October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

  Hearts hammering, they wrap Rasputin’s body in chains and drive him through the darkness to the Malaya Moika canal. They shuffle with their burden to the edge, and let the black water take him down.

  But they miss one of his boots, and leave it on the bridge, where the police will find it. When, three days later, the authorities pull Rasputin’s contorted body out of the water, word spreads that the underside of the newly formed ice is scratched where, with the frenzied strength of the godly, Rasputin struggled to emerge.

  People flock to the spot where the so-called mad monk died. They bottle the water, as if it were an elixir.

  The tsarina is overcome with pious grief. The right are delighted, hoping Alexandra will now repair to an asylum, and that Nicholas will magically gain a resolve he has never had. But Rasputin, colourful as he was, was only ever a morbid symptom. His murder is not a palace coup. It is not a coup at all.

  What will end the Russian regime is not the gruesome death of that pantomime figure too outlandish to be invented; nor is it the epochal tetchiness of Russian liberals; nor the outrage of monarchists at an inadequate monarch.

  What will end it comes up from below.

  2

  February: Joyful Tears

  The pitch-black early hours in the third year of war: a viciously cold winter. In Petrograd, as in countless Russian cities, people gathered in the streets before dawn, trying to keep warm, desperate for bread there was no certainty they would receive. Rationing was in place, but fuel shortages meant bakers could not meet demand even if they had the ingredients. The hungry waited for hours, forming lines that became inching, shuffling, mumbling mass meetings, crucibles for dissent. Very often their wait was in vain: crowds of the furious and famished then roamed the streets, hurling stones through shop windows, hammering on doors, looking for food.

  People talked politics in Yiddish, Polish, Latvian, Finnish, German (still), and in many other languages as well as in Russian: this was a cosmopolitan city. Around its wealthy heart it was a city of workers, swollen by the war to around 400,000, an unusual proportion of them relatively educated. And it was a city of soldiers, of whom 160,000 were stationed there in reserve, their morale poor and getting worse.

  In January, the tsar’s government had ordered General Sergei Khabalov, the commander of the military district, to suppress any disorder in Petrograd. He had readied 12,000 troops, police and Cossacks for this purpose. He had machine guns stationed at strategic locations, in case of riots. The agents of the Okhrana ramped up their spying, including within a demoralised left, many of its leaders in exile.

  Repression notwithstanding, on 9 January, the twelfth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, 150,000 Petrograd workers came out and marched in what was, for many, the first strike since the revolt they commemorated. In a portent to which they did not pay adequate attention, police reported that watching soldiers cheered the workers’ red banners. After that day, Petrograd’s working class struck and struck again.

  Every moment of political confrontation throws up its myths and kitsch. But it is not sentimentality to insist that the workers’ culture that had grown since 1905 was becoming stronger. Patchily, unevenly, these were strikes inflected by economic rage, by opposition to the war, and also, for an activist minority, by that striving for class honour.

  Though most pronounced there, strikes were not restricted to the capital. More than 30,000 workers downed tools in Moscow, a less radical city than Petrograd, more dominated by the liberal middle classes, its working class more dispersed. The strikes continued, sporadic, into February, putting activists in constant danger of arrest. In Petrograd on 26 January, eleven labour representatives on the official Central War Industries Committee – created by industrialists in response to the government’s utter lack of coordination – were jailed for ‘revolutionary activity’.

  Krupskaya and Lenin mouldered in their Swiss exile. In a speech to a young audience in the Zurich People’s House, Lenin remained bullish that revolution in Russia could be a detonator, ‘the prologue to the coming European revolution’; that despite its ‘present gravelike stillness’, the continent was ‘pregnant with revolution’. ‘We of the older generation’, he added melancholically, ‘may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming’ – European, socialist – ‘revolution’.

  By 14 February, more than 100,000 workers from sixty factories were still on strike in Petrograd. In the eighteenth-century splendour of the Tauride Palace, the ‘consultative’ Fourth Duma opened, and immediately attacked the tsar’s government over the food shortages. Hundreds of students, fired up with radical ideas, defied the police to march down Nevsky Prospect, the spectacular and fashionable shopping street cutting through the city’s heart. The young demonstrators yelled revolutionary songs into the cold air.

