IN PETROGRAD DURING THE
SEVEN DAYS
ARNO DOSCH-FLEUROT
Cossacks trotting through the Nevsky in Petrograd.
A crowd of ordinary citizens were passing in front of the Singer Building on the Nevsky in Petrograd at noon February 25th, Russian time (March 10th), stopping occasionally to watch a company of Cossacks amiably roughing some students with a miscellaneous following who insisted on assembling across the street before the wide, sweeping colonnades of Kasan Cathedral. As the Cossacks trotted through, hands empty, rifles slung on shoulders, the crowds cheered, the Cossacks laughed.
A few trolley cars had stopped, though not stalled, and groups of curious on-lookers had crowded in for a grandstand view. The only people who did not seem interested in the spectacle were hundreds of women with shawls over their heads who had been standing in line for many hours before the bread-shops along the Catherine Canal.
Some Cossacks and infantry in side streets.
People charged by police.
People were going about their affairs up and down the Nevsky without being stopped, and sleighs were passing constantly. Cossacks and a few companies of infantrymen were beginning to appear on the side streets in considerable numbers, but, as a demonstration over the lack of bread in the Russian capital had been going on at intervals for two days with very little violence, people were beginning to get used to it. I arrived from the direction of the Moika Canal just as the cannon boomed midday and I felt sufficiently unhurried to correct my watch. Then I hailed a British general in uniform who had arrived, also unimpeded, from the opposite direction, and we had just stopped to comment on the unusual attitude of populace and Cossacks, when there was a sudden rush of people around the corner from the Catherine Canal and before we could even reach the doubtful protection of a doorway a company of mounted police charged around the corner and started up the Nevsky on the sidewalk. We were obviously harmless onlookers, fur-clad bourgeois, but the police plunged through at a hard trot, bare sabres flashing in the cold sunshine. The British general and I were knocked down together and escaped trampling only because the police were splendidly mounted, and a well-bred horse will not step on a man if he can help it.
Display of stupid physical force.
This was a display of that well-known stupid physical force which used to be the basis of strength of the Russian Empire. Its ruthlessness, its carelessness of life, however innocent, terrorized, and, we used to think, won respect. We know better now, especially those of us who were eye-witnesses of the Russian revolution, and saw how the police provoked a quarrel they could not handle.