One cause for concern was the safe and orderly detention of the tsarist ministers and officials. On the evening of the 27th the Council of Ministers had held its last meeting in the Marinsky Palace and formally submitted its resignation to the Tsar. At one stage in the meeting the lights had gone out and it was assumed that the revolutionaries were about to storm the palace. In fact it was just a power-cut and when the lights came back on after a few minutes, several of the ministers were found hiding under the table. None the less, their panic was not without cause. Some 4,000 tsarist government officials were seized by the crowd in the February Days, and the fate of many of them was not one that anyone would envy. The Temporary Committee of the Duma ordered the arrest of all ex-ministers and senior officials, and their delivery to the Duma ‘for justice’, partly to save them from the horrors of ‘mob law’. It was fitting and symbolic that Shcheglovitov, the former Minister of Justice, should have been the first to be brought by the crowds to the Tauride Palace. There he was met by Kerensky, shortly to become the next Minister of Justice, who, clearly aware of the drama of the situation, announced to the prisoner: ‘Ivan Grigorievich Shcheglovitov, you are under arrest! Your life is not in danger!’ And then with irony added the words: ‘Know that the State Duma does not shed blood.’ Several ex-ministers even turned themselves in to the Duma rather than run the risk of being captured by the crowds. Protopopov was among these. He tried to save himself by turning evidence against the Tsar and, when this failed, broke down into tears and whined pathetically. Sukhomlinov, the ex-Minister of War, arrived on 1 March with his own armed escort, causing wild excitement among the soldiers. They were only just dissuaded from executing him on the spot. But they did succeed in tearing off his epaulettes as a rejection of the old military order.34
All these fallen officials were detained in the Ministerial Pavilion of the Tauride Palace and then transferred to the Peter and Paul Fortress for interrogation and imprisonment. It was one of those small but nicely symbolic ironies of the revolution that the man who was placed in charge of escorting the ministers to the Peter and Paul should have been a man, Viktor Zenzinov, who had himself once been a prisoner there. He recalls what must have been a very strange sensation as he, now a government official, arrived at the prison gates with Shcheglovitov, once the Minister of Justice himself, but now just another ‘political’:
We drove through the gates, did a turn or two, went under the arch and came to a stop in front of the door. Just the same guards stood there now as I remembered from seven years before. Then out came to meet us — I could scarcely believe my eyes — Captain Ivanishin, the same Captain Ivanishin, who seven years before had run the Trubetskoi Bastion, where the solitary confinement prisoners were kept and where I had been kept under him in a damp stone cell for six months during 1910 … Now he was conducting himself politely with me. I have no doubt that Ivanishin recognized me immediately, just as I recognized him, but he did not give any sign of recognition.
On Zenzinov’s request, Kerensky ordered the removal of Ivanishin. But the order was not carried out. It was only later, after several weeks, when Ivanishin was found guilty of accepting bribes from the imprisoned ministers, that he was finally dismissed.35