  Four days later, workers in the Putilov metalworks began a sit-down strike, demanding a 50 per cent raise in their paltry wages. After three days they were sacked. But the punishment did not deter their companions: instead, protest spread through the great plant.

  On the 22nd the tsar left the capital for Mogilev, a drab town 200 miles to the east that housed the Stavka, the supreme headquarters of the armed forces. That was the day the Putilov bosses decided to show their strength: they declared a lockout. Closing the factory doors, they put 30,000 militant workers onto the streets – on what happened to be the eve of a recent innovation of the left, International Women’s Day.

  Celebrations and events across the empire marked 23 February, demanding rights for women and applauding their contributions. In the factories of Petrograd, radicals gave speeches on the situation of women, the iniquity of the war, the impossible cost of living. But even they did not expect what happened next.

  As the meetings ended, women began to pour from the factories onto the streets, shouting for bread. They marched through the city’s most militant districts – Vyborg, Liteiny, Rozhdestvenskii – hollering to people gathered in the courtyards of the blocks, filling the wide streets in huge and growing numbers, rushing to the factories and calling on the men to join them. An Okhrana spy reported:

  At about 1 p.m., the working men of the Vyborg district, walking out in crowds into the streets and shouting ‘Give us bread!’, started … to become disorderly … taking with them on the way their comrades who were at work, and stopping tramcars … The strikers, who were resolutely chased by police and troops … were dispersed in one place but quickly gathered in others.

  All in all, the police muttered, they were ‘exceptionally stubborn’.

  ‘Are we going to put up with this in silence much longer, now and then venting our smouldering rage on small shop owners?’ demanded a leaflet issued by one tiny revolutionary group, the Interborough Committee, the Mezhraiontsy. ‘After all, they’re not to blame for the people’s suffering, they are being ruined themselves. The government is to blame!’

  Abruptly, without anyone having planned it, almost 90,000 women and men were roaring on the streets of Petrograd. And now they were not shouting only for bread, but for an end to the war. An end to the reviled monarchy.

  The night did not bring calm. The next day came a wave of dissent. Close to half the city’s workforce poured onto the streets. They marched under red banners, chanting the new slogan: ‘To Nevsky!’

  The geography of Peter’s capital was carefully plotted. The south of Vasilievsky island, the Neva’s left bank, as far as its branch, the Fontanka, were sumptuous; this was the quarter of the Mariinsky theatre, the spectacular Kazan and Isaac Cathedrals, the palaces of the nobility and the substantial apartment blocks of professionals, Nevsky Prospect itself. Ringing them were districts more recently thrown up by migration: remoter parts of Vasilievsky, Vyborg and Okhta on the Neva’s right bank; on its left, the Alexander Nevsky, Moscow and Narva neighbourhoods. Here the workers, many fresh from the countryside’s black earth, lived in their own blocks, in tottering brick barracks, in squalid wooden hovels between the blaring factories.


  Such segregation meant that, to make their protests heard, the urban poor had to invade the city centre. They had done so in 1905. Now they tried again.

  The Petrograd police blocked the bridges. But the gods of weather showed solidarity in the form of this brutal winter. The streets were lined with thick snowpiles, and the great Neva itself remained frozen. The demonstrators descended in their thousands from the embankments onto the ice. They walked across the face of the waters.

  In a telegram home, the British ambassador George Buchanan offhandedly dismissed the disorder as ‘nothing serious’. Almost no one had, as yet, any sense of what had begun.

  Climbing up from the river on the smarter side of town, the demonstrators pushed on through palatial streets towards the heartland. The police watched nervously. The mood grew brittle.

  Jeering, hesitant at first, in ones and twos then growing in confidence and numbers, some in the crowd began to hurl sticks and stones and jags of the ice over which they had come at the detested policemen, ‘Pharaohs’ in the city’s slang.

