Now events moved quickly. Together, citizens and soldiers seized the arsenal, arming themselves with the guns and ammunition that had been stored for the capital’s protection. Soon, men and women draped in cartridge belts and carrying weapons raced down the street, firing wildly into the air. They flung open jails and set the prisoners free, looted shops and bakeries, torched police stations and other government buildings. When firemen arrived at these scenes, rather than fighting the blazes, they cheered and watched the structures burn.
Distraught, the tsar’s younger brother, Grand Duke Michael, telephoned Stavka. Nicholas had to appoint a government acceptable to the people … now! But the grand duke was not allowed to speak with Nicholas directly. Instead, he was forced to leave a message with one of the generals. “I see,” said the general after Michael explained the dire situation. “Please wait while I speak with the tsar.” Forty long minutes later, the general called back. “The Emperor wishes to express his thanks,” he told Michael. “He is leaving for Tsarskoe Selo [where he can confer with his wife] and will decide there.”
Nicholas still did not understand.
Government ministers finally gave up. Adjourning themselves, they simply walked away.
Duma president Rodzianko tried one last time. “Sire, do not delay,” he telegrammed to Stavka. “[This] will mean the end of Russia. Inevitably, the dynasty will fall with it. Tomorrow [will] be too late.”
It was already too late. By midafternoon, the first crowd of workers and soldiers waving red flags and singing revolutionary songs arrived at the Tauride Palace, where the Duma was meeting. It was, wrote one historian, “a motley, exuberant mob. There were soldiers tall and hot in their rough, wool uniforms; students shouting exultantly; and a few gray-bearded old men just released from prison, their knees trembling, their eyes shining.” They had come looking for a government that would be responsive to the people.
Some deputies wavered. It would be illegal, they claimed, to assume the tsar’s powers without his permission. Shouldn’t they cable and ask for his approval first? Otherwise, any government they formed would be illegitimate.
But others, including Alexander Kerensky, the Duma member who just days earlier had called for the tsar’s removal, realized the ridiculousness of their argument. This was a revolution, and all revolutions are by definition illegal: forcible uprisings against an established government. The people had swept away the tsar’s authority, and the only real power now lay with them. And as the hours passed, the capital was sinking deeper into anarchy. The people needed leadership. Kerensky turned to President Rodzianko. “Can I say the Duma is with them?” he asked. “That it stands at the head of the government?”
Still loyal to the tsar, Rodzianko vacillated, unsure of what to do. “I don’t want to revolt,” he admitted.
“Take the power,” advised another member. “If you don’t, someone else will.”
Rodzianko had no choice. Russia would continue to burn if the Duma did not step up. Reluctantly, he addressed the crowd. “The Duma accepts responsibility for the government.”
Then members got to work. Before the day was done, twelve deputies of the former Duma created what they called the Provisional Committee of Duma Members for the Restoration of Order and for the Relations with Individuals and Institutions (Provisional Government for short). It was meant as a temporary government, one that would restore order and end the revolutionary chaos. And it would rule only until a national “constituent assembly” could meet, where representatives from all across the country would decide on the type of government Russians would live under. Led by men from the nobility and the middle class, the Provisional Government hoped to establish a democracy modeled on England’s government, with two houses of parliament and a fair court system. Many still wanted a tsar—but one without any dictatorial power.
On the very day the Provisional Government organized in the Tauride Palace, labor leaders—many of them just released from prison by the revolutionary mob—reorganized the Petrograd Soviet, forming a union of workers and soldiers. As night fell, representatives from both groups (one for every thousand workers, and one from every company of Petrograd soldiers) arrived at the soviet’s first meeting. Held in another room of the Tauride Palace, the meeting swelled to three thousand delegates, many of them still toting rifles.
The Petrograd Soviet saw the goals of the revolution far differently from the Provisional Government. Power, it believed, had not been wrested from the tsar so that the nobility and middle class could simply rule the workers through another form of government. No, the revolution had been fought for “the people”—the poor and the marginalized.
