The crowd violence of the February Days was not orchestrated by any revolutionary party or movement. It was by and large a spontaneous reaction to the bloody repressions of the 26th, and an expression of the people’s long-felt hatred for the old regime. Symbols of the old state power were destroyed. Tsarist statues were smashed or beheaded. A movie camera filmed a group of laughing workers throwing the stone head of Alexander II into the air like a football. Police stations, court houses and prisons were attacked. The crowd exacted a violent revenge against the officials of the old regime. Policemen were hunted down, lynched and killed brutally. Sorokin watched a crowd of soldiers beating one policeman with the butts of their revolvers and kicking him in the head with their heels. Another was thrown on to the street from a fourth-floor window, and when his body thumped, lifeless, on to the ground, people rushed to stamp on it and beat it with sticks.
Once it became clear that any further resistance was doomed to failure, many of these policemen tried to give themselves up to the Tauride Palace, where the Duma and the Soviet were struggling to restore order, in the belief that it would be better to be imprisoned by the new government than to be the victim of this ‘mob law’ on the streets. Others tried to escape the capital, knowing that their chances of survival would be better in the provinces. Two burly policemen were discovered heading for the Finland Station dressed in women’s clothes. Only their large size and awkward gait, and the heavy police boots under their skirts, betrayed their identity to the crowd.27
ii Reluctant Revolutionaries
‘The revolution found us, the party members, fast asleep, just like the Foolish Virgins in the Gospel,’ recalled Sergei Mstislavsky, one of the SR leaders, in 1922. Much the same could be said for all the revolutionary parties in the capital. ‘There were no authoritative leaders on the spot in any of the parties,’ Sukhanov recalled. ‘They were all in exile, in prison, or abroad.’ Lenin and Martov were in Zurich, Trotsky in New York, Chernov in Paris. Tsereteli, Dan and Gots were in Siberia. Cut off from the pulse of the capital, the leaders failed to sense what Mstislavsky called ‘the approaching storm in the ever mounting waves of the February disturbances’. Having spent their whole lives waiting for the revolution, they failed to recognize it when it came. Lenin himself had predicted in January that ‘we older men perhaps will not live to see the coming revolution’. Even as late as 26 February, Shliapnikov, the leading Bolshevik in Petrograd, had told a meeting of socialists in Kerensky’s flat: ‘There is no and will be no revolution. We have to prepare for a long period of reaction.’28
In the absence of the major party leaders, the task of leading the revolution fell on to the shoulders of the secondary ones. They were not just second-ranking but also second-rate. Shliapnikov was an experienced trade unionist and party worker underground. But as a politician, in Sukhanov’s words, he ‘was quite incapable of grasping the essence’ of the situation that had been created. His ideas were ‘clichés of ancient party resolutions’. Not much more could be said of the Mensheviks in the capital. Chkheidze, the ‘Papa’ of the revolution, was an amiable and competent but sleepy-headed Georgian, who, in the words of Sukhanov, could not have been ‘less suited to be a working-class or party leader, and he never led anyone anywhere’. Skobelev, a Duma deputy from Baku, was a provincial intellectual, designed on a small-town rather than a national scale. As for Sukhanov, he was on the fringes of all the party factions, being much too undecided to declare his views. Like all too many of the socialist leaders, he was always inclined to look at politics as an intellectual rather than as a politician. Trotsky described him as ‘a conscientious observer rather than a statesman, a journalist rather than a revolutionist, a rationaliser rather than a journalist — he was capable of standing by a revolutionary conception only up to the time when it was necessary to carry it into action’. N. D. Sokolov was a similarly floating figure, too vague in his beliefs to fit into any party. This bearded lawyer, with his little pince-nez, would have been more at home in a library or a lecture hall than in a revolutionary crowd. Finally, the SRs were no better off for leaders in the capital. Mstislavsky and Filipovsky found themselves as the closest things the Soviet had to ‘military men’ (Mstislavsky was merely a librarian at the Military Academy but Filipovsky was a naval engineer) thrown into positions of leadership for which they were suited neither by their temperament nor their skills. Zenzinov was a party hack.29 And as for Kerensky — well more on him below.
