Discussion 11

Reading: Dr. Stephen Kreis's "The Russian Revolution,

February to October 1917"

 

On Monday December 19, 1916 the corpse of Grigory

Efimovich Rasputin was found and people knelt in the snow

outside the Moika Palace to give their thanks to God and to

Felix Yusupov, the man responsible for Rasputin's demise.

On Tuesday, the Empress prayed over the corpse,

smothering it with flowers and ikons. On Thursday night,

Rasputin's body was buried in a plot of ground on the edge

of the park at Tsarskoe Selo. His murderers could not be

executed -- they were too popular. Not only that, Yusupov

was married to the Tsar's niece, Irena. Instead, Yusupov was

sent into temporary exile to his family estates to the south.

In August 1915, one year after the start of the Great War,

Tsar Nicholas II had taken over Supreme Command of the

Russian Army at the Stavka (HQ) at Mogilev. It was here that

he first learned of Rasputin's murder. That day he walked his

collies and watched a Path� serial called, The Streets of

New York. He was too weak to survive, they said in

Petrograd, power "hung over him like a shroud." His days in

power were clearly numbered. Most venom was reserved for

the tsarina. The crowds called her, "the German woman."

Her dull and melancholy evenings were passed listening to

chamber music and gazing into the fire. Each day,

sometimes several times, she poured out her simple-minded

political philosophy in letters to her husband at the Stavka.

The Russians loved "to feel the whip," she wrote to Nicky.

"It's their nature -- tender love and then the iron hand to

punish and guide them."

February 1917 began bitterly cold. The streets of Petrograd

were filled with ice. Food lines lengthened. "Never before

has there been so much swearing, argument and scandal,"

wrote one Okhrana agent. There were 170,000 troops in the

city, double the peacetime garrison, but the secret police

thought them to be "raw, untrained material, unfit to put

down civil disorders." The best troops, of course, were at the

front. On February 14th, police agents reported that army

officers had, for the first time, mingled with the crowds

demonstrating against the war and the government on

Nevsky Prospekt. "Behind the white columns of the hall

grinned Hopelessness," a conservative said of the mood at

the Duma debates. "And she whispered: ‘Why? What for?

What difference does it make?'"

Food hoarding was common. Wood for heating was beyond

the means of the poor and the temperature in middle class

flats was kept just above freezing. Grain trains on their way

to the capital were blocked by heavy snowfalls. International

Woman's Day was held on Thursday, February 23rd. This

gave an excuse for women from textile plants to stream into

the streets shouting, "Down with hunger! Bread for the

workers!" They pelted the windows of the engineering shops

to bring the men out. Nikolai Sukhanov, the crotchety

radical civil servant who was to become the Revolution's

diarist and victim, thought the disorders unremarkable. He

had seen them before. But what he now noticed was the

strange attitude of the authorities. The crowds felt it too.

They began overturning tramcars and sacked a large bakery.

The "Pharaohs," slang for the police, stood by and did

nothing. Okhrana agents noticed that skilled workers now

joined the strikers. The agitators working the crowds no

longer bothered to pull their overcoats over their heads in

order to hide their faces. The troops hesitated when they

were told to disperse the crowds. A Cossack officer shouted

at some strikers led by an old woman, "Who are you

following? You are being led by an old crone." The woman

replied, "No old crone, but a sister and wife of soldiers at the

front." Someone yelled, "Cossacks, you are our brothers,

you can't shoot us." The Cossacks, great symbol of Russian

ferocity and terror, turned away.

The tsarina thought there was no more to the events in

Petrograd than children running about for excitement. "If the

weather was cold," she wrote Nicky, "they probably would

have stayed at home." She also wrote that she hoped that a

young socialist lawyer by the name of Alexander Kerensky

would be hanged. In a recent Duma debate, Kerensky had

called for someone to do to the Tsar what Brutus had done

to Caesar. In fashionable circles, the main talk was of the

party Princess Radziwill was throwing the following Sunday.

Quite a few people had simply missed the boat! As luck

would have it, the weather stayed warm on Friday.

Demonstrators were out again in force. It seemed that all of

the city's 2.5 million residents were in the streets.

