Petrograd garrison
Petrograd garrison
(until 1914 St. Petersburg), included military units, military schools, commands of military warehouses and institutions that were located in St. Petersburg and its immediate surroundings. It was formed after the construction of the Peter and Paul Fortress (1703). To perform garrison service in St. Petersburg, as a rule, from 2 to 4 regiments were quartered (in ordinary houses) for a period of 1-2 years. In the fall of 1723, the Preobrazhensky Regiment and the Semenovsky Regiment were transferred from Moscow to St. Petersburg and stationed on the St. Petersburg side. In 1725, P. included 2 guards (6630 people) and 4 infantry (about 5.5 thousand people) regiments and naval units (about 14.5 thousand people). The usual area for cantonment of military units was the St. Petersburg side. After the formation of the Izmailovsky Regiment and the Horse Regiment in 1730, the number of guards increased to 9,700 people. Subsequently, the entire guard was concentrated in St. Petersburg. In the 30s and 50s. XVIII century The composition of the P.G. was replenished with cadet corps (Land, Naval, Artillery and Engineering). In the early 90s. There were over 56 thousand military personnel and families in St. Petersburg. The number of P. g. constantly increased. The number of lower ranks alone from 1801 to 1857 increased from 32,800 to 40,900 people. Some of the soldiers and officers of the Moscow and Grenadier Guards regiments and the Guards crew participated in the uprising on December 14, 1825. In the second half of the 19th century. P.G. grew by more than 60%. In 1910 there were about 47.5 thousand people. During the First World War, the composition of the city changed significantly. Cadre regiments (including the Guards) were sent to the front, and their places were taken by reserve formations. The number in February 1917 was 460 thousand people, including about 200 thousand in the capital. Most of the garrison were soldiers of the reserve battalions of the guards regiments (deployed to reserve regiments in the summer) and other reserve units. The proletarian stratum in parts of the city was much higher than in the army as a whole (from 24 to 65%). The transfer of troops to the side of the rebellious workers determined the success of the February uprising against tsarism. In March, the first cells of the Bolshevik Military Organization emerged in parts of the garrison. During the June crisis of 1917, many units went to demonstrate under Bolshevik slogans. In the July Days of 1917, according to official (understated) data, up to 40 thousand soldiers took part in the demonstrations. After the July Days, the Provisional Government sent about 51 thousand people from the garrison to the front. Many active members of the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b) were arrested. Nevertheless, it was the Military Organization of the Bolsheviks that essentially led the struggle of the Poles’ soldiers against the Kornilovism. By the October days, there were over 150 thousand soldiers and officers in the city, with about 240 thousand in the suburbs. On October 24 (November 6), by order of the PVRK, the entire city was put on combat readiness. Soldiers from a number of units took part in the siege and capture of the Winter Palace, and together with the Red Guard repelled the offensive of the Kerensky-Krasnov troops on Petrograd. In December 1917 - February 1918, P. was demobilized. A significant number of former soldiers, non-commissioned officers and junior officers became instructors in the Red Guard and the Red Army, and individual military units became entirely part of the Red Army.
Saint Petersburg. Petrograd. Leningrad: Encyclopedic reference book. - M.: Great Russian Encyclopedia. Ed. board: Belova L.N., Buldakov G.N., Degtyarev A.Ya. et al. 1992 .
See what “Petrograd garrison” is in other dictionaries:
Petrograd garrison- Parade of troops of the Petrograd garrison on Palace Square. Parade of troops of the Petrograd garrison on Palace Square. Spring 1917. Petrograd garrison (until 1914 St. Petersburg), included military units, military schools, military teams... ...
Formed in 1864; before the start of the 1st World War, St. Petersburg Military District. Headquarters of the Petrograd Military District in a building on Palace Square (see Headquarters of the Guards Corps building). On the eve of the 1st World War, the territory of the Petrograd Military District included the territories... ...
Petrograd Military District- Petrograd Military District, formed in 1864; before the start of the 1st World War, St. Petersburg Military District. Headquarters of the Petrograd Military District in the building on Palace Square (see Headquarters of the Guards Corps building). On the eve of the 1st World War, the territory of Petrograd ... Encyclopedic reference book "St. Petersburg"
Revolution of 1917 in Russia ... Wikipedia
- (PVRK), the body of the Petrograd Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies for the practical management of the armed uprising, operating during the period of preparation and conduct October revolution, then (until December 1917) an emergency body... ... St. Petersburg (encyclopedia)
Petrograd garrison
Soldiers and officers of the Petrograd garrison. March 1917
The February Revolution ended by mid-March 1917 with the overthrow of the monarchy and the coming to power of the Provisional Government. The leaders and participants in the coup owe its success - quick and almost bloodless - primarily to the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison.
For some reason, it is generally accepted that at the beginning of 1917 the authorities had no idea that unrest could begin in the country and, first of all, in the capital. In fact, they began to develop a working plan to combat possible riots back in November 1916, and by mid-January 1917 it was ready. It is based on technologies tested during the First Russian Revolution of 1905-1907. The main support of this plan was the police forces (3,500 people) and military units of the capital’s garrison, or more precisely, the training teams of the reserve battalions stationed in the city, preparing reinforcements for the personnel regiments located at the front. None of the plan's developers even dared to imagine that it was these training teams, as well as the reserve companies, that would go over to the side of the rebellious population.
Every betrayal has motives and reasons. The soldiers of the reserve regiments also had them. Both objective and subjective. But more on that a little later, but for now let’s talk about what the Petrograd garrison was like at the beginning of 1917.
The Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) military district was formed back in 1864. Territorially included the lands of the entire Russian north-west plus Finland. That is, about 1/3 of all European territories of the empire. Before World War I, the Guards, 18th and 22nd Army Corps and many military personnel were stationed here educational institutions, individual units like the Life Guards of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Convoy, bodies of the highest military leadership of the army and navy, and much more. In 1915, the district was reformed and turned into a rear area of the Northern Front. As before the war, most units were stationed in Petrograd and its environs. So, in the city itself at the beginning of 1917 there were from 160 to 200 thousand people (Petrograd garrison), in Tsarskoye Selo - more than 40 thousand.
Lieutenant General
Sergey Khabalov
On the eve of the “troubles,” the Petrograd Military District was recreated. Troops numbering 715 thousand were drawn into its orbit. The Petrograd garrison, including units stationed in the Petrograd province (Peterhof, Gatchina, Oranienbaum, Strelna, etc.), numbered 460 thousand. In the summer of 1916, Lieutenant General Sergei Khabalov was appointed head of the Petrograd district (then the rear region of the Northern Fleet). He automatically took command of the Petrograd garrison. On February 19, 1917, when the district was again separated from the Northern Front into an independent military-administrative unit, S. Khabalov began to be called the commander of the air defense. I wonder who recommended that the emperor appoint Khabalov to this difficult position and give him full power in the capital?
The 58-year-old artillery general was an excellent theorist and teacher, but had no combat experience, nor experience in commanding large masses of troops. His combat limit was qualified command of a battalion for 4 months in 1900. The last 17 years of his career - service in the Pavlovsk and Moscow military schools, military governorship in the Ural region. Here is what the mayor of Petrograd, Alexander Balk, remarked about the commander: “General Khabalov, throughout my entire service together, impressed me as an approachable, hard-working, calm person, not without administrative experience, but quiet-minded and without any ability to impress his subordinates and, most importantly, to dispose of troops " Only on March 12, on the fifth day of the uprising, the emperor, who was in Mogilev, at Headquarters, received enough information to assess the scale of the danger. In particular, Minister of War Mikhail Belyaev said that “the state of affairs is catastrophic, that the entire government, as well as the commander of the troops, General Khabalov, are completely at a loss and that if energetic intervention does not follow, the revolution will take on enormous proportions.”
“That same evening, the Emperor ordered the appointment of Adjutant General Nikolai Ivanov (66 years old) as Commander-in-Chief of the Petrograd Military District and to assign at his disposal: the St. George battalion, located at Headquarters, and from the Northern Front two cavalry regiments, two infantry regiments and one machine gun team. Approximately the same outfit was given to Western Front“,” recalled Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich. General Nikolai Ivanov did not have time to carry out the order, since the emperor soon canceled it as unnecessary. It became impossible to correct the situation.
Demonstration of units of the Petrograd garrison
Now is the time to talk about the motives and reasons for betrayal, which will become clear after brief description what happened in the Petrograd barracks and on the Petrograd streets in February 1917.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Petrograd garrison was adequately equipped. Guards units stationed in the capital and surrounding areas were located in modern and comfortable barracks. There was all the infrastructure necessary for life and service. But it was designed for about 50 thousand people. Approximately the same number of regiments of the Guards Corps, minus the infantry division, cavalry and artillery brigade stationed in Warsaw. The frenzy of general mobilization, which engulfed the War Ministry and local logistics institutions, reached its climax by 1917. They dragged everyone they could into the reserve companies. At this time, the military department calculated that the remaining human resource not called up was no more than 1.5 million people. This is in Russia with its 180 million population! The answer is simple. If we subtract the number of soldiers who were at the front, the number of losses and compare the resulting figure with the number of conscripts, it will easily become clear that several million people were “marinated” in the “training” of Petrograd, Moscow, Kiev and other large cities. In inhumane, admittedly, conditions. Because in the company barracks of, say, the Preobrazhensky Life Guards Regiment on Kirochnaya Street, designed for 200-250 people, 2,000, or even more, had to be squeezed in.
It would be a stretch to call the soldiers’ stay in reserve companies training. It is objectively impossible to teach military affairs to such masses of people in a city. And then another problem arrived - a subjective one. Who should I teach? With a shortage of infantry combat officers at the front, where personnel officers in platoon and company positions were replaced by wartime warrant officers, the rear received crumbs. The same green warrant officers who for some reason were not sent to the “front line” and veteran officers discharged from hospitals. Both of them accounted for three or four people per company of 1000-2000 recruits. Sometimes you hear that the elite of the Russian army - the Guard - went over to the side of the rebellious people. Absolute fake. The Guard fought and died at the front. And in its barracks in Petrograd and its suburbs, conscripts who had not managed to become not only guardsmen, but also simply soldiers, found no place for themselves due to idleness. The career guardsmen who returned after being wounded to reserve companies constituted an insignificant minority and could not influence the situation. And some, morally killed by the war, did not want to. Paradoxically, it was also not possible to send this entire mass of people to the front. There would simply be nowhere to put them there, since there were quite enough divisions in the front line, major operations, and therefore, large losses were not expected until May.
Chapter 10
PETROGRAD UPRISING
Introduction. - Labor unrest: reasons. - Street fighting. - Mutiny of the Petrograd garrison. - Crash.
§ 1. Introduction.
On February 23, the emperor returned to Headquarters, and over the next ten days, so many extraordinary and rapidly successive events occurred that they seemed to merge into an inextricable whole. Geographically, however, the drama was limited to Petrograd, Headquarters in Mogilev and the railway route between them. Until the first days of March, the rest of the country hardly knew about what was happening and did not take any part in the revolutionary events. The impressive manifestation of popular feelings, since we are talking about all of Russia, was more a consequence than a cause of the significant changes that took place in its destiny these days. Throughout the entire crisis, there was some time shift between the development of events in Petrograd and the reaction of Headquarters. This led to absurdity: on February 27, the Tsar continued to give orders to his no longer existing government in Petrograd, and on March 2, the generals of various headquarters continued to negotiate with the Chairman of the Duma, as if he could still control events, which in fact was not the case.
As for Petrograd, two phases of events should be distinguished: the first - from February 23 to 28. This period was marked by a rapidly growing wave of strikes in the industrial outskirts and street demonstrations, mainly on Znamenskaya Square, at the eastern end of Nevsky Prospect. The police, with rather lukewarm support from the Cossacks and military units, made half-hearted attempts to disperse the demonstrators. The situation worsened only on the night of 25, when it was decided to use Troops to prevent further demonstrations. The fatalities on February 26 are mainly the result of street clashes and stray gunshots. As the evening approached on February 26, it seemed that labor unrest was weakening, and that the intervention of the troops decided the outcome in favor of the government. The second phase began when the government decided to postpone the February session of the Duma until April; the center of revolutionary events became the Tauride Palace (seat of the Duma).
At the same time, but not in direct connection with the postponement of the Duma session, on the morning of the 27th, unrest spread to the troops of the Petrograd garrison, which significantly changed the situation. The authorities foresaw labor unrest and street riots, and even expected them precisely on these days. In this case, there was a detailed action plan, even if it turned out to be unsuccessful. But against an unforeseen mutiny of the Petrograd garrison there was no automatically effective system of countermeasures. The mutiny of the garrison and the reaction of the Duma to the postponement of the session were the factors that turned the workers' uprisings into a revolution.
Only by the evening of February 27 did the Duma deputies and, independently of them, the committees of the revolutionary parties in Petrograd realize that the time had come for immediate political action. Everyone put forward their own plan to overcome the crisis. These plans were inflated soap bubbles, capturing the imagination of the crowd and distortingly reflecting the rapidly changing moods of the street to burst one after another. In fact, the tsarist government ceased to exist only on the night of February 27-28, and the next morning, Minister of War Belyaev ordered the units that remained loyal to the regime to disperse to their barracks, having first laid down their arms in the Admiralty building, their last combat position. The vacuum created by the collapse of the tsarist government was quickly filled, but the formation of a new government took place under circumstances that are still extremely difficult to restore.
§ 2. Labor unrest: causes.
The strike, which began at Petrograd factories on Thursday, February 23, initially involved 90,000 people. The next day the movement began to expand. On Saturday the 28th, 240,000 workers went on strike. In itself, the fact that the outlying workers were on strike did not carry anything new or ominous. And yet there was something about that February strike that remains unexplained to this day. We attempt to interpret these labor unrest, emphasizing, however - whether our assumptions are considered sufficiently strong or not - that some of the reasons for the strikes are still completely obscure. Admitting that the whole truth is inaccessible to us, we still do not have the right to cover up our ignorance with phrases about a “spontaneous movement” and “the cup of patience of the workers”, which has “overflowed.” These stereotypes only obscure the essence of the matter. A mass movement of such scale and scope was impossible without some kind of guiding force. Even the underground revolutionary committees, which were experienced in this matter and acted according to party instructions, had a hard time mobilizing the workers for smaller actions than in February 1917. Even on the anniversary Bloody Sunday in 1917, workers from 114 enterprises took part in the strike, about 137,536 people in total, and they did not take to the streets. In addition, this day in the industrial areas of Petrograd was considered a non-working day, so it did not require much effort to organize a strike.
Two important reasons were cited for the rapid growth of the strike movement in the last week of February: deterioration in the supply of bread and the lockout at the Putilov plant. As for the first reason, there were indeed some difficulties in delivering bread to bakeries at the beginning of the week. This sparked panic rumors of a flour shortage, increasing demand for bread and lengthening queues, as well as increasing frustration. However, there is solid evidence that there was no shortage of flour. Not once during February did the twelve-day supply of flour for the capital's bakeries fall below the average norm. The main difficulty was distribution, and it could have been easily overcome with good will. But there was none.
For some time now, there had been a quarrel between the Petrograd city authorities and the government over control over the food supply. The city authorities, supported by the Union of Cities and the Progressive Bloc of the State Duma, insisted that the food supply to the citizens of the capital should be in their hands, and the Minister of Internal Affairs Protopopov, although he did not have the necessary means for this, wanted to take on this additional responsibility. , which caused new attacks on him in the press and in the Petrograd City Duma and created a general atmosphere of a food crisis. In addition, rumors about the introduction of grain standards hit the popular imagination hard, especially since bread is the main food product in Russia. They were afraid not only that there would be little bread, which in itself caused protest from the peasant or worker, but they were also frightened by the thought that some kind of boss would be able to control the amount of bread that a person puts into his mouth. Apparently, the influx of customers into bakeries was partly due to the desire to stock up on crackers.
