March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2

By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Marian Schwartz

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's March 1917, Book 2, covers three days of the February Revolution when the nation unraveled, leading to the Bolshevik takeover eight months later.

The Red Wheel is Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's multivolume epic work about the Russian Revolution. He spent decades writing about just four of the most important periods, or "nodes.” This is the first time that the monumental March 1917—the third node—has been translated into English. It tells the story of the Russian Revolution itself, during which the Imperial government melts in the face of the mob, and the giants of the opposition also prove incapable of controlling the course of events.

The action of Book 2 (of four) of March 1917 is set during March 13–15, 1917, the Russian Revolution's turbulent second week. The revolution has already won inside the capital, Petrograd. News of the revolution flashes across all Russia through the telegraph system of the Ministry of Roads and Railways. But this is wartime, and the real power is with the army. At Emperor Nikolai II’s order, the Supreme Command sends troops to suppress the revolution in Petrograd. Meanwhile, victory speeches ring out at Petrograd's Tauride Palace. Inside, two parallel power structures emerge: the Provisional Government and the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers’ Deputies, which sends out its famous "Order No. 1," presaging the destruction of the army. The troops sent to suppress the Petrograd revolution are halted by the army’s own top commanders. The Emperor is detained and abdicates, and his ministers are jailed and sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress. This sweeping, historical novel is a must-read for Solzhenitsyn's many fans, as well as those interested in twentieth-century history, Russian history and literature, and military history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268106874

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was a Soviet political prisoner from 1945 to 1953. His story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) further unmasked Communism and played a critical role in its eventual defeat. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974. He ultimately published dozens of plays, poems, novels, and works of history, nonfiction, and memoir, including In the First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Red Wheel, The Oak and the Calf, and Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).

Book preview

13 MARCH TUESDAY

[171]

Shlyapnikov had made decent headway on the Executive Committee. He had been entrusted with the entire Vyborg side and with knocking together a workers’ militia. As far as his sleepless, by now dulled head could tell, this was a real and important victory. An armed Vyborg side would weigh more than any vote in the Soviet of Deputies, and certainly more than the entire State Duma. It was, as Lenin liked to say, the main link. And now it seemed to Shlyapnikov that he had laid hold of this main link.

But what if it wasn’t? What if it wasn’t the main one? If matters continued the way they had today, the emigres would come flooding in immediately. Lenin would, too, and in his own meticulous manner he would rebuke Shlyapnikov for every mistake in his quarrelsome, offensive way. Shlyapnikov shrank at the thought of that haranguing.

Nonetheless, events and opportunities had opened up so expansively and so suddenly, just try to guess which one you should saddle.

The muddle-headed EC session had ended just before morning, and as strong as Shlyapnikov was, he was tottering.

He had to set up his own permanent watch here, in the Tauride, so that he would learn each piece of news right away. But there wasn’t even anyone to do this; you couldn’t find anyone appropriate. Except maybe Stasova. (She had arrived in Petersburg from exile in the autumn, to see her aged parents, and had found a footing here.) At least for the daytime hours: let her treat it as a job and keep an eye out here. And we could call it—the CC Secretariat? She could bring in some other girl, too.

All right, go get some sleep. Shlyapnikov had no need to hoof it; he could take a motorcar.

Right then, though, a student ran over from the telephone. They’d just called to say there’d been a gang attack on Gorky’s apartment!

Wouldn’t you know it! That was quite a sting! Indeed, things could not be all that good. This was bound to happen: a notable revolutionary figure! Aleksei Maksimych—no harm could be allowed to come to him, he is like our best party member, more ours than the Mensheviks’. He’s given us money, too, and in 1905, in his Moscow apartment, during the uprising, he supported thirteen Georgian militiamen, and we made bombs there.

It was the Bolshevik law: you have to rescue your own!

He buttoned his coat, pulled his cap down low (neither of which he’d taken off all those hours of the session in the warm palace, there being nowhere to put them)—and stepped outside.

In the open area in front of the palace, men were warming themselves around three bonfires. There were soldiers here and there.

I am the commissar of the Vyborg side! Shlyapnikov shouted not all that loudly, having lost his voice, but in a tone that was new for him, a new right to give loud orders. Is there a motorcar?

His tone was picked up on and understood immediately (no Duma deputy would dare shout like that), and several soldier volunteers came running; this was better than freezing.

There are! Where are you going? And they led him to one.

Whose motorcar is this? Shlyapnikov asked for no particular reason, out of interest.

Minister of War Belyaev’s! We took it from the courtyard.

Now they’d shaken the driver in his sheepskin jacket behind the wheel. "I am a member of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’

Deputies! Start the engine! He stepped back and called out: Hey, men! Who’s coming with me to the Petersburg side? I have an assignment!"

A dozen volunteers immediately ran up from the bonfire. He let three with rifles onto the back seat and himself sat up front, slammed the door, and a couple of men immediately lay down on the running boards, their rifles facing forward across the fenders.

They were off !

The streets were nearly deserted, but alive. Occasionally shots were fired somewhere. Or men would stroll by with rifles, in a throng. Trucks would race toward them or pass them and honk, and there would be several men with bayonets poking out in the back. Frightened ordinary citizens made their way on foot.

He urged the driver to drive faster. What was happening to Gorky? Would we be in time to take Maksimych back?