Something was odd in the behavior of the Cossacks. The

crowds had begun to cheer their customary tormentors. A

Cossack unit was ordered to charge. The horsemen rode

delicately in single file through the crowd. "Some of them

smiled and one actually winked," wrote one observer.

Killing started on Saturday, February 25th. The

demonstrators were back. All factories had closed. The

police opened fire on a mob that was beating a police officer

with an iron tramcar lever, and fired a volley into the crowd

near the Nikolaevsky train station and the demonstrators

fled. A cavalry squadron shot down nine people on the

Nevsky. But slowly the people began to command, forcing

officers to abandon their carriages and rescuing those who

had been taken by the police. The police were melting away,

fearing for their lives. Politics played little part here. There

were no leaders. "What do they want?" asked one

bystander. "They want bread, peace with the Germans and

freedom for the Yids," his companion replied.

Sunday began with a deceptive calm. The churches of

Petrograd were full. The weather was warm and sunny and

the scene so apparently uneventful that the tsar received a

telegram that announced, "the city is quiet." So it was -- but

not for long. A crowd started for the Nevsky, crossing the

frozen river to avoid the police on the river bridges. They

ran into an infantry unit near the Mioka canal at one o'clock.

The troops knelt and fired two volleys into the crowd.

Meanwhile, general fighting broke out in the Nevsky area.

Students wearing Red Cross arm bands gave first aid to the

wounded. At a nearby school for young ladies of the nobility,

the girls heard a mistress use an unfamiliar and thrilling

word: "Revolt!"

As the crowds were cut down, the tsarina was visiting the

grave of Rasputin. "It seems to me that it will all be all

right," she wrote to Nicky . "The sun shines so clearly and I

felt such peace and quiet at His dear grave. He died in order

to save us." An Okhrana agent was less certain. The game

depended entirely upon the army, he reported. "If the troops

turn against the government, then nothing can save the

country." Meanwhile, Princess Radziwell's party was in full

swing. The regime still had a few hours left.

The president of the Duma, Rodzyanko, became more and

more alarmed over the course of Sunday afternoon. Those

soldiers garrisoned in the city would not shoot at the mob --

in fact, many of them had gone over! If only they had used

fire hoses instead of bullets. Rodzyanko then sent a

telegraph to the tsar -- copies were also sent to the high

commanders asking that they support his views. The

meaning of the telegram was quite clear:

Situation serious. Anarchy in the capital. Government

paralyzed. Transport of food and fuel in full disorder.

Popular discontent growing. Disorderly firing in the

streets. Some military units fire on one another,

Essential immediately to order persons having the

confidence of the country to form new government.

Delay impossible. Any delay deadly. I pray to God that in

this hour the blame does not fall on the crown.

After regular 5 PM tea at Mogilev, Nicholas invited a few

commanders to read the telegram. How would the tsar

respond? Nicholas suggested that since the Duma was to be

prorogued (closed down) that evening, then nothing should

be done and no answer was necessary. This caused some

concern at the Stavka, but mostly among junior officers.

One officer wrote in his diary: "why can't the tsar

understand that he must show his will and his power?"

Meanwhile, Nicholas wrote the tsarina about the pains he

had suffered in his chest while at church that morning. At

9:20 PM he sent a final telegram to his wife saying that he

would leave for Tsarskoe Selo on Tuesday. Then he read a bit

and played dominoes.

The Volynsky guardsman who had shot down demonstrators

held a meeting on Sunday night. They decided that they

would not act as executioners but would join with the

people. At seven o'clock on Monday morning, cartridges

were issued and the unit formed up on parade in battle

order. The Captain arrived with his orders. He was met with

mutiny. "We won't kill anymore. Enough blood." From a

barracks window a shot rang out and the Captain was dead.

The Volynsky mutineers ran into a nearby engineering

barracks shouting, "Comrades, get your rifles!" The locked

doors of the storeroom were broken down and the

quartermaster was shot dead. The engineers joined the

uprising marching into the streets where their band played

to cheering crowds. The gates of the main arsenal were

battered in and the depot commander killed. Thousands of

revolvers were handed out to the crowds. Teenagers swirled

out of side streets, shouting and firing their weapons at the

pigeons on the streetcar wires.

