October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

2 February: Joyful Tears

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:

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.

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 stand-off 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.

There was a moment of wavering confrontation. Then a gasp and a spurt of blood and the crowd were shouting in delight, tossing a cavalryman on their shoulders. He had drawn his sabre, and he had put a police lieutenant to death.

Others died that day, too. In Gostiny Dvor, troops shot and killed three demonstrators, and wounded ten. Crowds launched themselves at police stations across the city, unleashing a hail of stones, smashing their way in and arming themselves with whatever weapons they could find. More and more police officers began to flee the rising onslaught, stripping off their uniforms to escape.

There was unease, an uncoiling in governmental corridors: an understanding, at last, that something serious was underway.

The regime’s first reflexes were always repressive. As evening came down in swirls of snow, the tsar sent orders down the wires to General Khabalov. ‘I command you to suppress from tomorrow all disorders on the streets of the capital, which are impermissible at a time when the fatherland is carrying on a difficult war with Germany.’ As if he might have considered them permissible at any other time. That day, when troops had opened fire it had been in panic, anger, revenge or unsanctioned brutality: henceforth, if crowds would not disperse, such attacks would be policy. And the war itself, that glorious national war, was brandished as a further threat: those not back at work within three days, Khabalov announced to the city, would be sent to join the carnage of the front.

That night, police snatch squads went hunting. They arrested around 100 suspected ringleaders, including five members of the Bolsheviks’ Petersburg Committee. But the revolutionaries had not started the insurrection. Even now, they struggled to keep pace with it. Their arrest would certainly not stop it.

‘The city is calm.’ On Sunday 26 February, the tsarina cabled her husband with strained optimism. But as the day’s light came up over the wide stretch of the river, glinting on the ice between the embankments, the workers were already crossing it again, returning. This time, however, they arrived in streets thick with police.

This time, when demonstrators implored the soldiers not to shoot, their appeals would not always be heard.

It was a bloody day. The coughing of machine guns and rifles’ reports echoed over the skyline, mingled with the screams of stampeding crowds. People scattered and scurried, past the cathedrals and the palaces, away from the onslaughts. That Sunday, repeatedly, troops obeyed their officers’ orders to fire – though, too, the attacks were undermined by weapon ‘malfunctions’, hesitations, deliberate misaimings. And for every such incident of stealth solidarity, rumours sprang up of scores more.

Not everything went the regime’s way. Early afternoon, workers flocked to the barracks of the Pavlovsky regiment. Desperately they begged for help, shouting to the men within that their regiment’s training squad was shooting at demonstrators. The soldiers did not come out in response, not immediately. Respect for orders made them hesitate. But they withdrew into a long mass meeting. Men shouting over each other, over the noises of shots and confrontations in the city, flustered and horrified speakers debating what they should do. At six o’clock, the Pavlovsky’s fourth company headed at last for the Nevsky Prospect, intent on recalling their comrades in disgrace. They were met by a detachment of mounted police, but their blood was up and they were ashamed of their earlier hesitation.

They did not back down but fired. A man was killed. On returning to their base, the soldiers’ ringleaders were arrested and taken across the water, behind the long low walls of the fortress, to the notorious prison of Peter and Paul below the thornlike spire.

Forty people died that Sunday. The slaughter devastated the demonstrators’ morale. Even in the militant Vyborg district on the north side, the local Bolsheviks considered winding down the strike. For its part, the autocracy broke off its half-hearted negotiations with the Duma’s President Rodzianko, and dissolved the parliament it held in such contempt.

Rodzianko telegraphed the tsar.

‘The situation is serious.’ His warning sped along the wires by the railway lines, across the wide hard countryside to Mogilev. ‘There is anarchy in the capital. The government is paralysed. It is necessary immediately to entrust a person who enjoys the confidence of the country with the formation of a new government. Any delay is equivalent to death. I pray God that in this hour responsibility will not fall upon the sovereign.’

Nicholas did not reply.

The next morning, Rodzianko tried again. ‘The situation is growing worse. Measures must be adopted immediately, because tomorrow will be too late. The last hour has come when the fate of the fatherland and the dynasty is being decided.’

At the High Command headquarters, Count Vladimir Frederiks, Nicholas’s imperial household minister, waited politely as his master read the message unspooling from the machine. ‘That fat Rodzianko has written me some nonsense,’ the tsar said at last, ‘to which I will not even reply.’

