When the Second Pacific Ocean Squadron was all but wiped out in the Strait of Tsushima in May 1905, more than 4,000 Russians died and 6,000 were captured, forcing the tsar to abandon his pretensions in the Far East and sue for peace. Closer to home, peasants – more politicised than Lenin dared hope —continued to burn out landlords. On 5 July, an aristocratic officer shot dead a deckhand who had dared to complain about the maggoty food on board his ship anchored in Odessa. The Battleship Potempkin, Sergei Eisenstein’s masterly film of the incident and subsequent revolt, demonstrates how imperial mismanagement sparked rebellion – the Potempkin was Russia in miniature. As the oppressed seized the moment, the empire struck back. The steady march of the tsarist military machine down the Odessa Steps, bayonets poised to stamp out mutiny and massacre innocent bystanders, was Bloody Sunday all over again.
The situation deteriorated over the summer. An outbreak of cholera was expected. Riots spread like an epidemic. There were huge political meetings held in Petersburg lecture halls – 2,000 workers and students gathered at the Technological Institute on I October, followed by 12,000 at the university on the 5th. Trains were running irregularly. A fatal accident occurred on the overnight Moscow-Petersburg service on 4 October, when carriages were smashed as the locomotive, travelling at full speed, hurtled into a siding. Was it human error or the result of the disruption caused by the railway ‘go-slow’? Three days later, the Moscow-Kazan railway came out on strike – a stoppage which swiftly spread across the network.58 On 13 October, forty revolutionaries met at the Technological Institute to shape uncoordinated rebellion into a general strike, which started four days later under the direction of the newly created St Petersburg ‘soviet’, or council of workers. On 19 October, freedom of the press was declared by the St Petersburg soviet, and industrialists who refused to shut down their plants were intimidated. The soviet sent orders to the post office and railways, collected money for hungry strikers, negotiated with the city council and formed its own militia. Armed with knives, revolvers and shovels, it numbered 6,000 strong by mid-November. Strikers created self-defence groups, which roamed the night streets in patrols of eight to ten. French bankers, come to put the finishing touches to a loan agreement, didn’t recognise the city and returned to France prematurely, without concluding the deal.59
Andrei Biely’s great modernist novel Petersburg is set against the backdrop of the developing crisis between 30 September and 9 October 1905, when the government was losing control. The book centres on a bomb plot to kill Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, a fictional character who has much in common with the arch-reactionary procurator of the Holy Synod and sometime tutor to Nicholas II, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Ableukhov is a self-confessed ‘man of the school of Plehve’. When his ‘wizened and utterly unprepossessing little figure’ is considered in relation to ‘the immeasurable immensity of the mechanisms managed by him’, it seems hardly surprising that the country is slipping from government control. During the ‘entire period when the strike was in progress,’ Ableukhov ‘appeared in chancelleries, offices and ministerial residences – exhausted, emaciated’. He is terminally out of touch. His carriage cuts him off from ‘the scum of the streets’ and the ‘red covers of the damp trashy rags on sale’ at crossings. Meanwhile, Ableukhov’s son, Nikolai – a university student who flirts with the revolutionary movement – is selected to bomb a government target. In a world of terrorists like Nechaev and Ishutin and double-agents like Evno Azeff, and in the context of a city splintered and broken up by the novel’s modernist vision, it is hardly surprising that the victim selected by Nikolai’s controllers is his father.