In addition to the infighting over who would manage food supplies, there were two other factors that could actually lead to a shortage of bread in bakeries and unrest in bread lines. They said that some bakers, instead of baking bread from the full quota of flour allotted to them, sent some of the flour to the provinces, and there it was sold for good money on the black market. The rumor of abuses forced General Khabalov to introduce strict supervision of bakeries. Secondly, we cannot neglect the possibility of deliberate sabotage on the part of the bakers. Petrograd bakers were united into a fairly strong Bolshevik faction. During labor unrest in the winter of 1915-16. Bakeries played a significant role in the strike movement in the capital. This is evidenced by a letter written in early March 1916 by Pavel Budaev, a member of the Bolshevik Party and the St. Petersburg Bakers' Union, to his friend, also a baker, in Siberia. Budaev talks about a bakery strike organized by the Bolsheviks on the Vyborg side: on Christmas Day 1915, the police demanded that bread be sold on the first day of Christmastide, but bakery workers did not go to work for two days, and bread appeared on sale only on the third day. On January 9, all factories went on strike, “taking up the initiative of the Vyborg side.”1
Although complaints about the lack of flour and bread in February 1917 were not very justified, nevertheless the crowd chanted the slogan “Bread!” and during the first three days of the riots he figured on the banners of the demonstrations. This slogan suited cautious organizers of street demonstrations like Shlyapnikov and, unlike the other two slogans of those days - “Down with war” and “Down with autocracy” - it had a particularly effective effect on the troops called in to disperse the demonstrations. They refused to shoot at a crowd that was “only asking for bread.”
In addition to rumors of food shortages, the main reason for the workers' demonstrations in February 1917 is often cited as the lockout at the Putilov plant. The circumstances that led to a similar action in February 1916, and the role played by the “Leninists” in this matter, have been described above.2 In both cases, riots began in the workshop, whose workers demanded an exorbitant increase in wages. Our source of information about the riots of 1917 was not a police report, but a request sent to the Prime Minister, War and Navy Ministers by thirty members of the Duma, including the Trudoviks, A.I. Konovalov and I.N. Efremov.3 According to this document, the workers of one On February 18, the workshops of the Putilov plant asked for a 50% increase in wages. It is significant that when they put forward such an exorbitant demand, they did not first consult with their comrades who worked in other workshops. The plant director flatly refused, and then the workers staged a sit-in strike. After a meeting between the administration and representatives of workers from other workshops, a 20% increase was promised. But at the same time, on February 21, the management fired the workers of the striking workshop. This repressive measure caused the strike to spread to other workshops, and on February 22 the management announced the closure of these workshops for an indefinite period. This meant that thirty thousand well-organized workers, most of them highly qualified, were literally thrown out onto the street.
The lockout contributed greatly to the spread of strikes. Following established practice, workers went from factory to factory and used all possible means, including intimidation, to convince their comrades to join the strikers. Arriving just in time, for the agitation of the workers had reached its limit due to rumors of food shortages, the call for a strike, as well as the call to demand a sharp increase in wages, acted without fail. The ability to get lost in large crowds during strikes and demonstrations provided a wide field of activity for agitators.
Later, in the twenties, Soviet historians of the labor movement, for example, Balabanov, tried to explain the avalanche of strikes in February 1917 by the end of a long process of accumulation of forces and the growth of class solidarity among workers. The purpose of these historiographical constructions is to prove that the development of the revolutionary movement with its struggle for political rights was preceded by economic struggle and the growth of class consciousness. Real events did not quite correspond to this exemplary construction of Marxist social dialectics. Judging by what we know about the activities of underground revolutionary organizations among the Petrograd workers, not one of them was ready for a systematic revolutionary action at this particular moment. When on February 22, factory workers discussed the organization of Women's Day on February 23, V. Kayurov, a representative of the St. Petersburg Bolshevik Committee,4 advised them to refrain from isolated actions and follow the instructions of the party committee.
But imagine my surprise and indignation when the next day, February 23, at an emergency meeting of five people in the corridor of the plant (Erikson), Comrade Nikifor Ilyin announced a strike in some textile factories and the arrival of female worker delegates with a statement about our support for metalheads.
I was extremely outraged by the behavior of the strikers; on the one hand, there was a clear disregard for the resolution of the district party committee, and then - he himself had just last night called on the female workers for restraint and discipline, and suddenly there was a strike. There seemed to be no purpose or reason, except for the particularly long lines for bread, which in essence were the impetus for the strike.
And indeed, at the beginning of 1917, the Petrograd Bolsheviks did not really know how to react to the increase in labor unrest. The Bolsheviks' attempt to start a civil war, recorded in the above-cited leaflet of the Petrograd Committee, failed in February 1916. Since then, the prospects for revolution in war time seemed dubious to the Bolshevik leaders. We see that in the critical days before the explosion of labor unrest at the end of February 1917, the Petrograd Bolsheviks behaved cautiously. They warned the workers against partial and isolated strikes, since this gave the factory owners and the government the opportunity to disperse the working masses and jeopardize the success of the revolution in the future. Like Miliukov and the Duma liberals, they believed that the most favorable moment for the revolution would come immediately after the end of the war. It took them 48 hours to realize that, contrary to their warnings, the labor movement had assumed unexpected dimensions, and only then did they begin to call for the creation of a revolutionary government.
The insignificance of the role that the Bolsheviks played in the revolution of 1917 does not in itself surprise us. With the exception of Shlyapnikov, their leaders in the capital were inexperienced and lacked authority.5 Soviet historians of the revolution clearly understood this. Only after Pokrovsky’s school was liquidated in the early thirties did Soviet historiography take the view that the wisdom of the Bolsheviks and the impeccability of their policies played an important role in the February events and that the role of other, non-Bolshevik, workers’ and revolutionary organizations was insignificant. It is not surprising that in the Soviet Union there was so little material about the activities of other revolutionary organizations in Petrograd. Of course, the right-wing Mensheviks could not lay claim to leadership of the workers. Their organization was connected with the working group of the Military-Industrial Committee, which ended up in prison on February 27, 1917, and it is very doubtful that Gvozdev could in any way influence the outbreak of labor unrest on February 23-25.
However, in Petrograd there was another Social Democratic organization, the activities of which are very superficially described by Soviet historians, and only they have access to the necessary archives. This was the so-called Interdistrict Committee, otherwise Mezhrayonka, an association of worker delegates from different industrial districts of the capital. This organization became especially active during the war, at one time it was headed by Karakhan.6 The influence of Trotsky and the experience of the St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905 played an important role in the composition and ideology of this organization. In August 1917, Trotsky and the entire organization of the Interdistrict Committee united with the Bolsheviks, and from that moment on, its former members tried not to remind that the organization initially, before uniting with the Bolsheviks, played an independent political role, because this could damage their reputation. On the contrary, every more or less prominent member of Mezhrayonka assured that at heart he had always been a Bolshevik, and the independence of the organization was a tactical device dictated by the conditions of underground work under the tsarist regime.
It seems, however, that in February 1917, no revolutionary group made as much effort to persuade the working masses to take to the streets as Mezhrayonka. M. Balabanov reports that Mezhrayonka issued leaflets with slogans - “Down with autocracy,” “Long live the revolution,” “Long live the revolutionary government,” “Down with war.”7 If so, then this proves that the stake is on the revolution, from which after the failure of 1916, the Bolsheviks refused, it was made and won with great success by the Mezhrayonka.
Yet it is difficult to believe that such a small revolutionary group as the Interdistrict Committee could organize a labor movement of such magnitude without any help. In addition, its leaders apparently did not have a firm determination to implement the slogans contained in the leaflet. Yurenev, who then headed the Interdistrict Committee, participated in informal meetings that took place after February 23 in private homes between Duma liberals, representatives of the legal opposition and underground revolutionaries. So, on February 26, Yurenev surprised V. Zenzinov (right Socialist Revolutionary) at one of these meetings in the apartment of A.F. Kerensky in that “he took some kind of amazing position.”8 By this time, the revolution was already in full swing, and clashes between troops and crowds took place throughout the city. However, Yurenev, in contrast to everyone else present, not only did not show any enthusiasm, but, says Zenzinov, “poisoned us all with his skepticism and disbelief.” “There is no and there will be no revolution,” he stubbornly insisted. “The movement in the troops is fading away and we must prepare for a long period of reaction.” He especially sharply attacked A.F. Kerensky, reproaching him for his “usual hysteria” and “usual exaggeration.”
We argued, Zenzinov continues, that the wave was rising, that we must prepare for decisive events, Yurenev, who considered himself on the left flank, tried hard to pour cold water on us. It was clear to us that this was the position at that moment not only of him personally, but also of the Bolshevik St. Petersburg organization. Yurenev spoke out against forcing events, argued that the movement that had begun could not succeed, even insisting on the need to calm the agitated working masses.
Zenzinov's memoirs were written many years later, but this does not mean that they are incorrect. Yurenev’s attitude towards the meeting can be logically explained in different ways: he met with representatives of liberal circles who were ready to establish first contacts with the revolutionary movement, and he had reasons to cool their ardor and desire to “lead the revolution” and become leaders of the working masses - this role was not played by anyone a social democrat would not want to share with representatives of the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, it is possible that on February 26, Yurenev was indeed frightened by the prospect of a clash between the Petrograd workers and the garrison; he was as disgusted by street battles as Shlyapnikov, who held the same post in the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee that he himself held in Mezhraionka. The Mezhrayonka had the beginnings of its organization in the Petrograd garrison, but, apparently, it was weak, and nothing so far indicated that discontent had spread to the army.9 No one had yet heard of the mutiny of the Pavlovsky regiment. The revolutionary committees at this moment had every reason to fear a clash with armed units, but they could, without losing anything, wait for the end of the war. The legal opposition, both in the Duma and in public organizations, sought to use the situation created in the capital to achieve its goal. For them, this chance to get the long-awaited constitutional reform was perhaps their last. If you miss an opportunity, the war may end in the summer, and then everything will be lost. Zenzinov points out the impossibility of convincing Yurenev, but Yurenev probably wanted to put the liberals in their place and make them understand that the Petrograd proletariat will not fight in the streets in order to rake in the heat for them with their own hands. He, of course, was well aware of the reasons for the sympathy for the revolution on the part of those who hoped to use the revolution to force the Tsar to make concessions and seize power. But even if we consider the categorical pessimism of the leaders of underground revolutionary organizations to be a political maneuver aimed at maintaining control over the labor movement, it is still difficult to reconcile it with the militant grasp of the party ideology prescribed to all political figures of social democracy. Militancy, obviously, was lacking among both the Bolsheviks and Mezhrayonka. And yet the labor movement grew, and demonstrations on Znamenskaya Square and Nevsky Prospekt became increasingly difficult to disperse. It is difficult to believe that such a movement could not lose its drive and cohesion without any organization or leaders agitating and rousing the masses. The theory of the spontaneous movement of the Petrograd proletariat is only a recognition of our inability to explain the course of events. Why should such a movement begin then, and only then, in Petrograd? Neither before nor after this did the working masses of Russia demonstrate such a capacity for concerted “spontaneous” actions.
Regarding the driving factors of events, there is another aspect of the February Revolution that requires study. We are talking about the alleged role of German money and German agents. In the debate about German assistance to the Bolsheviks after Lenin's return, the issue was obscured and hushed up. We have already stopped at this. There are two independent problems - German intervention in the February events and German assistance to the Bolsheviks. And both are equally difficult for a historian to resolve. From the very beginning, all participants in the case were keenly interested in not leaving any documentary evidence. On the German side, when access to the archives was opened, something became clear, but on the Soviet side, nothing changed, not a single document became available, and any questions there would be considered a political provocation, an insult to doctrine.
In Russia at that time, many apparently were convinced that the Germans somehow had a hand in the February events. At one of the first meetings of the Provisional Government, in March, Foreign Minister Miliukov casually mentioned the role of German agents and money in the February Revolution. There followed a sharp attack from Kerensky, who left the meeting room, declaring that he could not be there “where the sacred cause of the revolution is being violated.”10 Of course, Kerensky distorted and exaggerated, shouting that Miliukov was “being violated,” Miliukov simply expressed the generally accepted Opinion. The hidden springs of the popular uprising require explanation, and the intervention of German agents provides an explanation for this amazing success of a “revolution without revolutionaries.”
In one of the previous chapters we tried to look at how the various German military departments intensified to contribute to the organization of labor unrest and, perhaps, revolution. We have seen what Gelfand (Parvus) developed for German authorities detailed Gshan, offering at their service his extensive connections both in the Balkans and in Scandinavia, and that the German government gave him significant financial support so that he could independently carry out his revolutionary plans. If we return to political events in Russia, then very few traces of Gelfand’s activities are found there, although there are some indications that German money and Gelfand’s ingenuity were not in vain.
We saw above that the strike that broke out in Petrograd in January 1916 was provoked and supported financially by Helphand's organization, and perhaps the same agents organized the strike in Nikolaev. With these precedents in mind, it is difficult to believe that the Germans had nothing to do with the events of February 23-26, 1917, which were so reminiscent of the events of 1916. We also saw that in 1917 Helphand's organization was still operating in Copenhagen, and Helphand's economic and financial position was better than ever. None of his agents in Russia (ten people are said to have worked for him) were caught.
It is possible that the factions he supported changed between February 1916 and February 1917. And the more faceless Mezhrayonka played, apparently, a more important role in 1917 than the Petrograd Bolshevik organization. Helphand, who had close connections with the left Mensheviks and with Trotsky, could choose to support one committee or another. But this is just a guess. Neither Gelfand nor the other participants in this activity left any evidence that this was really the case. One might suspect, however, that the all-important question of strike financing (that is, supporting the workers week after week while they went on strike, putting forward either impossible economic or impossible political demands that the factory management could not satisfy) was settled by impersonal strike committees with the help of funds , the source of which was Gelfand’s organization.12 And the more impersonal and inconspicuous the committees and people providing support, the better for the conspiratorial structure of Gelfand’s organization.13
Although German agents and German money may have been behind the labor unrest in February 1917, it would be a mistake to exaggerate their influence on subsequent events. As soon as the demonstrators, emerging from the outskirts of Petrograd, mixed with the crowd in the city center, the nature of the movement began to change. The slogans with which the demonstration began on the industrial outskirts were changed or discarded as soon as contacts began with the inhabitants of the center - students and high school students, minor employees, junior officers and other representatives of the middle classes who were ready to gawk at the demonstration of workers, join the procession, sing revolutionary songs and listen with taste to street speakers. First, the workers came out with slogans: “Bread!” - “Down with autocracy!” - "Down with war!" We have already seen that the food situation hardly justified the first slogan. The second was common for any demonstration in Russia. Along with the red flag, it testified to revolutionism. But the third slogan, which played a large role in the labor demonstrations of February 23-26, deserves further clarification.
The chronicler of the Russian revolution, Sukhanov, believes that the slogan “Down with war” can be considered as evidence of the spread of the ideas of the Zimmerwald Conference among the proletarian masses. But even Sukhanov had to admit that it was a mistake to put forward such a slogan at a moment when the protests of the workers in the outskirts turned into a nationwide revolution, in which the bourgeois opposition parties were supposed to play a leading role. He comments:
It was a priori clear that if we count on bourgeois power and join the bourgeoisie to the revolution, then it is necessary to temporarily remove slogans against war from the queue, it is necessary at this moment to temporarily fold the Zimmerwald banner, which has become the banner of the Russian and, in particular, the St. Petersburg proletariat.14
If we leave aside the Marxist jargon that Sukhanov uses when describing Russian events 1917 (“proletariat”, “bourgeoisie”), then his analysis is completely correct. It is true that the slogan: “Down with war” did not attract the middle-class crowd in the center of Petrograd. Paradoxically, this class suffered much more from ever-increasing inflation and other war hardships than the workers. Salaried employees had a harder time keeping up with rising prices than regular wage workers. Nevertheless, the middle classes did not lose their patriotism and were generally deaf to the defeatist ideas of Zimmerwald, and it was Patriotism that forced them to join the decisive onslaught against the autocracy. They completely succumbed to the propaganda of the liberal press, the Duma and public organizations and welcomed the fall of the tsarist regime, because they thought that the tsarist government would either be defeated in the war or conclude a shameful separate peace. Therefore, the slogan “Down with war” shocked them; it could easily have led to a split in the revolutionary movement if the organizers of the demonstrations had not removed it at the initial stage. The St. Petersburg Bolshevik Committee can hardly be accused of putting forward this slogan. In their proclamations of the previous year, the Bolsheviks refrained from any anti-war calls. Mezhrayonka, apparently, included the slogan in its leaflet in February 1917. In Mezhrayonka they should have known well why the Bolsheviks did not use this slogan, and understood what was “a priori clear” to Sukhanov, namely, that from the point of view of revolutionary tactics the slogan was a gross mistake.