Yesterday, could Shlyapnikov have imagined, as he was hiding out with the Pavlovs, that the next night he would be riding in the motorcar of the Minister of War?

Near the District Court fire—which was still giving off powerful heat and steam from the street snow—men stopped them for questioning and shouted hurrah—and then they jerked nonstop down the French Embankment and onto the deserted Trinity Bridge.

If not for the glow behind them, and the darkness up ahead—no, there was one small fire hard on the left, that must be the Okhrana—and if not for the wild truck with the bayonets oncoming on the bridge, it would be a night like any other: snowy in the Neva’s blackness, the dark Peter and Paul Fortress, the sparse chains of streetlamps here and there—an ordinary Petersburg night. Except for that glow.

Shlyapnikov looked over his left shoulder. The entire swath of palaces was totally dark—including the Winter Palace.

Whereas the sky was clear, starry, frosty.

They made a major detour around the Peter and Paul Fortress, killing their lights so as not to draw gunfire, and drove onto dark Kronverksky.

Here was Gorky’s building; Shlyapnikov would recognize it in the dark.

No sign of havoc from the outside. All the windows were dark. The front door was locked.

But he couldn’t leave it like this. He knocked loudly.

The doorman didn’t come out immediately. Then he didn’t want to open up. Seeing the bayonets, though, he did.

What’s going on here? What kind of gang was it? Was there a raid? No, none.

Shlyapnikov didn’t believe it. He dashed up the stairs.

And in front of Gorky’s door—an untrampled floor, cleanliness, silence, no havoc whatsoever.

Had some jokesters played a trick on him?

But he couldn’t leave now, like this! He rang the doorbell anyway. And rang it again. Fright and commotion inside: Who is it?

It’s Shlyapnikov. Forgive me, I need Aleksei Maksimych.

If only to verify his safety. If only to assure him, should anything happen, he can. . . .

Finally, they opened the door. Behind several women stood Aleksei Maksimovich in a terry robe, stooped, displeased, wrinkling his broad- spread, duckish nose, his yellow mustache hanging to his chin, and his voice resentful.

What on earth is this, Aleksan Gavrilych? Why? Why are you here? He didn’t invite him in and sent him away without even asking the news.

[172]

Nikolai couldn’t live without Alix the way a man can’t live with his chest eaten out or half his head lopped off. He had great military passions, and in the atmosphere of GHQ he seemingly should have flourished in this masculine military life—but no! The very first day he felt distracted, a lack, a longing—and empty and sad was the rare day when a letter from her did not arrive. (Although the following day there were always two.) Whenever one did come, Nikolai would unseal it with a quickened beating of his heart and plunge into it and inhale the fragrance of the perfumed pages (sometimes there were even flowers enclosed)—and how he was drawn to his wife immediately, straight away! As she always repeated, so he, too, was convinced that separation made their love even stronger. He himself failed to write her letters only on days when he had too many papers or audiences, but even over those papers and during those audiences she was constantly on his mind, and even more so during hours of leisure or on outings. Only when he reviewed his lined-up regiments did he forget her for a few brief minutes. Even the heir’s presence with his father at GHQ only slightly dissipated and ameliorated this ever-present lack of his clever wife in his existence. Due to the heir’s ill health, though, he often couldn’t travel with his father, and then a dreary loneliness surrounded Nikolai like a wall, and even one week at GHQ seemed like a year, and three an eternity. Indeed, he almost never lasted three weeks there, or else the Empress herself would come to Mogilev.

How much more torturous were these four days spent this time at GHQ, due to the children’s illness and the alarming reports from Petrograd. The Emperor was utterly spent by his nerves and his persistence in refusing concessions to the mounting chorus. He was utterly spent and needed to be reunited quickly with his wife, with whom he had been joined for the past twenty-two years, like two trees branching off a single trunk.

After his late tea, when Voeikov and Frederiks presented him the alarms from Tsarskoye Selo and Nikolai had decided to go there, he had felt immediate relief. When he entered his train car at close to two o’clock in the morning, his relief was even greater (although the train would not be ready until five or six in the morning).

He still had time. He calmed down. But he still wasn’t sleepy. What the Emperor did feel obligated to do was to speak with Nikolai Iudovich about the details of his expedition and his intentions. Their cars weren’t far apart, so he summoned the general.

The conversation left him quite satisfied, and his soul was even more relieved. What a thorough grounding in the people, what wisdom this old man had, and what devotion to his Emperor! This man could be relied upon, a courageous combat general. (He now regretted that in 1915 he had not agreed with his wife and appointed him Minister of War, considering him too obstinate; if he had, perhaps they would have seen none of the present disturbances.)

His entire mood was anything but troubled now that he himself was on his way there.

Right then Nikolai finally received the evening telegram from Khabalov, who was somehow very much panicked and said he could not restore order in the capital, and most of the units had betrayed their duty, fraternizing with the rebels and even turning their weapons against loyal troops. And now a large part of the capital was in the rebels’ hands.

Could such a thing really be? This was unthinkable rubbish.

Nikolai Iudovich thought the same and was not the least bit discouraged.

I’ll drive them all out, clear them out! Your Imperial Majesty, you can have confidence in me as you would in yourself. I will do everything possible and impossible!

His loyal, shovel-shaped, humble beard seemed to confirm this.

