Vova called me to his balcony when he heard the first of what sounded to him like a big parade, and I joined him there to watch the procession cross the Troitsky Bridge toward the palace. I pointed out to Vova how the men and women and children carried icons and portraits of the tsar and flags and banners, including one that stated, disconcertingly, Soldiers, Do Not Shoot at the People!, which the children at the front of the column gripped in their small hands. Do Not Shoot at the People. Posters had been pasted up around Petersburg inveighing against the march, and cannons had been placed in the palace square and cavalry assembled in front of the palace and in the Alexandrovsky Gardens, and twelve thousand soldiers had been posted along the streets, on Nevsky Prospekt, on the Troitsky Bridge, at the Neva Gate. The line of people marched as solemnly as a church processional of Holy First Communicants, past the soldiers and the Cossacks stationed along the bridge, while my skin began to tingle with foreboding. The Cossacks liked to kill and to kill at close range. Why do you think the tsar used them for his personal bodyguards? Bystanders at the edges of the bridge and the curbs of the street just beyond pulled their hats peaceably from their heads or crossed themselves as the column plowed past—after all, a priest carried a large cross at the head of the parade. The workers’ petition had been sent ahead to their tsar and was later printed in the papers: Sire, we come to thee to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated. We have reached that frightful moment when death is better than the prolongation of our unbearable sufferings. Batiushka, hear our plea.
As Vova and I stood there, Vova dancing from the cold, I heard shots, the sounds faint but a fat number of them, and Vova began to pantomime the firing of an imaginary gun. I thought, Surely no one would be firing on those women and children, these men holding portraits of the tsar, but I called to my maid anyway to bring Vova inside, and he went off wailing that he hated me, that he wanted to stay and see, he wanted to see the people. I learned later that as the marchers approached the Narva Gates, a squadron of cavalry charged through that green arch that bore the figures of medieval Russian knights in their helmets, boots, and armor. And when the marchers still continued to press their way forward—for how easily can a crowd turn itself back?—remember Khodynka Field—the infantry pointed its rifles at the marchers, fired off warning shots, and then aimed into the crowd, suddenly, without any further delay. And who ordered this shooting of the people? Grand Duke Vladimir, Emperor Vladimir, monitoring the situation in his tall polished boots, brother of Alexander III, commander in chief of the Preobrazhensky Guards and of the St. Petersburg military district, father-disciplinarian of wayward dancers. To such a monarchist no demonstration by the people was permissible, no dissent tolerated. Hadn’t I learned that myself? Though the crowd began to scatter and stampede in confusion, the cavalry continued firing and like a shock wave from a bomb, the disorder spread outward from the gates toward the Troitsky Bridge. From Vova’s balcony, I watched the excitable Cossacks drive their horses right into the crowd stalled there and bring their whips and sabers down upon the hats of the men and the kerchiefs of the women and the blades split the face of one man into two faces and he fell with his faces onto the street. At that I bolted into the house where my son was waiting to flail at me with his fists and cry as if he had missed the sight of a pack of Siberian wolves skulking past his door. I held him, a small angry puddle, in my arms while outside in the pandemonium, people tried to flee back the way they came, back down Nevsky Prospekt, pressing themselves into the Alexandrovsky Gardens as if to hide among the trees or lose their pursuers on the garden paths, and the Cossacks and the mounted Guards cut through the procession and then back again, shooting so wildly that children, who, like Vova, had found themselves some high perch by which to view the parade, some tree or garden statue or top of fence, were felled like small beasts. In the middle of this chaos, Father Gapon, that yourodivi, that idiot, stood in the palace square in disbelief, his big crucifix at his feet, hundreds of bodies bleeding into the snow that stretched white and wide into the distance all around him, and cried out, There is no God. There is no tsar.
Ah, but there was a Tsar. He was at Tsarskoye Selo, playing dominoes. And I thought, Perhaps Niki will not do as well with all this as I had believed.
This day came to be known as Bloody Sunday, and the bleeding from it lasted all that year of 1905, the blood being all the loudly expressed dissatisfactions of the entire country—not only the factory laborers who requested decent hours and housing, but also the citizens angered by the costly war with Japan, the peasants who had survived the famine of the last decade and now claimed a right to the land they tenanted, the intelligenty who demanded civil rights and who, along with a few liberal noblemen, called for a national parliament, a national zemstvo in which they all, not only the tsar, had a voice. It seemed the whole country began holding meetings and coming up with manifestos to send to the tsar and his ministers, and to the Winter Palace were sent sixty thousand petitions, like the cahiers, the letters of grievance, sent by the French people to King Louis XVI in 1789, and all these letters asked the tsar for reform. The petitions for a cabinet of ministers and a Land Assembly of representatives of all the tsar’s subjects came from the tsar’s own ministers; the petitions for the redistribution of land from the squires to the peasants came from, of course, the peasants; and the petition for a Union of Unions in which every worker would belong to an association concerned with political freedom—lawyers, professors, clerks, bookkeepers, teachers, Jews, women, railroad employees, peasants—came from the liberals, the intelligenty. And these petitions were followed by action. More than a hundred thousand ironworkers and electrical workers struck spontaneously later in January, and once again I watched men march over the Troitsky Bridge, ten abreast, and for a few days we had no light. The schools had to be closed in February. In September the printers struck and so for weeks there were no newspapers, rail workers struck and there were no trains and no telegraph. So many of the previous revolutionary troublemakers had already been sent or had fled abroad to avoid arrest that a new cadre of leaders had emerged—the writer Gorky and the nobleman Prince Lvov and others like him who had long sought to help the peasantry and advocated reform. They wrote articles and gave speeches, and soon the agitation in the cities spread to the countryside. In Russia’s provinces, in Tomsk, Simteropol, Tver, and Odessa, the great agricultural swath, the peasants cut down their squires’ forests, took their hay, destroyed whatever machinery they couldn’t load onto their carts, and stole their squires’ crystal and porcelain and paintings and statues. The peasants of one village hacked a piano to bits and divided among themselves its ivory keys. Other manor houses were burned, their libraries and tapestries and grand pianos and oriental carpets turned to ash—and the houses they didn’t burn, they desecrated, squatting to leave piles of excrement on the carpets and floors, smearing the wallpaper with their filthy hands. We were here in your house. The squires fled to the cities to petition the court for help, while in the countryside the skies turned ocher from the fires and the peasants like plowhorses pulled their loaded wooden carts of stolen goods across the fields. In Moscow the students at the university burned portraits of the tsar and hung red flags from the roofs of the buildings. Even in Latvia, in Finland, in Georgia, in my own Poland, there were strikes and barricades and street fighting from the people who had never enjoyed, but had simply endured, Russia’s dominion. Yes, Russia’s old unrest of the 1820s had returned, suddenly, and with a vengeance.