It was one o’clock in the night, a time when Yefremov was usually asleep. Suddenly, at this odd hour, there sounded a short, booming peal of the cathedral bell. Then another, and a third. The pealing grew faster, its noise spread over the town, and soon the bells of all the outlying churches started to ring.
Lights were lit in all the houses. The streets filled with people. The doors of many houses stood open. Strangers, weeping openly, embraced each other. The solemn, exultant whistling of locomotives could be heard from the direction of the station. Somewhere down one street there began, first quietly, then steadily louder, the singing of the Marseillaise:
Ye tyrants quake, your day is over,
Detested now by friend and foe!
The singing brass sounds of a band joined the human voices in the chorus.
The soldiers in the trenches were equally ecstatic, despite the initial confusion caused by the efforts of the officers to withhold the news from the capital. Red flags were raised in the trenches and red ribbons tied to the military trucks, pieces of artillery and the horses. There were parades to celebrate the revolution, military bands played the Marseillaise and soldiers wildly threw their caps into the air. On the naval ships there was a similar outburst of emotion. The red flag was raised on battleships ‘as an emblem’, in the words of the Helsingfors sailors, ‘of our freedom and our unity’.58
In the countryside the news of the abdication filtered down more slowly. Some of the more remote villages did not learn about the events in the capital until the end of March, and in some places, such as in Kazan and Mogilev provinces, where the tsarist forces remained dominant, not until April. Many of the peasants were at first confused by the downfall of the Tsar. ‘The church was full of crying peasants,’ one witness recalled. ‘ “What will become of us?” they constantly repeated — “They have taken the Tsar away from us?” ’ Some of the older peasants, in particular, venerated the Tsar as a god on earth and saw his removal as an attack upon religion — a fact exploited by many priests in their counter-revolutionary agitation. Even among the more ruralized workers the overthrow of the Tsar was sometimes seen as a sin. The American Frank Golder noted in his diary on 15 March:
Talked with one of the workmen (an old muzhik) of the Navy archives. He said it was a sin to overthrow the Emperor, since God had placed him in power. It may be that the new regime will help people on this earth, but they will surely pay for it in the world to come.
In the villages people at first spoke in muted voices about the ‘big events’ in the capital. Until the land captains and the police were removed from power, which took place gradually during March and April, the peasants had no guarantee that they would not be arrested if they spoke their minds. But as the weeks went by, they grew in confidence and began to voice their opposition to the Tsar. A survey by the Duma based upon the reports of its provincial agents for the first three months of the revolution summarized this process:
the widespread myth that the Russian peasant is devoted to the Tsar and that he ‘cannot live’ without him has been destroyed by the universal joy and the relief of the peasants upon discovering that in reality they can live without the Tsar, without whom they were told they ‘could not live’ … Now the peasants say: ‘The Tsar brought himself down and brought us to ruin.’59
