Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  “No,” Grigori said aloud. “I will not let them do this again.” He turned the safety knob on his Mosin-Nagant rifle, unlocking the bolt, then he raised the gun to his shoulder.

  The crowd was screaming and running in all directions, trampling the fallen. The Pharaohs were out of control, lashing out at random. The police fired indiscriminately into the crowd.

  Grigori aimed carefully at Pinsky, targeting the middle of the body. He was not a very good shot, and Pinsky was sixty yards away, but he had a chance of hitting him. He pulled the trigger.

  Pinsky continued to yell through his megaphone.

  Grigori had missed. He lowered his sights—the rifle kicked up a little when fired—and squeezed the trigger again.

  He missed again.

  The carnage went on, police shooting wildly into the crowd of fleeing men and women.

  There were five rounds in the magazine of Grigori’s rifle. He could usually hit something with one of the five. He fired a third time.

  Pinsky gave a shout of pain that was amplified by his megaphone. His right knee seemed to fold under him. He dropped the megaphone and fell to the ground.

  Grigori’s men followed his example. They attacked the police, some firing and some using their rifles as clubs. Others pulled the Pharaohs off their horses. The marchers drew courage and joined in. Some of those on the ice turned around and came back.

  The fury of the mob was ugly. For as long as anyone could remember, the Petrograd police had been sneering brutes, undisciplined and uncontrolled, and now the people took their revenge. Policemen on the ground were kicked and trampled, those on their feet were knocked down, and the Pharaohs had their horses shot from under them. The police resisted for only a few moments, then those who could fled.

  Grigori saw Pinsky struggle to his feet. Grigori took aim again, eager now to finish the bastard off, but a Pharaoh got in the way, heaved Pinsky up onto his horse’s neck, and galloped off.

  Grigori stood back, watching the police run away.

  He was in the worst trouble of his life.

  His platoon had mutinied. In direct contravention of their orders, they had attacked the police, not the marchers. And he had led them, by shooting Lieutenant Pinsky, who had survived to tell the tale. There was no way to cover this up, no excuse he could offer that would make any difference, and no escape from punishment. He was guilty of treason. He could be court-martialed and executed.

  Despite that, he felt happy.

  Varya pushed through the crowd. There was blood on her face, but she was smiling. “What now, Sergeant?”

  Grigori was not going to resign himself to his punishment. The tsar was murdering his people. Well, his people would shoot back. “To the barracks,” Grigori said. “Let’s arm the working class!” He snatched her red flag. “Follow me!”

  He strode back along Samsonievsky Prospekt. His men came after him, marshaled by Isaak, and the crowd fell in behind them. Grigori was not sure exactly what he was going to do, but he did not feel the need of a plan: as he marched at the head of the crowd he had the sense that he could do anything.

  The sentry opened the barracks gates for the soldiers, then was unable to close them on the marchers. Feeling invincible, Grigori led the procession across the parade ground to the arsenal. Lieutenant Kirillov came out of the headquarters building, saw the crowd, and turned toward them, breaking into a run. “You men!” he shouted. “Halt! Stop right there!”

  Grigori ignored him.

  Kirillov came to a standstill and drew his revolver. “Halt!” he said. “Halt, or I shoot!”

  Two or three of Grigori’s platoon raised their rifles and fired at Kirillov. Several bullets struck him and he fell to the ground, bleeding.

  Grigori went on.

  The arsenal was guarded by two sentries. Neither of them tried to stop Grigori. He used the last two rounds in his magazine to shoot out the lock on the heavy wooden doors. The crowd burst into the arsenal, pushing and shoving to get at the weapons. Some of Grigori’s men took charge, opening wooden cases of rifles and revolvers and passing them out along with boxes of ammunition.

  This is it, Grigori thought. This is a revolution. He was exhilarated and terrified at the same time.

  He armed himself with two of the Nagant revolvers that were issued to officers, reloaded his rifle, and filled his pockets with ammunition. He was not sure what he intended to do, but now that he was a criminal he needed weapons.