But, as can be calculated from other considerations, if the strike movement was started by those who received instructions from Berlin, Copenhagen and Stockholm, then this slogan had meaning. The people who spent their employers' money on encouraging such demonstrations were primarily interested in the destruction of Russian military power and the Russian spirit; they were not interested in the prospect of revolution, nor were they interested in the need to maintain a semblance of national unity in the form of overthrowing the centuries-old political system. It was important for Helphand's unidentified agents to ensure anti-war demonstrations that did not deviate from the main goal. And the “proletarian masses” cared little about what slogans they demonstrated under, as long as money was coming from the funds of the strike committees - in all likelihood, from the same people who inscribed the slogans on the banners. Sukhanov writes very vividly about the cynicism of such proletarian revolutionaries, allowing us to assume that the slogans were imposed on them by some mysterious outsiders. On Saturday the 25th Sukhanov met a group of workers discussing the events. "What do they want?" - one of them asked gloomily. "They want peace with the Germans, bread and equality for the Jews." Sukhanov was delighted with this “brilliant formulation of the program of the great revolution,” but did not seem to notice that the gloomy worker imagined that the slogans did not come from him and others like him, but were imposed by some mysterious “them.”
In reality, the Zimmerwald banner that Sukhanov speaks of was carried not only metaphorically, but also literally. Right Socialist Revolutionary Zenzinov was on Znamenskaya Square on February 25 and recalls the following scene:
Now the crowd was already pouring in a thick mass along Nevsky - all in one direction, towards Znamenskaya Square, and as if with some specific purpose. Homemade red banners appeared from somewhere - it was clear that all this happened impromptu. On one of the banners I saw the letters "R.S.D.R.P." (Russian Social Democratic Labor Party). The other one read “Down with War.” But this second one caused protests in the crowd, and it was immediately withdrawn. I remember this quite clearly. Obviously, it belonged either to the Bolsheviks or the “Mezhrayontsy” (adjacent to the Bolsheviks) - and did not at all correspond to the mood of the crowd.15
Zenzinov is probably not entirely fair to the Bolsheviks. Defencism, as we will see, penetrated even among the Bolshevik leaders. Lenin, when he returned to Russia in April, needed all his political sophistication to again restore the anti-war slogan (but no longer in the crude formulation of the February days), first in the party program, and then in the consciousness of the “proletarian masses”. Nevertheless, anti-war slogans and anti-war speeches pronounced from the pedestal of the monument to Alexander II on Znamenskaya Square in the first three days of labor unrest should be considered evidence of the direct intervention of German agents, and not the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee as such.
§ 3. Street fighting.
It is surprising how little importance was attached to the demonstrations of February 23-25 by those most affected. Strikes in industrial areas, with demonstrations, the singing of revolutionary songs and the sporadic appearance of red flags among the crowds, were taken for granted, no one thought that all this could affect the course of major political events in the near future. There was no mention of demonstrations in the Duma debates; The Council of Ministers, which met on February 24, did not even discuss the demonstrations. The ministers believed that this was a matter for the police, not politics. Even the revolutionary intelligentsia of Petrograd, who were not directly involved in underground work, were not aware of what was happening. Mstislavsky-Maslovsky, an old Socialist-Revolutionary militant who had previously published a manual on street fighting (he now served in the library of the General Staff - such was the careless tolerance of the autocratic government!), says in his memoirs that the revolution, “long-awaited, desired,” found them , “like the foolish virgins of the gospel, sleeping.”16
Of course, the police were ready. But the demonstrators, who initially numbered in the thousands, now numbered tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, and the police called in the troops available in the capital to maintain order. However, police action was slow. There were not enough police officers, and not only little was done, but no more could be done to prevent the accumulation of people in the streets and squares. As soon as a crowd gathered somewhere, the police dispersed it, and, under threat of arrest, people dispersed along side streets and into the courtyards of neighboring buildings. But as soon as the police left, the crowd gathered again in the same place, and slogans and speeches resumed. Both demonstrators and police, with few exceptions, did not cross certain boundaries. It happened that demonstrators overturned a tram, but they made no serious attempts to build barricades. It is characteristic that even in the days of subsequent street fighting between the opposing sides, the front line was never established. The revolutionary masses and government troops closed in.
Since the weather was unusually cold, both the crowds and the police went home for the night, only to take up the seemingly aimless competition with renewed vigor in the morning. On Sunday the 26th, demonstrations began later - just after noon. And no one took advantage of the night to capture and hold strategic points in view of future battles. Neither side seemed to see anything catastrophic or simply serious in what was happening.
Sporadic outbreaks of violence and shootings in different parts cities in the first days of the revolution cannot be considered the result of a deliberate decision either on the part of the police and army, or on the part of the revolutionary committees. It is clear that government troops were ordered to fire into the crowd only in self-defense. The very thought of those killed and wounded on the snow-covered streets of the capital horrified the authorities. What will the allies think? It was assumed that the Cossacks would disperse the crowd with whips, but since they were going to war, they did not have this part of the equipment. When this became clear, an order was issued to provide them with money so that everyone could get a whip for themselves. And the empress, in one of her letters to the sovereign, assured that there was absolutely no need to shoot at a crowd consisting of nasty boys and girls who were taking advantage of the difficulties in supplies to commit mischief. The order not to shoot allowed the crowd to approach the soldiers and talk to them. The soldiers soon understood the mood of the crowd. It seemed to them that the demonstration was peaceful and it would be a sin to use weapons against it. There was very little ammunition available, and no steps were taken to ensure there would be sufficient supplies in case serious street fighting broke out. This created the most fundamental difficulties when on the 27th a mutiny broke out in the garrison and it could only be stopped by armed suppression.
At the same time, even the Bolshevik leaders seemed to be doing everything in their power to prevent shootings in the streets. Shlyapnikov speaks out quite definitely on this issue. When workers demanded that he arm the demonstrators, he flatly refused. It’s not difficult to get a weapon, he said, but that’s not the point:
I was afraid that the tactless disposal of weapons acquired in this way could only harm the matter. An inflamed comrade who used a revolver against a soldier could only provoke some military unit and give the authorities a reason to set soldiers against the workers. Therefore, I resolutely refused to seek weapons for everyone; I most urgently demanded that the soldiers be involved in the uprising and that in this way all the workers could obtain weapons. It was more difficult than acquiring several dozen revolvers, but it was a whole program of action.17
Despite the determination of both sides to avoid the use of weapons, shootings occurred throughout the city, and the number of wounded and killed increased daily. This is partly due to mutual suspicion. In Petrograd they firmly believed the rumor that the police had installed machine-gun posts in the attics residential buildings and is preparing to shoot at demonstrators from these covers. Any shooting, especially at a distance, was immediately attributed to machine gun posts. Later, the revolutionaries sent special squads to search houses and arrest policemen shooting from rooftops.
The provisional government created several commissions to find out what role the police played in the February battles. Subsequently, historians analyzed all the available data, but did not establish a single case of police officers sitting on rooftops firing at a crowd with machine guns. Nevertheless, the legend of the “protopopov’s machine guns” played a role in angering the police and in provoking excesses in which a large number of officers and lower police officials were killed.18
This anger explains a number of clashes that occurred on the eve of Sunday 26 February. However, in order for a clash to occur, some kind of provocation is needed on the part of the organizers of the demonstrations. Bombs were thrown at military detachments, and they, in defense, immediately used weapons. But even in these cases, many believed that the bombs were thrown by police agents provocateurs. This is confirmed by a conversation between the Chairman of the Duma and the head of the Petrograd garrison. Rodzianko was firmly convinced that a policeman had thrown a bomb at I1schidents like those mentioned, and he told Khabalov so. “The Lord be with you! What is the point of a policeman throwing grenades at the troops?” - Khabalov answered in surprise and somewhat naively.19
On the 25th, a serious incident occurred on Znamenskaya Square. It is rightly considered a turning point in the initial phase of the uprising. Several eyewitnesses, among them the Bolshevik worker Kayurov and V. Zenzinov, gave different accounts of what happened, although no one witnessed the murder itself. A large crowd gathered around the monument Alexander III, from the pedestal of which, as in previous days, revolutionary speeches were spoken. Just in case, a detachment of Cossacks was sent to the square, but the Cossacks did nothing to disperse the demonstration. At approximately 3 o'clock in the afternoon, a detachment of mounted police arrived at the scene under the command of an officer named Krylov. Following the established practice of dispersing demonstrations, he pushed through the crowd to grab the red flag, but was cut off from his unit and killed outright. According to Zenzinov, he was shot, and it was proven that the bullet came from a Cossack rifle. According to Martynov,20 who used materials from the police archive, Krylov was killed with a bladed weapon and then received several saber blows. An autopsy did not reveal a gunshot wound. Kayurov describes a terrible scene, how the demonstrators finished off Krylov with a shovel, and the crowd enthusiastically picked up the Cossack who hit Krylov with a saber.
But no matter who killed Krylov - the crowd or the Cossacks - everyone, both the police and the demonstrators, had the impression that the Cossacks on Znamenskaya Square had joined the rebels. This case of the Cossacks’ attitude towards clashes between the police and the crowd was not the only one. How did this change happen? After all, in general, Cossack troops were considered extremely reliable, since it was a question of suppressing peasant or worker revolts. A possible answer may be found in the memoirs of Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, whose personal influence in the days that followed was as important as it was invisible.
V.D. Bonch-Bruevich was an old Bolshevik who supported Lenin at the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Party in 1902, since then their connection has not been interrupted. During and after the 1905 revolution, he actively participated in the organization of the Bolshevik underground press. When the revolutionary wave began to subside in 1906, Bonch-Bruevich, instead of emigrating like most Bolshevik leaders, remained in Russia and worked at the Academy of Sciences, researching Russian religious sects and their literature. He thoroughly studied the psychology and social composition of sectarians, in particular, the sects known as Old and New Israel. He even published one of the sacred books of these sects, the so-called Dove Book, and earned the gratitude of the adherents.
Bonch-Bruevich says in his memoirs that in February he received a deputation of Cossacks from the regiment stationed in Petrograd, who wanted to talk with him about religious issues. After a ritual embrace, which was a secret conventional sign among initiates of the New Israel sect, the Cossacks asked Bonch-Bruevich what they should do if they were sent to suppress the uprising in Petrograd. Bonch-Bruevich told them to avoid shooting at all costs, and they promised to follow his advice. He subsequently learned that the detachment that sent the deputation was patrolling on Znamenskaya Square on critical days and was involved in the murder of a police officer. Bonch-Bruevich's discreet hints explain how secret contacts were established between revolutionary intellectuals and disoriented Cossacks who left their fields and villages to go to war, and found themselves in the turmoil of the revolution in the great Babylon of the north.21
Despite the fact that the general situation in the capital had deteriorated by the end of the last week of February, reports sent to Mogilev by the commander of the Petrograd Military District Khabalov, Minister of War Belyaev and Protopopov were falsely encouraging. Events in the capital were interpreted as disorganized, anarchic agitation, a mixture of food riots and hooliganism; the reports expressed confidence that the measures taken would put an end to all this within twenty-four hours. These measures consisted of tightening control over bakeries, arresting about a hundred revolutionaries - including a significant part of the members of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee - and replacing the Cossack detachments, which lukewarmly supported the police, with cavalry units.22
However, by this time the tsar was probably already concerned about the situation in Petrograd. His assessment, although not entirely accurate, was still closer to the truth than what could be read in the reports of his ministers. On the evening of the 26th, Khabalov received a telegram from the tsar, which said: “I command you to stop the riots in the capital tomorrow, which are unacceptable during the difficult time of the war with Germany and Austria.” The telegram was composed by the sovereign himself and sent without consultation with anyone. She led Khabalov into complete confusion. Even if we allow for some exaggeration of his testimony during interrogation at the Muravyov Commission, Khabalov’s testimony obviously quite accurately reflects his state after receiving the telegram. He told the commission:
This telegram, how can I tell you? - to be frank and truthful: she hit me hard... How to stop “tomorrow”... The Emperor commands to stop at all costs... What will I do? how can I stop? When they said, “Give me some bread,” they gave you some bread and that was it. But when the flags have the inscription “Down with autocracy” - what kind of bread will calm you down! But what to do? - The Tsar ordered: we must shoot... I was killed - positively killed! Because I did not see that this last resort that I would use would certainly lead to the desired result...
At approximately 10 pm on February 25, a meeting of responsible police and army officials was held, whose task was to maintain order in the capital, and Khabalov gave the order:
Gentlemen! The Emperor ordered the riots to stop tomorrow. This is the last resort, it must be used... Therefore, if the crowd is small, if it is not aggressive, not with flags, then you are given a cavalry detachment in each area - use the cavalry and disperse the crowd. Since the crowd is aggressive, with flags, then act according to the regulations, i.e. warn with a three-time signal, and after a three-time signal, open fire.
Later, when the decision was already made to dissolve the Duma, Khabalov made a report to the Council of Ministers.
February 26 was Sunday. The city, as before, was calm at night, there were no military patrols, and on Sunday morning the workers sat at home. However, the events of the past day forced the police authorities to gather the policemen, distribute them into platoons and arm them with rifles. In the morning, Khabalov reported to Mogilev that the city was calm. Shortly after noon, while this message was traveling to Headquarters, a serious uprising broke out, still concentrated on Znamenskaya and Kazan Squares. The riots did not last long and were suppressed by troops using firearms. There were many wounded and killed, although in the picture of Nevsky strewn with corpses, which we find not only in the fantastic description of Trotsky, but also in Sukhanov, there are many exaggerations.24
However, it is difficult to exaggerate the impression that the shooting made on the soldiers themselves. Over the past three days, they had been on the streets, seen the crowds, talked to the women and youth who had joined the demonstrators, and saw that their commanders were hesitant to resort to violence to disperse the crowds. When they were finally ordered to open fire on the same, mostly unarmed, crowd with which they had just fraternized, they were horrified, and there is no reason to doubt General Martynov’s assessment of the situation: “The overwhelming majority of the soldiers were indignant at the role they they had to play, suppressing the uprising, and shot only under duress."25 This especially applied to the training team of the Volyn regiment, which consisted of two companies; the unit had two machine guns, and it, on the orders of Major Dashkevich, was supposed to disperse the demonstration on Znamenskaya Square . As a result, the crowd fled, leaving forty dead and the same number wounded on the pavement.26
There were shootings, dead and wounded in many other places in the city, and by the evening of the 26th the police authorities, summing up in official jargon, could say that “order had been restored.”
In view of what happened the next day (Monday the 27th), it must be said that one incident on February 26th eclipses all clashes between police and demonstrators. We are talking about a revolt of soldiers in the Pavlovsk Guards Regiment. On Sunday, two companies were sent to patrol the streets and took part in the shelling. The officers probably had them quite under control, and there were no signs of insubordination. The demonstrators rushed to the Pavlovsky barracks, asking the reserve company of the regiment to come out and stop the shooting at the crowd carried out by the patrolling companies, after which some of the soldiers (in all likelihood, there was no officer control) poured out into the street with rifles, demanding an end to the bloodshed. The disorder continued until the officers appeared, began negotiations with the soldiers and then, with the help of the regimental chaplain, sent the soldiers back to the barracks.27 This incident was reported to Khabalov and the Minister of War Belyaev, and it naturally caused some consternation . Belyaev insisted on immediate measures and proposed immediately executing the rebels. Khabalov argued that the case should be considered by a military court. For now, the soldiers' weapons were taken away and they were locked in the barracks. It turned out that twenty-one rifles were missing. The soldiers seemed to be depressed and betrayed the instigators - nineteen people - who were arrested and sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Apparently, the incident was settled and did not affect the morale of the other companies. It was the Pavlovsky regiment that appeared on the 27th with weapons and an orchestra to defend the headquarters command of the district, when the troops almost lost control and many detachments of the Petrograd garrison “joined the people.” It is interesting to note that the Petrograd military authorities did not immediately inform Mogilev about the fact of the mutiny.