The city governor demanded a plan from the police chief.

The existing security plan divided the city into sectors, each

under the control of a unit that was now mutinying. News

came in that a squadron of armored cars were rumbling

down the Nevsky with red flags flying from them. Civilians

began to urge regiments to come out. "Comrade soldiers,"

they shouted to a battalion of the Moscow regiment, "Come

out: join the people!" The crowd broke down the picket

fence and surged on the troops. The commander ordered his

men to fire volleys and drew his own revolver. He was

beaten to death. The troops began to shoot at their own

barracks while the crowd broke into the armory and helped

themselves to rifles and ammunition. The Kresty prison was

taken and its 2400 prisoners were freed. Policemen,

identified by their long coats and gray fur hats, were

lynched in the streets. Station houses were set on fire. Other

potential targets of the mob fled.

Alexander Kerensky was woken by his wife Olga at eight in

the morning on Monday, February 27th. Kerensky was thirty-

six, a Duma deputy who had found his moment. Born in

Simbursk, he had become involved in radical politics at

St.Petersburg in his teens, but had no time for fashionable

terrorism or Marxism for that matter. He was, as one

observer wrote, "unquestionably humanitarian and utterly

Russian in every respect." On graduation, he started a legal

aid office in the city, advising workers on their rights and

representing them without fees. In 1904, he married

Baranovskaya, the daughter of an army officer. During the

1905 revolution, he founded a socialist newspaper and

served four months in the Kresty prison after a friend's

revolver was found in his apartment. Kerensky was thrilled

with his luck. "I was now," he wrote, "'one of us' in radical

and socialist circles."

In 1912, troops shot dead 170 striking miners in the Lena

goldfields in Siberia. The massacre caused deep resentment

throughout Russia and Kerensky made a national reputation

when he was appointed to the inquiry commission. He was

elected to the Duma a few months later. Most Duma

members thought him weak because he speeches were

emotional. Almost alone, he denounced anti-Semitic

atrocities. The war was a catastrophe for the Jews. Not a day

passed without Jews being hanged on false charges of

spying yet more than 250,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the

ranks of the Russian army. Kerensky went in person to Kuzhi,

a small town near the front in Kovno where Jews were being

lynched for supposedly hiding Germans in their cellars. He

examined the cellars and proved the charges false.

His Okhrana nickname was "Speedy" and on the 27th he

hurried through the mutinous city of Petrograd to the right

wing of the Tauride Palace where the Duma met. At one

o'clock, a flood of soldiers and workers, scraps of red on

their coats, arrived at the palace. Kerensky greeted them.

"He is their vozhd, their leader," one onlooker whispered. By

mid-afternoon, two provisional committees were set up in

separate wings of the palace. One was dominated by

moderate bourgeois members of the Duma and would later

become the Provisional Government. The other was the first

Petrograd Soviet to meet since 1905. The Soviet elected a

permanent executive committee drawn from all socialist

groups. The Bolsheviks had two members out of the

fourteen. It decided to publish its own daily newspaper to be

called Izvestia.

At eight o'clock on Monday evening Nicholas was cabled a

warning that only a handful of his troops remained loyal. A

state of siege was proclaimed. Any form of counterforce

simply melted away. But the mutineers also felt their

position desperate. They feared that loyal troops would be

sent from the front to crush them. The defenders of the

Tauride Palace, the center of the revolution, had no weapons

heavier than four non-working machineguns. A volunteer

sent out to buy lubricants for them returned empty-handed.

But mutineers slipped into the deserted Maryinsky Palace.

Grand Duke Mikhail demanded that loyal troops still holding

the Winter Palace be withdrawn. He did not want the people

to be fired upon from the House of the Romanovs. There

should be no repetition of 1905, he remarked. Exhausted

politicians, wrapped in their coats, slept in the armchairs

and benches of the Tauride. Kerensky was there too.

Meanwhile, a pair of soldiers cut Repin's famous portrait of

Nicholas from its frame with their bayonets. Mutiny had

won.