Out of delicacy, the Emperor hesitated to ask the general the precise hour of his departure from Mogilev with the St. George battalion, but obviously it would not be during the night (which would have been good!) but early in the morning.

However, if Ivanov didn’t begin his detachment’s movement until morning and one of his first objectives was to defend Tsarskoye Selo, then wouldn’t the royal trains’ urgent departure lose its meaning? No, because lately they had been taking another, more roundabout but also more convenient route, via the Nikolaevsky railroad. While they were making this detour, Ivanov would already be in Tsarskoye. Alix had already been promised that he would depart tonight. He would feel awkward in front of his suite making any change: the order had been given and they had boarded.

As they parted, he made the sign of the cross over the old general. And they exchanged three kisses.

More than anything, the train’s movement in itself was a relief. Nikolai now needed to be filled with peace and emotional repose. And to get away from the constant telegrams and dispatches that had simply been pouring into GHQ. Less news meant fewer decisions. To spend nearly twenty-four hours without these upheavals was so much easier! And then to reach Tsarskoye and be convinced that your loved ones are whole and not taken— and feeling firm, to resolve everything as one with Alix. Nikolai didn’t know exactly what he would resolve and do, but there he would at least get his bearings after a few hours.

After five in the morning, in the train’s initial movement, his car’s even rocking yielded a marvelous combination: the illusion of simultaneous movement and peace.

[173]

He no longer had any hope whatsoever of sleep. This wasted trip to Gorky’s had killed the last hour for sleep.

Anyway, he was now the commissar of the Vyborg side, which meant he had to be everywhere at once, and get both there and back to the Tauride in time for all the sessions. They raced to the Vyborg. The cold seat chilled him through his coat. Again two soldiers lay on the running boards, and they raced through the nearly deserted, awakening, liberated city. Liberated! That was remarkable! If anyone was not to be seen, it was a city policeman. All the soldiers had become a force on their side, not the enemy’s!

On the Vyborg, on the contrary, armed posts of workers appeared at the intersections—something one of ours had posted. One of these posts in front of the Ericsson Works even stopped him: there was no going any farther. The wheeled units, the wretches, were sitting in their barracks with machine guns and resisting, and the entire further section of Sampsonievsky was deserted and no one was walking or riding there.

What do you think should be done? Here we are gathering forces, machine guns, but we want to bring in artillery, too, to take out the wheeled units’ barracks with cannons. Won’t persuasion work? No, it hasn’t worked at all.

Strike the battalion directly?

Just yesterday they didn’t know, and they’d debated how to take the weapons into their own hands. And now the weapons were all ours!

What about the Moscow Regiment’s barracks? All ours entirely. The officers were rendered harmless yesterday. And the Interdistrict group assembled a workers’ militia here to catch and kill officers one by one.

Well, that was their business, they were moving ahead everywhere.

But Shlyapnikov wasn’t used to being constrained on his own Vyborg side even under surveillance, and now, in the liberated city, might he really not get to Serdobolskaya? He knew here not only the streets but all the garden paths, those shortcuts stamped out and maintained by feet even in the winter, because people always took the shortest way. Even in these faceless snowy paths he would never go astray.

He stopped his motorcar full of soldiers and told them to wait for him here for two hours, while he raced down the paths.

Indeed, people were scurrying down them. A couple of times, bullets whistled by so close and low that Shlyapnikov plopped down both times on the trampled snow and lay there and looked at its humps and the footprint patterns.

He lay in a snowy field all alone and thought: Here’s your liberated city, Executive Committee member, commissar of the Vyborg side. What a disgrace: in the center you got around everywhere, while here on our Vyborg side . . . ? No, this had to end, truly, even if it took cannons.

He did reach the Pavlovs’, of course. Their conspiratorial apartment was unrecognizable. A dozen comrades had gathered openly. They were making a racket, red banners were leaned up at the front door, and they were preparing poles for new ones, and the rooms were heaped to overflowing with the rifles, swords, and bullets they’d acquired.

Maria Georgievna of the golden hands had abandoned her sewing and was feeding them something.

Shlyapnikov was given a bowl of hot cabbage soup.

So. What do you have here? Choosing deputies for the Soviet? Assembling a workers’ militia? . . .

Whereas we in the Tauride. . . . It’s a tough business, brothers. We can’t let the moment slip. This is the time to rip all the ground out from under the Mensheviks.

And the Kadets all the more so. As for the Tsar—don’t even ask.

[174]

The two Nekrasov brothers, little Greve, and Rybakov, an elderly ensign from the reserves, were spending the night at Staff Captain Stepanov’s apartment. At dawn they were awakened by the frantic soldier-doorman from the officers’ wing:

"Your honors! You have to leave quickly. A few of the gentlemen officers in the assembly arsenal have changed into soldier’s clothes and gone. Civilians have come, and they’re looking for officers, to kill. I told them nobody was here. They threatened to kill me, too, if I was lying. They’re standing right at the front door! Take the service door!"

A combat wakeup call, the usual. They’d slept dressed and now they threw on their greatcoats even before the first shiver and ran down the staircase. They thought—across the parade ground and into the 2nd Company, where they had taken away their swords yesterday and were promised protection. (They never did take their revolvers from the officers’ club!) But there were already workers, with and without rifles, walking around the parade ground in the splashing light.

Too late! There was no way to break through.

