The pitch-black early hours in the third year of war: a viciously cold winter. In Petrograd, as in countless Russian cities, people gathered in the streets before dawn, trying to keep warm, desperate for bread there was no certainty they would receive. Rationing was in place, but fuel shortages meant bakers could not meet demand even if they had the ingredients. The hungry waited for hours, forming lines that became inching, shuffling, mumbling mass meetings, crucibles for dissent. Very often their wait was in vain: crowds of the furious and famished then roamed the streets, hurling stones through shop windows, hammering on doors, looking for food.
People talked politics in Yiddish, Polish, Latvian, Finnish, German (still), and in many other languages as well as in Russian: this was a cosmopolitan city. Around its wealthy heart it was a city of workers, swollen by the war to around 400,000, an unusual proportion of them relatively educated. And it was a city of soldiers, of whom 160,000 were stationed there in reserve, their morale poor and getting worse.
In January, the tsar’s government had ordered General Sergei Khabalov, the commander of the military district, to suppress any disorder in Petrograd. He had readied 12,000 troops, police and Cossacks for this purpose. He had machine guns stationed at strategic locations, in case of riots. The agents of the Okhrana ramped up their spying, including within a demoralised left, many of its leaders in exile.
Repression notwithstanding, on 9 January, the twelfth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, 150,000 Petrograd workers came out and marched in what was, for many, the first strike since the revolt they commemorated. In a portent to which they did not pay adequate attention, police reported that watching soldiers cheered the workers’ red banners. After that day, Petrograd’s working class struck and struck again.
Every moment of political confrontation throws up its myths and kitsch. But it is not sentimentality to insist that the workers’ culture that had grown since 1905 was becoming stronger. Patchily, unevenly, these were strikes inflected by economic rage, by opposition to the war, and also, for an activist minority, by that striving for class honour.
Though most pronounced there, strikes were not restricted to the capital. More than 30,000 workers downed tools in Moscow, a less radical city than Petrograd, more dominated by the liberal middle classes, its working class more dispersed. The strikes continued, sporadic, into February, putting activists in constant danger of arrest. In Petrograd on 26 January, eleven labour representatives on the official Central War Industries Committee – created by industrialists in response to the government’s utter lack of coordination – were jailed for ‘revolutionary activity’.
Krupskaya and Lenin mouldered in their Swiss exile. In a speech to a young audience in the Zurich People’s House, Lenin remained bullish that revolution in Russia could be a detonator, ‘the prologue to the coming European revolution’; that despite its ‘present gravelike stillness’, the continent was ‘pregnant with revolution’. ‘We of the older generation’, he added melancholically, ‘may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming’ – European, socialist – ‘revolution’.
By 14 February, more than 100,000 workers from sixty factories were still on strike in Petrograd. In the eighteenth-century splendour of the Tauride Palace, the ‘consultative’ Fourth Duma opened, and immediately attacked the tsar’s government over the food shortages. Hundreds of students, fired up with radical ideas, defied the police to march down Nevsky Prospect, the spectacular and fashionable shopping street cutting through the city’s heart. The young demonstrators yelled revolutionary songs into the cold air.
Four days later, workers in the Putilov metalworks began a sit-down strike, demanding a 50 per cent raise in their paltry wages. After three days they were sacked. But the punishment did not deter their companions: instead, protest spread through the great plant.
On the 22nd the tsar left the capital for Mogilev, a drab town 200 miles to the east that housed the Stavka, the supreme headquarters of the armed forces. That was the day the Putilov bosses decided to show their strength: they declared a lockout. Closing the factory doors, they put 30,000 militant workers onto the streets – on what happened to be the eve of a recent innovation of the left, International Women’s Day.
Celebrations and events across the empire marked 23 February, demanding rights for women and applauding their contributions. In the factories of Petrograd, radicals gave speeches on the situation of women, the iniquity of the war, the impossible cost of living. But even they did not expect what happened next.
As the meetings ended, women began to pour from the factories onto the streets, shouting for bread. They marched through the city’s most militant districts – Vyborg, Liteiny, Rozhdestvenskii – hollering to people gathered in the courtyards of the blocks, filling the wide streets in huge and growing numbers, rushing to the factories and calling on the men to join them. An Okhrana spy reported:
At about 1 p.m., the working men of the Vyborg district, walking out in crowds into the streets and shouting ‘Give us bread!’, started … to become disorderly … taking with them on the way their comrades who were at work, and stopping tramcars … The strikers, who were resolutely chased by police and troops … were dispersed in one place but quickly gathered in others.
All in all, the police muttered, they were ‘exceptionally stubborn’.
‘Are we going to put up with this in silence much longer, now and then venting our smouldering rage on small shop owners?’ demanded a leaflet issued by one tiny revolutionary group, the Interborough Committee, the Mezhraiontsy. ‘After all, they’re not to blame for the people’s suffering, they are being ruined themselves. The government is to blame!’
Abruptly, without anyone having planned it, almost 90,000 women and men were roaring on the streets of Petrograd. And now they were not shouting only for bread, but for an end to the war. An end to the reviled monarchy.
The night did not bring calm. The next day came a wave of dissent. Close to half the city’s workforce poured onto the streets. They marched under red banners, chanting the new slogan: ‘To Nevsky!’
The geography of Peter’s capital was carefully plotted. The south of Vasilievsky island, the Neva’s left bank, as far as its branch, the Fontanka, were sumptuous; this was the quarter of the Mariinsky theatre, the spectacular Kazan and Isaac Cathedrals, the palaces of the nobility and the substantial apartment blocks of professionals, Nevsky Prospect itself. Ringing them were districts more recently thrown up by migration: remoter parts of Vasilievsky, Vyborg and Okhta on the Neva’s right bank; on its left, the Alexander Nevsky, Moscow and Narva neighbourhoods. Here the workers, many fresh from the countryside’s black earth, lived in their own blocks, in tottering brick barracks, in squalid wooden hovels between the blaring factories.
Such segregation meant that, to make their protests heard, the urban poor had to invade the city centre. They had done so in 1905. Now they tried again.