The mutineers had the run of the city on Tuesday. Trucks

with rifles and bayonets drove through the streets while

looters broke into the palaces. The French ambassador

mused that the era stretching back to Catherine the Great

had come to an end. He was right. Nicholas spent the day

on the imperial train on his way to join his wife at the

Alexander Palace. Shortly after midnight, the train was flung

into reverse 90 miles short of Petrograd because the next

station was in rebel hands. In the early hours of March 1,

after 303 years, a Romanov was fleeing from his people. The

train stopped at Pskov station. Here, in the drawing room

car, March 2, 1917, Nicholas signed the act of ABDICATION.

The official death toll was 1224 -- the equivalent of a few

hours' casualties in the war. The Americans hailed the event

as a "fitting and glorious successor" to their own revolution.

US ambassador David Francis said that it was the realization

of the American dream. But there were two governments in

Petrograd. The Provisional Government, dominated by

middle-class members of the Duma and the Soviet of

workers' and soldiers' deputies. The two governments

represented different classes and sharply different political

platforms. The Soviet wanted an eight hour day, land grants

to the peasants, an army with voluntary discipline and

elected officers, and an end to the war. The Provisional

Government, on the other hand, wished to continue the war

and to keep social change at a minimum. Georgy Lvov, a

prince and a landowner, became the first Prime Minister of

revolutionary Russia.

Lenin was in Zurich at the time of the

revolution. When the first reports came in

from Petrograd, he was astonished. Stuck

in a miserable apartment whose windows

could only be opened when the nearby

sausage factory closed for the night, Lenin

had recently told a meeting of socialists

that he did not expect a revolution in his

lifetime. "The tsarist monarchy has been

smashed, but not finally destroyed," Lenin

wrote in his first Letters from Afar (March

7, 1917).

The Soviet of Workers' Deputies is an organization of the

workers, the embryo of a workers' government, the

representative of the interests of the entire mass of the

poor section of the population, i.e., of nine-tenths of the

population, which is striving for peace, bread and

freedom.

The conflict of these three forces determines the

situation that has now arisen, a situation that is

transitional from the first stage of the revolution to the

second.

Of more importance perhaps, was the fact that his

Bolsheviks had played little part in the activities in

Petrograd those final days of February 1917. The Bolshevik

Party was at this time, marginal. It was riddled with

informers and Lenin spent the majority of his time engaged

in internal disputes with other socialists. However, Lenin

held out great potential for the Germans. He was opposed to

the war, an "imperialist and capitalist war." If he returned to

Petrograd now he was sure to undermine the Russian war

effort. And he wanted to return to Russia. He had to return

to Russia. But how? The Swedes would not help return him

but the Germans offered a sealed railway car which would

take Lenin across enemy lines and back to Russia. "It was

with a sense of awe," wrote Winston Churchill of Lenin's

German support, "that they turned upon Russia the most

grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed

truck like a plague bacillus into Russia." Lenin arrived at

Petrograd's Finland Station late at night on April 3 and gave

a speech before he had even left the platform. In three

sentences, Lenin outlined the Bolshevik program and his

contempt for the Provisional Government: "The people

need peace. The people need bread and land. And

they give you war, hunger, no food, and the land

remains with the landowners."

In May Leon Trotsky returned. Sentenced to life in Siberia for

his part in the 1905 Revolution, he had fled across the Arctic

taiga in a reindeer sled, guided by a local so drunk that

Trotsky had to kick him and take off his fur hat to keep him

awake. After a week he found himself safely at a railroad

station and was soon in Paris. He was deported during the

Great War to Spain and then went to New York a few days

after Rasputin's murder. News of the February Revolution

came to him in the $18 a month flat he furnished on the

installment plan on 164th Street in the Bronx. He left New

York with regret, a city he called "the fullest expression of

our modern age."

The war continued. "A great pump which sucks out the

strength of the country," wrote one observer. Kerensky

became War Minister in early May. He was idolized at mass

meetings for the war effort. It is said that women flew into

fits of hysteria and threw their jewelry at his feet. Bruce

Lockhart, a British diplomat and secret agent thought

Kerensky the most powerful speaker he ever was to hear --

more powerful than even Adolf Hitler. By the end of June,

Kerensky's summer offensive was a disaster. Regiments

dissolved as thousands of deserters streamed away from

the front, killing any officer who tried to stop them. Behind

the front, the few civilians left were filled with fear and the

women snatched their skirts and fled when they saw

soldiers. Further back, trains were so overloaded with

deserters that car axles caught fire from the weight.