All of a sudden, a sergeant came up from the porter’s room, a vaguely familiar face, and identified himself as the regimental church’s sexton. Wouldn’t the gentlemen officers come to his place? No one would look for them there. Out the service door it was just a few steps away, quite close. Well, then, let’s go.

The Nekrasov brothers knew their regimental yard well, yet had never noticed this place. Right there, quite close, was the regimental storehouse, long and blind—and in it, it turned out, at the butt end, was the sexton’s room, separated from the storehouse by a solid brick wall.

They slipped through before it got light.

Their practiced eye examined the room not as a room but sizing it up militarily. Narrow and long, crosswise to the storehouse itself. There was a door in one long wall and a window onto the church in one short wall, and the rest was solid. Through the window, nearly the entire room could be shot at; through the door, only the central part.

Vsevolod’s orderly came with them, and inside there was already another soldier. And so they were seven.

They began to sit. Like in prison. They waited for an hour, an hour and a half—for what? It was exhausting. The dawn filtered through the window. And lit it fully. No one came. But they didn’t know anything either.

They decided to send the orderly to do some basic reconnoitering and to the 2nd Company to get the sergeant major to send them his men and rescue them.

He was gone a long time, but he brought a lot back: they couldn’t go to the 2nd Company, which was filled with workers with red armbands, and the sergeant major couldn’t make a peep.

So much for giving that company their swords. . . .

And the officers’ club, he related, had been thoroughly routed in the night. They’d ripped down the pictures and portraits and slashed them. Smashed the chandeliers. Broken the unupholstered furniture and chopped up the upholstered furniture with swords.

And yesterday Sergei had been afraid of firing from the club to keep them from touching it. . . .

What had happened in their apartment? He sent to find out. Sergey’s orderly was keeping guard there, and it turned out he’d barely lied his way out and avoided being beaten up by the mutineers. They were playing the piano keys with their rifle butts. They’d dragged out the boots, clothing, and linens. They’d divvied up a stack of medals and swaggered around with them hanging off each of them.

Now they sent him to take a look around the barracks. Were there officers anywhere?

The orderly returned: not a one anywhere.

What could they do? Leave the regimental yard? Change clothes?

The lower ranks of the group went and cautiously brought soldiers’ greatcoats for all four officers. Ensign Rybakov changed immediately; an unrefined face, no different from a soldier. He left.

But the Nekrasov brothers hesitated. It was humiliating. They kept their own clothing on. So did little Greve.

They sat there another hour, exchanging little conversation. When each conversation only tears at your soul, better your own inner state, even if it is freezing. A mutiny, and in all Petrograd, and in a few hours, and a success— that’s a revolution! How did it strike? Who was at the top? What would happen now? There was no revolution at the front; they would come and deal with it; in fact wouldn’t even have to deal with anyone here. No one here knew how to hold a rifle. But the regiment was disgraced. As was their own honor. And that meant their lives.

There was no gunfire coming from anywhere. They couldn’t believe that their regiment was devastated, that strangers were roaming around looking for blood.

And they were hungry—more and more so. They hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. If only they could get some bread. The sexton said he would. He left.

And came back and called for both soldiers. They returned soon after— with a boiling samovar, trays of food, and a big box of cigarettes, all sent by the regimental priest’s wife.

This was their downfall! They hadn’t been sufficiently cautious. Three men walking single file across the parade ground, a samovar, a tray—someone had noticed.

Before they could brew tea and take a bite of bread, a woman’s voice nearby screamed piercingly:

There’s the officers! They’re in here!

Before they could make up their minds and decide what to do, there were other shouts, the tramping of a running crowd, and without so much as a Come out!, so quickly, while the sexton was putting on the latch—a shot through the door! And it wounded him. He was knocked off his feet, landed on the floor, and crawled to the side, touching his shoulder and praying out loud.

They kept up their fire at the door, and the shouting got thicker and thicker, and the crowd came running, shouting:

Beat the bloodsuckers!

They drank our blood long enough!—

and cursing, and cursing, and a savage howl—where had so much hatred come from? Where had it been? How had they lived without knowing it?

And shots, all at the door, and not even low, not competently, but at shoulder height. But no one stayed in the firing zone. Greve managed to squat down and crawl away from the samovar. The sexton crawled as far as the bed, Vsevolod gave him a pillow to stanch the wound and himself lay on the floor under the windowsill. Sergei managed to squeeze into the corner behind the bed. Both soldiers were on the floor.

Outside everyone was hollering and shooting. And again inexperience: all they had to do was run around to the window, where they could fire on almost everything in the room.

But they didn’t. It was still the same loud, angry hubbub of voices, common folk, men and women, curses about bloodsuckers and disorderly shooting at the door.

Then a voice broke out:

Comrades! Maybe there’s no one in there. Don’t shoot! Wait, don’t shoot! It got quiet. There, in the room, they got very quiet. It was a mousetrap;

there was nowhere to go. And they had no weapons.

But did they need any? Who were they going to kill? Weapons wouldn’t save them, there was no breaking out.

They pushed the door. It wasn’t closed? Had a bullet knocked off the latch? One soldier looked in, from the Moscow Regiment. A young, intelligent face, like good campaigners sometimes have, a stranger. He gestured: Sit there, don’t come out. To Vsevolod’s orderly:

Why on earth aren’t you coming out, you fool? They will kill you! And he dragged him out by the scruff of his neck and pushed him outside.

