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, Rozhdestvensk – 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