It now seems strange to us that this incident did not serve as a warning to the officers of other units guarding the city. This can be explained to some extent by the special conditions of service in the capital. A soldier in the Petrograd garrison served on average from six to eight weeks. A constant point of irritation was the issue of vacations. The idleness and boredom of the crowded barracks forced the soldiers to ask to go to the city, while the officers were mainly concerned with keeping them in the barracks, since it was difficult to keep track of them in the troubled waters of Petrograd life. The number of some companies reached one and a half thousand people; there were young recruits there - just boys, who had not yet taken the oath to the banner and the sovereign, there were also soldiers who had been at the front, who spent a lot of time in hospitals due to wounds or illness; this made everything boring, and the lack of discipline in the hospitals corrupted it. Among them were many Petrograd intellectuals who worked as soldiers in artillery factories, and through them some of the underground propaganda penetrated into the soldiers’ environment.28
The morale of the soldiers was greatly affected by the thoughtless and senseless manner in which they were used during the first three days of the street riots. In accordance with the developed plan to maintain and restore order in the capital, they were forced to stand for hours at strategic points, without being given specific instructions on what to do in the event of unrest. The soldiers understood that the authorities were reluctant to use firearms against the crowd. They also understood that the police, when they could not cope on their own, looked to them for help, which they were reluctant to provide because their relationship with the police was already strained.29
There was already contact between demonstrators and soldiers, and this sometimes led to troops siding with the demonstrators against the police. When the Tsar's order radically changed the situation and when, on the afternoon of the 26th, the troops were ordered to shoot at the demonstrators, they were naturally stunned. In the end, the crowd behaved as it always did when its behavior was tolerated. And yet, if we leave aside the incident in the Pavlovsky regiment, there were no clear cases of disobedience among the soldiers that day, and, as we have already noted, even the chairman of the Mezhrayonka Yurenev believed that the attempt to start a general revolutionary uprising had failed, that the army was against the rebels won't join.
§4. Mutiny of the Petrograd garrison.
At the moment when the radical and revolutionary intelligentsia was already losing faith in the success of their cause, a new factor came into play. The soldiers of the Volyn Regiment, who took part in the shooting on Znamenskaya Square on Sunday, February 26, did not sleep in their barracks, discussing what was happening. These were soldiers of two companies of the training team, and their commander, Captain Lashkevich, ordered to open fire on the crowd. One of the non-commissioned officers of the regiment, a certain Kirpichnikov, distinguished himself that day - he snatched a homemade bomb from the hands of one demonstrator and, with a sense of duty, handed it over to the police.
Kirpichnikov subsequently turned out to be the most energetic propagandist of “defencism” among the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison. In his account of what happened, Kirpichnikov describes Lashkevich as an unpopular officer, wearing gold glasses (note this symbol of wealth and intelligence), cruel, rude, insulting and bringing even old soldiers to tears, his nickname was “spectacled snake.”30
As the officers left the barracks, the soldiers gathered to talk about the day's events. They did not understand why they were ordered to shoot. Kirpichnikov does not report the details of the conversation that took place in the dark barracks, and even if he did, it would still give little, because reality turned into a legend before it had time to come true. There is nothing to suggest that the soldiers' sudden decision not to shoot at the demonstrators was prompted by revolutionary conviction. It was prompted rather by a natural disgust for everything that the most unpopular officer orders. At the same time, they were obviously aware of the risk they were exposed to by deciding to disobey. Whether this was the work of some representative of revolutionary groups or another secret organization, we do not know. Taking into account what follows, we cannot rule out this possibility. Kirpichnikov, whom the soldiers apparently considered the leader, was unlikely to be a member of such a group.
The situation became explosive the next morning, Monday the 27th, when the soldiers went out into the corridors of the barracks to line up and Lashkevich appeared. The first company of the training command greeted him as usual, and he made a short speech, explaining to the soldiers what their duty was, and quoting the sovereign's telegram. Then Kirpichnikov reported that the soldiers refused to go out into the street. According to Lukash, who reports Kirpichnikov’s words, what happened next was like this: The commander turned pale, recoiled and hurried to leave. We rushed to the windows, and many of us saw that the commander suddenly spread his arms wide and fell face down into the snow in the courtyard of the barracks. He was killed by a well-aimed random bullet!" When these lines were written, common sense had already been replaced in Russia by the fantastic logic of revolutionary rhetoric. The murder of Lashkevich is sometimes attributed to Kirpichnikov himself. The night before, the commander of the Pavlovsky regiment, Colonel Eksten, was killed at the door of the barracks, after being subdued mutinous company. Subsequently, officers were rarely killed by the soldiers they commanded. Generally speaking, it was the murder of the commander that had the most revolutionary effect on soldiers and sailors. This was the doctrine adopted by the Bolshevik Party and Lenin himself.31
Whoever killed Lashkevich, this brought more revolutionism into the consciousness of the soldiers of the Volyn Regiment than any propaganda. The soldiers suddenly felt that there was no return for them. From that moment on, their fate depended on the success of the rebellion, and this success could only be ensured if others immediately joined the Volyn regiment. After some hesitation and discussion on the training ground, the soldiers grabbed their rifles and rushed outside to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky and Moscow regiments. The news of the mutiny of the Volyn Regiment spread like fire through the streets, where, bypassing patrol posts, workers were already gathering from the outskirts to continue the demonstration that had begun the day before. Soldiers of the Volyn Regiment fired into the air and shouted that they supported the people. But very soon they ceased to be a single whole, mingling with the demonstrators and becoming part of the very crowd that was so characteristic of those days - unarmed, disheveled soldiers and armed workers in caps and even hats.
The officers of the rebel units were nowhere to be seen. On this decisive day, February 27, the behavior of the officers of the Petrograd garrison had great consequences. In most cases, they did not know their soldiers well, their authority was supported only by traditional discipline, to strengthen which there was no personal effort on their part. But even those who knew the soldiers well, who had advanced and even progressive views, like Colonel Stankevich, to whom we owe one of the first voluminous works on the revolution,32 immediately felt great personal danger when they heard that soldiers were killing officers in the barracks. In addition, many officers of the Petrograd garrison also succumbed to the propaganda of the press and public organizations and wanted negotiations with the Duma and immediate constitutional reform, no matter how late they were.33
The mutiny of the Volyn regiment, which quickly spread to other parts of the Petrograd garrison, was, of course, key event on this day - Monday 27 February. After the fall of the tsarist regime, in the intoxication of the first weeks, it seemed that the mutiny of the garrison was a manifestation of the will of the people for revolution. With the advent of the new government, it became an article of faith to believe that even in these first days (February 27 - March 2) any military unit faced with the alternative - to join the revolution or participate in its suppression - would enthusiastically join the people at the first opportunity. Events in Petrograd do not confirm this.
First of all, it is quite obvious that the government did nothing to raise the morale of those units that were ready to obey orders. On Monday, February 27, around noon, Minister of War Belyaev ordered General Zankevich to take under his command the remaining loyal parts of Petrograd to help General Khabalov, who had completely lost his head. Zankevich had at his disposal a large detachment, which he gathered on the square of the Winter Palace. The soldiers enthusiastically greeted his speech, in which he called on them to stand firm like a rock for the Tsar and the Fatherland. But after that, hours passed, and no order came; no one bothered to feed the patrol troops, and as dusk fell, the soldiers went to their barracks to have dinner. Along the way they were absorbed by the crowd.
Typically, neither Khabalov nor Belyaev knew which units they could count on. Thus, in the barracks of Sampsonievsky Prospekt there was a Samokatny battalion, consisting of ten companies - two rifle, four forming and four reserve. They had 14 machine guns at their disposal. The cyclists were literate people, they understood mechanics, but they later said that “a lot of petty-bourgeois elements had crept into their midst.” They were commanded by a very popular officer named Balkashin. When he ordered sentries around the barracks on February 27, the soldiers immediately obeyed him. He tried several times to contact the headquarters of the Petrograd Military District, but to no avail. Only at 6 o'clock in the evening did he decide to withdraw his company from the street and lock himself in the barracks. At night, he once again tried to contact headquarters, but the soldiers he sent did not return. He managed, however, to replenish the supply of ammunition by sending a cart to the battalion headquarters on Serdobolskaya Street. The Scooter Battalion put up vigorous resistance in its barracks, which were just wooden houses, on the morning of February 28th. When it became obvious that the barracks would be destroyed by machine gun and artillery fire, and Colonel Balkashin realized that it was impossible to break through, he decided to surrender. He ordered a ceasefire, left the barracks and addressed the aggressive crowd, saying that his soldiers were doing their duty and were innocent of the bloodshed and that he alone was responsible for ordering the soldiers to shoot into the crowd out of “loyal feelings.” In response, shots were fired, one bullet hit Balkashin’s heart, and he died immediately. This seems to have been the only case of exceptional bravery noted in Petrograd during these days.34
The case of the Samokatny Battalion35 shows what a determined and popular officer could have done if the headquarters of the Petrograd garrison had been less disoriented. The feelings of the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison were definitely divided, and, apparently, there was more than one occasion when they clearly did not want to be involved in actions that they considered a riot. The first memoirs of that time, published in the Soviet Union, reflect this fact, although later they began to constantly keep silent about it. For example, the worker Kondratyev, a member of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee, recalls in his memoirs36 how he went with the workers and rebels of the Volyn Regiment to the barracks of the Moscow Regiment, where several officers and lower ranks barricaded themselves in the officers' mess and fired at demonstrators across the training ground. Kondratyev and those who were with him burst into the barracks and saw that the soldiers were depressed, unarmed and did not know what to do. No exhortations from the revolutionaries had any effect. “Straining his vocal cords to the limit” and shouting until he was hoarse, Kondratiev set an ultimatum - if the soldiers did not support the “cause of the people,” the barracks would be immediately shelled by artillery. According to Kondratyev, this threat had an effect on the soldiers, and they took their rifles and went out into the street. This incident was undoubtedly typical of what happened that day in Petrograd; he explains why neither the self-appointed headquarters of the rebels (under the command of the Socialist Revolutionaries Filippovsky and the above-mentioned Mstislavsky-Maslovsky) nor the military commission of the Duma Committee (led by Colonel Engelhardt) had troops at their disposal for most of the day, although thousands of armed soldiers switched sides revolution. Soldiers who went out into the streets preferred to get lost in the crowd rather than remain visible in their units. They sold rifles to the highest bidder, decorated their greatcoats with scraps of red ribbons, and joined one demonstration or another, smashing police stations, opening prisons, setting fire to courthouses, and engaging in other forms of bloodless revolutionary activity.
The mutiny of the Petrograd garrison took the local military and civil authorities by surprise. It completely destroyed the system of maintaining order on which the government relied. When developing this system, the authorities believed that clashes would be limited to firefights between
soldiers and demonstrating workers. In this regard, the city was divided into sections, and a specific regiment was assigned to each. This system lost all meaning since the district headquarters no longer knew which units it could rely on. The reaction of the officers to the first news of the soldiers' mutiny shows the extent to which their instability, fed by propaganda, as well as newspaper and liberal verbiage, extended. The officers of the Volyn Regiment were completely confused. One of them described what happened at the regimental headquarters when the officers came to Colonel Viskovsky, the battalion commander.37 Having learned what had happened to Captain Dashkevich, Viskovsky began to confer with his adjutant. From time to time he went out to the officers who were waiting in the next room for orders and instructions. He asked about the details of what happened. The officers gave various advice and suggested calling the cadets. Such advice from subordinates went beyond what was accepted and was a violation of military discipline. Until 10 o'clock the rebels remained on the parade ground, apparently not knowing what to do next. At this point, the mutiny could have been suppressed, but the senior officer continued to hesitate and repeat to his subordinates that he believed that the soldiers would remain faithful to duty, come to their senses and hand over the instigators. When the mutinous company left the barracks yard, the battalion commander advised the officers to go home and left himself.
If we take into account the behavior of Colonel Viskovsky, then it is not surprising that it occurred to General Khabalov to turn to an officer of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, who came to Petrograd from the front and had a reputation as a loyal and energetic person. When Colonel Kutepov38 arrived at the city police headquarters, where General Khabalov was waiting for him, the soldiers of the Volshsky regiment had already reached the barracks of the Preobrazhensky regiment, killed the regimental commander and forced some of the soldiers to join them. Kutepov was appointed commander of the punitive expedition and received instructions to occupy the entire area from Liteiny Bridge to Nikolaevsky Station and restore order and discipline among all units located there. He was given a company from one of the Guards Regiments, hoping that he would gather reinforcements along the way.
Kutepov was in Petrograd for only a few days and knew nothing about the mood in the capital, even about the mood of the officers of his own Regiment. He had to get acquainted with the mood of the people under his command while moving along the crowded Nevsky to the intersection with Liteiny Prospekt. He found the moral state of the reserve guards regiment more or less satisfactory, which could not be said about the machine-gun company that he came across at the Alexandrinsky Theater. The soldiers did not respond to his greeting, and the company commander, the captain, reported to him that machine guns could not be used, since there was neither water nor glycerin.
When a rather motley crowd under the command of Kutepov reached the intersection of Nevsky and Liteiny, they were overtaken by an officer of the Preobrazhensky Regiment with the order of General Khabalov. He canceled the order given earlier and asked Kutepov to immediately return to the Winter Palace Square. Kutepov replied that he should not return the same way, he would return along Liteiny through the Field of Mars. This decision turned out to be fatal for Kutepov’s expedition. From that moment on, he lost contact with General Khabalov until the end of the day and spent a lot of time negotiating with the rebellious crowd on Liteiny and on the adjacent streets. For Khabalov, Kutepov seemed to have completely ceased to exist.
In his testimony to the Muravyov Commission, Khabalov describes this situation as follows:
And so a detachment consisting of 6 companies, 15 machine guns and one and a half squadrons, under the command of Colonel Kutepov, a heroic cavalier, was sent against the rebels demanding that they put down their weapons, and if they don’t put down, then, of course, act against them in the most decisive manner. .. Something impossible begins to happen on this day! ... Namely: the detachment was moved - moved by a brave, decisive officer. But he somehow left, and there were no results... There should be one thing: if he acts decisively, he would have to face this electrified crowd: organized troops should have crushed this crowd and driven this crowd into a corner towards the Neva , to the Tauride Garden...
After several attempts to contact Kutepov, Khabalov learned that he had been stopped on Kirochnaya Street and needed reinforcements. But the reinforcements sent must have dissolved along the way before reaching their destination.
Kutepov's report gives a clearer picture of how the street fighting continued. Turning his detachment from Nevsky to Liteiny, Kutepov met the rebels of the Volynsky regiment, who were joined by the Lithuanian Guards regiment. The soldiers of the Volyn Regiment seemed to be in great indecision, and one of the non-commissioned officers, on behalf of his comrades, asked Kutepov to line them up and take them back to the barracks. The only thing the soldiers were afraid of was execution for mutiny. Kutepov addressed the rebels, assuring them that those who join him will not be shot. The rebels rejoiced at this announcement and raised Kutepov in their arms so that everyone could hear his promise.
In the arms of the soldiers, I saw the entire street filled with standing soldiers (mainly the Lithuanian and Volyn Western Regiments), among whom were several civilians, as well as clerks of the General Staff and soldiers in artillery uniforms. I said in a loud voice: “Those people who are now pushing you to commit a crime against your sovereign and your homeland are doing it for the benefit of our German enemies, with whom we are fighting. Don’t be scoundrels and traitors, but remain honest Russian soldiers.
This appeal was not very well received. Some of the soldiers shouted: “We are afraid that they will shoot us.” There were also several shouts: “He’s lying, comrades! You will be shot!” Kutepov managed to repeat his promise that none of those who joined him would be shot. But, obviously, it was impossible to form the rebels of the two regiments into disciplined ranks, since Kutepov’s detachment immediately came under fire, and the rebels scattered. Time passed, Kutepovo soldiers began to complain of hunger. Kutepov bought bread and sausage on the way, but saved them for dinner. Meanwhile, the shooting intensified, and the number of wounded in Kutepov’s detachment grew.
Kutepov occupied the mansion of Count Musin-Pushkin, which housed the Red Cross of the Northern Front, and set up an improvised hospital there. He did not give up trying to contact the police headquarters - with the city administration - but Khabalov had already transferred to the Admiralty without notifying Kutepov about this.