Here he is, the sloven! There’s no one else there. Disperse!

The shouts quieted down. They stopped shooting. They talked and talked agitatedly, and it seemed they were dispersing.

Now the officers had no hesitations or doubts, they quickly put on the soldier greatcoats to slip out at the first opportunity. They should have changed clothes immediately that morning. Pride. They would have been gone by now, and the sexton wouldn’t have been wounded.

They had no way to help him, he was pressing the cushion to his shoulder. But before they could button up their greatcoats there was a new roar and firing at the door again, now more confidently. Evidently the orderly had

told them. They squeezed into their corners. The brothers shook hands.

They kept it up, and then a voice:

Hey, maybe they’ll come out themselves? Come on, stop shooting!

But they were afraid to come in themselves: after all, the first few would get cut down. That was why they hadn’t broken in all this time.

Come on out whoever you are!

There was nothing left to do. And now, where were they to go in greatcoats? They were ashamed. Why had they even put them on? They threw off the soldier greatcoats, didn’t have time to pull on their own, and went out in just their tunics, the three of them. Captain, staff captain, and ensign. Vsevolod forgot his stick, so went without it.

Stepping back from the door fifteen paces, the workers stood in a dark, solid semicircle; they all had red armbands on their coat sleeves. They all had their rifles at the ready, whatever they thought that meant. They were shaking. Some had the cartridge belts they’d looted from the storehouse across a shoulder.

All at once all the faces in a single sweep, not a single one not examined, all remembered forever, for the remaining minutes of life: more of them young, and all of them embittered.

Behind them a large crowd, including women, shaking their fists over the shoulders of those in front and shouting:

Beat the bloodsuckers!—and cursing. Surrender your weapons!

We have no weapons. We surrendered them yesterday.

They didn’t believe it. One of the Ericsson men cautiously stepped out in front; the factory was right nearby, and they had all walked and ridden streetcars by it and met each other however many times. And never had the officers noted so much ill will toward themselves.

The man approached and frisked the officers’ belts and pockets. He was amazed they had no weapons. They saw all this and the crowd got louder:

Why bother with them? Shoot the bloodsuckers! Step back and don’t get in the way!

We’re tired of you giving us orders! Now we’re giving the orders!

The leader who’d done the frisking stepped away from the doomed men. And with new tension—no longer of a dangerous search but of triumph— they stepped aside, making room for others who wished to do this, some making ready, some already taking aim. But no one fired; evidently they

were awaiting their leader’s order.

How complex life is but how simple all fatal decisions: Here. And now. But more than anything, astonishment: We fought and died for this country. Why does it hate us?

Little Greve, a boy facing a crowd of adults, froze. Vsevolod Nekrasov muttered: Damn idiots. . . . But Sergei stood up straight, showed his chest with its St. George Cross, and sighed for the last time; he had not thought to die here, or this way. He had time to feel sorry for his old parents, that they were losing both sons in the same moment—and both at Russian hands. But he couldn’t have found anything to say to the murderers out loud—in justification, to make them stop.

Right then, before the order came, a new shout cut through from the side, from the regimental church’s porch:

Stop! Stop! Don’t shoot!

And from the porch steps, where they could see well, ten or so Moscow men ran this way, and pushing the crowd aside, pushing them aside, pushing through energetically—made their way through—and burst into the semicircle between the executioners and the doomed men:

Stop! Don’t touch them! These are good officers! We know them. Don’t touch them!

While the officers themselves didn’t have the chance to recognize them. No, there was no stopping it.

Step back! the embittered red armbands shouted. It’s none of your business! Step back or we’ll hit you, too!

But the soldiers put themselves in the way. One shouted: You’re killing a war cripple, you heroes of the rear! That sent a shiver through the circle:

Where’s the cripple?

Here! They pointed to Vsevolod Nekrasov. Look! And they looked at his leg.

Handing over his rifle, one of the workers came up and started feeling Vsevolod’s leg, through his pants, lower and lower. He shouted as if about a mannequin:

He’s right! A wooden leg!

And the now still, harsh, laborers’ dark semicircle began to diffuse, stir, break up:

A cripple. . . .

Gave his leg. . . .

How do you like that? Nearly made a mistake. . . .

They still had people to execute. There was the tall, open staff captain and a nice young little ensign. No, now they too were spared for that leg. The semicircle broke up—and they approached like guilty men, approached as if already friends:

Got coats? You’ll freeze. Go bring them coats.

We have a wounded man there, a sergeant, Sergei said.

We’ll get him to the infirmary right away! said the soldier-rescuers. But they were entirely unfamiliar faces; the brothers didn’t recognize them.

Go have a smoke, the crowd now offered.

And sit down and eat something; your samovar’s getting cold. But the senior worker, iron-hewn, took it back:

No time to eat or sit around. There’s an order to present all prisoners to the State Duma. Collect your things.

[175]

Maslovsky still hadn’t managed to slip away and go home or even get some sleep here. But he was much fortified morally by the fact that the Military Commission had come under the State Duma’s responsibility. A responsibility now shared with Rodzyanko.

And what of it! A hereditary aristocrat and however many military men in his line—couldn’t he in his youth have become a brilliant officer? But back then he could see the withering away of aristocratic life; no laurels to be won there. Maslovsky went into anthropology, a Central Asian expedition, scientific efforts, not very successful—but then all of society moved off toward revolution, and so did Maslovsky. And nearly singed his wings. For the last few years, on the quiet, he had begun his literary experiments. He would have liked to be a writer.

