Caught in the Revolution by Helen Rappaport

Author:Helen Rappaport
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

The atmosphere was ominous. There wasn’t a tram in sight and hardly any izvozchiki and the shutters on the shops were fastened tight; ‘in front of the Gostinny Dvor [indoor market] men were out with hammers, nailing boards across the plate glass windows’, in which Beatty noticed fresh bullet-holes. There was no mistaking the signs: ‘The Bolsheviki were taking possession of the city.’26 Indeed, the ranks of the Bolshevik-led protesters were dramatically swelled that morning when several thousand ‘evil-looking’ sailors arrived from Kronstadt on a collection of barges, tugboats and steamers. The presence of the belligerent Kronstadters, armed to the teeth with every weapon they could lay hands on and with their cap ribbons bearing the names of their ships ‘turned inside out, so that they [could not] be identified’, ensured that that day’s street demonstrations became progressively more violent, with machine guns mounted on motor lorries firing indiscriminately into the crowds and people – who ‘shrank away’ in fear, at the sight of the sailors – rushing aimlessly in all directions.27fn3 But the same lack of cohesion and leadership prevailed as the previous day: nobody seemed to know whose side anyone was on, ‘least of all the demonstrators themselves’, as Harold Williams noted.28 The violence was confused and elemental, with those among the disorganised mobs who were armed running around firing, often out of sheer fright, and then beating a retreat at the slightest retaliation.

By the afternoon the Liteiny had become ‘very agitated’, just as it had been ‘in the bad days’ of February, wrote Louis de Robien, the atmosphere made even worse by the influx of sailors from Kronstadt. ‘The road was littered with caps and sticks, lying among the debris of plaster knocked from the walls by the bullets,’ he recalled. Everywhere he walked that afternoon he saw groups of ‘surly unbuttoned men with their rifles slung across their backs, in their hands, or under their arms as though they were out shooting’. There was no organisation to this rabble; ‘they dragged their feet’ and were ‘all mixed up with the women’ and did not want to be regimented or to fight in any disciplined way.

Harold Williams watched an ‘endless procession’ crossing the Troitsky Bridge. ‘I did not notice much enthusiasm,’ he recalled. ‘Most of the soldiers looked rather tired and bored and none could give any intelligible reason for their demonstration.’29 As this crowd marched past the British embassy, ‘rough looking men came up to the windows with rifles and ordered us to shut the windows,’ recalled Lady Georgina Buchanan; they were forced to ‘sit in closed rooms, dying of heat’ all day, her husband having declined the Provisional Government’s offer of a safe refuge.30 Her daughter Meriel saw ‘three thousand of the dreaded Kronstadt sailors’ pass by on their way to the Field of Mars and heading for the Nevsky. ‘Looking at them, one wondered what the fate of Petrograd would be if these ruffians with their unshaven faces, their slouching walk, their utter brutality were to have the town at their mercy.

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