Kutepov lost many officers in the battles. While he was unsuccessfully trying to reach headquarters by phone, a crowd filled Liteiny Prospekt. It was getting dark and demonstrators were smashing street lights.
Twilight gave way to complete darkness, and Kutepov’s detachment almost stopped organized resistance, Kutepov himself realized this when leaving Musin-Pushkin’s house:
When I went out into the street, it was already dark, and the entire Liteiny Prospekt was filled with a crowd that, pouring out from all the alleys, screamed and extinguished the lamps. Among the screams, I heard my last name, accompanied by vulgar abuse. Most of my squad mixed with the crowd, and I realized that my squad could no longer resist. I entered the house and, ordering the doors to be closed, gave the order to feed the people with the sieve bread and sausage that had been prepared for them. Not a single unit sent lunch to its people.39
Red Cross personnel asked Kutepov to remove all healthy soldiers from the house in order to preserve its integrity as an infirmary. Kutepov could only obey. Thus ended the only attempt by the Petrograd military authorities to clear part of the center of the capital. But the excitement of the crowd also apparently weakened, and it began to disperse. The victory of the revolutionaries was achieved by unorganized and unmanaged workers and soldiers, without any intervention from revolutionary headquarters.
This is how Nikolai Sukhanov saw this scene described by Kutepov, walking along Liteiny Prospekt around this time with the Bolshevik Shlyapnikov and another comrade;
Already at dusk we went out to Liteiny, near the place where in a few hours there had been a skirmish between the tsarist and revolutionary troops. To the left the District Court was burning. Near Sergievskaya there were cannons with their muzzles pointed in uncertain directions. Behind them stood, in my opinion, in disarray, shell boxes. Some semblance of a barricade was immediately visible. But it was crystal clear to every passerby: neither guns nor barricades would protect anyone or anything from the slightest attack. The Lord knows when and why they got here, but there were almost no servants or defenders around them. Groups of soldiers, however, were nearby. Others were giving orders, giving orders, shouting at passers-by. But no one listened to them.
Sukhanov conveys his impression as follows:
Seeing this picture of the revolution, one would despair. But it was impossible to forget the other side of the matter: the tools that were at the disposal of the revolutionary people were, however, in their hands helpless and defenseless from any organized force; but tsarism did not have this power.40
Sukhanov is right in saying that on the evening of February 27 there was neither organized resistance on the part of the government nor organized leadership on the part of the revolutionaries. But Sukhanov, like many other chroniclers of this time, does not indicate the reasons why there were no organized government forces. Numerous incidents that took place on this day indicate that many of the officers commanding units of the Petrograd garrison were not inclined to take repressive measures against the demonstrators, and the soldiers under their command were experiencing some kind of anxiety. To a certain extent this alarm was justified, not so much because of the general bitterness of soldiers against officers, but because of the noticeable tendency of demonstrators to seize and kill officers in the streets, while avoiding armed confrontations with soldiers. There were many wounded and killed among officers and non-commissioned officers, although most of the officers were either at home due to illness or discussing the political situation in officer meetings. The Duma's cunning propaganda achieved its goal. The impending change of regime seemed so inevitable to most officers that they did not want to spoil their reputation by finding themselves on the side of the vanquished at a critical moment. Khabalov realized that many of his officers wanted him to contact representatives of the Duma and use the authority of the opposition to restore order in the garrison. And although such generals as Khabalov and Belyaev remained faithful to the oath, their will to resist was paralyzed by the fear of meeting open resistance from their subordinates, and they failed to organize even those few units that, such as the Samokatny Battalion, were ready to obey the order.
The rebels, that is, the soldiers who left their barracks to mingle with the crowd, according to Sukhanov, numbered only 25,000 people out of 160,000 believed to be in the garrison. But the remaining “neutral” units were poorly equipped and had no experience at all in suppressing uprisings in a big city. As is clear from the quoted memoirs, an important problem was the nutrition of the soldiers patrolling the streets. Nothing was done to establish boundaries beyond which neither crowds nor demonstrations would be allowed.
§ 5. Crash.
On the evening of the 27th, almost all the units at Khabalov’s disposal between the Admiralty and the Winter Palace went to the barracks for dinner. Making their way through the crowded streets and pushing between the demonstrators, the mass of soldiers dissolved in the crowd, and the few who reached the barracks were unable and unwilling to return to the Winter Palace. Khabalov's detachment became smaller and smaller. It is characteristic that before leaving, some of the soldiers asked the officers to forgive their desertion; they said that they did not wish harm to the officers, but they must think about their own safety. With Khabalov in the Admiralty there remained an ominously dwindling handful of their abandoned and disgraced commanders.
Late at night, General Zankevich insisted on moving the headquarters from the Admiralty to the Winter Palace.41 The soldiers scattered throughout the huge building, the officers settled down for the night. It was then that General Khabalov decided to declare a state of siege in Petrograd and printed posters briefly announcing this. This decision met with the full support of Prince Golitsyn, who wanted to introduce a state of siege in the city in order to free the government from all responsibility, thus completely shifting responsibility to the military authorities. But since there was no glue at the headquarters, the posters could not be put up, and Khabalov ordered them to be scattered along the streets, where they were caught by the wind and trampled into the snow by the crowd.
There were even more pitiful things: one of the generals, coming to the Winter Palace, asked for a cup of tea. He was told that the palace administration had ordered that tea should not be served until eight o'clock in the morning. Fortunately, one of the palace servants offered the general a cup of tea prepared in his private apartment.
But the cup of humiliation has not yet overflowed. The tired soldiers had barely warmed up, and the generals had barely fallen asleep on their poorly made beds, when a new difficulty arose. Grand Duke Michael spent the evening at the Mariinsky Palace, where the last, historic meeting of the government took place and at the last minute, with the participation of Rodzianko, a plan to save the monarchy was developed. Now the Grand Duke returned to the Winter Palace in irritation, having just received a mild reprimand from his brother for his unsolicited interference. He tried to go to his country palace, but, since the trains were not running, he decided to spend the night in Zimny, where he found the defenders of the regime thinned out. At approximately 3 o'clock in the morning on February 28, he called generals Khabalov and Belyaev and asked them to withdraw units from the palace, because he did not want the troops to fire; crowd from the Romanov house.
The action of the Grand Duke is easily explained. He saw how the government created by his brother collapsed at the last meeting of the Council of Ministers. His selfless proposal to take full responsibility upon himself in order to resolve the crisis met with complete misunderstanding on the part of the sovereign. However, as second in line of succession to the throne, he faced the possibility, quickly becoming certain, that he would have to become regent for a child, his nephew, or perhaps take over the precarious throne himself. To associate one's name with unsuccessful repressions against the population of Petrograd meant giving up the chance to resolve the problem of the dynasty in an acceptable way.
The order to clear the palace in the middle of the night was the final blow for the generals. They moved back to the Admiralty, where on the morning of this day, February 28, it was decided to stop all actions. But even then there was no official surrender to the “enemy.” Khabalov probably did not know who to surrender to. The soldiers were ordered to hand over their weapons for safekeeping to officials of the Naval Ministry in the Admiralty building and calmly disperse to their barracks, while the officers went home.
It is amazing that while all these gloomy ceremonies were being performed in the Winter Palace in the darkness of the night from February 27 to 28, the streets of the capital were deserted, and it was quite possible, as the case of the Scooter Battalion shows, to supply the remaining units with everything necessary. And there was no significant armed guard at the point that became the headquarters of the revolution - i.e. at the Tauride Palace. Moreover, the Duma deputies, who were still in the building after a chaotic day, were worried that Khabalov might decide to march a mile or more from the Winter Palace and arrest them. There were rumors that he was preparing something, but nevertheless no one did anything, and could not do anything, to organize armed protection of the temporary Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which had already unauthorizedly entered one of the wings of the Tauride Palace.
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 10
2. See chap. 5. - A note from the Police Department was published in: Fleer, uk. op. (see note 21 to Chapter 1), pp. 259 ff.
3. See; Fleer, uk. cit., p. 327. - A somewhat tendentious description can be found in Balabanov (M. Balabanov. From 1905 to 1917. Mass workers' movement. M.-L., 1927, p. 340 et seq.).
4. See the article by V. Kayurov, in the magazine "Proletarian Revolution", 1923 No. 1 (13).
5. See chap. 2, § 2.
6. Karakhan, like other members of the group, joined the Bolsheviks in August 1917, and under Soviet power worked mainly in the diplomatic field. During the purges of 1936-1938. was accused of secret relations with the Germans and disappeared without trial.
7. Balabanov, uk. cit., p. 431.
8. "New Journal", XXXIV-XXXV, New York, 1953.
9. Yurenev recalls that “by the end of 1914, the “union” [another name for the “mezhrayonka”] sought to create a special military organization, and such an organization was actually created, although it was weak, but had extensive connections with the soldiers.” - I. Yurenev. The struggle for party unity. Petrograd, 1917.
10. See: V. Nabokov. Provisional government. APP, I, pp. 9-96. - P.N. Miliukov. Memoirs (1859-1917). New York, 1955, vol. 2, p. 328. - G.M. Katkov. German Foreign Office Documents on Financial Support to the Bolsheviks in 1917. "International Affairs", vol. 32, No. 2, Avril 1956, pp. 181-189. - Kerensky's comments on the said article by Katkov in the September issue of International Affairs, and there - Katkov's response.
11. See Ch. 5, §5.
12. It should be noted that Soviet historians of the labor movement, writing in the 1920s, carefully avoided mentioning who financed the strikes. Neither Balabanov, nor Fleer, nor any other author with whom we had the opportunity to consult, shed any light on this issue.
13. Shlyapnikov (“On the Eve of 1917”, M., 1920, p. 255) gives some information about the existence of Social Democratic groups that were not associated with the Petrograd Committee or the Bureau of the Central Committee. He writes: “Such groups of Social Democrats, which did not have permanent connections with the citywide organization, existed in large numbers in St. Petersburg. Some of these circles became isolated and closed themselves out of fear of provocateurs. I knew of two groups of workers who were not part of the network of St. Petersburg organizations for a long time due to distrust of Chernomazov [later exposed police agent]. These circles still carried out work, but due to their isolation from the local center, it was of a makeshift nature." To characterize their work, Shlyapnikov uses Lenin's term "handicraft", implying that it was relatively ineffective because it lacked the scientific Marxist method and connections with other organizations. Shlyapnikov did not even suspect that the success of the latest strikes and demonstrations was the merit of precisely such circles. 14, N.N. Sukhanov. Notes on the revolution. 7 volumes. Berlin, 1922-1923. volume I, page 30. 15. V. Zenzinov. February days. "New Journal", XXXIV-XXXV, New York, 1955.
16. S. Mstislavsky-Maslovsky. Five days. The beginning and end of the February Revolution. Berlin-Moscow, 1922, p. 12 (2nd ed.).
17. A. G. Shlyapnikov. Seventeenth year. 4 volumes, M., 1925-1931, vol. 1, p. 105.
18. SP. Melgunov. March days of 1917. Paris, 1961. Melgunov gives arguments why this legend is implausible. The confidence he expressed was recently confirmed in the memoirs of the Soviet writer Viktor Shklovsky, who himself climbed through attics in search of “protopopov’s machine guns.” Shklovsky confirms that he took part in many searches, but not a single machine gun was ever found. - V. Shklovsky. Lived once. "Banner", August 1961, No. 8, p. 196.
19. “The Fall...” (see note 6 to Chapter 3), vol. 1, p. 214.
21. Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. At combat posts of the February and October revolutions. Moscow, 1930, pp. 72 ff. - It may very well be that in reality there was more than Bonch-Bruevich tells in his memoirs, which were published after he stopped taking an active part in political life. These memories often only refer to facts, hint at them, and are not very particular about the details. Bonch-Bruevich attaches great importance to this seemingly random meeting with the Cossacks. Having said that the Cossack regiment had to be removed from Znamenskaya Square after the incident, Bonch-Bruevich concludes: “Here we were not dealing with Christian anti-militarism, but with open revolutionary and political actions of military units against the old regime, for the people and for fraternization with the people on the streets . At that moment it was the most important political action." At the time when the memoirs were published, a follower of Marx and a Bolshevik, such as Bonch-Bruevich, could not claim that such an important political action was provoked by his personal chance meeting with a religious group. But, knowing what a sophisticated intriguer, what a clever political manipulator Bonch-Bruevich was, we can conclude that his contacts with the Cossacks were not as accidental as he says, that it was from him that the embarrassing propaganda came, the object of which in the winter of 1916-1917 The Cossacks undoubtedly arrived in Petrograd. (For Bonch-Bruevich and Rasputin, see: Chapter 8, § 7; for the role he played in the publication of “Order No. 1”, see: Chapter 13, §3).
22. In his testimony to the Muravyov Commission, Khabalov mentions these measures, insisting that he was trying to avoid shelling of the crowd when dispersing the demonstrations. See: "The Fall...", volume I, pp. 187 ff.
23. Spiridovich, in his posthumously published book, sharply criticizes these instructions. In his opinion, it was not the military who should have decided whether to shoot or not. The police officer present on the spot was the only person competent to turn to the army for armed support at the right time. - Spiridovich, uk. op. (see note 1 to chapter 6), vol. 3, p. 100.
24. Sukhanov writes (cit. vol. 1, p. 5 3): “At about 1 o’clock, the infantry on Nevsky, as is well known, intensified rifle fire. Nevsky was covered with the bodies of innocent people who had nothing to do with what was happening. Rumors about this (?) quickly spread throughout the city. The population was terrorized. The revolutionary movement on the streets of the central part of the city was liquidated. By five o'clock in the afternoon it seemed that tsarism had won again and that the movement would collapse."
26. An eyewitness to the shooting on Znamenskaya Square was V.L. Burtsev, who described it in an interesting article in Birzhevye Vedomosti. See Burtsev's testimony in: "The Fall...", vol. I, pp. 291 et seq.
27. Another case when an officer of the Pavlovsk regiment died, see above ch. 10, § 4.
28. See Ch. 5, § 6 and ch. 10, § 2.
29. On the relationship between the police and the Petrograd garrison, see; A.Kondratiev. Memories of the underground work in Petrograd of the St. Petersburg organization of the RSDLP (b) in the period 1914-1917. "Red Chronicle", VII (1923), pp. 30 74.
30. Ivan Lukash. The uprising of the Volyn Regiment, the story of the first hero of the uprising, Timofey Kirpichnikov. Petrograd, 1917.
31. V. Lenin. Essays. (2nd and 3rd ed.), volume XIX, p. 351. (“Report on the 1905 Revolution”).
32. V.B.Stankevich. Memoirs 1914-1919. Berlin, 1920. In particular - page 66.
33. “It must be said that the mood of the officers, especially the Izmailovsky regiment, did not make it possible to rely on the fact that they would act energetically: they expressed the opinion that it was necessary to enter into negotiations with Rodzianko.” - Khabalov’s testimony in the Muravyov Commission. See: "The Fall...", volume 1, page 201.
35. The incident with the Samokatny Battalion is fully described by Martynov - “The Tsar’s Army in the February Coup,” p. 120. He quotes the documents at his disposal.
36. "Red Chronicle", VII (1923), p. 68.
37. Spiridovich. The Great War... - The Otrshok in question is contained in volume 3, on page 123. It contains a letter written to Spiridovich by one of the officers of the Volyn regiment.
38. Kutepov, in fact a decisive, even cruel man, subsequently played an important role in the White movement, commanded a corps under General Wrangel, in 1920 he was involved in the evacuation of whites from Crimea to Gaplipoli, in exile in Paris he headed the YuVS (Russian All-Military Union ). In January 1930, he was kidnapped, allegedly by Soviet agents, his further fate is unknown. This information is gleaned from memoirs written in 1926 and published in a collection of articles dedicated to Kutepov (General A.P. Kutepov. The first days of the revolution in Petrograd. Excerpt from memoirs. In; General Kutepov. Collection of articles. Paris, 1934); see also gene indications. Khabalov in: "The Fall...", vol. I.
39. General Kutepov, pp. 165, 169.
40. Sukhanov, uk. cit., volume 1, p. 97.
41. Zankevich believed that from a moral point of view it was preferable to “die defending the palace.” "The Fall...", volume I, page 202.
Katkov G.M. February revolution. Paris, YMCA-Press; reprint - M.: Russian way, 1997.
