THE FALL OF THE WINTER PALACE
However much the rest of Petrograd talked that night, there was one
spot in the storm-tossed city where no words were wasted. This was the
office of the Voina Revoliutsiony Komitiet (Military Revolutionary
Committee), sprung suddenly and quietly into an existence shrouded in
deep mystery.
Alex Gomberg, Russian product of New York’s East Side, with an American
habit of providing against emergencies, suggested that it would be
useless to attempt to get through the Bolshevik lines without a pass
from this committee. Gomberg, odd little bundle of materialism and
idealism, who had a deep love for the country of his adoption which
his scoffing cynicism could not hide, never lost a chance to do a good
turn to America or Americans. Though he could not resist the home call
of revolution, he said he would rather be a messenger-boy in New York
than President of Russia. As a friend of Trotzky, known to the members
of the all-powerful committee, he undertook to arrange the necessary
permits.
He led the way down the dimly lighted corridor to the farther end.
A young fair-haired boy met us in an outer office, took our names
and request, and disappeared into the next room, shutting the door
behind him. We stared curiously after him. Beyond that door were the
men who were directing the siege and capture of Petrograd--directing
it so efficiently that in the days that followed, the enemies of the
Bolsheviki insisted the committee was composed of Germans, because
Russians were incapable of such perfect organization.
When the inside door opened again the fair-haired boy reappeared with
the passes in his hand. Mine was typewritten on a bit of paper torn
from a scratch-pad, numbered “Five,” and stated simply:
“The Military Revolutionary Committee of the Council of Workmen’s and
Soldiers’ Deputies allows Miss Bessie Beatty free passage all over the
city.”
That scrap of paper was to prove the open sesame to many closed
doors before the gray dawn of morning. It bore the blue seal of the
committee, the only signature capable of commanding the slightest sign
of respect from a Russian bayonet that night.
The Smolney Institute is excellently located to provide seclusion for
a young women’s seminary, but in the middle of a cold night it seemed
a long dark way from anywhere. Walking down the stairs, we speculated
upon the improbability of finding an _izvostchik_ abroad at such an
hour.
Down in the courtyard a huge motor-truck was cranking up for departure.
Its only occupants were three sailors, a young Cossack soldier with a
cape of shaggy black fur that hung to his heels, and a Red Guardsman.
We hailed them, and Mr. Gomberg shouted a request to be taken to town.
It was drowned by the sound of the engine. He repeated it in louder
tones. The sailor looked dubiously at me and at Louise Bryant, the
other woman member of the party.
“It’s a dangerous trip,” he said. “We are going out to distribute
proclamations, and we are almost certain to be shot at.”
We looked at one another for a moment, considered that it was probably
our only chance to reach the Winter Palace, and asked to be allowed to
take the risk. Two strong hands came over the side to pull me up, and
two sailors sitting on a board across the body of the truck arose to
give us their seats. They held a hurried consultation, then asked us
to stand again. They had decided that this exposed position would be
too dangerous for women. The Cossack lad in the shaggy cape spread some
proclamations on the floor of the car.
“Sit here,” he said, “and when the shooting begins you can lie flat on
your backs and keep your heads low.”
A bundle of rifles lay on the floor under my knees, and as we started
off over the cobbles I grabbed a chain and held fast to keep from being
bumped out. The streets were like black cañons. Apparently there was
not a human being abroad; yet every time the sailor tossed a handful
of white leaflets into the air, men came darting mysteriously from
doorways and courtyards to catch them.
The Cossack towered above me, rifle in hand, with eyes searching the
dark for signs of danger. At the street intersections we slowed up, and
groups of soldiers gathered around the bonfires crowded close to the
truck for news from Smolney. They peered with curious and startled eyes
into our unexpected faces, then hurried back to the circle of light
around the blazing birch-wood logs. During one of these pauses Mr.
Gomberg grabbed a proclamation and read it to us:
“TO RUSSIAN CITIZENS
“The power has gone over to the organ of the Petrograd Council of
Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, the War Revolutionary Committee,
which is at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.
“The cause for which the people strive: immediate democratic peace,
abolition of _pomieschik_ property on land, workmen’s control, the
creation of a Soviet government--this business is done.
“Long live the Revolution of workmen, soldiers, and peasants.
“WAR REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE.”
It was one by the clock in the steeple of the Nicolaievski Station when
we turned into the Nevsky. The great circle was deserted. Earlier in
the day there had been fighting here, but no trace of it was visible
now.