He had seen correctly all those twenty years before what it would be like to be an officer in these last few days. Like a wolf among men, everyone hunting him.

The voyenka(as the Soviets had started calling their Military Commission yesterday) was worn out in alarm, ignorance, and helplessness, but by the latter half of the night it was strengthened by a pleasant event, one of the simple human joys: someone brought in a large pot of warm cutlets, browned and juicy, fried with onions—and a round loaf of white bread. Revolution or no—the stomach had its own demands! There weren’t any forks so they tore up the loaf with their fingers and then cut it with a penknife, and grabbed the cutlets with their fingers, too, and in this way ate everything clean without ever finding out who had cooked it or where.

Otherwise the military situation was troubled and more dangerous than during the day due to the Tauride Palace’s nighttime defenselessness and total lack of any organized military force. At any moment, Khabalov could drive the riffraff from the open area out front with a single volley and take the Tauride Palace with his bare hands.

There weren’t even any curious or defenders crowding near the voyenka’s doors; everyone had fanned out to sleep.

Fortunately, the disembarkation of the 177th Regiment at the Nikolaevsky Station turned out to have been fabricated. However, other ominous news came in about the disembarkation of some regiment at the Baltic Station. The Kronstadt commandant informed them—probably he’d intended to report to Khabalov but for some reason he had landed through channels at the State Duma—that a major movement of a disorganized crowd of troops had begun from Oranienbaum to Petrograd assembling possibly as many as 15,000. True, by this time, the Semyonovsky Regiment was already considered to have crossed over to the rebellion’s side, and the Jäger Regiment, too, so they instructed them to send out a security detachment of 500 Semyonovsky men and 300 Jägers, the right way, with officers and machine guns, to block this vague nighttime deployment. (Officers! Were there any left, and how were they doing? But reinforcing them was the State Duma’s instruction.)

Like the evening, though, the night came down to not a single order sent being confirmed or a single picket or patrol sent out ever returned. It all spilled out and was lost, as if it had never been sent in the first place.

Petrograd was threatened along all four rail lines—the Nikolaevsky, Vindava, Warsaw, and Baltic—but it couldn’t prevent an attack or put up a defense. Petrograd itself held hidden government forces about whose intentions nothing was known and whose actions might be discovered too late. Also unknown was where the government was. It had not been found in the Mariinsky Palace, so had it obviously moved to the Admiralty? It had been there all this time, undoubtedly with a direct line to GHQ, which was pouring out instructions, and preparing an all-round strangulation of the rebellion. General Ivanov was already leading a nightmarish force.

Engelhardt, having left for the Preobrazhensky battalion—following the general law of disappearance—had not reappeared by morning.

There was a puzzle: Might he, under this convenient pretext, simply have hidden from a dangerous place? While Maslovsky perished here desperately and foolishly!

Indeed, if it weren’t for the sailor Filippovsky, he would have slipped away, too. But the hardy Filippovsky sat and wrote as if it weren’t night, wrote random orders—on the State Duma Vice President’s stationery. Imagine!

Presenting the greatest danger, it seemed to Maslovsky, was the Peter and Paul Fortress, perhaps due to the special feeling any revolutionary had toward it. The fortress had not surrendered. No! Ideally, they plug it up, close all the exits from the outside. But where was he going to find men willing to go there in the night and cold and stand around—getting fired upon from the fortress’s loopholes?

Two zealous sergeants and a few soldiers were all the voyenka had to handle dispatches and instructions.

The night seemed endless—and menacing to the end. Revolutionary duty nailed him there. (Still, when they attacked, from the main entrance, Maslovsky would have time to leave through the side door onto Tauride Street, and from there it was three steps home, and they wouldn’t arrest a civilian.)

How much he had gone through in this sleepless night. More like an entire lifetime!

Just before six in the morning, the telephone informed him that the Petrograd and Izmailovsky battalions had definitely gone over to the side of the people. (In the Izmailovsky, dissenting officers had been beset and some killed, either eight or eighteen.)

There had been no events or battles anywhere else. With the coming of the light, people began calling to demand protection: the Gunpowder Factory, the Okhta explosives factory, the naval and artillery ordnance yards. Military sentries had deserted everywhere. Security was needed above all for the explosives factories, of course. One evildoer with a box of matches . . . But there was absolutely no one anywhere to send.

And yet, what could not have been believed yesterday evening, that now another day had come and revolutionary power was still standing—and it was to that power that everyone was turning.

Outside the doors, willing men were jostling; they could be sent.

With morning well under way, after two hours of light, Engelhardt showed up, evidently having slept and now wearing the uniform and aiguillettes of a General Staffer, and with him as well was Professor Yurevich of the Military Medical Academy, whom Engelhardt immediately, entirely inappropriately, declared commandant of the Tauride Palace—and this man started giving out orders as well, getting mixed up with the others.

Maslovsky was angry at Engelhardt for his nighttime absence, but he was also calmed by his sumptuous arrival now. How entirely respectable everything looked! He should go put on his military dress, too. Damn it, we’ll still be fighting this Tsarism for a while!

However, Engelhardt bitterly reported that the Preobrazhensky men, despite his fervent nighttime speech, had not budged or attacked anything. Not only was there no unity between the officers and soldiers, there was none even among the officers. That nighttime telephone call to Shidlovsky had been almost a coincidence—but it had decided so much!