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1917, February 27 - armed uprising in Petrograd. The transition of soldiers of the Petrograd garrison to the side of the rebel population. Formation of the Temporary Committee of the State Duma and elections of the Petrograd Soviet. Victory in the elections to the Petrograd Soviet of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. By the beginning of 1917, the political situation in the country had worsened. The extremely tense atmosphere of political struggle put forward a new means: a coup! But fate decreed otherwise.
Before the expected coup, according to Albert Tom’s definition, “the sunniest, most festive, most bloodless Russian revolution began...” Preparations for the revolution, directly or indirectly, had been going on for a long time. The most diverse elements took part in it: the German government, which spared no expense on socialist and defeatist propaganda in Russia, especially among the Petrograd workers; socialist parties that organized their cells among workers and military units; the proto-popovsky (police) ministry, which provoked street protests in order to suppress it with armed force and thereby defuse the unbearably thick atmosphere.
It was as if all the forces, with diametrically opposed motives, in different ways and means, were moving towards one ultimate goal. But, nevertheless, the uprising broke out spontaneously, taking everyone by surprise. The first outbreaks began on February 23, when crowds of people clogged the streets, rallies gathered, and speakers called for a fight against the hated government. This continued until the 26th, when the popular movement assumed enormous proportions and bloody clashes began with the police, using machine guns. In the morning, the reserve battalions of the Lithuanian, Volyn, Preobrazhensky and Sapper Guards regiments went over to the side of the rebels (the real Guards regiments were on the Southwestern Front).
The troops took to the streets without officers, merged with the crowd and accepted its psychology. An armed crowd, intoxicated by freedom, walked through the streets, joining more and more crowds, sweeping away barricades. Officers encountered were disarmed and sometimes killed. The armed people took possession of the arsenal of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Crosses (prison). On this decisive day there were no leaders, there was only one element. In its formidable course there was no goal, no plan, no slogans. The only common expression was the cry: “Long live Liberty!”
Someone had to master the movement. And this role was assumed by the State Duma. The center of the country's political life became the Duma, which, after its patriotic struggle against the government hated by the people, and after much fruitful work in the interests of the army, enjoyed widespread success throughout the country and the army. This attitude towards the Duma gave rise to the illusion of the “nationwide” Provisional Government. Therefore, military units approached the Tauride Palace with music and banners, and according to all the rules of the old ritual, they welcomed the new government in the person of the Chairman of the State Duma Rodzianko.
At the same time, the village was destitute.
A series of difficult mobilizations took away her working hands. The instability of prices and the lack of trade with the city led to the stoppage of the supply of grain, famine reigned in the city and repression in the countryside. Due to the huge rise in prices and insecurity, the serving class was in poverty and grumbled. Public thought and the press were under censorship control. It is therefore not surprising that Moscow and the provinces joined the coup almost without a fight. Outside Petrograd, where, with some exceptions, there was not that horror of bloody clashes and the outrage of an intoxicated crowd, the coup was greeted with great satisfaction and even jubilation.
Number of victims: 11,443 people killed and wounded in Petrograd, including 869 military officials. On March 2, the Provisional Committee of State Duma members announced the creation of the Provisional Government. On March 7, the Provisional Government decided to “recognize the abdicated Emperor Nicholas II and his wife as deprived of liberty and deliver the abdicated emperor to Tsarskoye Selo.” The Provisional Government agreed to the departure of Nicholas II to England. But this was prevented by the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, under whose supervision the emperor began to be.
The uprising of the Tsarskoye Selo garrison became one of the brightest episodes of the February days of the city. However, little attention was paid to this event on the pages of historical publications. First of all, this was due to the insufficient development of the research source base, represented mainly by individual eyewitness accounts and fragmentary memoirs of contemporaries.
Prerequisites for the emergence of a revolutionary situation in the imperial residence
A favorable environment for the development of the revolution in Tsarskoe Selo became, and by this time there were, according to the information of the assistant palace commandant, about 40 000 lower ranks and officers of numerous reserve units.
By the beginning of 1917, it included reserve battalions of four guards rifle regiments, reserve hundreds and teams, and a division of the 1st reserve heavy; In addition, the 343rd Novgorod foot squad of the state militia (about 1000 people) was stationed in the village of Kuzmino.
Colonel of the reserve battalion of the Life Guards of the 2nd Tsarskoye Selo Rifle Regiment V. N. Matveev recalled: “The reserve battalion of the regiment consisted of four companies and various types of teams... The number of the reserve company of the battalion was about 1000 lower ranks, and the total number of the reserve battalion with all teams and non-combatants reached eight thousand. For this enormous number of soldiers there were absolutely insufficient number of officers, and even then mostly those assigned to the battalion of warrant officers, who had neither service experience nor authority, who did not wear a regimental uniform and... did not have time to imbue with regimental traditions. The majority of career officers were at the front".
One of the reasons for the growing discontent among the lower ranks of the reserve battalions on the eve of the revolution was deterioration of nutrition and supply. Beginning in the fall of 1916, daily allowance standards were reduced and three fasting days a week were introduced.
Colonel of the reserve battalion of the Life Guards of the 2nd Tsarskoye Selo Rifle Regiment N. L. Artabalevsky wrote in his diary in February 1917:
“I was at the riflemen’s dinner. The food is bad, as it has been for a long time. The cabbage soup is undercooked and liquid. The meat is tough. Portions are incomplete. Today they cook lentils instead of porridge, which are very unimportant and unclean. In my opinion, this is bad. Bad food can lead to dissatisfaction. The lack of boilers forces the shooters to hurry with lunch...
In the company premises there are arrows stuffed far beyond normal. Bunks in two rows. Dressed disgustingly. Some don’t even have a shirt, and the lice eat them up.” The several-fold increase in the number of lower ranks in reserve battalions gave rise to problem of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.
The city of Tsarskoe Selo continued to live for some time by inertia its usual life, not entirely peaceful - Russia was at war for the third year, but not yet realizing that in a few days the life of its inhabitants, and the city itself, would change beyond recognition once and for all.....
Early February 1917
At the beginning of February 1917, the training teams of the reserve battalions, in which the most zealous riflemen were trained, received orders to remain in constant combat readiness in the event of possible protests by approximately 12,000 Kolpino workers.
Such protests were not expected in Tsarskoe Selo due to the lack of large factories, disorganization and political indifference of approximately 2000-3000 artisans of the Palace Department.
On February 15, 1917, the Guards naval crew arrived from the front to strengthen the security of the Alexander Palace, where the family of Emperor Nicholas II was located.
Diary of Alexandra Fedorovna: "Olga and Anastasia got measles... they got it from a little cadet, Baby's friend."
“At about four o’clock I arrived in Tsarskoe Selo. Under the snow cover the city seemed especially elegant. Court carriages with coachmen in red liveries gave everything a festive look. The snow-covered boulevards looked fabulous. Silence and tranquility everywhere.
After making several visits and seeing former subordinates, I found myself in a family. There, as in many other Tsarskoye Selo families, the cult of Their Majesties reigned. He himself held a good position and, in addition, was the head of one of Her Majesty's trains. His wife worked at the Empress Hospital. Now the Queen is completely absorbed in the illness of her children.
The Alexander Palace really looked like a hospital back then. In the rooms of the Heir and Vel. The curtains of the princesses are drawn, twilight reigns. The Heir and the two eldest Vel. The princesses temperature is above 39. The younger princes Maria and Anastasia Nikolaevna care for the sick and are proud that they are “sisters of mercy” and help the Tsarina. The Tsarina keeps up everywhere. The Heir’s situation is difficult. Olga and Tatyana Nikolaevna are feeling very good. They are even cheerful. Sent officer Rodionov, lilies of the valley from the Guards Crew, brought true pleasure to the patients.
At the other end of the palace, Anya (A. A. Vyrubova), so beloved by the royal family, lies in the heat. Her temperature is over 40. Several doctors have been to see her. “Aklina” is on duty there. V.K. Maria and Anastasia Nikolaevna go there on duty twice a day. Lilies of the valley were also sent there. These lilies of the valley were almost the last smile of the old regime to the Tsar’s children. No one suspected this that day, They hid the truth from the children. V. The princesses were happy. The queen strictly forbade telling the sick about the riots.
The Empress in the costume of a sister of mercy is sometimes seen by children, sometimes by Anya. She manages everything and takes care of the sick herself. The queen was so busy with the sick that she was not even able to personally listen to General Groten, who went to Protopopov for news. The queen instructed her friend to listen to the general. Protopopov sent a letter that yesterday the situation was worse, today it is better, good arrests have been made, “The main leaders and Lelyanov have been brought to justice for speeches in the City Duma. That in the evening the ministers discussed taking energetic measures for tomorrow and that they all hope that tomorrow (i.e. Monday. A.S.) everything will be calm." So frivolously Protopopov lied and reassured the Empress, but the Empress reported this information to the Sovereign , taking them at face value.
After breakfast, the Empress was with Maria Nikolaevna at the Sign. We drove to Rasputin's grave. There was already a rather tall log house above it. A. A. Vyrubova built a chapel. We drove to the village. Aleksandrovka, talked with Mesoedov-Ivanov, Khvoshchinsky and other officers. Returning to the palace, the Queen walked around the sick. Everyone's fever increased. Measles is in full swing. The Tsarina wrote a letter to the Emperor, Her Majesty reported all the reassuring information that Protopopov had sent. She wrote how she prayed at Rasputin’s grave and sent a piece of wood from his grave, where she was kneeling.
“... It seems to me that everything will be fine,” the Queen wrote, “the sun is shining so brightly and I felt such calm and peace at his dear grave. He died to save us."... In such a serene mood, the Tsarina received N.F. Burdukov after sending the letter. He had asked for an urgent appointment the day before. He had an appointment for today. Well aware of what was happening, Burdukov decided to warn the Tsarina. He was not bound by official discipline. He is a journalist. You can’t write to Vyrubova - she’s sick. Upset, without even changing his usual gray suit, this time he walked into the palace in an unusual way. They didn’t even do the usual questioning at the gate. Confusion is visible. The palace is deathly quiet .Unpleasant.
He was led into the salon. The Empress came out dressed as a nurse. She offered her hand and offered to sit down. The queen seemed to have sunk, grown old, and turned grey. Worried, Burdukov portrayed the situation in the capital as hopeless and catastrophic. The queen listened calmly and said that she was waiting for a report from. Burdukov begged to leave with the children anywhere, but to leave. The queen calmly answered that she was with the sick. She is now a nurse. She alone must run from one patient to another. It seemed that tears were shining in the Queen’s eyes, but she tried to be calm. Burdukov tried to continue, but the Empress stood up. With pride, she said in a firm voice:
- “I believe in the Russian people. I believe in his common sense. In his love and devotion to the Emperor. Everything will pass and everything will be fine."
The audience is over. Having kissed Her Majesty's hand, Burdukov left the palace. He was depressed. However, by evening, the Queen's optimism was shaken. At midnight, the Tsarina sent the first alarming telegram to the Emperor, which she ended with the words: “I’m very worried about the city.”
Half an hour later we were already talking. I began by asking the general to pay attention to the fact that I allowed myself to get into his office in his private apartment, that the gendarme Kurguzkin let me through to the telephone. This alone, I said, shows how alarming the situation is here. I told the general about the situation in Petrograd and that the Department was boasting about the arrests it had made. I suggested that the Department did not know what was really going on; that the Duma must be dissolved and unrest suppressed by armed force, but I added that for this it is necessary that the OWNER be here. There will be an owner here, everyone will do their job properly. It will be bad without the Master.
Come, Your Excellency, quickly, come, come. v kindly thanked me for the information and we said goodbye. Having thanked Kurguzkin, I returned to General V. We sat down for lunch. Everyone was in a good mood. Calm reigned in Tsarskoe Selo."
“In the Tsarskoye Selo Palace, the 27th was the first day when the Empress finally understood the seriousness of the events taking place in Petrograd. Trying to appear calm, the Tsarina was very worried. The heir was worse. News of the military riots struck the Tsarina. The loyalty of the troops always seemed to her beyond doubt. And suddenly, riots.
At 11:12 a.m. the Tsarina sent the first alarming telegram that day: “The revolution yesterday assumed terrifying proportions. I know that other units also joined. The news is worse than ever. Alice." At 1:50 am she telegraphed: “Concessions are necessary. Strikes continue. Many troops have gone over to the side of the revolution. Alice." At 9:50 pm she telegraphed: “Lily spent day and night with us; there were no strollers or motors. The District Court is on fire. Alice". Those around were in great alarm. The telephone news was terrible. But they tried not to disturb the Empress. Still, none of those who were with Her Majesty foresaw the approaching catastrophe.
On February 27, Kirill Vladimirovich sent two companies of the Guards crew to the strike group of troops loyal to the Tsar, which guarded the Winter Palace and the Admiralty, but the Guards sailors sided with the rebels and participated in the arrests of figures in the Tsarist government.
“As soon as we received gratitude,” testified non-commissioned officer N.P. Kuznetsov, we immediately, in a small group of the most conscientious soldiers, rushed to the teahouse where we always gathered, and decided that we needed to wash away the shame of this gratitude. Voices full of despair began to be heard: “We are traitors!” That’s why they thank us because they went to shoot their brothers!”
By order of the battalion commander, Colonel A.I. Giuliani, the training team surrounded the disgruntled riflemen, and then opened fire on them to kill. The rebels retreated to the barracks and continued their resistance, dismantled their weapons and ammunition, a mounted platoon rode out, and the military orchestra played “La Marseillaise” and the regimental machine-gun team opened fire on the training unit, which fled along with the officers.
: The rebels argued that because of the snowfall, the tanks should turn back to Petrograd halfway. As for the regiments located in Tsarskoye Selo, things did not go so well: the snowfall did not cancel their intentions. The First and Second Guards Rifle Regiments succumbed to the agitation of the Petrograd leadership. The fourth regiment, the Imperial, conjured by its officers, resisted for a long time, but in the end also filled the streets.
So, At about three o'clock in the afternoon on February 28, 1917, the uprising of the Tsarskoye Selo garrison began.
Took command of the reserve battalion Staff Captain F.V. Aksyuta, and his deputy was ensign, Bolshevik I.P. Pavlunovsky. The rebels moved towards the division of the 1st reserve heavy artillery brigade, which joined them. Having captured a three-inch battery from the division's arsenal, we then headed to the barracks of the reserve battalions of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th regiments. So this “revolutionary avalanche” rolled on, taking with it one part after another without much resistance.
“A crowd of two thousand armed riflemen,” Colonel N.A. Artabalevsky wrote in his diary, “illuminated by a few lanterns, hummed, rumbled, threatened and worried during this dark night. There was a sense of horror about her, like a wild animal unleashed from its chain. These gray figures did not seem like people to me, but like wild, poisoned animals, ready and capable of the worst. The element of hell! And at that moment there was no opportunity to throw a chain on this enraged beast... The shooters, incited and incited by dark agitators, were taken over by the animal instincts of rebellion and reckless, the most mischievous and reckless revelry.”
The rebel masses were not organized, and the movement was homogeneous. There was no plan for the performance, and as soon as the first goal - attracting those who had not yet rebelled - was achieved, the crowd scattered in different directions.
Some of the rebels decided to go to, where they demanded from the administration to release the prisoners, but were refused. Taking advantage of the logs lying here, the rebels broke through the gates, broke into the building, burned the papers of the office, freed the prisoners, among whom was the famous one, and put the chief and guards in cells.
Then the prisoners who had just been released from prison, along with some of the rebel soldiers, decided to celebrate the acquisition of freedom and began to rob shops and break into wine cellars: “There is a large crowd of people near Lisitsyn’s store, but mostly soldiers. The store had already been smashed and looted, and only wine was still left in the basement, which the crowd continued to plunder... Everyone was drunk, everyone was excited, everyone was armed. Several people sit in the basement and serve wine through a small window... Those who are already drunk enough take the wine with them, those who can still drink drink it here. There are no corkscrews. To open the wine, break the neck of the bottle. Lips, gums and hands are cut by shards of broken bottles. Excited red faces are stained with blood and halva crumbs.”