  Towards the army’s rank and file, in contrast, the demonstrators were conciliatory. They gathered in great crowds by barracks and army hospitals. There they struck up conversations with curious and friendly soldiers.

  The bulk of Petrograd’s soldiers were conscripts, recruits in training, or bored, bitter, ill-disciplined, demoralised reservists. Among them, too, were injured and sick personnel evacuated from the front.

  A. F. Ilyin-Genevsky was already a convinced Bolshevik when he was gassed and shell shock shattered his memory for a time. From his hospital bed he saw the political awakening of the wounded, ‘the rapid revolutionising of the army’ under such desperate tutelage. ‘After all the bloody horrors of war, people who found themselves in the peaceful quiet of the hospitals involuntarily began to think over the cause of all this bloodshed and sacrifice.’ And he saw such reflections devolve into ‘hate and rage’. No wonder the war-wounded in particular were notorious for their hostility to military life.

  And what of the 12,000 ‘reliable’ troops, on whom the city’s rulers pinned their hopes?

  What of the implacable Cossacks? Slavic-speakers from, particularly, the Don region of Ukraine and Russia itself, Cossack communities had not known serfdom, and boasted a long if rough tradition of militaristic, self-governing democracy. By the nineteenth century they had become projected as a myth: they were depicted as and often believed themselves uniquely proud, honoured and honourable, a quasi-ethnic, quasi-estate-based cavalry, a people-class. Living symbols of Russia, and traditional agents of tsarist repression: their whips and sabres had spattered a lot of blood on the snow, twelve years before.

  But Cossacks were never a monolithic group. They, too, were differentiated by class. And many of them had grown sick of the war, and of how they were being used.

  On Nevsky Prospect, a crowd of strikers came to a stand-off with mounted Cossacks, their lances glinting in the sun. A fearful hesitation. For a long moment something was poised in the icy air. Abruptly the officers wheeled and rode away, leaving the demonstrators cheering in astonished delight.

  On Znamenskaya Square, other strikers hailed other Cossack cavalrymen, and this time the riders smiled back at the demonstrators they ostentatiously did not disperse. When the crowd clapped them, the police agitatedly reported, the Cossacks bowed in their saddles.

  Over the hours, in the Tauride Palace, representatives to the national Duma continued to speechify against the regime. What they demanded was relevance: that the tsar must establish a ministry responsible to the Duma itself. For the left, Alexander Kerensky, the well-known Trudovik with a substantial reputation thanks to his writings on the Lena Goldfields massacre, held forth against the government in such swingeing and grandiloquent terms that the tsarina, hearing of it, wrote furiously to her husband, wishing Kerensky hanged.

  Evening came and the air grew even colder. The heaving streets rang with revolutionary songs. Seeing workers from the Promet factory marching behind a woman, a Cossack officer jeered that they were following a baba, a hag. Arishina Kruglova, the Bolshevik in question, yelled back that she was an independent woman worker, a wife and sister of soldiers at the front. At her riposte, the troops who faced her lowered their guns.

  Two thousand five hundred Vyborg mill-workers took a narrow route down Sampsonievsky Prospect, stopping short, horrified, when they met a Cossack formation. The officers grimaced, grabbed their reins and spurred their horses, and with weapons aloft they shouted for their men to follow. This time, to the crowd’s rising terror, the Cossacks began to obey.

  But they followed the command with absolute precision. Like dressage riders, their mounts high-stepping elegantly through the slush, they advanced in slow, neat single file. The troops winked at the dumbfounded crowd as they came, dispersing no one at all.

  There is an old Scottish term for a particular technique of industrial resistance, a go-slow or a sabotage by surplus obedience, making the letter of the rules undermine their spirit: the ca’canny. That chill evening, the Cossacks did not disobey orders – they conducted a ca’canny cavalry charge.

  Their furious officers ordered them to block the street. Once more the men respectfully complied. With their legendary equestrian skills, they lined up their horses into a living blockade breathing out mist. Again, in their very obedience was dissent. Ordered to be still, still they remained. They did not move as the boldest marchers crept closer. The Cossacks did not move as the strikers approached, their eyes widening as at last they understood the unspoken invitation in the preternatural immobility of mounts and men, as they ducked below the bellies of the motionless horses to continue their march.