In the capital, the previous day’s murder weighed heavy on some of those who had been ordered to commit it. Like that of the Pavlovsky, the Volinsky regiment’s training detachment had shot demonstrators, and had spent the night gathered in their barracks in a long session of self-recrimination. Now its men confronted their captain, Lashkevitch, and declared expiatory mutiny. They would not, they told him, shoot again.

Peremptorily, Lashkevitch read out the tsar’s command to restore order. Once, perhaps, that might have persuaded them to submit. Now it was a provocation. There was a scuffle, shouts, alarm. Someone in the crowd of soldiers raised a weapon. Or perhaps, it has even been suggested, Lashkevitch raised his own gun in a panic and turned it on himself. Wherever it came from, a sudden shot sounded. The soldiers stared as the captain fell.

Something died with him. A hesitation.

The Volinsky soldiers roused the Litovsky and Preobrazhensky regiments from their barracks nearby. Officers from the Moscow regiment struggled to assert command. They were overpowered. The soldiers headed out into the city for the Vyborg district. This time it was they who sought to fraternise with the workers.

Under the gun-grey skies, the streets of Petrograd began to rage.

A dumbfounded General Khabalov tried to mobilise six loyal companies. Some officers and soldiers, individually and in makeshift groups, stayed loyal, and even put up armed resistance to the escalating insurrection. But at a mass level, out of conviction or cowardice, exhaustion or equivocation, for whatever reason at all, the troops refused to rally. Those soldiers who would not join with and fight alongside the workers, under leaders thrown up in the rough meritocracy of the moment, simply disappeared. In eyewitness descriptions, the same phrase recurs many times: even the supposedly loyal units ‘melted away’.

Crowds of workers and soldiers ransacked government buildings and broke into police arsenals, took the weapons they found and went after the police, killing them where they could. They burned the stations down, sending their records up in smoke with them, firing at any ‘Pharaoh’ they saw, including the police snipers who had scrambled to the rooftops and sometimes leaned over to take aim. The rebels searched churches for caches of weapons, soldiers and workers rummaging together in uneasy reverential silence. They stormed prisons and tore open doors and freed the bewildered inmates. They set light to the district court and stood watching the bonfire, as if in some new winter festival. In the absence of any counterforce, the overthrowers exuberantly, chaotically overthrew.

Their clamour spread beyond Petrograd. In Moscow, in particular, officials had tried and failed to suppress news of the growing disturbances. Word of what was occurring reached the second city. Moscow workers began to walk out, some heading home, some for the city centre, seeking news and direction.

On the afternoon of the 27th, the tsar was pursuing his military pottering at Stavka, unperturbed. His tranquillity was not unique: the war minister, Bieliaev, cabled him to report, with surreal complacency, that a few minor disturbances were occurring in a few military units in Petrograd, and that they were being dealt with. That all would soon be calm.

In the boulevards of the insurgent city, revolutionary socialists jostled alongside angry liberals and all shades in between, and they were not calm. What they shared was a certainty that change, a revolution, was necessary, and ineluctable. They were in a new city, in eruption, on Red Monday. The old law was dying, the new not yet decided.

Under the darkening sky, accompanied by breaking glass and in the guttering light of fires, groups of men and women drifted aimlessly together and apart, workers, freed criminals, radical agitators, soldiers, freelance hooligans, spies and drunkards. Armed with what they had found. Here, a figure in a greatcoat waving an officer’s sabre and an empty revolver. There, a young teenager with a kitchen knife. A student with machine-gun bullets slung around his waist, a rifle in each hand. A man wielded a pole for cleaning tramlines as if it were a pike.

Crowds of thousands surged down Shpalernaya Street, flocking to the spread stone wings of the Tauride Palace, seat of the Duma: ineffectual, divided and blindsided though the body was, huge numbers of citizens looked to it as an alternative government. All the more lamentable, then, that the Duma itself was unwilling, even now, to rebel against the tsar – even against his orders that it dissolve itself.

As directed, with the loyalty of cowardice or the cowardice of loyalty, the Duma members wound their official meeting down. The letter of the tsar’s command duly obeyed, they left the assembly hall. They shuffled a little way through the high corridors of the building – and into another chamber, where they reconvened as, technically, a new, private gathering. Struggling for resolve, this remaindered Duma committed to staying in Petrograd and attempting to assert some control. Its members authorised a council to elect a Provisional Committee from among representatives of all the Duma parties except for the extreme right, and except for the Bolsheviks.

Before they chose this group, Rodzianko, accompanied this time by Nicholas’s own brother Grand Duke Michael, made yet another effort to breach the tsar’s bovine placidity. Only a shift to constitutional monarchy, Rodzianko was now certain, might placate the country, and Michael had agreed, in principle, to take power on this model.

