The Petrograd police blocked the bridges. But the gods of weather showed solidarity in the form of this brutal winter. The streets were lined with thick snowpiles, and the great Neva itself remained frozen. The demonstrators descended in their thousands from the embankments onto the ice. They walked across the face of the waters.
In a telegram home, the British ambassador George Buchanan offhandedly dismissed the disorder as ‘nothing serious’. Almost no one had, as yet, any sense of what had begun.
Climbing up from the river on the smarter side of town, the demonstrators pushed on through palatial streets towards the heartland. The police watched nervously. The mood grew brittle.
Jeering, hesitant at first, in ones and twos then growing in confidence and numbers, some in the crowd began to hurl sticks and stones and jags of the ice over which they had come at the detested policemen, ‘Pharaohs’ in the city’s slang.
Towards the army’s rank and file, in contrast, the demonstrators were conciliatory. They gathered in great crowds by barracks and army hospitals. There they struck up conversations with curious and friendly soldiers.
The bulk of Petrograd’s soldiers were conscripts, recruits in training, or bored, bitter, ill-disciplined, demoralised reservists. Among them, too, were injured and sick personnel evacuated from the front.
A. F. Ilyin-Genevsky was already a convinced Bolshevik when he was gassed and shell shock shattered his memory for a time. From his hospital bed he saw the political awakening of the wounded, ‘the rapid revolutionising of the army’ under such desperate tutelage. ‘After all the bloody horrors of war, people who found themselves in the peaceful quiet of the hospitals involuntarily began to think over the cause of all this bloodshed and sacrifice.’ And he saw such reflections devolve into ‘hate and rage’. No wonder the war-wounded in particular were notorious for their hostility to military life.
And what of the 12,000 ‘reliable’ troops, on whom the city’s rulers pinned their hopes?
What of the implacable Cossacks? Slavic-speakers from, particularly, the Don region of Ukraine and Russia itself, Cossack communities had not known serfdom, and boasted a long if rough tradition of militaristic, self-governing democracy. By the nineteenth century they had become projected as a myth: they were depicted as and often believed themselves uniquely proud, honoured and honourable, a quasi-ethnic, quasi-estate-based cavalry, a people-class. Living symbols of Russia, and traditional agents of tsarist repression: their whips and sabres had spattered a lot of blood on the snow, twelve years before.
But Cossacks were never a monolithic group. They, too, were differentiated by class. And many of them had grown sick of the war, and of how they were being used.
On Nevsky Prospect, a crowd of strikers came to a standoff with mounted Cossacks, their lances glinting in the sun. A fearful hesitation. For a long moment something was poised in the icy air. Abruptly the officers wheeled and rode away, leaving the demonstrators cheering in astonished delight.
On Znamenskaya Square, other strikers hailed other Cossack cavalrymen, and this time the riders smiled back at the demonstrators they ostentatiously did not disperse. When the crowd clapped them, the police agitatedly reported, the Cossacks bowed in their saddles.
Over the hours, in the Tauride Palace, representatives to the national Duma continued to speechify against the regime. What they demanded was relevance: that the tsar must establish a ministry responsible to the Duma itself. For the left, Alexander Kerensky, the well-known Trudovik with a substantial reputation thanks to his writings on the Lena Goldfields massacre, held forth against the government in such swingeing and grandiloquent terms that the tsarina, hearing of it, wrote furiously to her husband, wishing Kerensky hanged.
Evening came and the air grew even colder. The heaving streets rang with revolutionary songs. Seeing workers from the Promet factory marching behind a woman, a Cossack officer jeered that they were following a baba, a hag. Arishina Kruglova, the Bolshevik in question, yelled back that she was an independent woman worker, a wife and sister of soldiers at the front. At her riposte, the troops who faced her lowered their guns.
Two thousand five hundred Vyborg mill-workers took a narrow route down Sampsonievsky Prospect, stopping short, horrified, when they met a Cossack formation. The officers grimaced, grabbed their reins and spurred their horses, and with weapons aloft they shouted for their men to follow. This time, to the crowd’s rising terror, the Cossacks began to obey.
But they followed the command with absolute precision. Like dressage riders, their mounts high-stepping elegantly through the slush, they advanced in slow, neat single file. The troops winked at the dumbfounded crowd as they came, dispersing no one at all.
There is an old Scottish term for a particular technique of industrial resistance, a go-slow or a sabotage by surplus obedience, making the letter of the rules undermine their spirit: the ca’canny. That chill evening, the Cossacks did not disobey orders – they conducted a ca’canny cavalry charge.
Their furious officers ordered them to block the street. Once more the men respectfully complied. With their legendary equestrian skills, they lined up their horses into a living blockade breathing out mist. Again, in their very obedience was dissent. Ordered to be still, still they remained. They did not move as the boldest marchers crept closer. The Cossacks did not move as the strikers approached, their eyes widening as at last they understood the unspoken invitation in the preternatural immobility of mounts and men, as they ducked below the bellies of the motionless horses to continue their march.
Rarely have skills imparted by reaction been so exquisitely deployed against it.
Next day, the 25th, 240,000 people were out on strike, demanding bread, an end to the war, the abdication of the tsar. Tramcars did not run, newspapers did not publish. Shops stayed closed: there was no shortage of sympathetic business owners exhausted with the incompetence of the regime. Now, smarter clothes were visible in the crowds, among workers’ smocks.
The mood on both sides was growing hard. The Alexander III monument is a massive and ugly bronze, a thickset horse with head bowed as if in shame at the despot it carries. That day, from its shadow, mounted police opened fire on the approaching crowd. But this time, stunning the protestors as much as their adversaries, watching Cossacks fired too – back at the police.
In Znamenskaya Square, the police lashed viciously at the strikers. Demonstrators scrambled away from their whistling knouts. They staggered, they ran to where Cossack troops waited on their motionless horses nearby, watching in uneasy neutrality. The crowds begged for help.
A hesitation. The Cossacks rode in.