  The rest of the soldiers in the barracks joined in the looting of the arsenal, and soon everyone was armed to the teeth.

  Carrying Varya’s red flag, Grigori led the crowd out of the barracks. Demonstrations always went toward the city center. With Isaak, Yakov, and Varya he marched across the bridge to Liteiny Prospekt, heading for the affluent heart of Petrograd. He felt as if he were flying, or dreaming, as if he had drunk a large mouthful of vodka. For years he had talked about defying the authority of the regime, but today he was doing it, and that made him feel like a new man, a different creature, a bird of the air. He remembered the words of the old man who had spoken to him after his mother was shot dead. “May you live long,” the man had said, as Grigori walked away from Palace Square with his mother’s body in his arms. “Long enough to take revenge on the bloodstained tsar for the evil he has done this day.” Your wish may come true, old man, he thought exultantly.

  The First Machine Guns were not the only regiment to have mutinied this morning. When he reached the far side of the bridge he was even more elated to see that the streets were full of soldiers wearing their caps backward or their coats unbuttoned in merry defiance of regulations. Most sported red armbands or red lapel ribbons to show they were revolutionaries. Commandeered cars roared around, erratically driven, rifle barrels and bayonets sticking out of the windows, laughing girls sitting on the soldiers’ knees inside. The pickets and checkpoints of yesterday had vanished. The streets had been taken over by the people.

  Grigori saw a wine shop with its windows broken and its door battered down. A soldier and a girl came out, bottles in both hands, trampling over broken glass. Next door a café proprietor had put plates of smoked fish and sliced sausage on a table outside, and stood beside it with a red ribbon in his lapel, smiling nervously and inviting soldiers to help themselves. Grigori guessed he was trying to make sure his place was not broken into and looted like the wine shop.

  The carnival atmosphere grew as they neared the center. Some people were already quite drunk, although it was only midday. Girls seemed happy to kiss anyone with a red armband, and Grigori saw a soldier openly fondling the large breasts of a smiling middle-aged woman. Some girls had dressed in soldiers’ uniforms, and swaggered along the streets in caps and oversize boots, evidently feeling liberated.

  A shiny Rolls-Royce car came along the street and the crowd tried to stop it. The chauffeur put his foot on the gas but someone opened the door and pulled him out. People shoved one another trying to get into the car. Grigori saw Count Maklakov, one of the directors of the Putilov works, scramble out of the backseat. Grigori recalled how Maklakov had been so entranced with Princess Bea the day she visited the factory. The crowd jeered but did not molest the count as he hurried away, pulling his fur collar up around his ears. Nine or ten people crammed into his car and someone drove it off, honking blithely.

  At the next corner a handful of people were tormenting a tall man in the trilby hat and well-worn greatcoat of a middle-class professional. A soldier poked him with his rifle barrel, an old woman spat at him, and a young man in worker’s overalls threw a handful of rubbish. “Let me pass!” the man said, trying to sound commanding, but they just laughed. Grigori recognized the thin figure of Kanin, supervisor of the casting section at the Putilov works. His hat fell off, and Grigori saw that he had gone bald.

  Grigori pushed through the little crowd. “There’s nothing wrong with this man!” he shouted. “He’s an engineer, I used to work with him.”

  Kanin recognized him. “Thank
you, Grigori Sergeivich,” he said. “I’m just trying to make my way to my mother’s house, to see if she’s all right.”

  Grigori turned to the crowd. “Let him pass,” he said. “I vouch for him.” He saw a woman carrying a reel of red ribbon—looted, presumably, from a haberdashery—and asked her for a length. She cut some off with a pair of scissors, and Grigori tied it around Kanin’s left sleeve. The crowd cheered.

  “Now you’ll be safe,” Grigori said.

  Kanin shook his hand and walked away, and they let him pass.

