WITH no government and a nomadic Tsar lost in a railway train going nowhere, power in Petrograd passed on Tuesday February 28 to the revolution, with competing powers in the Tauride Palace trying to establish their own agendas for the reshaping of Russia. Home of a Duma that was no more, the parliamentary building now housed a noisy mass of workers, soldiers and students, joined together in a new organisation, a Soviet on the lines which had emerged in the 1905 revolution. The few hundred respectable deputies who backed the Temporary Committee of the Duma now jostled for places in rooms and hallways packed with a thousand excited street orators, mutineers and strike leaders. It was chaos and would remain so for days to come.
When Vladimir Nabokov, a lawyer destined to play a leading part in the events of that week, arrived at the smoke-filled Tauride Palace it looked to him like an improvised camp: ‘rubbish, straw; the air was thick like some kind of a dense fog; there was a smell of soldiers’ boots, cloth, sweat; from somewhere we could hear the hysterical voices of orators, addressing a meeting…everywhere crowding and bustling confusion…’16
In that crush of people, the young man who was beginning to stand out as the dominant figure was Aleksandr Kerensky aged 36. As both a member of the Temporary Committee and as vice-chairman of the new ‘Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’, he bestrode both camps. He was also the finger of justice.
When the mutineers dragged in their first important prisoner, the chairman of the State Council Ivan Shcheglovitov, Kerensky strode up to him and shouted dramatically: ‘Your life is not in danger. The Imperial Duma does not shed blood’.17 The arrested man was led off to the Government Pavilion, a separate building with some anterooms previously reserved for ministers who had come to address the Duma. It was connected to the main hall by a glass-roofed passage and technically was not part of the parliamentary building, so that deputies avoided the stigma of ‘turning the Duma into a prison’.
There would be hundreds of men like Shcheglovitov in the next hours and days — hunted down and brought to the Tauride Palace as prisoners, fearing to be shot, and it was to Kerensky’s credit that he protected them from violence. Even the hated former interior minister Protopopov — the man who had so recently fallen on his knees before the Empress, calling out ‘Oh Majesty, I see Christ behind you’ and now the man most likely to be torn to bits — was safe once inside the Tauride Palace. Found hiding in a tailor’s shop, Protopopov, ‘trembling with terror’ was almost unrecognisable: a shrunken, frightened figure, all posturing gone. Kerensky pushed forward and stood over him. ‘Don’t touch that man’, he cried with a raised arm that commanded what was otherwise a rabble.
The crowd fell back silent as Kerensky pushed on, the cringing Protopopov trailing in his wake. ‘It looked as if he were leading him to execution, to something dreadful…Kerensky dashed past like the flaming torch of revolutionary justice and behind him they dragged that miserable little figure in the rumpled greatcoat, surrounded by bayonets.’18
Goremykin, prime minister until the previous year, was another prisoner brought in, though at first he was treated with special consideration on the insistence of the ‘old school’ Duma deputies. It would be a brief respite.
Kerensky found him in Rodzyanko’s room. ‘In a corner sat a very old gentleman, with exceedingly long whiskers. He wore a fur coat, and looked like a gnome.’ Kerensky, noting that he had taken the trouble to hang round his neck the Order of St Andrew, refused to be impressed. ‘In the name of the revolutionary people I declare you under arrest’, he shouted.19 Rodzyanko, faced with this challenge to his own authority as leader of the Duma committee, backed down helplessly. Two soldiers led away the confused and crestfallen old Goremykin to join the others.
Kerensky was everywhere. ‘I was summoned and sent for from all sides. As in a trance, regardless of day or night…I rushed about the Duma. Sometimes I almost lost consciousness for fifteen or twenty minutes until a glass of brandy was forced down my throat and I was made to drink a cup of black coffee.’20
Kerensky would become more and more excitable as the hours and days passed. Nabokov, seeing him for the first time, was struck by his ‘loss of emotional balance’. He was also astonished when Kerensky, coming out of one meeting ‘excited, agitated, hysterical,’ put up his hands, grabbed the corners of his wing collar, and ripped them off,’ achieving a deliberately proletarian look, instead of that of a dandy’.21
His power, nevertheless, was enormous for there was no doubting among the Duma deputies that the new Soviet, with a thousand members milling around the Tauride Palace, was master if it chose to be. Kerensky was the bridge between two rivals in an uneasy coalition, and for the Duma members he was a bridge they could not afford to cross. The Temporary Committee of the Duma had the better claim to government, but its members knew that in this revolution they could only lead where Kerensky was willing to follow.
TRAPPED in Millionnaya Street, Michael knew little that day of events in the world aside. After a few restless hours on a settee, he was awakened by ‘the noise of heavy traffic and movement of cars and lorries filled with soldiers who were shooting mainly in the air and there were also explosions of hand-grenades. The soldiers shouted and cheered, waved red flags and had red ribbons and bows on their breasts and buttonholes’.22
Peering cautiously out from the apartment windows, Michael guessed from the jubilation of the troops driving by that there was no longer any resistance in the capital. There had been fierce fighting that morning around the Admiralty building until the last of the loyal troops, holed up there since the evacuation of the Winter Palace at 5 a.m., surrendered after warnings that the guns of the St Peter and St Paul Fortress would be turned on them.23 Thereafter the streets belonged to the revolution and the head-hunting gangs seeking out policemen, and anyone deemed ‘a traitor’ to the revolution.
One target was Grand Duke Andrew’s mistress Kschessinska. In the depths of winter, when the fuel depots were empty and people freezing in their homes, four military lorries, laden with sacks of coal, had arrived at her mansion on Kammenny-Ostrov Prospekt.24 To the mob, she was not an admired ballet star but the pampered recipient of blatant imperial favours, and a profiteer in arms deals. A vengeful crowd therefore descended on her house and sacked it from top to bottom. Kschessinska, forewarned, fled the house just in time, dressed like a peasant and with a shawl over her head, but not before remembering to pack a small suitcase with the most valuable of her jewels.25
At the nearby Astoria Hotel, a mob stormed in, after claiming that shots had been fired from there, and wrecked it. British and French officers staying there — military observers attached to the Russian army — were left alone, and indeed one was astonished to find himself being saluted as rebel troops ran up the staircase in search of Russians hiding in their rooms. Many of these, women as well as men, were dragged away as ‘prisoners of the revolution’, their fate uncertain.26
For Michael it was galling to think what might have been, if his brother had given him the free hand he had requested. Now there was no authority, no rallying point for those who would have welcomed the chance to turn the tables on the lawless mob rampaging throughout the capital. Where was the relief force so confidently promised by Nicholas? There was no sign among the celebrating rebels that they feared their arrival, and since the telephones were not working Michael could not contact anyone to find out what had happened to them. There was therefore nothing to do but sit tight and wait out the day. Fortunately their luck held. The bands searching the city for prisoners, not knowing that Michael was in 12 Millionnaya Street, left the building alone. ‘The day passed peacefully and no one bothered us’, he wrote that evening in his diary.27