The soviet was an organization to be reckoned with. Among its many members were railroad men, enabling the soviet to stop trains whenever it wanted; bank clerks so it could control the flow of money; and soldiers who could carry out the soviet’s will.
Members of the Provisional Government—most especially Alexander Kerensky—knew they needed the soviet’s support to govern. Peeling off his formal morning coat and rolling up the sleeves of his starched dress shirt to look more like a man of the people, Kerensky strode down the hall to the soviet meeting. “Comrades!” he cried in a voice both fiery and dramatic, his bright, birdlike eyes looking out over the assembly. “I speak … with all my soul, from the bottom of my heart.… [The Provisional Government and the soviet] must come to settle side by side.”
The soviet agreed. It would let the Provisional Government take the lead while it sat back as a kind of watchdog of the revolution. This fit in with Marxist political theory, which assumed that after a revolution, a backward peasant country like Russia needed a long period of capitalism and democracy before it could move toward a communist state. During this time, people would learn to relinquish what Marx had called “their petty notions of small property.” Additionally, a long period of capitalism would allow the illiterate, politically inexperienced masses time to gain knowledge before taking up government’s reins. Until this happened, the leadership of the upper classes was essential.
But the soviet did not relinquish leadership without some concessions. The Provisional Government agreed, among other things, to abolish the police and in its place create a “people’s militia”; to release all “politicals” still imprisoned or in exile; and to dissolve all the bureaucracy set up by the tsar to run his government.
These concessions had disastrous consequences. Eliminating bureaucratic institutions left the Provisional Government without an effective way to govern the country at a time when it desperately needed leadership. The well-intentioned Provisional Government would find itself unable to stop Russia from falling into even greater chaos.
Meanwhile, at Stavka, completely unaware that his throne had toppled, Nicholas made plans to leave the next morning for Tsarskoe Selo. “Leave tomorrow.… Always near you. Tender love to all,” he telegrammed to Alexandra. Then he headed for bed.
BEYOND THE PALACE GATES:
MOLECULE IN A STORM
Juvenale Tarasov, a farmer from a nearby village, was visiting Petrograd on business when the revolution erupted. Soon afterward, he recalled his experiences for American journalist Ernest Poole, who was covering events in Russia for the New Republic. Said Tarasov:
With a jubilant shout of freedom arising from every corner of the city … the long-expected revolution which … had gathered for fifty years, was suddenly upon us at last! Eagerly I burst out into the street and hurried to the palace square.… I found it like a beehive, black with swarming thousands of people and soldiers. I made my way deep into the crowd, listening, watching, all my thoughts and feelings gripped by a force gigantic—like the world! But a new world! It was like a dream! Then suddenly I heard the word go ’round to burn the Palace. At once I thought of the Hermitage [a public art museum] which stood so close to the Palace one could not burn without the other—the Hermitage with its Rembrandts and all its other treasures of art. My father and I had been there often. The
place had been like a holy cathedral, my only religion as a child. And now, as I stood in a trance, something strange happened inside of me—and what took place I cannot recall. I remember shouting to two men to hoist me up on their shoulders. Then I began speaking to the crowd. And as I noticed that thousands of eyes were turning in my direction, I seemed to lose all consciousness. Now I was speaking down to them from somewhere in the cloudy sky.… When I regained my senses I was lying on the pavement. There was cool dirty snow on my face, and a soldier [was] on his knees beside me.… The Winter Palace was not burned. I do not mean in the least to say that the Hermitage was saved by my speech. That doubtless played but one little part in the thoughts and passions deep and … surging through such a multitude. I was simply a molecule in a storm.