  Grigori’s group came out onto Nevsky Prospekt, the broad shopping street that ran from the Winter Palace to Nikolaevsky Station. It was full of people drinking from bottles, eating, kissing, and firing guns into the air. Those restaurants that were open had signs reading “Free food for revolutionaries!” and “Eat what you like, pay what you can!” Many shops had been broken into, and there was smashed glass all over the cobblestones. One of the hated streetcars—priced too high for workers to use—had been overturned in the middle of the road, and a Renault automobile had crashed into it.

  Grigori heard a rifle shot, but it was one of many, and he thought nothing of it for a second; but then Varya, by his side, staggered and fell down. Grigori and Yakov knelt either side of her. She seemed unconscious. They turned the heavy body over, not without difficulty, and saw immediately that she was beyond help: a bullet had entered her forehead, and her eyes stared up sightlessly.

  Grigori did not allow himself to feel sorrow, either on his own account or for Varya’s son, his best friend, Konstantin. He had learned on the battlefield to fight back first and grieve later. But was this a battlefield? Who could possibly want to kill Varya? Yet the wound was so exactly placed that he could hardly believe she was the victim of a stray bullet fired at random.

  His question was answered a moment later. Yakov keeled over, bleeding from his chest. His heavy body hit the cobbles with a thump.

  Grigori stepped away from the two bodies, saying: “What the hell?” He dropped into a crouch, making himself a smaller target, and rapidly looked around for somewhere he could take cover.

  He heard another shot, and a passing soldier with a red scarf around his cap fell to the ground clutching his stomach.

  There was a sniper, and he was targeting revolutionaries.

  Grigori ran three paces and dived behind the overturned streetcar.

  A woman screamed, then another. People saw the bleeding bodies and began to run away.

  Grigori lifted his head and scanned the surrounding buildings. The shooter had to be a police rifleman, but where was he? It seemed to Grigori that the crack of the rifle had come from the other side of the street and less than a block away. The buildings were bright in the afternoon sunlight. There was a hotel, a jewelry store with steel shutters closed, a bank, and on the corner, a church. He could see no open windows, so the sniper had to be on a roof. None of the roofs offered cover—except that of the church, which was a stone building in the baroque style with towers, parapets, and an onion dome.

  Another shot rang out, and a woman in the clothes of a factory worker screamed and fell clutching her shoulder. Grigori felt sure the sound had come from the church, but he saw no smoke. That must mean the police had issued their snipers with smokeless ammunition. This really was war.

  A whole block of Nevsky Prospekt was now deserted.

  Grigori aimed his rifle at the parapet that ran along the top of the side wall of the church. That was the firing position he would have chosen, commanding the whole street. He watched carefully. Out of the corner of his eye he saw two more rifles pointing in the same direction as his, held by soldiers who had taken cover nearby.

  A soldier and a girl came staggering along the street, both drunk. The girl was dancing a jig, raising the skirt of her dress to show her knees, while her boyfriend waltzed around her, holding his rifle to his neck and pretending to play it like a violin. Both wore red armbands. Several people shouted warnings, but the revelers did not hear. As they passed the church, happily oblivious to the danger, two shots rang out, and the soldier and his girl fell down.

  Once again Grigori saw no wisp of smoke, but all the same he fired angrily at the parapet above the church door, emptying his magazine. His bullets chipped the stonework and sent up puffs of dust. The other two rifles cracked, and Grigori saw that they were shooting in the same direction, but there was no sign that either of them had hit anything.

  It was impossible, Grigori thought as he reloaded. They were firing at an invisible target. The sniper must be lying flat, well back from the edge, so that no part of his gun needed to poke through the bars.

  But he had to be stopped. He had already killed Varya, Yakov, two soldiers, and an innocent girl.

  There was only one way to reach him, and that was to get up on the roof.

  Grigori fired at the parapet again. As he expected, that caused the other two soldiers to do the same. Assuming the sniper must have put his head down for a few seconds, Grigori stood up, abandoning the shelter of the overturned streetcar, and ran to the far side of the street, where he flattened himself up against the window of a bookshop—one of the few stores that had not been looted.

