back to the nurses’ home on Vladimirsky ‘under rather heavy fire from police in windows above armed with revolvers’, it was decided that no other nurses should risk it, and the rest had to bed down in the hospital. ‘Some slept in the bandage-rooms on tables and stretchers’, but they could only snatch brief periods of sleep, as ‘many wounded were constantly being brought in’.49 On several occasions that evening an angry crowd had burst into the hospital and demanded the building be searched for ‘hidden police and machine guns’ – but the hospital commandant, General Laiming, had assured them this was not so, inviting them to inspect the roof and reminding them that the palace’s owner, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, had been exiled for the murder of Rasputin (and was thus on their side).50 As they left, the crowd demanded that the hospital hang a Red Cross flag from its window confirming its neutrality. Lady Sybil Grey hurriedly organised this: ‘we made them out of old sheets and a Father Christmas coat, and also put a lantern with a red cross on it outside the door’.51 No sooner had they done this than the flags were pulled down and used to drape commandeered motor cars. Many of the nurses sat up by the windows, not wanting to ‘miss anything’. Those who had made it back to their dormitory – two blocks down the Nevsky on Vladimirsky, through what Dorothy Seymour described as a ‘shilling shocker’ night – were too anxious to sleep and ‘spent half the night standing at the window’, listening to the ‘terrible agitation’ on the street outside.52

  On Monday morning French actress Paulette Pax had, much to her amazement, received a call from a friend in the city asking if there would be a performance at the Mikhailovsky Theatre that night; and, if so, could she get tickets? This had come just as Pax had been listening to the sound of the mob and gunfire in the streets near her apartment in the centre of Petrograd. Becoming increasingly fearful of looters, she had rushed to hide away her most precious possessions, with the help of her two Russian maids, had battened all the shutters and done her best to protect the do
ors and windows against possible attack with mattresses and piles of cushions, before taking refuge, terrified, in the kitchen. Outside in the courtyard she could hear a crowd approaching, shouting and jeering, and she prepared herself for the worst. But it was not her apartment they were heading for: the mob had come in search of two faraony up on the roof of her apartment building, who had been targeting the crowds below with a machine gun; and who were quickly overcome and dragged away.53

  This incident was symptomatic of the manhunt now in progress. A long-overdue day of reckoning had arrived, as popular hatred was visited, with a savage vengeance, on the police. Their presence on the streets had almost totally evaporated and they were now being systematically ‘dug out like rats’ from their vantage points and hiding places.54 Many had gone into hiding in private houses or had disguised themselves. Mutinying soldiers were particularly enraged to discover that some police had been instructed to wear the uniforms of familiar regiments in order to convince the people that the army was loyal to the old government.55 All over the city, police stations and the homes of police and judges were attacked and sacked and their possessions thrown from the windows: ‘underclothes, ladies’ bonnets, chairs, books, flower-pots, pictures, and then all the records, white and yellow and pink paper, all fluttering in the sun like so many butterflies’.56 Other policemen barricaded themselves into their stations with supplies of food and ammunition, and held out until overcome by their attackers; a few were still manning machine guns on rooftops and in church belfries (which they knew the pious would be loath to attack). When the police were cornered, the mob were merciless: every building connected with them was attacked and sacked, in particular the large block of buildings at number 16 Fontanka, which housed the headquarters of the Okhrana – the tsarist secret police – ‘an object of almost fanatical hatred’, for its accumulation of information on not just political but even religious dissidents. Here, ‘every document, book and scrap of paper’ that could be found was brought outside and ceremonially piled onto huge bonfires in the streets.57 In all, around twelve police stations were set on fire that day – on the Petrograd and Vyborg Sides as well as in central Petrograd; the wisps of blackened pages bearing mug-shots, fingerprints and surveillance records, which had been the bedrock of official oppression for so long, now piles of ash settling in the snow or scattering in the wind.58

  During the February Revolution there were far too many incidental acts of murder of policemen for any reliable record ever to have been taken of the numbers killed. A very few, when caught by more responsible sections of the mob, were taken to the jails – though the ‘crowds would sometimes break through en route and strike and kick them to death’.59 It became a common sight to see policemen being attacked and finished off out of hand – shot, bayoneted, clubbed to death – on the street, their dead bodies left untouched. ‘Food for the dogs,’ some Russians called it. ‘There was no hope for them unless they surrendered,’ recalled Dr Joseph Clare, ‘and even then not much hope, for I know a place where thirty or forty policemen were pushed through a hole in the ice without as much as a stunning tap on the head – drowned like rats.’60 Nobody in the city was immune to the experience of such savagery, as Meriel Buchanan recollected of that afternoon, when ‘a few English ladies, courageously facing the very real danger of the streets, came to the usual weekly sewing party’ at the British embassy. Together they had sat:

  in the big red and white ball-room talking in hushed voices, listening to the distant sound of fighting still going on near the Liteynia and comparing notes of what they had seen on their way to the Embassy. One had met a mob of drunken soldiers and workmen who had trussed a policeman up in ropes and were dragging him along the frozen road, another had seen an officer shot down on the doorstep of a house, still another had passed a crowd gathered round a huge bonfire and had been told they were burning a sergeant of the Secret Police.61