Petersburg never gets close to the strikers. Indeed, Biely observes that from ‘the procession of bowlers, you would never say that momentous events were rumbling’. Yet the novel is – in the tradition of St Petersburg itself – murderously concerned with replacing the old with the new. Not only is the son detailed to kill his father, but the great innovator, the Bronze Horseman, is also seen to be on the move again, going at full gallop to change Russia. Biely, however, hints to his reader that Russia may yet be stuck in the mud. There is an unresolved tension between the front and back of Peter the Great’s bronze horse. The ‘two front hooves have leaped far off into the darkness, into the void’ while the statue’s ‘two rear hooves are firmly implanted in the granite soil’. Peter is seen ‘racing through the days, through the years, through the damp Petersburg prospekts’ and Biely predicts another ‘leap across history. Great shall be the turmoil.’ He repeatedly presents Petersburg’s streets and skies mired by ‘slush’ and suggests that the city’s ultimate vaporisation will be effected by revolution, by the terrorist bomb ticking in the sardine tin given to Nikolai, a bomb ‘capable of turning everything nearby . . . into slush’.60
In December 1903, Spring Rice observed that when Russians met, they ‘discuss how long it will be before the revolution comes. Just as in Japan we always talked about earthquakes.61 By October 1905 it was clear that one day soon, tsarism would break up like the frozen Neva at the beginning of spring. There would be a fracturing that would shake the world. Tamara Karsavina recalled the autumn of 1905 as ‘a nightmare’. Electricity cut frequently and the horrid clang of Petersburg telephones was silenced. She recorded how the 180 dancers at the imperial ballet, ‘so conservative at heart, usually so loyal to the Court . . . succumbed to the epidemic of meetings and resolutions’ and walked out. The strike committee, which included Karsavina and Pavlova, met in Fokine’s garret. Delegates arrived late because the trams had stopped and the bridges had been raised. Two dancers swept excitedly into the room, making fretting jokes about the plainclothes policemen lurking below – their cover blown by their green coats and standard-issue galoshes. Karsavina and Fokine conferred in private. He was resolute, but she was hesitant, for her mother had cautioned her not to oppose an emperor who had given her ‘an education, position, means, and livelihood’. The dancers at the Mariinsky were asked to sign a declaration of loyalty to Nicholas II. The strike committee refused – except for one, the original prince in The Nutcracker, Sergei Legat. One night, when the committee was in session, Fokine went to answer a rap on his door and came back ghost white. Sergei Legat had slit his throat. Already overwrought by his turbulent relationship with Petipa’s daughter, Legat felt himself a traitor to the tsar and a Judas to his friends.62
Nicholas II was advised by his generals against calling out the army, on whose loyalty they suggested he could not rely. So, to defuse what was an alarming situation, Nicholas prepared a manifesto full of empty promises. While it was stalled at the printers by an electricity strike, a bomb was thrown at the police. They shot back. Violence erupted and the authorities pressed to get the manifesto out. The following morning there were jubilant processions, with red flags waving to the strains of the ‘Marseillaise’ as socialists naively imagined that the document signified a great victory.63
Winter 1905 began with a bloody massacre, which was followed by months of disruption and bloodshed that culminated in an autumn general strike. The tsar’s indifference to political evolution and fair-mindedness effectively disqualified him from ruling. As people surged down the Nevsky, demanding a better world, the numbness of Nicholas II consigned the Romanovs to history. His October Manifesto was a desperate gesture, which mendaciously promised that ‘no law shall become effective without the confirmation by the State Duma, and that the elected representatives of the people shall be guaranteed an opportunity of real participation’.64 It did little to quell revolt. By the end of the year, fifty-five cities in Russia had soviets; and Gerasimov, head of the St Petersburg Okhrana, was instructed to flush out revolutionary activity in the capital. On a single evening he coordinated 350 searches, which uncovered three laboratories for producing explosives, 500 bombs, illegal printing presses and armouries. The following day there were 400 further searches.65 There were attacks on police and assassinations, followed by a vigilante backlash against Jews and students as lists
were made and houses to be targeted were marked. Jews took refuge in the relative anonymity of the big hotels or fled to Finland. The extreme right-wing Union of Russian People formed the Black Hundred gangs, to combat the subsequent increase in violence after the publication of the Manifesto. Essentially a bunch of thugs, they were welcomed by the regime as providing evidence of mass support for the tsar among the lower orders.66 The governor of St Petersburg issued the Union and similar ‘brotherhoods’ with the firepower to combat the armed revolutionary militia.