Once again they strove to impress upon the tsar the apocalyptic seriousness of the situation. To the surprise, it must be assumed, of no one, Nicholas riposted with icy politeness that he was perfectly capable of managing his affairs.

There is something almost Herculean about the tsar’s ability to refuse reality while his capital went up in flames, his police fled, his soldiers rebelled, and his officials, his own brother, implored him to do something, anything. Shortly thereafter it was the turn of his distraught premier to wire him, begging to be relieved of office. Nicholas stiffly informed Prince Golitzin that there would be no changes to the cabinet, and reiterated his demand for ‘vigorous measures’ to suppress disturbances.

The tsar paddled on, dignified and proper, eyes on the horizon, the current hauling him towards a cataract.

The twelve-, swiftly thirteen-person Provisional Committee of the Duma – to give it its preposterous full name, the Provisional Committee of the Members of the State Duma for the Restoration of Order in the Capital and the Establishment of Relations with Public Organisations and Institutions – was inaugurated by 5 p.m., dominated by the politics of the Kadets and the Progressive Bloc. It mandated itself, vaguely but urgently, to restore order in Petrograd and establish relations with public organisations and institutions. It understood, though, the limits of its own scope and voice at that moment of mass uprising. To make itself heard by the demonstrators, it reached out to two deputies from the left beyond the Progressive Bloc: N. S. Chkheidze, the leader of the Mensheviks; and that excitable Trudovik lawyer, who had earned the tsarina’s fury, Alexander Kerensky.

It was 7 p.m. The Kadet deputy Ichas convened a meeting of 150 colleagues to create commissions, above all to handle the military question. Very soon the Reserve First Infantry Regiment, 12,000 soldiers and 200 officers in full formation, marched through the city’s upheaval to the Tauride Palace. There they pledged loyalty to the Duma – or rather, to its Provisional Committee. With one of the inspired flashes of which he was, in those days, still capable, Kerensky relayed orders to several military units to take control of strategic locations – Okhrana headquarters, the gendarmerie, those crucial railway stations.

From the streets, meanwhile, as this continued, had arisen another kind of control. Some of the insurgents recalled those councils of 1905, those soviets. Activists and streetcorner agitators had already begun to call for their return, in leaflets, in boisterous voices from the crowds.

So it was that at the very moment when the Duma was planning its Committee, elsewhere in the cavernous Tauride Palace another very different group gathered.

Among those recently sprung from prison by the crowds were Gvozdev and Bogdanov, Mensheviks on the Central War Industries Committee. Immediately on their release they had fought their way through the chaos of Petrograd to join and caucus with their colleagues at the Palace, socialist Duma deputies of the SRs and the Mensheviks, representatives of the trade union and cooperative movements, Kerensky himself.

That day, running south over the wide Liteiny Bridge above the Neva’s ice, Gvozdev saw another figure hurtling towards him. In the middle of the bridge, between its decorative mermaids, he came face to face with Zalezhskii, a leading Bolshevik who had also just escaped jail, and was heading in the opposite direction from the city centre towards the Vyborg district. The Menshevik made straight for the corridors of power; the Bolshevik for the workers’ districts. So goes the story, whether or not this bridgetop meeting occurred.

At Tauride, the improvised assembly of Gvozdev, Bogdanov and their colleagues declared itself a Temporary Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. Immediately they sent word to the city’s plants and regiments that a soviet session would be held that same evening. In rushed, haphazard gatherings – there was certainly no time for more careful representative arrangements – factories chose representatives to join these deliberations. Within hours, the usual frock-coated Russian gentry, the intellectuals of the Duma and its associates, were joined by these less typical visitors. The corridors of the Tauride Palace nestling in its gardens began to fill with shabby, exhausted soldiers and workers.

That evening, the conclave of socialist intellectuals and hastily delegated workers and soldiers gathered in Room 12 on the left side of the palace. The former chair of the Soviet of 1905, Khrustalev-Nosar, was there; Steklov, close to the Menshevik left; Ehrlich, a leader of the Jewish Bund; and the dogged local Bolshevik leader, the metalworker Shlyapnikov. Workers and soldiers talked over each other in excitement, chosen according to those ad hoc mechanisms while most workers were preoccupied with revolt, without time or inclination to vote for delegates. When Shlyapnikov took a moment to telephone Bolshevik activists, urging them to come and join him, they paid him no attention. They, too, were more concerned to focus on the masses in the streets than on what might be afoot in those rooms. And besides, they were rather suspicious of this nascent organ, the brainchild of the socialists to their right.

