But whatever chances there might have been of containing the disorders were destroyed that evening by the Tsar. Having been informed of the situation at his headquarters in Mogilev, he sent a cable to General Khabalov, Chief of the Petrograd Military District, ordering him to use military force to ‘put down the disorders by tomorrow’.8 There could be no better illustration of the extent to which the Tsar had lost touch with reality. Nor could there be any better guarantee of a revolution. To be fair, Nicholas had been badly advised from the start. He had left the capital for Mogilev on 22 February, after being assured by Protopopov that he had nothing to worry about. Since then the police and Khabalov had played down the seriousness of the situation in their reports to Nicholas: it was embarrassing for them to have to admit that it might be getting out of their control. The Tsar thus had little real idea of the finely balanced nature of the situation, or of the risks involved in using force, when he sent his fatal order to Khabalov. But then it was his job to know — and the job of his advisers to inform him — what was going on in the capital. Only the Tsar could issue the final order to use force against the crowds, and once that order had been issued none of his advisers could challenge it. In other words, if the regime fell because of a breakdown in communications, then one can only say that it deserved to fall.
By Sunday morning, 26 February, the centre of Petrograd had been turned into a militarized camp. Soldiers’ pickets and armed policemen stood at the major intersections and strategic buildings; mounted patrols rode through the streets; officers communicated by field telephone; machine-guns, set up in Palace Square, pointed down the Nevsky Prospekt; and in the side streets were military ambulances standing by. During the morning everything was quiet: it was Sunday and people slept in late. But around midday huge crowds of workers once again assembled in the suburbs and marched towards the city centre. As they converged on the Nevsky Prospekt, the police and soldiers fired upon them from several different points. At the junction of the Nevsky and Vladimir Prospekts the Semenovsky Regiment — which had put down the Moscow uprising in 1905 — shot dead several marchers. On the Nevsky, near the Gostiny Dvor, a training detachment of the Pavlovsky Regiment shot a round of blanks and then opened fire on the crowd. The people scattered behind buildings and into shops, reemerging moments later to throw bricks and pieces of ice at the troops. Dozens of people were wounded or killed. The bloodiest incident took place on Znamenskaya Square, where more than fifty people were shot dead by a training detachment of the Volynsky Regiment. It was a terrible atrocity. An officer, who had been unable to get his young and obviously nervous soldiers to shoot at the demonstrators, grabbed a rifle from one of his men and began to fire wildly at the crowd. Among the dead bodies, which were later piled up around the ‘Hippopotamus’, were two soldiers from the regiment who had gone over to the side of the people.9
This shedding of blood — Russia’s second Bloody Sunday — proved a critical turning point. From this moment on the demonstrators knew that they were involved in a life-or-death struggle against the regime. Paradoxically, now that the worst had happened and some of their comrades had been killed, they felt less afraid for their own lives.fn2 As for the soldiers, they were now confronted with a choice between their moral duty to the people and their oath of allegiance to the Tsar. If they followed the former, a full-scale revolution would occur. But if they stuck to their oath of allegiance, then the regime might still manage to survive, as it had done in 1905–6.
After the shooting on the Nevsky Prospekt an angry crowd of demonstrators broke into the barracks of the Pavlovsky Regiment near the Mars Field and shouted at the soldiers that some of their trainees had been firing at the people. Visibly shaken by the news, the 4th Company of the Pavlovskys resolved to march to the Nevsky at once in order to stop the massacre. ‘They are shooting at our mothers and our sisters!’ was their rallying cry as they mutinied. About a hundred soldiers broke into the arsenal of the barracks and, taking thirty rifles, began to march towards the Nevsky. Almost immediately, they ran into a mounted police patrol on the bank of the Griboyedov Canal. They fired at them, killing one policeman, until they ran out of cartridges, whereupon they decided to return to barracks to bring out the rest of the men. But Khabalov’s troops were waiting for them there and, upon the mutineers’ arrival, disarmed them and confined them to barracks. Nineteen ringleaders were arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. They were to be its last prisoners — at least under the tsarist regime.10