“Put your heads down!” the Cossack ordered, catching sight of a group
of unidentified men ahead.
We obeyed; but when they proved to be Bolshevist soldiers and Red
Guardsmen, we peeped cautiously out again. At the bridge across the
Moika Canal we were turned back by the barricade erected early in the
afternoon, and by the command of the guard, who said there was firing
just ahead and no one could pass. From the direction of the Winter
Palace came the occasional _boom!_ of a big gun, followed by the short,
sharp crack of the rifles.
Reluctantly we retraced our way. In front of the Kazan Cathedral the
guards again ordered us to halt. In the darkness across the wide
street, we saw a crowd of black figures lined up in marching order
against the curb. We had come suddenly upon that little band of men and
women who left Smolney to make a demonstration of passive resistance
and die with their comrades at the Winter Palace. They had been joined
by the Mayor of Petrograd, members of the City Duma, and the Jewish
Bund. There were four or five hundred of them in all, and here, within
a few blocks of their destination, they had been stopped.
In that crowd were many of the men and women who had been the
firebrands of Russia, the Socialist revolutionists, the terrorists, who
were quietly walking forth to oppose themselves unarmed to the force of
these new revolutionists who, to their way of thinking, were murdering
the cause of Russian freedom for which most of them had suffered years
of imprisonment and the unspeakable hardships of exile in Siberia. Here
and there in the crowd was a young officer or a cluster of students;
but more of them were veterans who had grown gray in the service of
revolution, and their faces were grim and set.
Standing a few feet away was a squad of soldiers. The commissaire in
command of them raised his hand.
“We have orders from the Military Revolutionary Committee to let you go
no farther,” he said.
A murmur ran through the crowd. The gray-haired veterans of the old
days began to argue, and students and officers joined their entreaties.
The soldiers remained obdurate.
“What will you do if we go anyway?” asked Mayor Schreider of Petrograd.
“Will you shoot us?”
“No,” replied the commissaire. “We have orders not to shoot you. But we
have orders not to let you pass.”
He gave a quick command to his men, who fell back a distance of
fifty feet and lined up across the Nevsky. They formed a solid human
wall, stretching across the wide street from curb to curb. A block
below there was another and yet more formidable wall composed of Red
Guardsmen. The demonstrators looked at those husky young soldiers, and
turned away in dismay.
“If we go forward,” said a gray-haired terrorist, once expert in the
use of dynamite, “some one will be killed, and they will blame it on
the switchman. They will say it was a case of mistaken orders, and no
good will come to any one. We will go back, and try to persuade them to
stop the slaughter.”
[Illustration: The proclamation of the Military Revolutionary
Committee announcing the fall of the Kerensky government, distributed
in Petrograd while the guns of the cruiser Aurora were hammering the
Winter Palace]
[Illustration: Women soldiers in their last stand before the Winter
Palace]
[Illustration: The pass which permitted the author safe conduct through
the Bolshevist lines]
In regular marching order they departed as they had come--a sad and
solemn procession, helpless in the face of this new, strange thing
upsetting all their preconceived ideas of revolution.
We watched them go; then, anxious to press on, we presented our
passes to the commissaire of soldiers, who motioned us forward with a
“Pazhal’sta!” The wall broke, and we passed through without a word. The
blue seal of the Military Revolutionary Committee had done for us what
eloquence and argument could not do for the old revolutionists.
At the Moika the Red Guard halted us. Our passes made no appeal here.
We looked suspiciously like bourgeois on the way to the Winter Palace,
and must not be allowed to pass. We argued, and they discussed the
advisability of arresting us. The idea did not especially appeal, so we
retraced our steps to the Kazan Cathedral and the friendly commissaire.
He detailed a man with special orders to take us through the lines to
the Winter Palace.
Again the factory men with rifles slung over their shoulders regarded
us with suspicion; but they took the word of the soldier and finally
permitted us to pass.
It was quarter of three when we halted in the shadow of the great
red arch and peered cautiously out into the dark square. There was
a moment of silence; then three rifle shots shattered the quiet. We
stood speechless, awaiting a return volley; but the only sound was the
crunching of broken glass spread like a carpet over the cobblestones.
The windows of the Winter Palace had been broken into bits.
Suddenly a sailor emerged from the black.
“It’s all over!” he said. “They have surrendered.”