At 9 p.m., the socialist lawyer Sokolov called the unruly meeting to order. Perhaps 250 people were in the room: only fifty or so, Sokolov ruled, were qualified to vote: the rest would remain as observers. He made his decisions as much on personal acquaintance as according to any formal structure.

The gathering was repeatedly interrupted by banging doors, newcomers bursting in, excited reports from soldiers that this or that company had come over to the insurrection, roars and applause. Rank-and-file soldiers’ representatives came together in the room with those of the workers.

Thus the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was born, at the suggestion of its own, pre-emptive, Temporary Executive Committee.

Beyond the palace walls, in streets emptied of the detested tsarist police, workers were still plundering weapons from the regime’s stores to defend the factories, to impose their own rough order, gathering together, self-organising in armed groups, mostly young, mostly angry, radical, often politically incoherent. Among the urgent tasks of that night, its first, the Soviet set out to coordinate them by organising a workers’ militia to establish and maintain order. It inaugurated a food commission to regulate supply. Soon it would authorise certain newspapers to reappear. And unlike the Duma or its Provisional Committee, the Soviet could make such declarations and moves with a degree of connection – however hedged and mediated that chaotic night – to the streets, the workers, the soldiers.

It needed a presidium. The meeting moved to vote in the Menshevik Chkheidze as chair, and as vice-chairs Skobolev and Kerensky. Like Chkheidze, Kerensky was a token socialist who had been approached to be part of the Duma’s committee earlier that evening: unlike Chkheidze, following the Soviet elections, and after giving, for him, an unusually perfunctory speech, he left the room.

In Kerensky’s absence, the Soviet established an executive committee between the presidium and the full Soviet. This committee would come to be responsible for much of the Soviet’s management and many of its decisions. From that point on, it was at that level that the key debates occurred and decisions were made.

Chkheidze, Skobolev and Kerensky of the presidium itself were automatically given executive committee places, along with the four members of its secretariat. Eight others were elected. With six members in total, the Mensheviks were the strongest single party. However, for a brief moment that evening, two-thirds of the executive committee’s fifteen places were taken, if not by the radical left, then by those on the internationalist, anti-war wing of the socialist movement, Bolsheviks and others – but, sapped by infighting and uncertainty about the nature of the Soviet, their relationship to it, and its relationship to political power and a new regime, they did nothing with this short-lived majority.

The very next day, in fact, they would lose it, in response to a mishandled manoeuvre by the Bolshevik Shlyapnikov himself. Disgruntled by the small number of Bolsheviks on the executive committee, he moved to add to it members from each socialist party. His proposal was accepted – but along with his comrades and Iurenev of the Mezhraiontsy came those from the Popular Socialists, Trudoviks, SRs, Bund and Mensheviks. Thus expanded, the committee included many more right, or moderate, socialists.

For now, as the Soviet continued bickering and bargaining, Kerensky hightailed his way back through the great palace to its opposite, right wing. He headed to where the other new group of which he was a member, the Duma’s Provisional Committee, was meeting.

Late that night, the beleaguered General Khabalov, with no more than 2,000 troops still with him, dodged through a shadowy and dangerous Petrograd to seek refuge within the courtyard and surrounds of the tsar’s Winter Palace. On his arrival, the tsar’s brother ejected him, humiliatingly, forcing him and his men to scurry to the Admiralty building across the street. There they would hunker down for the night.

At Mogilev, a hazy awareness was at last spreading that all was not as it should be. Nicholas ordered General Ivanov to return to the capital, to restore order with a shock troop of Cavaliers of St George, recipients of the country’s highest military honour. Still, neither the tsar nor any advisor took steps to relocate troops from the fronts nearest Petrograd. Ivanov himself prepared for his new mission with absurd, inappropriate languor, sending his adjutant shopping for gifts for friends at home.

The uprising’s ripples were still spreading across the country.

Closest, and most crucial, was Kronstadt. Kronstadt was Petrograd’s protective naval base, a fortified town of 50,000 – naval crews, soldiers and young sailors, a few merchants and workers – encircled by forbidding batteries and forts on the tiny island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland. Its officers were notoriously sadistic and brutal. Only seven years before, several hundred sailors had been executed during an attempted revolt. That memory was raw.

Now the sailors got word of the uprising. They were close enough to see the smoke from fires and hear shooting across the water. They swiftly decided that they, too, would have a revolution.