Nonetheless, Engelhardt now did send the Preobrazhensky men an order: occupy the State Bank and telephone exchange and set up posts at the Hermitage and Aleksandr III Museum. There ought to be enough of their nighttime promise for these nonhazardous assignments. At the very least, the Preobrazhensky battalion should post guards around the Tauride Palace and maintain order here.

Through Engelhardt it was now possible to learn things that all their nighttime reconnoitering had failed to. It was a strange situation when they had polite telephone conversations with the General Staff, two supposedly warring sides: The government was not at the Admiralty. It wasn’t anywhere at all. It didn’t exist. Khabalov had moved to the Winter Palace for the night, but Grand Duke Mikhail had gone there and forced him back to the Admiralty. Khabalov had five squadrons, four companies, and two batteries.

This kind of frankness was astonishing and suspect. Might Engelhardt have been just as frank in these telephone calls in return? Had he admitted that the Tauride had no guard? Maslovsky kept an even more bilious eye on Engelhardt, Yurevich, and Obodovsky. Why was this engineer here, where had he come from, and who had invited him? He’d been sitting here for several hours. Maslovsky whispered to Filippovsky that no one should trust this bourgeois public, that the Soviets had been wrong to let the running of military affairs be snatched away.

Actually, the telephone calls had stopped; there had been a disaster at the telephone exchange: that morning the young ladies had all fled. A note to that effect had come from Rodzyanko saying that to restore the exchange’s operations they had to send motorcars to collect the young ladies from their homes. Moreover, they had to collect the dead body lying inside the station.

Occupying the telephone and telegraph was the right thing to do, so as not to repeat the mistakes of 1905.

Was he to understand that Khabalov was no longer defending the telephone exchange? Obodovsky advised otherwise: send a detachment there from the electrotechnical battalion, which could occupy the station and also operate it. Unfortunately, though, on the occasion of the revolution, this battalion had fled as well, and it was no easier to collect them than it was the young ladies.

Now, in the afternoon, more and more officials were gathering. Here was Duma deputy Rzhevsky, and some Prince Chikolini, and some Ivanov— and everyone was giving orders without coordinating with each other, and signing orders, on random Duma forms, haphazardly—either Military Commission Chairman, or for the Chairman, or Tauride Palace Commandant, or for the Commandant, but Engelhardt also wrote: Chief of the Petrograd Garrison.

They sent an order to the 2nd Naval Depot to occupy the Winter Palace and arrest any ministers they found there and any agents of the government.

Maslovsky and Filippovsky, separately, had the idea of sending several small groups to arrest the ministers in their apartments, not forgetting to include Stürmer. They had to get going on truly revolutionary matters! We’ll be fighting this Tsarism for a while.

And somewhere, entire battalions were floundering without a command, including the heroic first revolutionary Volynian, where all the officers had run off at the very beginning and no one remained. At 8:30, the Tauride simultaneously appointed two ensigns, with equal rights, to assume the provisional command of the Volynian battalion. But before an hour was out, a staff captain appeared from the Volynians laying claim to that command, so they changed their minds and appointed—him.

The main thing now was to convince officers to return to their battalions; without them, the garrison could not be taken in hand.

But after the killing of officers in the Izmailovsky battalion things had gone out of control. A large detail was sent to them with an order to hand over all weapons to the Military Commission. (Fine if they do, but what if they don’t?)

* * *

Soldiers! The people and all Russia thank you who have risen up for the righteous cause of freedom.

Soldiers! Some of you are still hesitating to join us. Remember your hard life in the village and factories, where the government always oppressed and suppressed you!

Soldiers! Remnants from the police, Black Hundreds, and other scoundrels have taken over rooftops and individual apartments. Try, everywhere, to remove them immediately with a fatal bullet, a correct attack.

Soldiers! Do not let people smash stores or loot apartments. This is not the way!

Soviet of Workers’ Deputies

* * *

[176]

The previous evening, after fleeing the Winter Palace, the Pavlovsky men ran no farther and started to fall apart, especially the training detachment. And with it Ensign Andrusov.

Back to their barracks they went. On their way, though, women and young ladies jumped out of the crowd, grabbed the Pavlovsky men by the arm, and foisted and even pinned on them pieces of red fabric.

The officers didn’t dare shout: Get away! or Don’t take it!

Why should they shout anyway? There had been a huge shift in people’s moods, and Andrusov was actually delighted. He was a part of something unique.

But yesterday had ended in an even more unusual way. Standing by the training detachment’s barracks on Tsaritsyn Street were workers and students with rifles who would not let the soldiers into their own barracks and told them to keep walking the streets.

So changed were all the rules that the disheartened soldiers didn’t dare try to push through, even though they wanted their dinner and bed. Their officer especially didn’t dare order them to do this; the very young officer especially sniffed this thrilling new air.

There didn’t seem to be anything at all for the officers to do here, with the soldiers. It was much safer to separate.

Such was the mounting sense of unknown danger that it would even be better for them to hide, to go missing.

Right there, on Tsaritsyn Street, there was an officer infirmary, and some of the Pavlovsky officers had managed to change into hospital robes and lie down. Andrusov actually envied them, the dodgers.