The other part of the rebels, more conscious, returned back to the barracks to discuss the current situation, disperse the robbers and take away the loot. The soldiers chose leaders from among themselves, and, as a rule, their own former platoon commanders. Patrols were urgently organized to restore calm and protect stores, and armored cars with posters drove through the streets: “Comrades, stop the robberies! You are now free citizens! Attempts to move the looting to the center of Tsarskoe Selo were prevented.
That day Gleb did not go to the house, and we spent him together at the window. What was happening was terrible. The soldiers, screaming, robbed shops and stores, always starting where there was wine and vodka. Since the beginning of the war, vodka has not been sold freely, and a new category of townspeople appeared, the so-called “politournye” - because of their addiction to polish made from alcohol. A well-worn motif advised: “Vanya, don’t drink varnish, then you’ll have money for Saturday evening.” Already from early morning the soldiers were completely drunk. Were these the same people we admired a few months ago? Now it was a gang of thieves, ragged, impudent, animals... They wandered around; some loaded with bottles of vodka and cognac, others with huge rolls of materials, boots, shoes pulled out of cardboard boxes, which were immediately thrown away. Their hats were decorated with colorful ribbons hanging around their heads, giving them the appearance of circus horses.
In this chaotic human crowd, sometimes there were women in headscarves holding children’s hands.
Trucks full of drunken military men tried to make their way through, honking loudly. Everyone walked with numerous billboards with slogans: “Death to the rich! Power to us!”
Suddenly, from somewhere under your feet, a goose appeared, running like crazy on its red paws.
Suddenly we saw Cossacks from His Majesty's personal escort. They drove by, magnificent as always, only on their caps, on beautiful shape and on the manes of horses - they were everywhere red cockades and red bows! They drove by, smiling at the motley crowd. I was outraged. They truly deserved the gallows. The endless trust and extraordinary comfort that they enjoyed during the Tsar’s service - how could all this be forgotten in one day!?
The most radical group of rebels called for moving to the Alexander Palace. “Our task was,” recalled a participant in the events, a soldier of the 1st Infantry Regiment M. Ya. Russians, “to remove the royal guard from standing guard in the palace, to prevent the escape of the royal family.”
At about eight o'clock in the evening on February 28, separate groups of rebels led by Staff Captain F.V. Aksyuta and the regimental priest Father Ruport, shouting “Hurray” and singing “La Marseillaise,” headed towards the fence of Alexander Park. But, as participants in the uprising testified, calls to go to the palace “did not meet with the sympathy of sufficient masses,” and at the first return shots, “units scattered in different directions,” and some returned to the barracks.
On February 28, the reserve battalion of the 1st Tsarskoe Selo Rifle Guards Regiment rose up, soon uniting with soldiers of other regiments stationed in Tsarskoe Selo and the 1st Heavy Artillery Battery. Having freed political prisoners from prison, the rebel troops moved to the Alexander Palace.
On the evening of February 28, soldiers of the reserve battalion of the 1st Infantry Regiment with red banners approached the gates of the Alexander Palace. Here, at the command of General Reis, they were met with guns at the ready by Cossacks, sailors of the guards crew, and soldiers of two companies of the combined regiment.
: “On the evening of February 28, as soon as it began to get dark, an alarm sounded in the town located next to the town, and a few minutes later several hundreds of Cossacks galloped through the yard of the Town, three in a row. I rushed after the galloping horsemen. I ran out through the second gate of the Town and saw a walking The consolidated regiment walked at a quick pace. The soldiers walked, holding rifles in their hands. The convoy and the consolidated regiment disappeared into the main gates of the Alexander Palace.
Then someone called on the phone and told my father that the wine cellar in the Tsarskoye Selo hotel was being destroyed. After some time, in Sofia, where the reserve regiments were stationed, increasing gunfire was heard. My father went out onto the porch, listened, and called a car to send my brother and me to grandfather Fyodor Konstantinovich. We spent only one night with grandfather and returned to Gorodok in the morning. I have the most chaotic memories of subsequent events.
Several times my father drove a car to the office of the palace commandant, where his deputy held meetings. The Empress stated that all her children were sick, she considered herself a sister of mercy, and the palace a hospital and forbade the guards from any military operations.
The soldiers of the Consolidated Regiment and the Cossacks of the convoy, alerted and placed in the basements of the palace, not receiving any orders and not knowing what was happening outside the palace, are languishing in the unknown and want to return to the barracks.
The air defense artillery soldiers said that if the palace guards fired, they would open artillery fire on the palace. At the meeting, he said that their commander, Colonel Maltsev, who was always red, was at the same time with them.
There was a rumor that workers were coming from Kolpino to seize the Alexander Palace...."
There is anxiety and commotion in the palace. At the very first rumors about the unrest that had begun in the city, the Chief Marshal came to the palace with his wife, a cavalry lady. He arrived with his assistant, General Dobrovolsky. In addition to the people who usually lived in the palace, there were: Count Apraksin, who was under Her Majesty, and the aide-de-camp Count Zamoyski. The latter happened to be in Tsarskoe Selo in those days and, seeing the danger for the Royal Family, considered it his duty, as His Majesty’s aide-de-camp, to appear at the disposal of the Empress. The gesture is amazingly beautiful. The only one in those days.
On February 28, 1917, at nine o’clock in the evening, two companies of the Consolidated Regiment, two hundred Convoy, a company, an air guard battery (two anti-aircraft guns on vehicles and two companies of the Guards crew from the village of Aleksadrovka were called to alarm. At first, the moral decay did not affect the imperial security. The posts at all services were still checked. But the palace was completely isolated from the outside world, and gradually unrest began in the security units.
"General Ivanov appeared at the Tsarskoye Selo station with a detachment of St. George's Knights. He printed an appeal to the population of Petrograd in Burovkova's printing house calling for an end to the unrest, introduced himself to the Empress, and then suddenly disappeared somewhere with his St. George's Knights.
The rector of the Feodorovsky Cathedral served a prayer service in the courtyard.
A hundred convoys stationed in Petrograd to guard the Dowager Empress went over to the side of the revolution.
The officers of the Consolidated Regiment do not know what to do. There is no order to remove the post at Rasputin’s grave and at the same time it is somehow inconvenient to post it.”
During the revolution, I was shell-shocked in Tsarskoe Selo in Volters Infirmary No. 12. On February 28, I returned to Tsarskoe Selo. I called Colonel Tsirg and asked to be allowed into the palace - he was refused. I went to the palace wanting to meet the captain. Kologrivov (4th Infantry Regiment - served in the Consolidated settlement), did not meet. Near the gate in the evening he was noticed by the Empress, was called by Her, stayed with Her for about 1 hour, and saw Vel. Princesses Maria Nikolaevna, Anastasia Nikolaevna and Her Majesty said little, she was shocked, there was complete bewilderment about the events and their scope, she was completely in control of herself, and regretted that our regiment was not in Tsarskoye Selo. (For about three weeks, the regiment commander asked Her to call the regiment. She replied: “I myself know when the time will come,” She reported this with regret). She (I know from Den) had hope for the armored division stationed in Petrograd. I know, it seems from Den, that before the revolution, Gen. Gurko greatly reassured the Empress. That time when I saw Her Majesty, She did not know where the Emperor was, there was no rumor of abdication; asked to say hello to the regiment, asked personally about the officers. I didn’t know Solovyov then.
According to the memoirs, “the rebels... killed a sentry 500 steps from the palace. The gun shots were getting closer and closer, a collision seemed inevitable.” All security units were immediately called to the Alexander Palace. By order of the commander of the combined infantry regiment, they occupied the park fence line for defense, and installed anti-aircraft battery guns opposite. Two companies of the regiment were located on the site in front of the palace, another detachment was located in the front rooms, and parts of the convoy, the guards crew and the railway regiment were in the basements.
The rebels fired only one shell at the palace, which, flying over the roof, fell in the garden without exploding. There was no further shelling. The military authorities of the palace, realizing that any clash between the parties was dangerous for the life of the Royal Family, entered into negotiations with the rebels. The rebels said that if the guard troops started shooting, they would destroy the palace with heavy artillery. The rebels were told that the guard troops would not be the first to start shooting, but if the garrison tried to attack, they would receive a decisive rebuff. From the garrison they suggested that the Palace Guard be sent to the State. Duma of parliamentarians, and until their return establish a neutral zone between the parties.
For the safety of the Royal Family, the authorities decided to send delegates - envoys to the Duma. Representatives from all units were quickly appointed. The tablecloth is torn and made for all the delegates white armbands. Camions were served and the deputation left for Petrograd amid shouts of cheers. The departure of the deputation had a calming effect on the rebels. Those responsible for protecting the Royal Family breathed more freely.
Random shooting was heard in the distance. A glow could be seen from Sofia's side.
And night had already fallen outside. The frost was getting stronger. The soldiers were getting cold. The officers encouraged them. The adjutant of his own regiment spoke especially well and successfully at that time, encouraging the soldiers with the speedy return of the Sovereign. Everything will change immediately.
At 10 pm the Empress actually received a telegram from the Sovereign with the message: “I hope to be at home tomorrow morning.”
The queen informed her retinue. Everyone cheered up. The soldiers rejoiced. They let it be known from the palace that the Empress would come out to the troops. Everything shook. By order, the officers warned the soldiers not to respond loudly to Her Majesty's greeting. Everyone looks at the high porch, entrance number one. Suddenly the wide doors opened. Two elegant footmen, holding high silver candelabra with candles, stood on either side. The Empress appeared with V.K. Maria Nikolaevna. A quiet command was heard to the troops.
The calm and majestic Empress quietly descended the marble steps, holding her daughter by the hand. Following Her Majesty were: Count Apraksin, Count Zamoyski and several other persons. There was something fabulous in this extraordinary exit of the Russian Empress to the troops, at night, under the flickering light of candelabra, into a park covered with a snowy shroud... Complete silence. Only the snow creaks underfoot. Shooting can be heard from a distance. From the side of Petrograd and Sofia there is a glow. The Empress slowly walked around row after row, nodding with a smile to the soldiers. The soldiers silently and enthusiastically followed the Queen with their eyes. The Empress quietly said something to many of the officers: “How cold, what a frost”... The Grand Duchess, a real Russian beauty, who was spared by illness, smiles at the officers, especially the sailors.
Upon the Empress’s return to the palace, units were allowed to go to the basement of the palace to warm themselves. There's a strange mood there. The strict rules of the palace have been violated. Some strange personalities appeared from somewhere. They approached the soldiers and whispered. Involuntary anxiety crept into the souls of the officers.
: Father told us that the deserters of the Tsarskoye Selo garrison decided to seize the palace without waiting for reinforcements from Petrograd. The royal residence was guarded by soldiers of the United Infantry Regiments under the command of. The guardsmen-sailors stood in four ranks; they were well armed and ready to fire. They had to strengthen the defense. A telephone call from the police warned the Empress that the bandits had already killed one policeman and were five hundred meters from the entrance to the park. It was already night, and the shots were heard getting closer. Out of horror that blood might be shed to protect her, the Empress, accompanied by Grand Duchess Maria, went out into the terrible cold to talk with the soldiers. She conjured them not to shed blood and reminded them that the life of the Heir was in their hands. The situation remained unclear for a long time; among the rebels there were also several defenders of the palace. The rebels had to see for themselves that the Royal Family was well protected, and finally left.
There was anxiety in the royal chambers as well. The Empress did not undress that night. Her Majesty allowed Countess Benckendorff and Baroness Buxhoeveden to settle down for the night in her salon and herself personally brought them pillows. and Apraksin settled down in the room of His Majesty's valet. Everyone was on the alert to do everything possible to protect the Royal Family.
In the left wing of the palace, near the sick A. A. Vyrubova, her parents and Lily Den, not counting the sister of mercy. The presence of Vyrubova and her family in the palace unnerved the courtiers and caused special murmurs and grumblings from servants and even soldiers on this day. More than ever on this day, the soldiers spoke unkindly about Anna Alexandrovna for everything that, in their opinion, she had brought to the palace. The courtiers believed that her presence brought danger to The royal family. Count Apraksin talked for a long time about this and, finally, it was decided that Apraksin would ask the Empress’s permission to transfer Anna Alexandrovna somewhere, but outside the palace. The Empress warmly stood up for her friend. To push away a friend at such a moment, as if to hand her over to the crowd to be mocked, would be a no-brainer. “I do not betray my friends,” the Queen finished the heated conversation and could not resist the sobs that were choking her.
Around three o'clock in the morning the alarm subsided. There was silence in the city. The soldiers wandering in crowds returned to the barracks. Everything calmed down for a while. allowed the detachment to be dispersed to the barracks. Only reinforced guards and sentries remained. As usual, the Cossacks of His Majesty’s Convoy are riding around the palace fence.
However, the very next day, a false report appeared in the newspaper “Izvestia of the Committee of Petrograd Journalists” that “soldiers entered the Tsarskoye Selo Palace”, and imperial family is in the hands of rebel troops. This information was subsequently communicated in a conversation that took place between the Chairman of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma M.V. Rodzianko with the commander of the Northern Front, General N.V. Ruzsky, at whose headquarters Nicholas II was in Pskov, and which, in turn, influenced on the emperor's decision to abdicate the throne.
Memoirs of O.V. Paley:
“The next morning a car arrived for the Grand Duke to take him to meet the sovereign, who was supposed to arrive at 8 1/2 o'clock in the morning. After waiting for some time, the Grand Duke returned to Mrs. Spreyer, extremely alarmed - the sovereign did not arrive Halfway between Mogilev and Tsarskoye Selo, the revolutionaries, led by Bublikov, stopped royal train and sent him to Pskov.
We returned home about eleven o'clock in the morning, and I was very surprised to find our palace in place, footmen in livery and collections intact."
On March 1, 1917, the entire garrison of Tsarskoye Selo rebelled. According to eyewitnesses, there was no plan for the performance, and as soon as the first goal - attracting those who had not yet rebelled - was achieved, the crowd scattered in different directions.
Russian Word, No. 48, Thursday, March 2, 1917, Moscow.In the Tsarskoye Selo Palace:
March 1st, early in the morning, the commandant of the Tsarskoye Selo Palace telephoned the chairman of the executive committee of the State Duma with a request to take measures to restore order in Tsarskoye Selo, and especially in the area of the palace. By order of the executive committee, members of the State Duma I.P. Demidov and V.A. Stepanov were sent to Tsarskoye Selo. All units of the Tsarskoye Selo garrison were ordered by the temporary committee to remain in their places and maintain order.
Delegates of the executive committee, members of the State Duma I. P. Demidov and V. A. Stepanov visited March 1st Tsarskoe Selo and established relations with the local rebel garrison.
At the station, two court carriages and a car sent by the rebel garrison were waiting for the delegates. Accompanied by officers, the delegates in cars went to the city hall, where by the time I.P. Demidov and V.A. Stepanov arrived, representatives of the population, officers and soldiers had gathered. The executive committee delegates were greeted with a standing ovation.
When the applause died down, I. P. Demidov and V. A. Stepanov addressed the audience with heated speeches:
“The most serious moment has come,” said the deputies. - the old government was broken, and control of events passed into the hands of the people. It is necessary to create a new order, organize new living conditions, which is impossible without the cooperation of the entire population and the entire army. Complete, unconditional trust in the State Duma and the executive committee elected by it is necessary.
These words were covered with a storm of applause. Particular delight was caused by the delegates' instructions that the establishment of normal state life was necessary in the interests of a successful fight against an audacious enemy.
After the meeting in the town hall, the delegates of the executive committee visited the barracks of all the regiments stationed in Tsarskoe Selo.
To manage the affairs of the city, the population of Tsarskoe Selo and the garrison elected a committee of 12 people, headed by the commander of the 4th Infantry Regiment.
Rallying soldiers on the balcony of the City Hall (Naberezhenaya St.)
Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich visited the Empress and informed her about the Tsar’s abdication of the throne. She didn’t believe it, she said that the newspapers were all lying, and she regretted that she couldn’t contact the emperor by phone.
The officers, including my father, wore white armbands. My father drove to the car and took the oath of office to the Provisional Government. In the evening he said that some attorney at law Sokolov wrote order No. 1. They say that this order will certainly cause the army to fall apart.
At the palace fence I saw a killed collie dog. I've seen it before. The killed dog made a greater impression on me than all the events of the last few days combined.