ANXIOUS DAYS AT THE PALACE
While Nicholas slept and Petrograd burned, Alexandra fretted about her children. Olga, Tatiana, and Alexei had all been sick with measles for the last two days. They lay in their darkened bedrooms, their fevers soaring and their bodies covered in red splotches. Things were so serious Dr. Botkin had left his house in town and moved into the palace to be near them. Alexandra had barely rested since that first red flush spread across Olga’s face. Donning her nurse’s uniform and ignoring her own ailments, she had cared for her children around the clock.
She knew little about the events erupting outside the palace—not until the evening of Monday, March 12. That’s when Anna Vyrubova’s father limped into the lilac drawing room. “Petrograd is in the hands of the mob!” he panted. “They are stopping the cars. They commandeered mine, and I’ve had to walk every step of the way!”
Hours later, the palace phone rang. It was Rodzianko. The empress and her children were in danger, he warned, and should leave Tsarskoe Selo immediately. There was no telling what the angry mob might do, and with so many soldiers in revolt, he had no way of protecting her.
Alexandra refused. The children were too ill. Besides, she had just received word from her husband. He was on his way home.
“When a house is burning,” argued Rodzianko, “the invalids are the first to be taken out.”
But the empress was firm. She would wait. Little did she know that the rebels had already seized the railroads around Tsarskoe Selo. All escape routes were gone.
Tuesday, March 13, dawned with a thick snowfall and an icy wind that rattled the palace windows. Upstairs in their sickbeds, the half-conscious children burned with fever. They were getting worse.
And so were events outside the palace gates.
Hours earlier, a mob of rebellious soldiers from Petrograd had arrived in the town of Tsarskoe Selo. They had come, they shouted, for “that German woman” and her son. But before storming the palace, they sacked the town. “Drunken soldiers … were running back and forth carrying off all they could lay hands on in the shops,” recalled Dr. Botkin’s daughter, Tatiana. “Some carried bales of dry goods, others boots, still others, though already quite drunk, were making off with bottles of wine and vodka.”
Even with the howling wind, Alexandra could hear the soldiers whooping and shouting. She could hear the sounds of breaking glass and gunshots. What would happen if the mob reached the palace?
“We shall not, must not be afraid,” she said to her friend Lili Dehn, who was visiting the family. “Everything is in the hands of God. Tomorrow the Emperor [will] come. I know that when he does, all will be well.”
Besides, they weren’t entirely helpless. That morning fifteen hundred men, a battalion of the still-loyal Garde Equipage, the marine guard that had protected them on the Standart, had arrived to defend the palace. Most of the Cossack guards and the other soldiers who had protected the Imperial Park had deserted to join the revolution. Looking out at the battalion, fifteen-year-old Anastasia felt reassured. “It’s just like being on the yacht again,” she declared.
Poised tensely, the troops waited as night fell. At nine p.m. the telephone rang. The voice on the other end warned that the rebels were on their way. Minutes later a sentry fell, shot through the neck by sniper fire. The sounds of shouting and gunfire echoed through the Imperial Park. They grew closer and closer.
During those anxious hours, Anastasia began to feel tired and her muscles ached. It was the first sign of oncoming measles. Hoping her symptoms would go away, she went upstairs and lay down. But nerves and the occasional gunshot made it impossible to sleep. Once, when the shooting sounded especially close, she got up and looked out her window. A huge field gun had been dragged into the courtyard, and soldiers were dancing around it, stamping their feet and trying to stay warm.
“How astonished Papa will be,” the girl whispered to Lili Dehn.
Night dragged on, but the attack never materialized. Instead, the mob turned back after hearing rumors that a huge force of troops armed with machine guns protected the imperial family.
It was still dark the next morning when a feverish Anastasia dragged herself out of bed. Nicholas had cabled he’d be home by six a.m. and measles or not, she wanted to be waiting when he arrived.
But he did not come.
“The train is late,” Alexandra explained. “Perhaps the blizzard detains him.” But her voice shook, and worry lined her face.
“The train is never late,” Anastasia exclaimed, suddenly panicked. “Oh, if only Papa would come quickly.”
