Part 33

During the afternoon I made a long tour through the Wiborg factory district, which was thickly policed by infantrymen. Occasional street cars were still running, but otherwise the district was ominously silent. The bread-lines were very long here, and on the corners were groups of workmen. Their silent gravity struck me as being something to reckon with. Still the lack of real trouble on the Nevsky as I came back in a measure reassured me.

Saturday morning the crowd on the Nevsky gathered at the early Petrograd hour of ten, but they seemed to be there to encourage the Cossacks. Wherever the Cossacks passed, individuals called out to them cheerfully and, even though they crowded in so close to the trotting horsemen as to be occasionally knocked about, they took it good-humoredly and went on cheering. I went away for an hour or so and when I returned the fraternizing of the crowd and the Cossacks was increasingly evident. By this time all sorts of ordinary citizens, catching the sense of events, were joining in the general acclamation. I was just beginning to get a glimmering of the meaning of all this when I was bowled over by the mounted police in front of the Singer Building.

The more timorous average citizens began to lose interest, but the workmen and students who were in the Nevsky now in considerable numbers, and arriving hourly, accepted the challenge of the police. They began throwing bottles, the police charged afresh, and by the early part of Saturday afternoon there was really a mob on the Nevsky. Liberally mixed through the whole, though, were the ordinary onlookers, many of them young girls. The Nevsky widens for a space before the Gastenidwor (the Russian adaptation of the oriental bazaar), and infantrymen were now detailed to hold the people back at the point of the bayonet. Meanwhile, all the side streets were wide open and the appearance of a large, angry mob was kept up by constant arrivals. The crowd becoming unwieldy, the soldiers fired into it several times, but they did not wound many, indicating that they were extracting many bullets before they fired. The shooting only augmented the crowd, as Russians do not frighten very easily, and though at a few points it was necessary to turn the corner, I found no difficulty in going back and forth all afternoon between Kasan Cathedral and the Nicola Station--the main stretch of the Nevsky. There was general roughing along this mile and a half of street which could have been stopped at any time in fifteen minutes by closing the streets. Instead, the police charged with increasing violence without doing anything to prevent the people coming from other parts of town. The idea was now unescapable that the police were inviting the people to a quarrel.

The Cossacks were sometimes riding pretty fast themselves, but never with the violence of the police, and the cheering was continuous. At any point I could tell by the quality of the howl that went up from the mob whether it was being stirred by Cossacks or police. At the Nicola Station the rioting was the roughest, the police freely using their sabres. The crowd, though unarmed, stood its ground and howled back, and when possible caught an isolated mounted policeman and disarmed him. In one case the mob had already disarmed and was unseating a policeman, and other sections of the mob were rushing up to have a turn at manhandling him, when a single Cossack, with nothing in his hands, forced his way through and rescued the policeman, amid the cheers of the same people who were harassing him. It was quite evident that the people and the Cossacks were on the same side, and only the unbelievable stupid old Russian Government could have ignored it.

At nightfall the crowd had had its fill of roughing, but Sunday was evidently to be the real day. There would have been, of course, nothing on the Nevsky, if properly policed, and I have been unable to understand how the old Government, unless overconfident of its autocratic power and disdainful of the people, could have let things go on. But though half the regiments in Petrograd were on the point of revolt and their sympathy with the people was evident even to a foreigner, Sunday was mismanaged like the days before. It was even worse. The powers that were had, as early as Friday, been so silly as to send armored motor cars screeching up and down the Nevsky. Now they began installing machine guns where they could play on the crowd. Up to this time I had been a neutral, if disgusted, spectator, but now I hoped the police and the whole imperial régime would pay bitterly for their insolence and stupidity. The few corpses I encountered during the day on the Nevsky could not even add to the feeling. They were the mere casualties of a movement that was beginning to attain large proportions.

The late afternoon and evening of Sunday were bloody. The Nevsky was finally closed except for cross traffic, and at the corner of the Sadovia and the Nevsky by the national library there was a machine gun going steadily. But it was in the hands of soldiers and they were firing blanks. The soldiers everywhere seemed to be firing blanks, but there was carnage enough. The way the crowds persisted showed their capacity for revolution. The talk was for the first time seriously revolutionary, and the red flags remained flying by the hour. That evening the air was for the first time electric with danger, but the possibilities of the next morning were not sufficiently evident to prevent me from going to the French theatre. There were a sufficient number of other people, of the same mind, including many officers, to fill half the seats.

As usual, between the acts, the officers stood up, facing the imperial box, which neither the Emperor nor any one else ever occupied. This act of empty homage, which always grated on my democratic nerves in a Russian theatre, was being performed by these officers--though they did not even seem to suspect it--for the last time.