  Keeping within the afternoon shadow cast by the buildings, he made his way along the street to the church. It was separated by an alley from the bank next door. He waited patiently for several minutes, until the shooting started again, then darted across the alley and stood with his back to the east end of the church.

  Had the sniper seen him run, and guessed what he was planning? There was no way to tell.

  Staying close to the wall, he edged around the church until he came to a small door. It was unlocked. He slipped inside.

  It was a rich church, gorgeously decorated with red, green, and yellow marble. There was no service taking place at that moment, but twenty or thirty worshippers stood or sat with bowed heads, holding their own private devotions. Grigori scanned the interior, looking for a door that might lead to a staircase. He hurried down the aisle, fearful that more people were being murdered every minute he delayed.

  A young priest, dramatically handsome with black hair and white skin, saw his rifle and opened his mouth to voice a protest, but Grigori ignored him and hurried past.

  In the vestibule he spotted a small wooden door set into a wall. He opened it and saw a spiral staircase leading up. Behind him, a voice said: “Stop there, my son. What are you doing?”

  He turned to see the young priest. “Does this lead to the roof?”

  “I am Father Mikhail. You can’t bring that weapon into the house of God.”

  “There’s a sniper on your roof.”

  “He is a police officer!”

  “You know about him?” Grigori stared at the priest with incredulity. “He’s killing people!”

  The priest made no reply.

  Grigori ran up the stairs.

  A cold wind was coming from somewhere above. Clearly Father Mikhail was on the side of the police. Was there any way the priest could warn the sniper? Not short of running out into the street and waving—which would probably get him shot.

  After a long climb in near-darkness, Grigori saw another door.

  When his eyes were on a level with the bottom of the door, so that he presented a very small target, he opened it an inch, using his left hand, keeping his rifle in his right. Bright sunlight shone through the gap. He pushed it wide.

  He could not see anyone.

  He screwed up his eyes against the sun to scan the area visible through the small rectangle of doorway. He was in the bell tower. The door opened south. Nevsky Prospekt was on the north side of the church. The sniper was on the other side—unless he had moved to ambush Grigori.

  Cautiously, Grigori ascended one step, then another, and put his head out.

  Nothing happened.

  He stepped through the door.

  Under his feet the roof sloped gently to a gutter that ran alongside a decorative parapet. Woode
n duckboards permitted workmen to move around without treading on the roof tiles. At his back the tower rose to a belfry.

  Gun in hand, he edged around the tower.

  At the first corner he found himself looking west the length of Nevsky Prospekt. In the clear light he could see the Alexander Garden and the Admiralty at the far end. In the middle distance the street was crowded, but nearby it was empty. The sniper must still be at work.

  Grigori listened, but heard no shots.

  He sidled farther around the tower until he could look around the next corner. Now he could see all along the north wall of the church. He had felt sure he would find the sniper there, flat on his belly, shooting between the uprights of the parapet—but there was no one in sight. Beyond the parapet he could see the wide street below, with people crouching in doorways and skulking around corners, waiting to see what would happen.

  A moment later, the sniper’s rifle rang out. A scream from the street told Grigori the man had hit his target.

  The shot had come from above Grigori’s head.

  He looked up. The bell tower was pierced by glassless windows and flanked by open turrets placed diagonally at the corners. The shooter was up there somewhere, firing out of one of the many available openings. Fortunately, Grigori had remained hard up against the wall, where he could not have been seen by the sniper.

  Grigori went back inside. Within the confined space of the stairwell his rifle felt big and clumsy. He put it down and took out one of his pistols. He knew by its weight that it was empty. He cursed: loading the Nagant M1895 was slow. He took a box of cartridges from the pocket of his uniform coat and inserted seven of them, one by one, through the revolver’s awkward loading gate into the cylinder. Then he cocked the hammer.

  Leaving the rifle behind, he went up the spiral stairs, treading softly. He moved at a steady pace, not wanting to exert himself so much that his breathing would become audible. He kept his revolver in his right hand pointing up the stairs.