Late evening on 27 February, and in Petrograd’s enormous Marinsky Palace, on the south side of St Isaac’s Square, the tsar’s council of ministers met for the last time. The city was now firmly in the hands of the revolution: they recognised this fait accompli, ending their inglorious tenure, submitting their resignations to the tsar. A meaningless formality.

Kerensky, a fine speaker with the moral authority of the left, an energetic and ambitious man still only in his mid-thirties, was making himself invaluable to the Duma Provisional Committee. He took a leading role in establishing a kind of military order, announcing that a revolutionary staff had been established at the State Duma, and setting out to drive frantically through Petrograd, declaring to groups of exhilarated insurgent soldiers that the Duma was with them.

The die was cast. Faced with anarchy, fearful of where it might lead, the Duma Committee felt compelled – notwithstanding the hesitance and tenacious loyalty to the regime of many of its members – to assume power. It declared that it would ‘take into its hands the restoration of state and public order and the creation of a government corresponding to the desires of the population’.

Rodzianko was one of several of its members to feel deeply uneasy about this turn. But the situation was clearly summarised by V. V. Shulgin, a smart and unsentimental conservative deputy. ‘If we don’t take power,’ he said, ‘others will, those who have already elected some scoundrels in the factories.’

He referred, of course, to the neighbouring committee a few doors down, also taking on the tasks of organisation, of power: the Soviet. The tumultuous coexistence of these two conflictual, overlapping, imbricated politics, philosophies and social forces had begun.

The hallways of the Tauride Palace, usually a place of pristine bureaucracy disturbed by nothing more untidy or chaotic than a dropped memorandum, had by now become a military camp. In the main Circular Hall lay the corpse of a soldier. Hundreds of his living comrades camped in the palace corridors, squatting at makeshift stoves, drinking tea, smoking and rubbing their eyes, ready to face down the counterrevolution everybody feared was coming. The corridors stank of sweat, dirt, and gunpowder. Offices had become messy storerooms for food and arms. One large meeting room was full of looted sacks of barley. Slung across them a dead pig lay bleeding.

Rodzianko, always a fastidious man, his colleague Stankevich would recall, squeezed past a knot of dishevelled soldiers, ‘preserving a majestic dignity but with an expression of deep suffering frozen on his pale face’. He edged by the rubbish propped against walls and piled at the junctions of corridors. In his memoirs, Shulgin was explicit with his own feelings about this situation. The masses who had overthrown the regime and who now had the temerity to share his palatial workplace were ‘stupid, animal, even devilish’.

‘Machine guns!’ he fantasised. ‘That’s what I wanted. I felt that only the tongues of machine guns could talk to the mob.’

Such were sentiments that underlay the future relationship between Shulgin’s Duma Committee and the Soviet – of which these rough corridor-squatters were the constituency. This would be a foundation of what would, misleadingly, come to be known as dvoevlastie – Dual Power.

Almost as quickly as the Duma deputies, the Soviet created its own military commission, issuing orders to the city’s ad hoc brigades, preparing them for the anticipated battle against the tsar’s forces. But at 2 a.m. on the 28th, Rodzianko and the Octobrist Colonel Engelhardt, of the Duma Committee’s Military Commission, crossed the corridors to announce to the Soviet their intention to place the functions of its Military Commission under their own.

Many on the Soviet side were angry at the presumption, and profoundly uneasy about handing over power to these representatives of the bourgeoisie. It was during this tense standoff that Kerensky reappeared.

He, of course, was a man of both camps, and he was in his element. In he came, tense but confident, holding the attention of the room with a fervid speech begging the Soviet to acquiesce to this coalition, reassuring them, guaranteeing them supervision of the Duma’s commission by representatives of the revolution.

And his argument found fertile ground. The truth was that most on the nascent Soviet commission had an analysis and sense that history was not yet theirs. That in this context there were, must be, limitations to and necessary brakes on their own role, their own power. As yet inchoate, this would be the start of a strange strain of self-limiting politics.

In the early hours of 28 February, the Soviet Committee distributed a leaflet.

‘Not wishing to disturb the struggle against the old power’: here was the hesitancy of those whose socialism taught that a strategic alliance with the bourgeoisie was necessary; that, however messily events proceeded, there were stages yet to come; that it was the bourgeoisie who must first take power, and precluded too vigorous a socialist mobilisation in this, their own unready country.

Decorously glossing this historical anxiety with the convoluted double negative of ‘not recommending rejection’, the Soviet Military Commission was thus swallowed into the Duma’s. So it was the Duma Committee, with this new, grassroots-linked authority, that issued the orders to mutinying soldiers to return to their garrison and recognise their officers.

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.

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.