The dawn in Russia

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

The guns were still in position around the district, and firing was to begin again in an hour. But on such mills as were still standing, the white flag now waved. Arms were being surrendered, and the dead were collected in rows upon the frozen surface of a pond. In one place was a mutilated child of nine; in another a baby’s arm, cut off at the shoulder and across the fingers, lay on the snow. For law and order were being restored. Near the mills I found many hundreds of work-people standing idly round their ruined barracks and smouldering homes. A barrack for mill-hands, as I have already shown, is not much of a place. The beds are jammed close together in rows; everything is hideous, the smell intolerable. Nor are the doghutch homes for married people much better. But at all events they had been warm. Now the workmen and their families had nowhere to go, and for the last three mornings the thermometer had stood at eighteen degrees below zero (Réaumur). Probably many homeless people were given shelter at night in other crowded rooms, but all day long they remained shivering helplessly among the ruins.

I waited for some time in an English manager’s house, expecting the guns to re-open fire. But no firing came, though the guns remained all day in position. As far as open fighting went, the Moscow rising was over. When I returned next morning (Monday, January 1st) I found the guns had been withdrawn, and the streets and ruins and mills were held by strong detachments of Cossacks and Guards. The surrender was complete. Three of the leaders had just been bayoneted to death, and their bodies were lying outside a shed. The remains of the last revolutionary band were cooped up as prisoners in the sugar-mill yard, and soldiers stood round the thick crowd of them, while the leaders were being sorted out for execution. Many women were found among them, and a large proportion of the dead were women too. Indeed, considering that this was mainly a work-people’s movement, it was remarkable how large a part the women played.

Of the killed it was impossible to form an accurate estimate. In the Presna district itself they said that eighty work-people were killed during the bombardment of Saturday morning. Perhaps 200 were killed in all, including those who tried to escape across the river. As to the larger question of the casualties during the whole ten days of the rising, every kind of estimate was heard between 5000 and 20,000. I have even heard of enterprising newspapers which put the total of killed alone at 25,000. But it takes a lot of killing to make a thousand dead, and after going carefully into such figures as I could get with two experienced officials who knew the city well, it seemed to me probable that the killed numbered about 1,200, and the wounded perhaps ten times that amount. But the truth can never be accurately known. The frozen bodies were piled up in police stations and other places till they could be carried out into the country by train and laid in hasty trenches. When I was in St. Petersburg many weeks later, a truck full of them arrived by mistake at the Moscow station there. The authorities denied it, but no one doubted the truth.

After our New Year’s Eve the process of vengeance and execution went on without further interruption. In the Presnensky district the prisoners were usually shot in batches—sixteen, twenty, or even thirty-five together, as I was told by an overseer who lived close by and saw it done. The work-people were set in a row before the firing party, and were driven forward three at a time. Three by three they were shot down before the eyes of the others. The heap of dead increased. Three more were driven forward to increase it, till at last only a heap of dead was left. In the case of two workmen, suspected of being leaders, there was a variety in the proceedings, perhaps by way of a practical joke. They were ordered by the officer just to walk round a corner of the sugar mill. They went carelessly, with their hands in their pockets, and when they turned the corner they were faced by eight soldiers standing at the present. In an instant they fell dead, and their bodies remained for a long time lying on the ground for all passers-by to see. Such executions continued among these factories for more than a week, and the numbers of those poor and uneducated men and women who died for their protest against despotism will never be known.

Nor will the numbers of the victims within the city itself be known. As I have said, on every street you met parties of soldiers and armed police bringing them to the police-stations. Even at the beginning of the rising, we have seen that prisoners were shot because the prisons were too full to hold them. It is quite certain that they had no mercy now, but what exactly became of them inside the walls, one could only judge from terrible hints and rumours that people whispered to each other. On the last day of the year, in a friend’s house, I met a skilled craftsman, an educated and middle-aged man, who from his own workroom could reach a window overlooking a police-yard. There, he said, one could watch the prisoners brought in and briefly examined by an officer. They were then strapped to a board and beaten almost to death, and if they were people of no account they were handed over to the executioners to be “broken up”—that is the English sportsman’s phrase for hares and foxes overtaken by the hounds. They were broken up. Their bones were smashed, their legs and arms lopped off with swords, and it did not take them very long to die.

The story may have been one of the exaggerations of war, but the man was a quiet and ordinary citizen, with no reason for lying, and he invited us quite freely to come and view the place, always soaked with blood. People of both parties who had lived many years in Moscow, did not hesitate to believe it, and they often told me of things still worse—of nameless things committed in the empty and windowless chambers of police-stations, where no light enters and no cry escapes.

One murder was especially talked about, because the victim happened to be the son of a leading barrister, who was a friend of the Governor himself. The boy was seized near the Riding School Barracks, close to the university, either on suspicion or for open hostility. The Sumsky Dragoons flogged him as usual, and their officer, finding him still alive, asked why they had not finished him off. An infantry officer who was standing by, took the news to the father, and he appealed to the Governor in person, asking only that the guard to take his son to prison should be composed of Moscow infantry and not of dragoons. The Governor replied that of course his request should be granted, and every consideration shown. Nevertheless, it was dragoons who formed the guard, and the boy never reached the prison alive.

Rumours reached us also about the fate of the revolutionists who had walked away into the country or afterwards escaped by train. I found some of them as prisoners a few weeks afterwards, at a long distance from Moscow; but many were overtaken on the road or shot by soldiers at the stations. The Semenoffsky Guards especially distinguished themselves by their zeal in hunting them down, and their exultation in the slaughter; but considerable allowance must be made for them, because they had not been given a chance of slaughtering the Japanese, and like all brave soldiers they naturally pined for active service.

DUBASOFF’S ROLL-CALL.