Evident Cossacks are with people.
The Cossacks were sometimes riding pretty fast themselves, but never with the violence of the police, and the cheering was continuous. At any point I could tell by the quality of the howl that went up from the mob whether it was being stirred by Cossacks or police. At the Nicola Station the rioting was the roughest, the police freely using their sabres. The crowd, though unarmed, stood its ground and howled back, and when possible caught an isolated mounted policeman and disarmed him. In one case the mob had already disarmed and was unseating a policeman, and other sections of the mob were rushing up to have a turn at manhandling him, when a single Cossack, with nothing in his hands, forced his way through and rescued the policeman, amid the cheers of the same people who were harassing him. It was quite evident that the people and the Cossacks were on the same side, and only the unbelievable stupid old Russian Government could have ignored it.
Machine guns installed.
At nightfall the crowd had had its fill of roughing, but Sunday was evidently to be the real day. There would have been, of course, nothing on the Nevsky, if properly policed, and I have been unable to understand how the old Government, unless overconfident of its autocratic power and disdainful of the people, could have let things go on. But though half the regiments in Petrograd were on the point of revolt and their sympathy with the people was evident even to a foreigner, Sunday was mismanaged like the days before. It was even worse. The powers that were had, as early as Friday, been so silly as to send armored motor cars screeching up and down the Nevsky. Now they began installing machine guns where they could play on the crowd. Up to this time I had been a neutral, if disgusted, spectator, but now I hoped the police and the whole imperial régime would pay bitterly for their insolence and stupidity. The few corpses I encountered during the day on the Nevsky could not even add to the feeling. They were the mere casualties of a movement that was beginning to attain large proportions.
Many soldiers firing blanks.
At the French theatre.
The late afternoon and evening of Sunday were bloody. The Nevsky was finally closed except for cross traffic, and at the corner of the Sadovia and the Nevsky by the national library there was a machine gun going steadily. But it was in the hands of soldiers and they were firing blanks. The soldiers everywhere seemed to be firing blanks, but there was carnage enough. The way the crowds persisted showed their capacity for revolution. The talk was for the first time seriously revolutionary, and the red flags remained flying by the hour. That evening the air was for the first time electric with danger, but the possibilities of the next morning were not sufficiently evident to prevent me from going to the French theatre. There were a sufficient number of other people, of the same mind, including many officers, to fill half the seats.
Imperial box saluted for the last time.
As usual, between the acts, the officers stood up, facing the imperial box, which neither the Emperor nor any one else ever occupied. This act of empty homage, which always grated on my democratic nerves in a Russian theatre, was being performed by these officers—though they did not even seem to suspect it—for the last time.
Lively rifle fire Sunday night.