October. China Miéville
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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 hour has come when the fate of the fatherland and the dynasty is being decided.’
At the High Command headquarters, Count Vladimir Frederiks, Nicholas’s imperial household minister, waited politely as his master read the message unspooling from the machine. ‘That fat Rodzianko has written me some nonsense,’ the tsar said at last, ‘to which I will not even reply.’
In the capital, the previous day’s murder weighed heavy on some of those who had been ordered to commit it. Like that of the Pavlovsky, the Volinsky Regiment’s training detachment had shot demonstrators, and had spent the night gathered in their barracks in a long session of self-recrimination. Now its men confronted their captain, Lashkevitch, and declared expiatory mutiny. They would not, they told him, shoot again.
Peremptorily, Lashkevitch read out the tsar’s command to restore order. Once, perhaps, that might have persuaded them to submit. Now it was a provocation. There was a scuffle, shouts, alarm. Someone in the crowd of soldiers raised a weapon. Or perhaps, it has even been suggested, Lashkevitch raised his own gun in a panic and turned it on himself. Wherever it came from, a sudden shot sounded. The soldiers stared as the captain fell.
Something died with him. A hesitation.
The Volinsky soldiers roused the Litovsky and Preobrazhensky Regiments from their barracks nearby. Officers from the Moskovsky Regiment struggled to assert command. They were overpowered. The soldiers headed out into the city for the Vyborg district. This time it was they who sought to fraternise with the workers.
Under the gun-grey skies, the streets of Petrograd began to rage.
A dumbfounded General Khabalov tried to mobilise six loyal companies. Some officers and soldiers, individually and in makeshift groups, stayed loyal, and even put up armed resistance to the escalating insurrection. But at a mass level, out of conviction or cowardice, exhaustion or equivocation, for whatever reason at all, the troops refused to rally. Those soldiers who would not join with and fight alongside the workers, under leaders thrown up in the rough meritocracy of the moment, simply disappeared. In eyewitness descriptions, the same phrase recurs many times: even the supposedly loyal units ‘melted away’.
Crowds of workers and soldiers ransacked government buildings and broke into police arsenals, took the weapons they found and went after the police, killing them where they could. They burned the stations down, sending their records up in smoke with them, firing at any ‘Pharaoh’ they saw, including the police snipers who had scrambled to the rooftops and sometimes leaned over to take aim. The rebels searched churches for caches of weapons, soldiers and workers rummaging together in uneasy reverential silence. They stormed prisons and tore open doors and freed the bewildered inmates. They set light to the district court and stood watching the bonfire, as if in some new winter festival. In the absence of any counterforce, the overthrowers exuberantly, chaotically overthrew.
Their clamour spread beyond Petrograd. In Moscow, in particular, officials had tried and failed to suppress news of the growing disturbances. Word of what was occurring reached the second city. Moscow workers began to walk out, some heading home, some for the city centre, seeking news and direction.
On the afternoon of the 27th, the tsar was pursuing his military pottering at Stavka, unperturbed. His tranquillity was not unique: the war minister, Bieliaev, cabled him to report, with surreal complacency, that a few minor disturbances were occurring in a few military units in Petrograd, and that they were being dealt with. That all would soon be calm.
In the boulevards of the insurgent city, revolutionary socialists jostled alongside angry liberals and all shades in between, and they were not calm. What they shared was a certainty that change, a revolution, was necessary, and ineluctable. They were in a new city, in eruption, on Red Monday. The old law was dying, the new not yet decided.
Under the darkening sky, accompanied by breaking glass and in the guttering light of fires, groups of men and women drifted aimlessly together and apart, workers, freed criminals, radical agitators, soldiers, freelance hooligans, spies and drunkards. Armed with what they had found. Here, a figure in a greatcoat waving an officer’s sabre and an empty revolver. There, a young teenager with a kitchen knife. A student with machine-gun bullets slung around his waist, a rifle in each hand. A man wielded a pole for cleaning tramlines as if it were a pike.
Crowds of thousands surged down Shpalernaya Street, flocking to the spread stone wings of the Tauride Palace, seat of the Duma: ineffectual, divided and blindsided though the body was, huge numbers of citizens looked to it as an alternative government. All the more lamentable, then, that the Duma itself was unwilling, even now, to rebel against the tsar – even against his orders that it dissolve itself.
As directed, with the loyalty of cowardice or the cowardice of loyalty, the Duma members wound their official meeting down. The letter of the tsar’s command duly obeyed, they left the assembly hall. They shuffled a little way through the high corridors of the building – and into another chamber, where they reconvened as, technically, a new, private gathering. Struggling for resolve, this remaindered Duma committed to staying in Petrograd and attempting to assert some control. Its members authorised a council to elect a Provisional Committee from among representatives of all the Duma parties except for the extreme right, and except for the Bolsheviks.
Before they chose this group, Rodzianko, accompanied this time by Nicholas’s own brother Grand Duke Michael, made yet another effort to breach the tsar’s bovine placidity. Only a shift to constitutional monarchy, Rodzianko was now certain, might placate the country, and Michael had agreed, in principle, to take power on this model.
Once again they strove to impress upon the tsar the apocalyptic seriousness