By early December the St Petersburg streets were full of shoppers once again and there were few signs that the country had been in the throes of revolution.67 The statues in the Summer Garden were, as usual, boxed for the harsh winter months. Nevertheless, given the revolutionary preoccupations of his novel, Biely offers this very scene as a potent image of imperilled imperial Petersburg: ‘The statues each stood hidden beneath boards. The boards looked like coffins standing on end. The coffins lined the paths. Both nymphs and satyrs had taken shelter in them, so that the tooth of time might not gnaw them away with frost.’68 Although the worst of the crisis appeared to be over, the Mariinsky dancers had played their part in what Lenin later called the ‘dress rehearsal’ for the real revolution.
11
DAZZLE AND DESPAIR
1906–17
The tsar’s 1905 October Manifesto promised a constitutional monarchy with a Duma, a lower house of government intended to have legislative powers. This commitment was immediately broken by the reassertion of Nicholas’s unassailable autocratic power in the ‘Fundamental Law of Empire’, published three months later. However, in March 1906, the Temporary Regulations legitimised trades unions, eased censorship1 and admitted workers to the first Duma, which was proclaimed on 27 April 1906 in the Georgievsky Hall of the Winter Palace. In this throne room – the very heart of the tsar’s empire – the royal family found the ceremony uncomfortably confrontational. There were some familiar delegates in full court dress, but the overwhelming impression created by the assembled members of the Duma was that of an uncouth rabble in working clothes. The conservative Peter Stolypin – appointed prime minister three months later – watched as a workman with high oiled boots insolently inspected the throne and reproachfully eyed the royal family. Stolypin murmured to Count Kokovtsov that he felt the man ‘might throw a bomb’.2 The dowager empress was utterly rattled by the rough faces that communicated ‘an incomprehensible hatred for all of us’. The whole experiment seemed untenable. Not long after the assembly started to sit in the Tauride Palace, the English writer Maurice Baring suggested to a Petersburg cabbie that it might be dissolved. ‘They won’t dare,’ replied the driver. ‘But if they do dare?’ ‘Then we shall kill them.’ ‘Kill whom?’ ‘Why all the rich.’ Baring suggested that the soldiers might intervene – they had shot at protesters in the past. ‘Before they did not understand what it was all about. Now they know . . . the people are screaming.’3
Nicholas II makes a speech to members of the State Council and the Duma on 27 April 1906.
Lenin had arrived in Petersburg incognito in November 1905 – too late to play an active part in the general strike. He understood that Bloody Sunday had revealed ‘the gigantic reserve of revolutionary proletarian energy’ and yet – at the same time – a damaging lack of organisation. His 1902 text, What Is to Be Done? asserted the need for discipline and centralised management – ‘professional revolutionists’ living at the expense of the party, who ‘would train themselves to become real political leaders’ and gain support through a Russian party newspaper.4 This he reiterated at the Second Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London in August 1903, resulting in the split between Lenin, leading the majority of the delegates who thereby became ‘Bolsheviks’ – and the minority, who became ‘Mensheviks’.5
After Father Gapon’s credulous attempt to petition the tsar, he fled Russia to make contact with revolutionary exiles in Switzerland. Bored by their studious devotion to Marx, he moved on to Paris, London – and celebrity. He dined out on Bloody Sunday, and speaking engagements followed, accompanied by a sizeable advance on his autobiography. With that money, the priest purchased arms to smuggle to revolutionaries, but the ship transporting them ran aground off the Russian coast. Returning home, Gapon elected to co-operate with the Okhrana but was betrayed to party combatants and hanged in a dacha near St Petersburg. Socialist Revolutionaries, or SRs, were suspected of the murder. Operational since 1901 – heirs to the narodniki, who believed that communal values lay at the heart of socialism the SRs denied responsibility, and the killers of the priest have never been positively identified.6
In Petersburg during 1906, Lenin collaborated with the Mensheviks, who believed that a bourgeois revolution was the precondition of a successful socialist insurrection. Lenin’s own scheme turned out to be more abrupt and brutal. In May 1906, under the bright sky of a White Night, the Bolshevik leader electrified a huge crowd. But with spies on his tail and life becoming too hot in the capital, Lenin decamped to Kaukola in Finland, from where he directed what was left of the revolutionary networks after Gerasimov’s crackdown.7 In one month over the New Year, 1,700 people had been arrested. In the six months to May 1906, more than 70,000 people were imprisoned. A revolt at Kronstadt in July resulted in thirty-six executions.8