The fiasco at the front hurried the Bolsheviks into a

premature uprising -- The July Days. The men of a

machinegun regiment infiltrated by Bolshevik agitators

marched through the capital, urging the overthrow of the

Provisional Government and the hanging of Kerensky. A mob

joined them. Bourgeois Petrograd hid in terror. Regiments

loyal to the government were drafted into the city and the

attempt to force an issue failed. Details of German

payments to the Bolsheviks were leaked to the press. Lenin

was an agent of Berlin! Lenin fled, hiding in a haymakers'

hut before crossing the border into Finland. Trotsky was

arrested. His new home was the Kresty prison.

On July 21, Lvov resigned and Kerensky formed a new

government which busied itself with foreign relations and

constitutional reform. Meanwhile, Russia disintegrated. Food

was scarce and money flooded off the presses. 476 million

rubles were printed in April, one billion in July. Inflation

reached 1000 per cent. Government printing plants could no

longer cut the sheets of currency so the sheets were issued

to the public who had to cut the notes with scissors. In the

factories, the men "come to work drunk, speak at meetings

drunk….They drink methylated spirits, varnish and all kinds

of other substitutes." In Tambov province, peasants ran

Prince Boris Vyazemsky off his estate and looted his house.

At the railroad station, deserters discovered him. They ran

him through with their bayonets and clubbed him with iron

bars. Then they cut off his head.

"Power," one observer wrote, "was hanging in the air."

Kerensky was a man of authority. He thrived on it. He used

the imperial train, he lived in the imperial suite in the Winter

Palace, he slept with his mistress in Alexander III's bed. His

commander-in-chief, the wiry Cossack, General Lavr

Kornilov, mounted a confused rightest coup in early

September against the government, with a division of

mountain troops. It did not reach Petrograd: the rail line was

cut and agitators worked on the men as they milled about

the track. The "counter-revolution" collapsed. Kornilov was

placed under house arrest while the general who had led

the attack on Kornilov's orders shot himself.

The Bolsheviks were rehabilitated by the blundering

Cossack reactionary and Kerensky found himself isolated.

Officers, tainted with Kornilov's counter-revolution, lost all

control of their men. Louise Bryant, a young American

correspondent and later the lover of John Reed, arrived at

the docks of the Vyborg to watch soldiers on the adjacent

platform shouting: "The officers! The bright, pretty officers!

They threw them in the canal," she filed to The Philadelphia

Public Ledger. "They have just finished it now. They have

killed fifty and I heard them screaming." In the rear, two

young officers disguised as soldiers were flung from a train

into a gorge, "falling like dolls," Bryant wrote. At the front,

troops fraternized with the Germans, who gave them

tobacco and wine. Russia was breaking up. Nationalist

movements rolled through the Ukraine, Finland and the

Baltic States. Cossacks, Bashkirs, Siberians, Buryats

declared themselves independent. Racial hatred boiled over.

Jews were particular targets. "The pogrom movement is

rising," the Russkiye Vedomosti correspondent in Bessarabia

reported. "Talk is heard of shifting all the blame on the

Jews."

Kerensky took brandy and morphine. "He really is

hysterical," his secretary told Louise Bryant. "He weeps and

is so dreadfully alone. I mean, he cannot depend on

anyone." There had still been no elections for the

Constituent Assembly, the parliament promised since

March. Committees had examined the American, Belgian

and Swiss constitutions in their search for perfection. They

discussed the merits of proportional representation and an

upper house -- "All Russia, it seemed, was just talking and

talking." Leon Trotsky, "a son of a bitch but the greatest Jew

since Jesus," in the eyes of an American Red Cross

representative, was a doer, not a talker. And he had just

been released from prison. The stage was now nearly set for

the greatest drama and the greatest dream of the twentieth

century -- the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.