  Such scenes of mindless cruelty left an indelible impression on the seven-year-old mind of the future historian Isaiah Berlin, who vividly remembered a ‘horrifying spectacle’ when out walking with his parents later that day, as they saw one policeman, ‘evidently loyal to the tsarist government, who, it was said, had been sniping at the demonstrators from a rooftop, being dragged by a mob to some awful end: the man looked pale and terrified and was feebly struggling with his captors’. The image, Berlin recalled many years later, had ‘remained with me and infected me with a permanent horror of any kind of violence’.62

  With so much rampant anarchy unleashed on the streets of Petrograd, Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko had sent an urgent telegram to the Tsar that morning, insisting that he return to the city and warning that ‘the last hour ha[d] come in which to decide the fate of the country and the dynasty’.63 Nicholas replied that he was coming back with a reserve of troops to quell the rioting. In the interim the Duma members were at a loss as to how to deal with events that had taken them totally by surprise. With Russia plunged into political uncertainty, the Duma at the Tauride Palace was a magnet for Petrograders all day. Arno Dosch-Fleurot made his way there on foot from the Hotel de France, following the crowds. En route he had noticed the road getting ‘thicker and thicker with automobiles and lorries filled with excited unarmed soldiers and serious civilians with rifles’.64 By about 1.00 p.m. the crowd of thousands massing outside the doors to the Duma was thick with ‘green-uniformed and green capped students; many waving red flags and red bunting and listening to revolutionary speeches’, all anxious to offer their support to the formation of a new government and seeking instructions on what they should do.65

  Once the residence of Catherine the Great’s lover, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the Tauride Palace – a graceful Palladian building of white colonnades, grand reception rooms and columned galleries – had been home to the Imperial State Duma since 1906. But within hours of events on Monday it had been transformed into a rackety military-camp-cum-political-hustings, where urgent meetings were held to establish a provisional government to take charge of the extremely volatile situation. With difficulty Fleurot had made his way into the building and found it full of troops. ‘Everybody seemed to be hungry; bread, dried herrings, and tea’ were being endlessly handed around.66 If anything, ‘the mental confusion within was more bewildering than the revolution without’, for the whole place seethed with tension and excitement, as regiment after regiment arrived and was ‘drawn up in ranks, four deep, down the whole length of the Catherine Hall’ – the main lobby and promenade of the Duma – to swear its allegiance to the new government. Rodzianko addressed each of them in turn, urging them to ‘remain a disciplined force’, to stay faithful to their officers and return quietly to barracks and be ready when called.67

  At around 2.30 p.m. in the semicircular main hall an enormous, mixed assembly of moderate and liberal members of the Duma met to organise themselves, under Rodzianko’s leadership, in hopes that a reformed, constitutional government could yet be salvaged from the wreckage. A twelve-man Provisional Executive Committee was eventually elected that evening to take control of the situation. One of its first acts was to order the arrest of the members of the Council of Ministers – the Upper House of the Duma, and guardians of the old regime – who met at the Mariinsky Palace. Some of them had already tendered their resignations, including the Prime Minister Nikolay Golitsyn; others had gone into hiding, and revolutionary patrols were now searching for them.

  Even as the Duma members were establishing their own committee, elsewhere in the Tauride Palace a large group of soldiers and workers intent on nothing less than the declaration of a socialist republic and Russia’s withdrawal from the war were meeting with the more moderate Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (the left-wing Bolshevik presence was yet to make itself felt), with the objective of electing their own Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.68 Its most immediate call, made in a hastily produced leaflet, was not, however, a political one – rather, it was an appeal to citizens to help feed the
hungry soldiers who had taken their side, until their revictualling could be properly organised. Petrograders quickly responded, welcoming men into their homes to warm themselves and be fed; restaurants offered free meals; old men were seen in the street ‘with large boxes of cigarettes, which they handed out to the soldiers’.69fn5

  At about nine o’clock that evening an American residentfn6 went out to have a look at what was going on and encountered ‘a very well dressed intelligent man, running breathlessly up the Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt’ on the Petrograd Side, ‘stopping a few moments every block to tell the great news: “The Duma has formed a temporary government.’’’ Such an event seemed unimaginable for a country so long under the heel of autocratic rule, he wrote, ‘astounding, colossal, not to be grasped at once or even half understood’. Later, at midnight, he went out again and found a ‘tremendous mass of people in the square on the Petrograd Side surrounding a truck packed with soldiers from which a 2nd lieutenant was telling the crowd the news: ‘Now it’s all right,’ the American heard him shout, ‘there’ll be a new government. Do you understand? A new government, and there’ll be bread for everybody.’ The American was as overwhelmed by this seismic change in Russian political life as were the Russians themselves:

  I don’t think any man’s mind that night, except the very leaders in the Duma, could stretch fast enough and far enough to do more than struggle with the realization of the simplest and most elementary facts of the revolution – with the plain fact that there actually was a revolution.70