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.
‘This is not a mutiny, comrade admiral,’ shouted one sailor. ‘This is a revolution.’
In September of 1916, Governor-General Viren had reported to his superiors that ‘one tremor from Petrograd would be enough and Kronstadt … would rise against me, the officers, the government and anyone else. The fortress is a powder magazine in which a wick is burning down’. Less than half a year later, in the small hours between February and March, Viren was hauled out of his villa in nothing but a white shirt.
He drew himself up and bellowed a familiar order: ‘Attention!’ This time the men just laughed.
They marched him to Anchor Square, shivering in his underclothes in the sea winds. They told him to face the great monument to Admiral Makarov, engraved with his motto: ‘Remember war’. Viren refused. When the Kronstadt soldiers bayonetted him he made them meet his eyes.
The tsar spent the last day of February wandering a frozen Russia by rail. He meandered in luxury, his train a wheeled palace. Gilded baroque interiors, kitchen carriage, filigreed bedroom, study sumptuous with brown leather, Karelian birchwood, cherry-red carpet, swaying through hard and frosted landscapes until darkness descended. A night arrival at Malaya Vishera Station, barely 100 miles from Petersburg. But Bublikov’s telegram had done its work: the stations along the line were occupied by revolutionary troops.
The railway authorities had orders from the Provisional Committee to divert the train, to try to draw the tsar back by rail, send him if they could to Petrograd where those who had overthrown his regime awaited him. The iron road could turn him. Cautious at the confused (dis)information about the situation they received on their arrival, Nicholas and his party hastily changed plans. With a rushed clattering of points, the royal train set swiftly out again, no longer for Tsarskoe Selo, but for the headquarters of the northern front, the ancient medieval town of Pskov. From there, Nicholas thought, perhaps he might find a route to somewhere more congenial, and perhaps even some loyal military support.
The man dethroned in all but final formality rattled too late into the dark.
3
March: ‘In So Far As’
In deep night, as the month turned, having cabled with Rodzianko about the situation in the city, General Alexeev sent a telegram to General Ivanov. He ordered him not to advance on the city as planned, because ‘complete peace was restored in Petrograd’.
This was quite untrue. But he and the Duma Committee said what they must to forestall the doomed counterinsurgency. Thus the Romanovian counterrevolution was recalled.
At the Tauride Palace, at 11 a.m. on 1 March, the Soviet Executive Committee met again in a tense session to debate the problem of power. Some on its right argued for coalition with the Duma Committee, since, as per their historical and political theories, the necessity of a transfer of power to the Provisional Government that that committee was forming was not, for them, in dispute. But the Executive Committee’s left-wing minority – three Bolsheviks, two SRs on the hard left of the party, one Mezhraionets – called instead for the formation of a ‘provisional revolutionary government’ without the Duma deputies. This was reminiscent of Lenin’s pre-war position: then, while the Mensheviks had argued that the proletariat and Marxists should abstain from a (necessarily) bourgeois government, Lenin, by contrast, had advocated a provisional, proletariat-led revolutionary government as the best vehicle for the (again, necessarily) bourgeois–democratic revolution.