We picked our way across the glass-strewn square, climbed the barricade
erected that afternoon by the defenders of the Winter Palace, and
followed the conquering sailors and Red Guardsmen into the mammoth
building of dingy red stucco. On the strength of our blue-sealed
passes, they permitted us to enter unquestioned. A commissaire of
sailors motioned us to a bench beside the wall. A squad of sailors
mounted the stairs to the council chamber, and placed the Provisional
Government under arrest. Above us we could hear the sound of doors
being broken open, while a searching squad went from room to room
looking for hidden prisoners.
The rifles taken from the military cadets were stacked in a heap in
the hall, and a solid line of victorious sailors filed in and out of
the palace. The desire for souvenirs, trophies of the hour, seemed to
have seized them; but the palace apparently offered little choice. One
sailor came down the stairs with a coat-hanger in his hand, and another
carried a sofa cushion. The best a third could find was a candle. The
commissaire stopped them at the door.
“No, no, tavarisch!” he said, holding out his hand. “Pazhal’sta,
pazhal’sta, you must take nothing from here.”
He talked to them in a patient, reasonable tone, as one would speak
to a child, and like children they gave up their plunder. One man, a
soldier who had taken a blanket, protested.
“But I am cold,” he said.
“I can’t help it, tavarisch. If you take that, they will say we came to
loot. And we did not come for loot: we came for revolution.”
At that moment there was a clatter on the stairs, and I turned to see
the members of the Provisional Government file slowly down. Konovaloff,
vice-president of the Cabinet and Minister of Trade and Industry,
came first. Tretiakoff of Moscow, president of the Economic Council,
followed. Behind him was the tall, dark, slender, handsome figure of
the young Foreign Minister, Tereshchenko, who cast an amazed glance
in my direction as he passed. Next in line came the little, frail,
gray figure of Kishkin, Minister of Public Welfare, and after him
two military men in uniform, General Manikovsky, Acting Minister of
War, and General Borisoff. Among the others were practically all the
remaining members of the Kerensky Cabinet.
Some of them walked with defiant step and heads held high. Some were
pale, worn, and anxious. One or two seemed utterly crushed and broken.
The strain of that day of anxious waiting, and that night under the
capricious guns of the cruiser _Aurora_, coupled with the weeks when
Cabinet crisis had followed Cabinet crisis, had proved too much for
them.
They marched silently off across the square, and headed for the
Fortress of Peter and Paul, rising grimly out of the darkness beyond
the Neva.
I sat there silently watching them go, and wondering what this
night’s work would mean in the future of Russia and the world. The
_commissaire_ who had motioned us to the seat indicated that we might
now go upstairs, and we passed quickly to the council chamber. We
made our way through the shattered rooms, blazing now with a million
lights from the twinkling crystal chandeliers. The silk curtains hung
in shreds, and here and there on the walls was the ugly scar of a
recent bullet. On the whole, the destruction was much less than we
had expected to find it. The attacking force had gone about its work,
determined to take the palace, but to take it with as little bloodshed
as possible, and in the lulls between storms they had made frequent
attempts to break the resistance by fraternization. None of the
defenders had been killed, but six of the sailors who had fought in the
open square had paid with their lives for their revolutionary ardor,
and many others had been wounded.
As we passed the door of Kerensky’s office, formerly the study of the
last of the Romanoffs, one of the palace care-takers spoke to the two
soldiers standing guard outside.
“Take good care of this,” he said. “The library is very valuable.”
Later, Mr. Gomberg, anxious to test the guard, presented a pass and
asked for admission.
“I am sorry,” said one of the soldiers, “but this pass is not good
here. No one can enter this room to-night.”
Nicholas II, who only a few months before had sat behind the sealed
door, was sleeping in exile on the edge of a Siberian swamp. Kerensky,
his successor, was spending the night hours in a desperate effort to
reach the front and rally the troops to prevent the very thing that had
just happened. I recalled, with a little sigh of regret, that this day
in this very spot I was to have lunched with the Minister-President of
Russia.
In one of the rooms where we lingered for a few moments, looking
curiously about us, a crowd of soldiers had gathered, and they were
talking together excitedly. I noticed them, and once I caught the
proletarian word of scorn, “Bourgeoisie!” But it never occurred to
me that we could be the object of their discussion. Suddenly a young
_commissaire_ came up to us.
“These men can not understand,” he said, “who you are, and why you are
here. They are quite excited and angry about it. They think perhaps you
may have come to rob. I told them I would question you, and if you had
no right to be here we would arrest you.”