  Rarely have skills imparted by reaction been so exquisitely deployed against it.

  Next day, the 25th, 240,000 people were out on strike, demanding bread, an end to the war, the abdication of the tsar. Tramcars did not run, newspapers did not publish. Shops stayed closed: there was no shortage of sympathetic business owners exhausted with the incompetence of the regime. Now, smarter clothes were visible in the crowds, among workers’ smocks.

  The mood on both sides was growing hard. The Alexander III monument is a massive and ugly bronze, a thickset horse with head bowed as if in shame at the despot it carries. That day, from its shadow, mounted police opened fire on the approaching crowd. But this time, stunning the protestors as much as their adversaries, watching Cossacks fired too – back at the police.

  In Znamenskaya Square, the police lashed viciously at the strikers. Demonstrators scrambled away from their whistling knouts. They staggered, they ran to where Cossack troops waited on their motionless horses nearby, watching in uneasy neutrality. The crowds begged for help.

  A hesitation. The Cossacks rode in.

  There was a moment of wavering confrontation. Then a gasp and a spurt of blood and the crowd were shouting in delight, tossing a cavalryman on their shoulders. He had drawn his sabre, and he had put a police lieutenant to death.

  Others died that day, too. In Gostiny Dvor, troops shot and killed three demonstrators, and wounded ten. Crowds launched themselves at police stations across the city, unleashing a hail of stones, smashing their way in and arming themselves with whatever weapons they could find. More and more police officers began to flee the rising onslaught, stripping off their uniforms to escape.

  There was unease, an uncoiling in governmental corridors: an understanding, at last, that something serious was underway.

  The regime’s first reflexes were always repressive. As evening came down in swirls of snow, the tsar sent orders down the wires to General Khabalov. ‘I command you to suppress from tomorrow all disorders on the streets of the capital, which are impermissible at a time when the fatherland is carrying on a difficult war with Germany.’ As if he might have considered them permissible at any other time. That day, when troops had opened fire it had been in panic, anger, revenge or unsanctioned brutality: henceforth, if crowds would not disperse, such atta
cks would be policy. And the war itself, that glorious national war, was brandished as a further threat: those not back at work within three days, Khabalov announced to the city, would be sent to join the carnage of the front.

  That night, police snatch squads went hunting. They arrested around 100 suspected ringleaders, including five members of the Bolsheviks’ Petersburg Committee. But the revolutionaries had not started the insurrection. Even now, they struggled to keep pace with it. Their arrest would certainly not stop it.

  ‘The city is calm.’ On Sunday 26 February, the tsarina cabled her husband with strained optimism. But as the day’s light came up over the wide stretch of the river, glinting on the ice between the embankments, the workers were already crossing it again, returning. This time, however, they arrived in streets thick with police.

  This time, when demonstrators implored the soldiers not to shoot, their appeals would not always be heard.

  It was a bloody day. The coughing of machine guns and rifles’ reports echoed over the skyline, mingled with the screams of stampeding crowds. People scattered and scurried, past the cathedrals and the palaces, away from the onslaughts. That Sunday, repeatedly, troops obeyed their officers’ orders to fire – though, too, the attacks were undermined by weapon ‘malfunctions’, hesitations, deliberate misaimings. And for every such incident of stealth solidarity, rumours sprang up of scores more.

  Not everything went the regime’s way. Early afternoon, workers flocked to the barracks of the Pavlovsky regiment. Desperately they begged for help, shouting to the men within that their regiment’s training squad was shooting at demonstrators. The soldiers did not come out in response, not immediately. Respect for orders made them hesitate. But they withdrew into a long mass meeting. Men shouting over each other, over the noises of shots and confrontations in the city, flustered and horrified speakers debating what they should do. At six o’clock, the Pavlovsky’s fourth company headed at last for the Nevsky Prospect, intent on recalling their comrades in disgrace. They were met by a detachment of mounted police, but their blood was up and they were ashamed of their earlier hesitation.