Soldiers of the Consolidated Regiment came to us and said that the regiment commander, Major General Ressin, had been removed from his post and disappeared. There was the first regimental soldiers' meeting, at which the elections of the regiment commander were made. The soldiers unanimously elected my father as commander. But it was explained to them that they could only choose an officer from their own regiment. Then Colonel Mikhail Alekseevich Lazarev was elected.
On the main staircase of the building under construction, the painter covered up just a few days ago the words of the highest rescript written in gold, in which the former emperor, after inspecting the refectory building, thanked the creators of the town for the initiative in Russian affairs.
Two companies of the Consolidated Regiment broke through to Tsarskoe Selo from Mogilev. The hero of the day was Staff Captain Golovkin. They said that he showed extraordinary energy and that if those in charge of the movement of the imperial trains had shown themselves as Golovkin did, the imperial train would not have been stuck on the way to Tsarskoye Selo.
An order came to appoint a doctor as head of the infirmary. Therefore, Musin-Pushkin was appointed head of the 17th infirmary. In this regard, my father issued a farewell order, in which he asked not to remember him in a bad manner..."
Early in the morning, a battalion of the Guards crew left the palace. The company was also released to the barracks; it never returned.
On March 1, the imperial lettered “blue train” arrives in Pskov, where the headquarters of the Northern Front is located. There Nikolai learns the following: his order to send “reliable” troops to Petrograd was not carried out by the military; The Duma + the Petrograd Soviet + the commanders of all fronts and fleets, without exception, demand his abdication. The king thus completely lost the confidence of the country. Nikolai finally realized his defeat. Many officers of the royal train cried. He kept smiling and waved his hand at them welcomingly. Then he secretly began to cry himself. Then he said: “I will now be a simple man in the street in Russia. I do not intend to intrigue. I will live near Alexei and raise him.” He was extremely depressed. “There is treason and cowardice and deceit all around,” he writes in his Diary.
On the evening of March 1, the echelon of St. George's cavaliers, sent by Nicholas II to suppress the uprising in Petrograd, stopped at the Vyritsa station, where the general was informed that the Tsarskoye Selo garrison, in the annexation of which he was absolutely sure, had become disobedient. By nine o'clock in the evening, the train arrived at the Tsarskoye Selo station without hindrance, after which General N.I. Ivanov went to the Alexander Palace, where from one to half past one on the night of March 1 to 2, he talked with Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.
In the current situation, the commander of the reserve battalion of the 1st Infantry Regiment, Staff Captain F.V. Aksyuta, showed revolutionary vigilance, marching to the station with soldiers in full combat readiness. To avoid bloodshed, at the request of the Empress, the general had to urgently leave Tsarskoye Selo and move back to Vyritsa. From there, N.I. Ivanov hurried Headquarters to speed up the arrival of the second echelon of St. George's cavaliers and telegraphed to Petrograd, demanding to send a new shift of locomotives. The command of the Tsarskoye Selo garrison, having intercepted these telegrams, took precautions in case of new attempts to promote General N.I. Ivanov. At the same time, through spies it was possible to find out that “the Cavaliers of St. George are quite sympathetic to the coup.”
Subsequently, on the basis of Order No. 1 of the Petrograd Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies for the Petrograd garrison, elections were held in parts of the Tsarskoye Selo garrison about soldiers' company committees operating under the company commander, which, by delegating their representatives, elected a battalion committee that appointed the commander of the reserve battalion. Delegates from battalion committees formed a garrison committee in the town hall, which united representatives from all military units, commands and departments and so far performed only organizational functions. Also from all military units of Tsarskoye Selo, delegates were sent to Temporary Committee of the State Duma and in Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.
The palace guards of Tsarskoye Selo declared to representatives of the executive committee of the State Duma their complete loyalty and asked to take measures to protect the palace from possible excesses. The representative of the executive committee, to whose side the entire garrison of Tsarskoe Selo had come over, vouched for the preservation of complete order, provided that the palace guards did not take any hostile actions against the revolutionary troops.
At 10 o'clock in the morning, General Ruzsky appeared on the royal train, arriving from Mogilev to Pskov, with a report on the situation in Petrograd. On this day, Nicholas II wrote in his diary: “Ruesky came in the morning. My renunciation is needed... The point is that in the name of saving Russia, keeping the army at the front and peace, I need to take this step. I agreed...” The texts of two telegrams were compiled to the Chairman of the State Duma Rodzianko and the Chief of Staff of Headquarters Alekseev about Nikolai I’s readiness to abdicate.
On March 2, 1917, at a railway station called Dno, the Tsar signed a decree from the throne in favor of his brother Mikhail Alexandrovich Romanov. And immediately a purely Russian phenomenon arose - the phenomenon of March 1917, a complete and unconditional break with the past. The leitmotif of this month is the Russian version of “La Marseillaise”: “Let us renounce the old world, shake off its ashes from our feet.” Burn everything that they previously worshiped, that they stood in awe of, that they secretly hated.
A company of soldiers rebelled in the barracks. The soldiers killed two officers and went to Petrograd, going over to the side of the revolution. This is where the story of His Imperial Majesty's Own Railway Regiment ended.
:
2nd of March dad came to visit. The streets became noticeably calmer. Negotiations were held between the Duma and the Tsar. Dad appeared in his general's overcoat with red lapels and even in his own court carriage with a coachman on the box. He was wearing a cape with a double-headed eagle and a cocked hat. This gave us some courage again. This means that life in the palace went on as before.
But our opinion was soon to change. A few minutes later we discovered that the Pope's carriage had attracted the interest of a group of armed soldiers, whose red bows and gloomy faces did not promise anything good. The doorbell rang. , fearless, as always, despite her age, she opened the door herself. () An officer's orderly, accompanied by a group of armed soldiers, asked in a threatening tone: “Are you with General Botkin? »
“He is a doctor,” she answered bravely, “and he came to see his sick brother.” “We are not interested in that,” replied the orderly. - We have orders to arrest all generals.". raised her voice: “I’m not interested in who you should arrest and why. I am the widow of the Adjutant General, and I think, first of all, you must maintain order; and now you can leave my house!”
The new heroes were still poorly prepared for revolutionary exploits and left without further words.
The news brought by the father was not comforting: the Empress could barely stand on her feet from worries, she did not know at all what was happening at Headquarters, and the children had to lie down due to illness. Only Grand Duchess Maria still held out; Despite her seventeen years, she found words to calm her mother.
“From now on we are in God’s hands,” said dad and put on the general’s overcoat again. He kissed us and calmly got into the carriage. But when the coachman raised his whip, one armed soldier jumped forward and began to pursue the team to the gates of the Alexander Palace.
The next day, like a bomb exploding, news from Petrograd hit us that the Tsar had abdicated the Throne in favor of his brother Grand Duke Michael, but he, in turn, refused and transferred power to the hands of the Provisional Government.
“We heard that Nicky renounced, and for Baby too... I spoke on the phone with Nicky at headquarters, where he had just arrived...”
Memoirs of O.V. Paley:
“About six o’clock in the evening on March 3, the commanders of the reserve regiments that were stationed in Tsarskoe gathered with the Grand Duke to talk about the new situation created thanks to the abdication of Grand Duke Mikhail... The military, who gathered for advice with Grand Duke Paul, foresaw that that once the monarchy had fallen, it would be extremely difficult to keep the troops in hand and force them to obey. Some companies completely went over to the side of the rebels. A Provisional Government was formed in Petrograd, and the Grand Duke decided to follow the latest instructions of the sovereign, who advised to obey this government, to help him in everything and strive for only one goal - to bring the war to a victorious end. From all this it is clear that the sovereign no longer thought about himself, and only the fate of his beloved Russia occupied his thoughts.
On the evening of March 3, he led. book Paul visited the empress again. She was calm, resigned and infinitely beautiful. A semblance of an arrest was already felt, because the courtyard of the Alexander Palace was full of soldiers with white stripes on their sleeves. They were there on the orders of the Provisional Government for the so-called safety of the empress and children, but in fact out of fear that their friends would not help them escape. Finally, the empress received information from her husband, who had left again for Mogilev to say goodbye to the troops and meet the empress mother, who had left Kiev, wanting to see her son.
When the Grand Duke, leaving the Empress, found himself at a high entrance overlooking the entire courtyard of the Alexander Palace, he addressed the crowd of assembled soldiers with the following words: “Brothers,” he told them, “you already know that our beloved sovereign abdicated the throne of his ancestors for himself and his son in favor of his brother and that this latter renounced power in favor of the people. At the moment in the palace that you are guarding , there is no longer an empress or heir to the throne, but only a woman nurse who cares for her sick children. Promise me, your old boss, to keep them healthy and unharmed. Don't knock or make noise, remember that the children are still very sick "Promise me this.". Thousands of voices answered: “We promise this to your imperial highness, we promise this to you, father, Grand Duke, be calm, hurray!”, and the Grand Duke got into the car, calming down a little...
On March 3, having said goodbye - alas, forever - to his mother and troops and not being let out of sight by his jailers, the sovereign arrived in Tsarskoe Selo23. He, together with his faithful marshal, Prince. Valya Dolgoruky drove his car to the fence of the park, to the nearest entrance to the palace. The fence was locked, although the officer on duty could not help but know about the sovereign’s arrival. The Emperor waited for ten minutes and said the following words, which I learned from the prince’s mother. V. Dolgoruky: “I see that I have nothing more to do here”... Finally, the officer on duty deigned to worry and ordered the grate to be opened, which immediately closed again. The Emperor became a prisoner along with his wife and children."
On March 3, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet decided to arrest Nicholas II and other members of the Romanov dynasty.
From Alexandra Fedorovna’s diary: "I spoke to Nicky on the phone..."
Tatyana Melnik-Botkina: “On March 4, all newspapers published a message about the abdication of Nicholas II. Our dad commented on it like this: “Instead of slandering and defaming, our revolutionary press should have analyzed the situation more deeply, as was done by the republican press in a free country , as, for example, in the magazine "Debates" No. 77:
“The Russian Tsar saved Russia from revolutionary unrest, the consequences of which would have been unpredictable... The manifesto in which he renounces power is evidence of his amazing nobility and the same enormous greatness of spirit...
By leaving the throne, Nicholas II provides his country with one last service, the most important one that could be provided in this critical situation."
Memoirs of O.V. Paley: “Nevertheless, the next day, March 4, a sharp change occurred. Anti-national propaganda, supported by adventurers from the Provisional Government, rumbled dully around the palace. Vladimir and I went to wander around the royal house in order to understand the state of mind of the soldiers and to make sure complete safety of the palace. With pain in my heart I heard how one Cossack from the convoy, prancing on a horse, shouted to another: “What do you say about all this, comrade? - “I think it’s cleverly done. Enough, we’ve had fun, now it’s our turn!” At first glance one could notice the changed mood of people. Timid and prudent yesterday, they were bold and insolent today. These unconscious creatures blindly followed the direction indicated by the Provisional Government."
March 4- at 11.30 I arrived at the palace, called and said that I considered it my duty to remain in the palace and would not remove the monograms without the permission of the Empress. We both cried. went to the Empress. Her Majesty at first wanted me to remain with the Consolidated Regiment, but since there were re-elections of the commander, they chose Lazarev instead. The combined regiment was becoming bad, I couldn’t stay with it. The Empress called me to her in the evening, ordered me to take off the monograms... (in this place above the lines of text there is an amendment by Markov, which was not possible to make out. N. Sokolov)... asked me to say hello to the regiment and assigned me to take the letter to the Emperor, cat. I had to get Khitrovo through Margarita Sergeevna. For the purposes of the trip, the Empress ordered me to join the Provisional Government.
: Father visited us again. This time he arrived in a carriage and was careful enough: he drove past the house to first change into civilian clothes.
The palace was constantly awaiting the return of the Tsar. The new commander of the Petrograd garrison, General Kornilov, made it clear to the Empress that she was a prisoner in the Alexander Palace. The same applied to her children and all members of her retinue who wanted to stay with her. The Pope decisively told us that it was completely unthinkable for him to leave the Tsar and Queen. He will share with them the fate of the captives.
The father quickly left because he was in a hurry to see the little Tsarevich. With heavy hearts we looked at his massive figure as he sat down in the carriage. When will we see each other again? And under what circumstances?
Since Gleb had to return to Russia again, he took his books from his house on Sadovaya Street. The house was not looted, and Vasily, still smiling, appeared proudly with red armband of the Provisional Government.
“Vasily,” Gleb was indignant, “how can you!”
“What do you want,” he answered, laughing. - The soldiers came, there were a dozen of them, all armed... Then they interrogated me: “Are you for the people?” “But I am the people,” I answered. Then they congratulated me, patted me on the shoulder, and that’s how I received a red bandage.” Vasily, gently stroking her, left the room, slamming the door, as usual, with a kick.
Thank God, among the soldiers we still had one more defender - Matveev: in civilian life he was a worker, he was Yuri's orderly when he returned from the front, sick. Despite his Bolshevik worldview, he fell in love with us, which was now very opportune.
5th of March I went to the Tsarskoye Selo Town Hall, where I received a certificate that I was joining the Provisional Government.
- From Alexandra Fedorovna’s diary: "I spoke to Nicky on the phone..."
From Alexandra Fedorovna’s diary: "I spoke to Niki on the phone. Maria has measles..."
On March 7, the Provisional Government decided to “recognize the abdicated Emperor Nicholas II and his wife as deprived of their liberty.”
: We learned about the Emperor's return from the newspapers. He made a stop at Headquarters before appearing, accompanied by Prince Dolgoruky, at the palace. We did not know any details, but the press emphasized that Kerensky personally spoke with him and himself inspected the Tsar’s residence, which had been turned into a prison. Finally we received a letter from my father, unfortunately very short; he reported that Grand Duchess Maria also fell ill with measles. This telegraphic style made it clear to us that correspondence was being monitored. If the people rejoiced that they received freedom, then ours was lost.
March 7 The Emperor arrived, and the thought of the trip disappeared. As far as I know, Kologrivov went (March 1-2) with a letter to the Emperor from the Empress. Some lady was driving (I don’t remember who). At this time, Colonel Syroboyarsky was in the palace and came to the palace on his own initiative. Kornilov did not come with me, but I heard that he was very rude, as, of course, were Guchkov and Kerensky. I didn’t see Kotzebue, but I heard that he was still better than the others; Korovichenko is just a bastard. It was difficult to say anything then - he behaved quite loyally, through him I sent flowers to the palace and received a letter from Her Majesty. I haven’t seen Aksyuta, but I know that he behaved badly; That’s why he was caught by Denikin and was in prison on suspicion of Bolshevism. Count Gudovich, captain of His Majesty's First Infantry Lifeguard, told me that Aksyuta told him that the Sovereign's weapons were buried with him and that only Denikin knew this place; Aksyuta was killed in a battle with the Bolsheviks.
: “The next day, as soon as the first lesson began at school, our coachman came for me. He said that the colonel had been arrested and that he ordered us to be brought quickly to say goodbye. At the porch of the Refectory I saw an excited crowd of people. Soon, accompanied by two guards Father appeared along the path from the Fedoropsky Cathedral. Come to me, he kissed me, then said to the guards: “Now that I have said goodbye to my brainchild, the cathedral, and to my son, I will calmly go where you take me.” They imprisoned him at the small Fiat, which the court couriers drove just a few days ago, and the car set off.
Those arrested were taken to the City Hall, from there they were transferred to, and then to the former Tsarskoye Selo security department. A few days later, the prisoners were transferred to the officers' guardhouse in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
My father sent a letter to the conclusion. It was like a dying order. He wrote that all my life I had brought him only joy, asked me to obey my mother and help her in everything, and at the end of the letter he begged me not to engage in social activities... He underlined this place three times. Apparently he thought a lot about his activities and came to this conclusion."
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The uprising of the Tsarskoye Selo garrison, considered one of the pillars of power, accelerated and strengthened the victory of the revolution in Petrograd, and also influenced the decision of Emperor Nicholas II to abdicate. The clash between the rebel officers and soldiers with the palace guard became a kind of prologue to the future civil war.
The events of the February-March days of 1917 opened a new and, unfortunately, the last page in the history of the Tsarskoye Selo imperial residence. So, already at the beginning of March 1917, one of unknown people proposed to rename Tsarskoe Selo to Soldatskoe Selo.
General, Commander of the Petrograd Military District General
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