We presented our passes. He examined them, and turned to the men, who
were by this time quite obviously casting unfriendly glances in our
direction.
“Tavarischi,” he said, “these passes are stamped, just as my own is,
with the blue seal. See it! You may be sure that if they had not the
right they would not be here with this.”
The men examined the paper quizzically, and nodded. They took an
informal vote upon the subject, and it was agreed that we should be
allowed to go free.
A few minutes later we followed them down the stairs and out of the
palace, the last people to leave except for the guards who were
detailed to remain on duty. The next day a decree was passed making the
mammoth red building a people’s museum, that it might be preserved from
ever again becoming a point of dispute in political conflicts.
I did not see the women soldiers. They were in another wing of the
palace. The following morning the city rang with stories of their
abuse; but in the investigation that was made by Madame Torkova, one of
the leaders of the Petrograd Duma, whose inclinations were decidedly
anti-Bolshevik, most of these tales were disproved. Some of the women
were taken to the headquarters of the Pavlovsky Regiment, and held
there until relatives could bring them feminine wearing apparel. A few
others, who had no way to obtain this, were allowed to go in their
soldiers’ uniforms.
From a number of the girls I heard the story of that night. It seems
that class feeling had for the moment wiped out every other instinct.
As they marched them away in the dark, some of the men, in their
excitement, took them by the arms and shook them, shouting:
“Why do you fight us? Why do you go against your own class? You
are working-women. Why do you fight with the bourgeoisie and the
counter-revolutionists?”
So effective was their propaganda that then, for the first time, a
class breach was made in the ranks of the women soldiers, and some of
them went over to the radicals as completely as any of the men had done.
With the surrender of the Winter Palace, the victory of the Bolsheviki
was complete. The dictatorship of the proletariat had become a fact.
The only power in Petrograd at dawn that morning was the power of the
People’s Commissaries, headed by Nicolai Lenin and Leon Trotzky, and
backed by the Russian fleet, the bayonets of the Petrograd garrison,
and the Red Guard rifles.
Petrograd was stunned. No one had the remotest idea what was going to
happen. “Where is Kerensky?” they asked. “Where is Korniloff? Where is
Savinkoff? Where are the Cossacks?” Last, and worst of all, “Where are
the Germans?”
Rumor was riding a mad steed. All sorts of wild reports swept
through the city, but no word of verified fact came from the outside
world. That morning the storm center shifted to the city Duma, which
refused to acknowledge the victory of the Bolsheviki or accede to
their demands. A Committee for the Salvation of the Country and the
Revolution was quickly formed, and all the anti-Bolshevik groups
gathered around it.
Early in the day, a Bolshevist representative called at the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs and demanded the secret treaties, declaring that he
wished to inform the Russian people as to the aims of the war. He was
told that ten thousand _dossiers_ were to be found in the archives of
the ministry, and he was at liberty to examine all of them. He thanked
his informant and left.
At the same hour Lenin called at the office of the _Izvestia_, official
organ of the executive committee of the Council of Workmen and
Soldiers, and announced that it would hereafter be in the hands of the
Bolsheviki. He proposed to the editors to continue work under the new
leadership. They refused, and Zenovieff, who only a few hours before
had been a fugitive, was elevated to the position of chief.
Absolute quiet reigned in the city that day and the next, and such
order as Russia had not known since the days immediately following
the March Revolution, when the entire populace was lifted into a
state of exaltation in which selfish desires played no part. Every
soldier had been told that the honor of the new Revolution was in his
hands. Every member of the Red Guard had been warned that provocation
in all the time-tried Russian forms would be used by monarchists,
counter-revolutionists, and German agents to discredit the cause of the
workers. They were admonished to refrain from violence themselves, and
to prevent looting wherever the slightest indication of it was found.
Placards were posted upon the buildings urging precautions against
disorder, and soldiers were on patrol duty at every street corner.
By Friday night the Committee of Salvation had succeeded in spreading
the strikes in the various ministries until the Bolsheviki were almost
completely isolated from the rest of the Russian _intelligentzia_. They
made the city ring with stories of outrages--stories that later proved
to be a fine fabric of falsification, worthy of Russian imagination.
The leaders of the Council of the Republic, the Peasants’ Council, and
even the Centroflot, Executive Committee of the Russian fleet, called
upon the people to refuse to recognize the Soviet government, and
announced that before long they would be able to establish a stable
government themselves.
