On the afternoon of November 7th, Bubo Musa had been one of the victims of a BR7 Armored sliding on the snow-covered roads. Unable to fling himself clear, his boot had been momentarily trapped by a wheel, and the heavy vehicle, sliding forward, struck his knee. Ordered by an officer to ignore the accident, Bubo had limped on throughout that dreadful afternoon. He had as a result limped on for the rest of his short life.
In the Hero City itself, unknown of course to Bubo and the members of his Field Provost unit, tension had been mounting throughout the day. Before dark fell the militia had contributed to the growing sense that something was about to happen by touring the streets in search of foreign visitors. All tourists were instructed to return to their hotels and remain there until daybreak. At Pulkovo Airport incoming tourists were, without explanation, taken in buses to hotels well outside the city; some were immediately placed on return flights to the West; others found their Leningrad flights mysteriously diverted to Moscow. Again, no explanations were offered.
For Russians no curfew had as yet been declared. But nobody could escape the presence of militia on the streets. At major intersections and every bridge over the Neva and the canals, militia trucks and armored vehicles were stationed in force. No one was allowed to approach the Blue Bridge itself.
Sometime in the late evening events began to develop in four separate corners of the city. From the direction of the Baltic station, from Vasilyevsky Island, from across the Neva at Okhtinsky Bridge and from the southern metropolitan area around Pulkovo, in response to Joseph Densky’s call, groups of men formed and began to march toward the Nevsky Prospekt. Their destination was the Winter Palace where in 1917 the marching workers had been ridden and gunned down by the Czar’s cossack troops.
It seems clear now that several attempts were made to disperse the workers marching on the Winter Palace. But each time the column would scatter and reassemble at a point closer to the center of the city. By the time the militia loudspeaker vans began to tour the central area instructing people to go home, the crowds drifting down the Nevsky Prospekt were in no mood to comply.
Carole Yates was with her husband in the Dzerzhinsky Restaurant on the Nevsky Prospekt itself. Against the advice of the Leningrad U.S. Consular officials they had driven into the city center on what Tom Yates saw as part of his factfinding tour. Twice they had narrowly avoided being escorted back to the consulate by militiamen picking up foreigners on the street. Now, from a table in the Dzerzhinsky, they were able to watch the crowds outside on the Prospekt ignoring the calls of the loudspeaker vans to return to their homes.
It’s near impossible to describe the atmosphere in the city that night, Carole Yates recorded. Perhaps if I say that everybody (with the exception of the militia, of course) seemed drunk on either excitement or vodka, or both, it might come close. In the Dzerzhinsky Restaurant the waiters no longer made any attempt to serve the customers. Every one seemed to have a quart of vodka in his hand. Between great gulps from the neck of the bottle the waiters were talking and gesticulating among themselves or at the tables of still unserved customers. I remember the name of Joseph Densky seemed to come up frequently.
What was happening? Well of course they all pretended to know. Some said that it was outright revolution, others that the army was already arresting KGB units in the suburbs as part of a military coup. Yet others said that student bombing teams were planning to attack militia stations throughout the city.
Then from somewhere north or south of the twisting River Neva came the first burst of shooting — No. 29 Field Provost had finally arrived in Leningrad. Assigned a key position at that part of the Nevsky Prospekt closest to the river, their orders were to use minimum force to clear the crowd from the bottom of the Prospekt and to block any approach march by workers along the embankment from the east.
But no unit was less capable of minimum force at that moment. Before them were civilian crowds of Slavs. All the desperate hatred they felt for their Slav officers boiled over. Fixing bayonets on order they drove the crowds before them, jabbing fiercely at men and women alike. Screaming women, blood streaming from hands and faces, fled along the Nevsky Prospekt. Some men fought back with their bare hands. Then at that moment the first workers’ column approached along the embankment.
To oppose them effectively the Field Police Battalion would have had to disengage at least two companies from the crowd and turn to face the approaching workers. In fact the discipline and training needed to execute the maneuver simply did not exist. Officers roared orders at men who either didn’t understand or refused to obey the Russian commands. In the confusion the workers’ column was upon them.
Attacked as they now saw it, from the rear, the Field Police began to fire blindly. Unable to maintain any semblance of a military formation, the soldiers fell back in small clusters pointing their rifles indiscriminately at workers or the crowd.
For minutes the advancing workers were paralyzed with shock. Before them was a unit of the Soviet Army, not militia, not KGB guards, but their own army — and it was shooting down unarmed civilians.
Then the workers surged forward, ducking the crack and whine of bullets, and threw themselves upon the soldiers. Workers fell and were trampled on by fellow workers. Rifles were torn from the soldiers’ hands and used to bayonet and club the uniformed figures to the ground.
At such close quarters numbers often proved more effective than weapons. Not more than a few sections of Field Police succeeded in retreating, still firing their automatics into the crowd, to the Kirovsky Bridge where a disciplined KGB guard unit rescued them.
As the firing began, Carole Yates and her husband had left the restaurant and emerged onto the Nevsky Prospekt.
Of course it was a foolish thing to do [Carole admitted in her account of that night]. Almost immediately we were swept along the Prospekt toward the shooting near the embankment I saw men and women falling silently or in screaming pain. I saw Soviet Army soldiers struck down with pieces of paving stone, rough batons of timber, anything that came to hand.
In one day I had seen more blood and violence than I had experienced in my whole life. Perhaps the vision of the morning’s airport bombing combined with the horrors I saw before me now. I’m sure they did for my husband. He was shouting and screaming like a madman, dragging me by the arm through the crowd with no idea where safety might lie. I know I was screaming at him to stop, but he had totally lost control. Blundering and crashing through the crowd we suddenly emerged into a side street off the Nevsky Prospekt. Breathless, sobbing even, he released my arm and fell back against a brick wall. Surfacing above my terror at what I had just seen was a sudden moment of insight. I was of a generation of women who had not felt it relevant to ask if physical courage was an important ingredient in the makeup of the men we were with. But tonight’s events had presented me with an image I could never again avoid. I now saw differently his actions at the airport this morning. My husband’s blind panic filled me with overwhelming disgust.
Ten thousand incidents were cameoed in Leningrad that night. The disarming and arrest by KGB guards of Bubo Musa, the onetime tailor from Bratsk, was to lead him to a northern labor camp (he was considered too politically unstable for a Penal Brigade which was the fate of the other surviving members of his Field Provost unit). Joseph Densky’s wife, her groin lanced by a bayonet, was to drag herself halfway home before dying of loss of blood on an empty pavement in a Leningrad suburb. Laryssa Navratovna, the prostitute with the apartment overlooking the Blue Bridge, was arrested for seditious activity on the Nevsky Prospekt. None of her influential friends were prepared to support her when she claimed she was simply plying her (illegal) trade in her favorite Prospekt cafés when the events of that night had overtaken her.