On my way home at midnight I picked up from wayfarers rumors of soldiers attacking the police, soldiers fighting among themselves and rioting in barracks. But outwardly there was calm until three in the morning, when I heard in my room on the Moika Canal side of the Hotel de France some very lively rifle fire from the direction of the Catherine Canal. This sounded more like the real thing than anything so far, so I dressed and tried to get near enough to learn what was going on. But for the first time the streets were really closed. The firing kept up steadily until four. Farther on in the great barracks along the Neva beyond the Litenie it kept up until the revolting soldiers had command.

I regret not having seen the revolt getting under way in that quarter. I regret missing the small incidents, the moments when the revolt hung in the balance, when it was the question of whether a certain company would join, for when I reached there it was still in its inception and the most interesting thing about it was to watch it spread like a prairie fire.

Still not realizing, like most people in Petrograd, that we were within a few hours of a sweeping revolt, I wasted some precious hours that morning trying to learn what could be done with the censor. But toward noon I heard the Duma had been dissolved, and, as there had not been since Sunday any street cars, 'ishvoshiks, or other means of conveyance, I started out afoot with Roger Lewis of the Associated Press to walk the three miles to the Duma.

The hush of impending events hung over the entire city. I remember nothing like that silence since the day the Germans entered Louvain. On every street were the bread lines longer than ever. All along the Catherine Canal, the snow was pounded by many feet and spotted with blood. But there were no soldiers and few police. We hurried along the Nevsky, gathering rumors of the fight that was actually going on down by the arsenal on the Litenie. But many shops were open and there was a semblance of business. All was so quiet we could not make out the meaning of a company of infantry drawn up in a hollow square commanding the four points at the junction of the Litenie and Nevsky, ordinarily one of the busiest corners in the world.

But as soon as we turned down the Litenie we could hear shots farther down, and the pedestrians were mostly knotted in doorways. Scattered cavalry commands were arriving from the side streets, and the Litenie began looking a little too hot. So we chose a parallel street for several blocks until we were within three blocks of the Neva, where we had to cross the Litenie in front of a company drawn up across the street ready to fire toward the arsenal, where there was sporadic rifle fire. Here there were bigger knots of curious citizens projecting themselves farther and farther toward the middle of the street, hoping for a better view, until a nearer shot frightened them closer to the walls. The barricade on the Litenie by the arsenal, the one barricade the revolution produced, was just beginning to be built two hundred feet away as Lewis and I reached the shelter of the Fourshtatzkaya, on the same street as the American Embassy. By crossing the Litenie we had entered the zone of the revolutionists. We did not realize this, however, and were puzzled by the sight of a soldier carrying simply a bayonet, and another with a bare officer's sword. A fourteen-year-old boy stood in the middle of the street with a rifle in his hand, trifling with it. It exploded in his hand, and when he saw the ruin of the breech block he unfixed the bayonet, threw down the gun, and ran around the corner. A student came up the street examining the mechanism of a revolver. There seemed to be rifle-fire in every direction, even in the same street, but haphazard.

If we had not been living in a troubled atmosphere these small indications would have impressed us deeply, but neither of us gathered immediately the significance of events. Before we reached the next corner we passed troops who evidently did not know yet whether or not they were still on the side of the Government. An automobile appeared full of soldiers, an officer standing on the seat. He waved toward him all the soldiers in sight and began haranguing them. There was no red flag in sight, and, until we caught his words, we thought he was urging them to remain loyal. He was really recruiting for the revolution.

As we kept on toward the Duma we encountered other automobiles, many of them, and motor trucks, literally bristling with guns and sabres. Half the men were civilians and the number of young boys with revolvers who looked me over made me feel it was a very easy time in which to be killed. I was wearing an English trench coat and a fur cap, so to prevent any mistake of identity I stopped and presented a full view to each passing motor. Still I knew my continued existence depended on the sanity of any one of thirty or forty very excited men and boys on each truck, and when I reached the protection of the enormous crowd that was storming the entrance to the Duma I felt more comfortable.

The Duma had just been dismissed by imperial decree, an ironical circumstance in view of the thousands of soldiers and civilians massed before its doors under the red flag. Their leaders were within, asking the Duma to form a provisional government. The Duma was not yet convinced, and the mental confusion within was more bewildering than the revolution without. This was early in the afternoon, and the Duma held off for hours. Even when it was known that the Preobarzhenski regiment, which began its career with Peter the Great, had turned revolutionary, the Duma insisted on waiting. But at nine o'clock in the evening, when every police station, every court, was on fire and the revolutionists completely controlled the city, President Rodzianko decided that the Duma must take command.

It is interesting to watch a revolution grow, and even at this time, early Monday afternoon, the revolutionists controlled only a corner of Petrograd. They were working up excitement, and, as often before in the war, the motor trucks played an important part. They thundered back and forth through doubtful streets, students, soldiers, and workmen standing tight and bristling with bayonets like porcupines. They carried conviction of force, and, as each foray met with less resistance, it was not long before they were dashing boldly everywhere. That accounts for the rapid control of the city. It could not have been done afoot.

