This time the crowd did not break up but began to bunch here and there as far as the Fontanka Canal. All afternoon the Cossacks kept them stirring, and occasionally the police gave them a real roughing. Each time the police appeared, I heard that menacing murmur, but by Friday evening, when the day's crowd disappeared, the increase in discontent and anger had not developed sufficiently in twenty-four hours to be really dangerous. I felt the Government still had plenty of time to remove the discontent, and an announcement pasted up conspicuously everywhere saying there would be no lack of bread seemed like an assurance that the Government would somehow overnight provide all bakers with sufficient flour. That was the one obvious thing to do.
A tour of the Wiborg factory district.
During the afternoon I made a long tour through the Wiborg factory district, which was thickly policed by infantrymen. Occasional street cars were still running, but otherwise the district was ominously silent. The bread-lines were very long here, and on the corners were groups of workmen. Their silent gravity struck me as being something to reckon with. Still the lack of real trouble on the Nevsky as I came back in a measure reassured me.
Crowd friendly with Cossacks.
Saturday morning the crowd on the Nevsky gathered at the early Petrograd hour of ten, but they seemed to be there to encourage the Cossacks. Wherever the Cossacks passed, individuals called out to them cheerfully and, even though they crowded in so close to the trotting horsemen as to be occasionally knocked about, they took it good-humoredly and went on cheering. I went away for an hour or so and when I returned the fraternizing of the crowd and the Cossacks was increasingly evident. By this time all sorts of ordinary citizens, catching the sense of events, were joining in the general acclamation. I was just beginning to get a glimmering of the meaning of all this when I was bowled over by the mounted police in front of the Singer Building.
Crowd beginning to challenge police.
Soldiers fire but wound few.
Police inviting quarrel.
The more timorous average citizens began to lose interest, but the workmen and students who were in the Nevsky now in considerable numbers, and arriving hourly, accepted the challenge of the police. They began throwing bottles, the police charged afresh, and by the early part of Saturday afternoon there was really a mob on the Nevsky. Liberally mixed through the whole, though, were the ordinary onlookers, many of them young girls. The Nevsky widens for a space before the Gastenidwor (the Russian adaptation of the oriental bazaar), and infantrymen were now detailed to hold the people back at the point of the bayonet. Meanwhile, all the side streets were wide open and the appearance of a large, angry mob was kept up by constant arrivals. The crowd becoming unwieldy, the soldiers fired into it several times, but they did not wound many, indicating that they were extracting many bullets before they fired. The shooting only augmented the crowd, as Russians do not frighten very easily, and though at a few points it was necessary to turn the corner, I found no difficulty in going back and forth all afternoon between Kasan Cathedral and the Nicola Station—the main stretch of the Nevsky. There was general roughing along this mile and a half of street which could have been stopped at any time in fifteen minutes by closing the streets. Instead, the police charged with increasing violence without doing anything to prevent the people coming from other parts of town. The idea was now unescapable that the police were inviting the people to a quarrel.
Rioting at the Nicola Station.