In August 1905 Russia signed a humiliating peace treaty with Japan in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Theodore Roosevelt acted as mediator. The populace was caught up in a storm of outrage, with Petersburg at its center. They had not forgotten Bloody Sunday, the nightmarish day of January 9, 1905, when guards, cavalry units, and police attacked a peaceful demonstration by Petersburg workers. That day almost 150,000 people had marched from various parts of the city toward the Winter Palace. Their leader, Father Georgy Gapon, planned to hand Nicholas II a petition that began: “We, workers, have come to you, Sovereign, to seek truth and protection. We are impoverished, we are oppressed and burdened with unbearable work…. We are seeking our last salvation from you, do not refuse to help your people.” The demonstrators were carrying icons, church banners, and portraits of Nicholas II; many were singing the anthem, “God Save the Tsar.”
Neither Father Gapon nor the workers knew that the tsar was not in the Winter Palace that day; fearing terrorists, he was away at his country residence. His German wife kept saying, “Petersburg is a rotten town, not one atom Russian.” And his supercilious generals firmly—and stupidly—decided to teach the Petersburg plebeians a lesson once and for all. When the crowd approached the Winter Palace, the order came: “Fire!” The troops attacked the unarmed demonstrators in other parts of the city, too. No one believed the government statement that around one hundred people died; rumor put the number in the thousands.
Petersburg had not seen such a massacre since the fateful December 14, 1825, when Nicholas I, the grandfather of Nicholas II, scattered the Decembrists on Senate Square with artillery fire. That irretrievably tragic day marked the appearance of the abyss between Russian tsar and intellectuals. Bloody Sunday of 1905 had even more unpredictable consequences. The words of Father Gapon echoed throughout the land: “We no longer have a tsar. A river of blood separates the tsar from the people.” Anna Akhmatova, who was sixteen in 1905, used to repeat, “January 9 and Tsushima were a shock for life, and since it was the first, it was particularly terrible.”4
In the fall of 1905, the first Russian revolution seized the country. Strikes virtually paralyzed Petersburg. Factories closed, the stock exchange was inactive, schools and pharmacies shut down. There was no electricity and the eerily deserted Nevsky Prospect was illuminated by searchlights from the Admiralty. A unique alternative form of political power arose spontaneously—the Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, with the radical Leon Trotsky as its cochairman. Unprepared to use brute force further, Nicholas II on October 17,1905, issued a Constitutional Manifesto, which promised the Russian people freedom of speech and assembly. Too little, too late. A sarcastic ditty rang through the streets of Petersburg: “The tsar got scared and made a manifesto; the dead got freedom, the living got arrest-o!”
The cynics were right—the Duma, a legislative assembly created by the tsar’s manifesto, never acquired real power. The rights granted were curtailed one after another. The first political parties created in Russia led a precarious existence. But the revolutionary ferment quieted down. Life in Petersburg returned to normal. Chasing away gloomy thoughts about politics, the residents of the capital tried to distract themselves and have some fun again.
Petersburg’s prospering commercial life had brought into full bloom a large class of assertive, self-indulgent bourgeois whose appearance was a relatively recent phenomenon in Russia. Their aspirations and activities added something new to the older court traditions of wealth and cultural style.
Once more the elegant city was shimmering and dizzying. Once more luxurious carriages bearing arrogant and mysterious welldressed ladies whom Osip Mandelstam would later call “fragile Europeans” raced down Nevsky Prospect. The most impressive were the private carriages pulled by expensive thoroughbreds with a satiny sheen to their coats.
The horses, with battery-operated lanterns hanging from the shafts, were no longer frightened by the recently installed trolleys, nor by the first “taximotors,” but they still snorted at the exhaust fumes. Footmen in costumes matching the crests on the doors of the carriages rode on the running boards. The lackeys of the palace carriages stood out in their bright red liveries with capes trimmed in gold braid and black eagles. The red caps of the gallant hussars repeated the striking color. The guards galloped in dashing gray coats with sword hilts peeking out of the slit left pocket. Each regiment had its own uniform. The colorful assortment of epaulets, orders, buttons, and trouser stripes gladdened the eye. Nor were the military the only ones with special uniforms—civil servants, engineers, even students all had their own.
