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 attacks 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.
They did not back down but fired. A man was killed. On returning to their base, the soldiers’ ringleaders were arrested and taken across the water, behind the long low walls of the fortress, to the notorious prison of Peter and Paul below the thornlike spire.
Forty people died that Sunday. The slaughter devastated the demonstrators’ morale. Even in the militant Vyborg district on the north side, the local Bolsheviks considered winding down the strike. For its part, the autocracy broke off its half-hearted negotiations with the Duma’s president Rodzianko, and dissolved the parliament it held in such contempt.
Rodzianko telegraphed the tsar.
‘The situation is serious.’ His warning sped along the wires by the railway lines, across the wide hard countryside to Mogilev. ‘There is anarchy in the capital. The government is paralysed. It is necessary immediately to entrust a person who enjoys the confidence of the country with the formation of a new government. Any delay is equivalent to death. I pray God that in this hour responsibility will not fall upon the sovereign.’
Nicholas did not reply.
The next morning, Rodzianko tried again. ‘The situation is growing worse. Measures must be adopted immediately, because tomorrow will be too late. The last