Soldiers were trigger-happy, the Black Hundreds were out for blood, and revolutionaries revealed their resolve. Baring tells the story of a policeman who rescued a student from a lynch mob. Walking away from danger together, the young radical turned and promptly shot his saviour. With sardonic understatement, Baring observed that there was ‘some danger from the reckless way in which the population toy with Browning pistols’.9 Attacks flared across the capital and although some were politically motivated, the disruptions also provided opportunities for street crime. Petersburg newspapers were so full of violence that it seemed as if the capital was paralysed by hooliganism. Despite a determined police effort to drive vagrants from the centre, Baring was astonished by the number of beggars – nearly 16,000 were picked up each year between 1905 and 1910. They clustered, huddled in doorways or slept flat out against walls, soaked by the miserable Petersburg weather as rain spattered from the bent-out ends of outsized downpipes. Abandoned by their parents or fleeing abuse, small children could be found sleeping in rubbish bins. In 1909, a gang of girls was arrested thieving in the gostiny dvor; their ages ranged from nine to twelve.10
After impotent and turbulent sittings, the Duma was indeed dissolved on 8 July. Prime minister Stolypin wanted a more conservative body voted in, so that the establishment, rather than the revolutionaries, would become the instrument of change. Just over a month later, Stolypin was receiving guests at his dacha on Aptekarsky Island when three terrorists, shouting, ‘Long live the Revolution,’ threw a bomb into the vestibule. They blew themselves up, killed nearly thirty guests and wounded many more, including the prime minister’s children. Kokovtsov, in Paris to negotiate a loan, was rebuffed. When the French judged that the Russian government was stronger than the revolution, they would agree a loan.11
Russia’s amour propre was rescued somewhat by the timely triumph of Sergei Diaghilev in the French capital. He not only organised the Russian section of the 1906 Parisian ‘Salon d’Automne’, presenting masterpieces of Russian art to the West, but followed this with festivals of Russian music. He crowned the enterprise in 1908, when Fyodor Chaliapin sung the lead in the imperial theatre production of Boris Godunov at the Paris Opera. Diaghilev had become an international impresario: ‘I am, firstly, a charlatan, though a rather brilliant one; secondly, a great charmer; thirdly, frightened of nobody; fourthly, a man with plenty of logic and very few scruples; fifthly, I seem to have no real talent.’12 He had chosen the ideal profession. Larger than life, Diaghilev epitomised the defiant and showy nature of the Russian capital. His successful Paris enterprise indicated that the artistic triumph of St Petersburg was of truly international cali
bre and that, with trouble at home, a good number of the most creative Petersburgers were happy to work abroad.
Igor Stravinsky’s father was a Mariinsky baritone, and Borodin and César Cui were frequent visitors to the family apartment overlooking the Kryukov Canal – one floor below Karsavina’s and one floor above a manufacturer of secret-police galoshes. Stravinsky was privately taught composition by Rimsky-Korsakov, and his musical apprenticeship was enriched by the number of outstanding concerts given in the capital. The Czech violinist and composer Jan Kubelik performed in the winter of 1904. Pablo Casals was in the midst of a cello recital at the height of the 1905 troubles when the electricity cut. Almost immediately, candles flared from the concert hall’s magnificent chandeliers.13 Gustav Mahler, the harbinger of twentieth-century music – the man who visited Niagara Falls and commented, ‘Fortissimo at last’ – came to Petersburg in the autumn of 1907 to conduct his 5th Symphony. Stravinsky was there, waiting in the wings. Just three years later the young Russian enjoyed a breakthrough success with his music for Diaghilev’s ballet The Firebird. In Paris, Stravinsky found celebrity and continued to work outside Russia for most of the rest of his life. Nine years younger than Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev made a sensational debut – aged seventeen – at the Petersburg Evenings of Contemporary Music in December 1908. He would spend a good part of the next three decades abroad and would find his return to a very different Russia difficult. Both composers were given their chance to work in Europe for Diaghilev’s remarkable Ballets Russes.
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