All day, from the time the arsenal fell into their hands, the revolutionists felt their strength growing, and from noon on no attack was led against them. At first the soldiers simply gave up their guns and mixed in the crowd, but they grew bolder, too, when they saw the workmen forming into regiments and marching up the Fourshtatzkaya, still fumbling with the triggers of their rifles to see how they met the enemy at the next corner. The coolness of these revolutionists, their willingness to die for their cause, won the respect of a small group of us who were standing before the American Embassy. The group was composed chiefly of Embassy attachés who wanted to go over to the old Austrian Embassy, used by us as the headquarters for the relief of German and Austrian prisoners in Russia; but though it was only a five minutes' walk, the hottest corner in the revolution lay between.

When we left the Embassy, Captain McCulley, the American Naval Attaché, said he knew a way to get out of the revolutionary quarter without passing a line of fire. So he edged us off toward the distant Nevsky along several blood-blotched streets in which there were occasional groups of soldiers who did not know which way to turn. Then, as the Bycenie, beyond, suddenly filled with revolutionists coming from some other quarter, we turned to cross the Litenie. Twenty minutes earlier Captain McCulley had passed there and the Government troops controlled for another quarter mile. Now we passed a machine-gun company commanding the street, which dared not fire because there was a line of soldiers between it and a vast crowd pouring through the street toward us. The crowd had already overwhelmed and made revolutionists out of hundreds of soldiers, and the situation for a moment was dramatically tense.

Down the bisecting Litenie another crowd was advancing, filling the wide street. Before it there was also a company of soldiers, and it did not know whether to face the Bycenie or the river. Three immense mobs were overwhelming it, though it knew of but two. Suddenly, just at the moment when we expected a shower of bullets, and flattened ourselves against a doorway, the company grounded arms and in three seconds was in the arms of the revolution.

As we retreated to the Nevsky ahead of the victorious crowd we could see company after company turn, as if suddenly deciding not to shoot, and join.

I walked rapidly back to the Morskaya and down to the cable office, which I found closed, not encountering on the whole two miles a single soldier or policeman until I reached St. Isaac's Cathedral, where a regiment of marines turned up the Morskaya toward the Nevsky, swinging along behind a band. Five minutes later I followed them up the Morskaya, but before I reached the Gorokawaya, half the distance, I could hear the thunder of the revolutionary motor trucks and the glad howls of the revolutionists. They had run the length of the Nevsky, and the city, except this little corner, was theirs. The shooting began at once, and for the next three hours on both the Morskaya and the Moika there was steady firing. This was still going on when, at nine in the evening, I passed around the edge of the fight, crossed Winter Palace Square, deserted except for a company of Cossacks dimly outlined against the Winter Palace across the square. By passing under the arch into the head of Morskaya again I was once more with the revolutionists.

I have since asked Mr. Milukoff, now Minister of Foreign Affairs, at that moment a member of the Duma's Committee of Safety, how much of an organization there was behind the events of that day.

"There was some incipient organization certainly," he replied, "though even now I could not be more definite. But for the most part it was spontaneous growth. The Duma was not revolutionary, and we held off until it became necessary for us to take hold. We were the only government left."

The rapid work was done by the Socialists, who quickly formed the Council of Workmen and Soldiers' Deputies and formulated the programme which has come to be the Russian Declaration of Independence. They consented to support the Duma if it adopted their democratic programme. There was nothing else for the Duma to do, and the main issues of the new Government were worked out before Tuesday morning, within twenty-four hours of the beginning of the revolution. Since then I have been repeatedly impressed with the organizing ability of the men in control, and their ability to take matters rapidly in hand.

Monday night the city was in the hands of the mob. Anybody could have a gun. Public safety lay in the released spirits of the Russian workmen who saw the vision of liberty before them. Tuesday was the most dangerous day, as the crowd was beginning to feel its power, and the amount of shooting going on everywhere must have been out of all proportion to the sniping on the part of cornered police. But the searching of apartments for arms was carried on with some semblance of order, and usually there was a student in command. The individual stories of officers who refused to surrender and fought to the end in their apartments are endless, but these individual fights were lost in the victorious sweep of the day. Tuesday evening the real business of burning police stations and prisons and destroying records went on throughout the city, but the actual burnings, while picturesque, lacked the terrorism one might expect. Still I felt that the large number of irresponsible civilians carrying arms might do what they pleased.

The same idea evidently occurred to the Committee of Safety, as it began at once disarming the irresponsible, and its work was so quick and effective that there were very few civilians not registered as responsible police who still had fire-arms on Wednesday morning.

As late as Wednesday there was a possibility of troops being sent against Petrograd, but all the regiments for miles around joined the revolution before they entered the city. There was obviously no one who wanted to uphold the old monarchy, and it fell without even dramatic incident to mark its end. To us in Petrograd the abdication of the Emperor had just one significance. It brought the army over at a stroke. The country, long saturated with democratic principles, accepted the new Government as naturally as if it had been chosen by a national vote.

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