It was a call the people did not heed. The masses had swung away from
their leaders. They had their own very definite ideas as to what they
wanted. The sailors were protesting violently that the Centrabalt
did not represent the rank and file of the navy, and it was finally
dissolved by order of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Soldiers
from the ranks were charging their committees with counter-revolution,
and shouting with fire in their eyes that their executives were putting
off the army elections week after week because they knew they no longer
had the faith of the men in the trenches and could not be reëlected.
The same split had come between the peasants and their executives, and
every rumor from the remote corners of Russia indicated that little
villages, towns, and cities were following the lead of Petrograd, and
rising in massed revolt.
The Bolsheviki had achieved a degree of success greater than they
suspected. The leaders, exhausted by lack of sleep, depressed by the
rejection of the _Intelligentzia_, and conscious of their inadequacy
for the mere physical task of bringing bread to keep Petrograd
alive, failed utterly to realize their strength. A heavy pall of
discouragement settled on Smolney.
Word had come that the Cossacks were marching on the city, and that
the citadel of the workers would be attacked the following morning.
Petrograd poured out to fight. The factory gates opened wide, and that
amazing army of the Red Guard, ununiformed, untrained, and certainly
unequipped for battle with the traditional backbone of the Russian
military, marched away to defend the “revolutionary capital” and the
victory of the proletariat.
Women walked by the side of men, and small boys tagged along on the
fringes of the procession. Some of the factory girls wore red crosses
upon the sleeves of their thin jackets, and packed a meager kit-bag of
bandages and first-aid accessories. More of them carried shovels with
which to dig trenches. The fire of the Crusaders was in their eyes, and
the faith of the Christian martyrs in their souls, as they marched down
the Nevsky, singing as they went, oblivious to the bitter cold that
blew in from the Baltic waters, and unafraid for the first time of
that foe whose very name had been a terror to countless generations of
beaten, broken human beings.
At ten o’clock Friday night my telephone rang, and a weary voice came
over the wire. It was my Lettish friend, Jacob Peters.
“I am trying to translate something,” he said. “It is very important,
and I do not know enough English. Could you find time to help me?”
“When?” I asked him.
“Now,” he said.
Half an hour later he knocked at my door. His face was gray with
fatigue. He had not been in bed for three days, and he looked utterly
crushed and discouraged.
“It is the decree of peace to the warring nations of the world,” he
said. “We are going to send it out on the wireless in every language.
They have given me the English translation. We have nobody to help us.
It is terrible--there are so few of us who can do this sort of thing.”
We sat down at my typewriter, and Peters struggled with the difficult
Russian words. Though he could speak Russian, his knowledge of the
fine points of the language was none too good. He had to translate it
first in his own mind into Lettish, and then into English, and his
poor, tired brain nearly went mad with the task.
Slowly I took down the words. At the end of an hour the sum of our
labors covered half a page of typewriting. We started glibly enough
with the title:
THE DECREE OF PEACE
and continued:
The All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workmen’s, Soldiers’, and
Peasants’ Deputies unanimously passed the following decree of peace,
October 26-November 8.
The Workmen’s and Peasants’ Government, made by the Revolution of the
twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of October (old style), and sanctioned
by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workmen’s, Soldiers’, and
Peasants’ Deputies, asks the warring peoples and governments to
start negotiations immediately for rightful and democratic peace;
for rightful and democratic peace for which the majority of the
worn-out, suffering, and war-weary workers are longing in all warring
countries; peace for which the peasants and workers of Russia have
been persistently asking since they overthrew the monarchy of the
Tsar, that is, peace without annexations and contributions and
self-definition of nations.
It was only the first paragraph. Peters looked despairingly at the
long document in front of him, and rubbed his tired eyes.
“I guess it’s no use,” he said. “We couldn’t finish it if we worked all
night. My Russian is not good enough. If we only had some translators!
If we only had some stenographers!”
Here was this new government of the People’s Commissaries preparing a
document that they confidently hoped would revolutionize the status
of the struggling world, and there was no one to translate it but
a Lett who had not been to bed for three days, and an American war
correspondent.
When Peters got up to leave, he held out his hand.
“This may be the last time I will see you,” he said. “If we fail now,
everything is lost. Up in my country the business is all in my name--my
throat will be the first one cut.”
“Well, we have tried, anyway, and if we fail I know the day will come
when the world will say that dark Russia did her best to bring peace to
all the war-weary peoples!”