It wasn’t until midmorning that they learned Nicholas’s train had been stopped en route. Alexandra quickly sent a cable from the palace telegraph office to the imperial train. She received no reply. Anxiously, she sent another message. And another. And still another. Each one came back marked “Address of person mentioned unknown.”
Sick and frightened, Anastasia broke down. “I’m beginning to be ill,” she sobbed to Lili Dehn. “What shall I do if I get ill? I can’t be useful to Mama.… Oh, Lili, say I’m not going to be ill.” And then, “Please don’t keep me in bed. Please, don’t. Please.”
Smoothing the girl’s hair and murmuring reassuring words, Lili persuaded her to lie down.
Early the next morning, March 15, the battalion guarding the palace deserted. And Alexandra’s self-control finally broke. “My sailors,” she sobbed. “My own sailors. I can’t believe it.”
It was not just the troops who deserted. Many of the palace’s hundreds of maids, chauffeurs, cooks, and footmen vanished from the marble hallways. That same day the electricity and water were cut off, as well as its telegraph and telephone. The remaining servants were forced to break ice on the pond for water. And without electricity, the little elevator between the empress’s drawing room and the children’s rooms above no longer worked. Exhausted and in pain, Alexandra had no choice but to climb the stairs. Gasping for breath, she dragged herself up the dark staircase. “I must not give way,” she confided to Lili Dehn. “I keep on saying, ‘I must not’—it helps me.”
WHERE IS THE TSAR?
That same morning, Nicholas’s train chugged into the town of Pskov. For days, his route home had been slowed or detoured as revolutionaries seized control of the tracks. Now, learning from advisers that the palace guard had deserted, he finally grasped the situation. There was, he concluded, no other choice. He would have to give in and appoint a government acceptable to the people. He immediately telegraphed Rodzianko with his offer. Minutes later, Rodzianko answered: “His Majesty … [is] apparently … unable to realize what is happening in the capital. A terrible revolution has broken out.… The measures you propose are too late. The time for them is gone. There is no return.”
Now telegrams began to pour in from Nicholas’s generals—those men of the nobility whose opinions he valued most. They all urged a bleak course of action. To save the army, the war campaign, the country, and, perhaps most important, the Romanov dynasty, the tsar needed to resign his throne. They believed his abdication in favor of a different ruler would be enough to appease the people.
Nicholas chain-smoked as he read these messages. Then he stood and looked out the train window. Th
ere was a gloomy silence. “I have decided that I will give up the throne in favor of my son, Alexei,” he finally said. Then turning to face the three attendant generals with him, he crossed himself and went to his bedroom.
Why did he give it all up so easily? Some historians have speculated that his abdication was an extraordinary act of patriotism, that he cared more about winning the war than keeping his throne. Others have suggested he was simply tired and longed to be left in peace. Whatever his reasons, that night in his diary, he wrote, “For the sake of Russia, and to keep the armies in the field, I decided to take this step.… I left … with a heavy heart. All around me I see treason, cowardice and deceit.”
But just hours later, Nicholas reconsidered his decision. How could he possibly leave his sick twelve-year-old son in charge of the country? He could not. With heavy heart, Nicholas sat down at the desk and wrote his Abdication Manifesto. In it, he gave up the throne in favor of his brother Grand Duke Michael.
His attendant generals rushed to the train’s telegraph room to forward the news to Petrograd.
IN PETROGRAD
Outside the Tauride Palace—now headquarters of the newly established Provisional Government—a crush of people jammed the gardens and courtyard, waiting for news of the tsar. An official stepped triumphantly onto the balcony. Explaining what had happened, he ended his speech with “Long live the Emperor Michael!”
The mob erupted in anger. They had not overthrown Nicholas simply to replace him with his brother! The people no longer wanted or needed a tsar. What they wanted was a republic, the type of government where the people held the power and their will was expressed through their elected representatives. Raising their fists in the air, they shouted, “Down with the dynasty!” and “Long live the Republic!”
The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia Page 16
