Not that the fighting was all done. Staccato bursts of gunfire continued to sound. It was on this last, lost day for the old regime’s defenders that some of the ugliest violence occurred.
In the General Staff building, in the Admiralty, in the huge and splendid Winter Palace itself, guarded by its bevy of blank-eyed rooftop statues, holdouts remained. In the Astoria Hotel, senior officers and their families dug in, protected by trusted men. When jubilant crowds gathered in the streets outside, rumours spread of snipers in the hotel. Confusion. A phase-shift of delight to rage. Shouts that someone was shooting down from the windows. Was it true? Too late: true or not, revolutionary soldiers were smashing the glass and walls with their own volleys. Their comrades broke into the hotel’s gilded vestibule, firing, and loyalist soldiers fired back.
A long and spectacular battle, a storm of ricochets, flying plaster chips, gold splinters and cordite, bullets pounding the walls, blood exploding across brocade and stiff-creased jackets. When the smoke and blare ebbed at last, several dozen officers were dead.
The Military Commission occupied the central telephone station and took the post office and central telegraph office. Bublikov, a member of the Duma, took fifty soldiers to the Ministry of Transport and placed everyone there under arrest, including the former minister, Kriger-Voinovskii, unless they pledged allegiance to the Duma Committee. That done, he tapped the iron network, sending a telegram to all the railway stations in Russia. In spurts of electricity, a clicking code following the paths of trains, he informed them that the revolution had taken place. And urged railway workers to come onside with ‘redoubled energy’.
In fact, the Duma Committee had nothing like the power at its disposal that Bublikov implied. His message was a speech act, a performance, and it had a powerful effect. Though it would take several days to reach the furthest reaches of the vast territory, with the news of the revolution spread the revolution itself.
Groupuscules and gatherings formulated plans. Latvians and Finns and Poles and others, in their diasporas and in their homelands, debated political forms. Moscow, close by, second only to Petrograd in political and cultural sway, was most immediately and crucially affected. There, having been late to commence, the revolution seemed eager to catch up. From a more-or-less standing start the previous day, now a general strike rocked the city. Workers seized weapons from police stations and arrested the officers. Crowds sacked jails and set the prisoners free.
‘To call it mass hypnosis is not quite right,’ said Eduard Dune, in 1917 a Moscow teenager just engaging with radical politics, ‘but the mood of the crowd was transmitted from one to another like conduction, like a spontaneous burst of laughter, joy, or anger.’ Most there, he thought, ‘that morning had been praying for the good health of the imperial family. Now they were shouting, “Down with the tsar!” and not disguising their joyful contempt.’
On the Yauza Bridge, police gamely tried to block a huge mass of demonstrators. A metalworker called Astakhov shouted for them to withdraw, and a hot-headed officer replied with lethal fire. Moscow’s February had claimed its first, one of its vanishingly few, martyrs.
The enraged horde stormed the blockade, routed the police, hurled the murderer into the waters of the Yauza, and continued to the city centre. Muscovites gathered there to celebrate the new order. ‘The old regime in Moscow in truth fell all by itself,’ reported the Kadet businessman Buryshkin, ‘and no one defended it or even tried to.’
There was class differentiation in the very liberation. Hawkers ran out of red calico for ribbons that night. ‘Well-dressed people wore ribbons almost the size of table napkins,’ said Dune, ‘and people said to them: “Why are you being so stingy? Share it out among us. We’ve got equality and fraternity now.”’
In Petrograd, the Duma Committee ordered the arrest of ex-ministers and senior officials. That ‘order’ was implicitly a plea, in fact, directed at the revolutionary crowds. And those crowds often had no need to hunt: fearful of the emerging order, representatives of the old rule tended to believe that the newly self-appointed leaders were more likely to keep them alive than was the rough street justice. Tsarist ministers such as the loathed Protopopov, previously minister of the interior, made their own way to the Tauride Palace, in a hurry to hand themselves in. Police officers queued outside its walls, begging to be taken into custody.
And as the Duma Committee took tentative power early on the 28th, as the city lurched, more and more factories and military units assembled and voted representatives to the Petrograd Soviet – a body by then formulating its own plans and powers.
The new delegates overwhelmingly represented moderate socialist groups – fewer than 10 per cent of votes went to the Bolsheviks, the most revolutionary, maximalist wing of the SRs, or to the small militant group, the Mezhraiontsy.
The extraordinary Mezhraiontsy, the Interborough or Interdistrict Group, was a recent radical formation. Dismayed by the hardening split in Russian Marxism, its founders Konstantin Yurenev, Bolsheviks Elena Adamovich and A. M. Novosyolov, the Menshevik Nikolai Egorov and others fostered collaboration. They built goodwill and membership among workers and intellectuals including Yuri Larin, Moisei Uritsky, David Riazanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Trotsky himself.
Lunacharsky was an unorthodox, erudite and sparkling critic, writer and orator. A gentle man, admired for his sensitivity as well as his brilliance, he had long been opposed to traces of stageism and mechanistic orthodoxy, for which he criticised Plekhanov and the Mensheviks. He argued instead for an ethical, aesthetic Marxism, even advocated ‘God-building’, an atheistic religion of godlessness, of humanity itself. For this and other theoretical sins Lenin had previously attacked him, but by 1917 he and his comrades were all but an external faction of the Bolsheviks.
To the Mezhraiontsy, unity had fast become secondary to the key issue of the war: they gave no quarter to ‘defencism’. With many quick and independent thinkers among their ranks, they were ‘the only organisation’, Yurenev would proudly recall, ‘publishing leaflets in the opening skirmishes of the revolution’. As early as the 27th, their agitators encouraged workers to elect representatives to a soviet – about which they were considerably more enthusiastic than were the Bolsheviks at this point.
The rough-and-ready representative mechanisms of that Soviet meant that soldiers would rapidly be overrepresented. For those soldiers, still giddy with freedom, the Soviet was their organisation: Kerensky’s interventions notwithstanding, many did not trust the Duma Committee, speaking as it did for the officers against whom they had mutinied.
The Duma Committee itself, that semi-reluctant power, was split as to what it wanted. It included those still aspiring to a constitutional monarchy; those for whom history had removed that possibility, whether it had been once preferable or not; and those who considered a republic not only necessary but desirable.
It was not a day of raptures and joyful tears in Kronstadt. In that tiny island town, it was the 28th that was the day of the revolution.
Soldiers of the Third Kronstadt Fortress Infantry marched out of a barracks in Pavel Street, their band playing the Marseillaise. Their comrades from the Torpedo and Mining Training Detachment followed them, shooting an officer dead as they advanced. Then came the First Baltic Fleet Depot. Then the garrison. Sailors joined the throng. The crews of the training ships in the iron-hard harbour came out in mutiny. ‘Do not find it possible to take measures for pacification with personnel from the garrison’, Commander Kurosh tersely reported to his superiors, ‘because there is not one unit I can rely on.’
Men demonstrated in the streets and in the main Anchor Square; they ranged through their sprawling base and barracks, bayonets in hands, following the paths of those executed mutineers. A few respected officers they protected: others they dragged to the square, hurled into a ditch, and shot dead in the dirt. Perhaps fifty in all were put to death. Many more fled or were thrown in Kronstadt’s jail.
The sailors did not know that they lagged a day behind the mainland, that they were joining a revolution already made. They expected a loyalist assault, and their savagery was revenge, yes, but also exigency and urgency in the face of that dreaded battle in a war – a class war. No officer could re-establish discipline now.