Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

Typical crowd on the Nevski Prospect during the Bolshevik or Maximalist risings.

Fortunately the panic was shortlived. It lasted hardly five minutes, as a matter of fact. All around the cry rose that nothing was the matter, that the Cossacks were not coming. The Cossacks, once the terror of the Russian people, in this upheaval have become the strongest supporters of the government. Nothing could better demonstrate the anti-government intention of the Bolsheviki than their present fear and hatred of the Cossacks. So the “Tavarishi” took up their battered banners and resumed their march. No one ever found out what started the panic. Some said that a shot was fired from a window on one of the banners. Others said that the shot was merely a tire blowing out. Some were certain that they heard a cry of “Cossacks,” and some cynics suggested that the pick-pockets, a numerous and enterprising class just now, started the panic in the interests of business. This was the only disturbance I witnessed. The newspapers reported two more in the course of the day. A young girl watching the procession from the sidewalk suddenly decided to commit suicide, and the shot she sent through her heart precipitated another panic. Still a third one occurred when two men got into a fight and one of them drew a knife.

The instant flight of the crowds and especially of the soldiers must have given Kerensky hope that the giant could be got back into the bottle, especially since on that very day, June 18, Russian style, the army on one of the fronts advanced and fought a victorious engagement. The town went mad with joy over that victory, showing, I think, that the heart of the Russian people is still intensely loyal to the allies, and deadly sick of the fantastic program of the extreme socialists. Crowds surged up and down the street bearing banners, flags, pictures of Kerensky. They thronged before the Marie Palace, where members of the government, officers, soldiers, sailors made long and rapturous speeches, full of patriotism. They sang, they shouted, all day and nearly all night. When they were not shouting “Long live Kerensky!” they were saying “This is the last of the Lenineites.” But it wasn’t. The Bolsheviki simply retired to their dancer’s palace, their Viborg retreats and their Kronstadt stronghold, and made another plan.

On Monday night, July 2, or in our calendar July 15, broke out what is known as the July revolution, the last bloody demonstration of the Bolsheviki. I had been absent from town for two weeks and returned to Petrograd early in the morning after the demonstration began. I stepped out of the Nicholai station and looked around for a droshky. Not one was in sight. No street cars were running. The town looked deserted. Silence reigned, a queer, sinister kind of a silence. “What in the world has happened?” I asked myself. A droshky appeared and I hailed it. When the izvostchik mentioned his price for driving me to my hotel I gasped, but I was two miles from home and there were no trams. So I accepted and we made the journey. Few people were abroad, and when I reached the hotel I found the entrance blocked with soldiers. The man behind the desk looked aghast to see me walk in, and he hastened to tell me that the Bolsheviki were making trouble again and all citizens had been requested to stay indoors until it was over.

I stayed indoors long enough to bathe and change, and then, as everything seemed quiet, I went out. Confidence was returning and the streets looked almost normal again. I walked down the Morskaia, finding the main telephone exchange so closely guarded that no one was even allowed to walk on the sidewalk below it. That telephone exchange had been fiercely attacked during the February revolution, and it was one of the most hotly disputed strategic positions in the capital. Later I am going to tell something of the part played in the revolution by the loyal telephone girls of Petrograd. A big armored car was plainly to be seen in the courtyard of the building, and many soldiers were there alert and ready. I stopped in at the big bookshop where English newspapers (a month old) were to be purchased, and bought one. The Journal de Petrograd, the French morning paper, I found had not been issued that day. Then I strolled down the Nevski. I had not gone far when I heard rifle shooting and then the sound, not to be mistaken, of machine gun fire. People turned in their tracks and bolted for the side streets. I bolted too, and made a record dash for the Hotel d’Europe. The firing went on for about an hour, and when I ventured out again it was to see huge gray motor trucks laden with armed men, rushing up and down the streets, guns bristling from all sides and machine guns fore and aft.

What had happened was this. The “Red Guard,” an armed band of workmen allied with the Bolsheviki, together with all the extremists who could be rallied by Lenine, and these included some very young boys, had been given arms and told to “go out in the streets.” This is a phrase that usually means go out and kill everything in sight. In this case the men were assured that the Kronstadt regiments would join them, that cruisers would come up the river and the whole government would be delivered into the hands of the Bolsheviki. The Kronstadt men did come in sufficient numbers to surround and hold for two days the Tauride Palace, where the Duma meets and the provisional government had its headquarters. The only reason why the bloodshed was not greater was that the soldiers in the various garrisons around the city refused to come out and fight. The sane members of the Soviet had begged them to remain in their casernes, and they obeyed. All day Tuesday and Wednesday the armed motor cars of the Bolsheviki dashed from barrack to barrack daring the soldiers to come out, and whenever they found a group of soldiers to fire on, they fired. Most of these loyal soldiers are Cossacks, and they are hated by the Bolsheviki.

Tuesday night there was some real fighting, for the Cossacks went to the Tauride Palace and freed the besieged ministers at the cost of the lives of a dozen or more men. Then the Cossacks started out to capture the Bolshevik armored cars. When they first went out it was with rifles only, which are mere toy pistols against machine guns. After one little skirmish I counted seventeen dead Cossack horses, and there were more farther down the street. As soon as the Cossacks were given proper arms they captured the armored trucks without much trouble. The Bolsheviki threw away their guns and fled like rabbits for their holes. Nevertheless a condition of warfare was maintained for the better part of a week, and the final burst of Bolshevik activity gave Petrograd, already sick of bloodshed, one more night of terror. That night I shall not soon forget.

The day had been quiet and we thought the trouble was over. I went to bed at half-past ten and was in my first sleep when a fusilade broke out, as it seemed, almost under my window. I sat up in bed, and within a few minutes, the machine guns had begun their infernal noise, like rattlesnakes in the prairie grass. I flung on a dressing gown and ran down the hall to a friend’s room. She dressed quickly and we went down stairs to the room of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragette, which gave a better view of the square than our own. There until nearly morning we sat without any lights, of course, listening to repeated bursts of firing, and the wicked put-put-put-put of the machine guns, watching from behind window draperies, the brilliant headlights of armored motors rushing into action, hearing the quick feet of men and horses hastening from their barracks. We did not go out. All a correspondent can do in the midst of a fight is to lie down on the ground and make himself as flat as possible, unless he can get into a shop where he hides under a table or a bench. That never seemed worth while to me, and I have no tales to tell of prowess under fire.

I listened to that night battle from the safety of the hotel, going the next day to see the damage done by the guns. A contingent of mutinous soldiers and sailors from Kronstadt, which had been expected for several days by the Lenineites, had come up late, still spoiling for a fight; had planted guns on the street in front of the Bourse and at the head of the Palace Bridge across the Neva, and simply mowed down as many people as were abroad at the hour. Nobody knows, except the authorities, how many were killed, but when we awoke the next day we discovered that, for a time at least, the power of the Bolsheviki had been broken. The next day the mutinous regiments were disbanded in disgrace. Petrograd was put under martial law, the streets were guarded with armored cars, thousands of Cossacks were brought in to police the place, and orders for the arrest of Lenine and his lieutenants were issued. But it was openly boasted by the Bolsheviki that the government was afraid to touch Lenine, and certain it is that he escaped into Sweden, and possibly from there into Germany.