In those dark hours, in a fug of cigarettes, the exhausted men of the Duma Committee continued dealing with the exigencies of rule, torqued by history into machinating against the tsar and his system, forced to be a revolutionary government. Urgently, they appointed commissars to various vacant ministries.
The Committee had heard of the tsar’s orders to Ivanov. They must prevent his counterrevolutionary forces reaching the capital. Nor could Nicholas himself be allowed to reach Tsarskoe Selo, the town in Petersburg’s suburbs where the Romanovs had a residence and to where Nicholas had already set out to join his wife and family.
By 3:20 a.m., the Military Commission had rushed to take control of the Petrograd stations, and the train lines along which passed people and goods, weapons and fuel and food, information and rumour and politics. Those tracks were sinews of power.
The 28th was a day, Trotsky said, ‘of raptures, embraces, joyful tears’. The sun rose on a changed city.
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 Ryazanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Trotsky himself.