Soon after, though, one of the soldiers from the shelterless training detachment wandered into that infirmary and discovered his healthy officers. A disgrace for them.

In his loitering about, Andrusov ran into Kostya Grimm, and they got the idea of asking to spend the night at their quartermaster’s apartment—just two buildings down. (It was dangerous for officers to travel all the way across the city because of all the soldiers they didn’t know.)

Meanwhile, they learned the soldiers were looking to kill Captain Chistyakov. They learned from the quartermaster that Chistyakov was hiding nearby, with another quartermaster. Grimm called home and told them to send Chistyakov, dressed as a civilian, to Vasilievsky Island, to the home of his father, a well-known liberal member of the State Council; no one would touch him there.

But no matter what clothes you put on Captain Chistyakov, there was no concealing his noticeable bandaged arm or hiding his intransigent eyes. They refused.

Vadim Andrusov called home, too. His father, a Kadet, and his mother were ecstatic over what was happening. The people’s long-awaited liberation had begun! We were being given the gift of an ages-old dream coming true. Now life would begin! Now order would begin. No change could make things any worse; it had been impossible to endure any longer.

Vadim complained to them that close up it wasn’t all that comfortable or pleasant.

But he himself was reenergized: truly, in the spirit of his family and upbringing, why shouldn’t he join the general celebration?

That night he and Kostya discussed what to do. The unusual had entered their life in an unusual way, so why shouldn’t they join in the people’s victory, so dreamed of and awaited?

These shifts were easy at a young age. They held the continuation of the spectacle that had begun yesterday.

But outside, under the windows, soldiers were still roaming late in the evening, and those armed men were still not letting them into the barracks.

In the morning they woke up and checked on their mood. Yes! They’d arisen revolutionaries!

They pinned red rosettes on their greatcoats.

An extraordinarily lightness filled their feet, chests, and heads, as if they were no longer tethered to the earth. And they were seized with the notion of making mischief. They felt as if they might at any moment accomplish something free and great and even become famous.

But it was awkward to go to their own soldiers in the training detachment like this. They couldn’t. So they went to the marching company that the day before yesterday had mutinied before everyone else.

The men there were still asleep.

The two ensigns started walking around the rooms, shouting: Why are you sleeping? Get up! Revolution!

But even this was insufficient, and the men began waking listlessly. Then Andrusov and Grimm started shouting, for some reason, whatever popped into their heads:

Get up! The Tsar is gone!

When they heard this, the Pavlovsky men jumped up in a great flurry.

Then they realized that this meant now no one would be punished for the mutiny and the nineteen arrested wouldn’t be tried.

They tossed up both ensigns, and both of them felt increasingly merry and unbound.

They went to the assembly for breakfast. A few young officers had red bits, too, while the few senior officers still there gave them a censorious look.

Captain Chistyakov was gone, too.

Right then the former commander of the Guards Corps, the bulky General Bezobrazov, appeared and began telling the officers in the billiards room that in the event of a summons for the battalion to go out, they shouldn’t let the crowd near but should stop it first with an order and then fire a salvo.

All this sounded wild, out of some irretrievable past. The young officers didn’t even try to argue with him; they just stood up and exited demonstratively.

Then Vadim and Kostya went to the Tauride Palace on foot. Now they could move freely among the unfamiliar soldier mass. People saw their red rosettes, didn’t disarm them, greeted them.

They jostled around the Tauride Palace for a while and found the Military Commission, which rejoiced at their arrival and immediately wrote out instructions: Grimm was to command his Pavlovsky platoon, attached to the State Duma. And Andrusov was to assume command of the Pavlovsky detachment posted at the Mikhailovsky manège.

Thus they both found themselves in the thick of things, young officers of the revolution.

FROM DISPATCHES TO THE MILITARY COMMISSION

(13 March, morning)

Documents – 2

—Immediately send 350 reinforcements to Ligovka, the corner of Chubarov Lane. Major siege, 6 (six) machine guns operating.

/Noted in pencil: not borne out/

—Medics from the Winter Palace infirmary ask us to send a detachment of troops in order to arrest individuals hiding there. . . . The Palace is not in anyone’s power. The sentries have been removed, but supporters of the old government are still inside.

On the medics’ behalf, university student R. Ize

—The drunken crowds who looted the Astoria Hotel have been seen in the vicinity of the Senate.

—The corner of Inzhenernaya and Sadovaya is bad. We have no patrols in this district.

—All is calm in the city. The soldiers are complaining of the cold and have decided to head for their barracks. 18 armored vehicles have been seized. On the outskirts, stores are being looted.

—Those freed from the Petrograd Transit Prison are asking that a place be designated for them to go and get a bed, an apartment, food and a weapon, as well as a pass.

Freed Political Prisoner (signature)

—According to reports that have come in, two suspicious subjects are handing out alcoholic beverages to military personnel and spreading knowingly false and alarming rumors.

Member of the Food Supply Comm. (signature)

—An order has been given to organize protection for the Arsenal, where there is apparently an attack under way.

—At the corner of Sadovaya and Inzhenernaya they are asking for immediate assistance in calming drunken soldiers.

—A store of weapons is being emptied out and sent off. The carrying off of shells must cease. They can remove them on horses across Lesnoye. They are awaiting troops from Finland.

Kuzma of the 1st Reserve Regiment

—ORDER. Volunteer Dmitri Tairov and Private Vladimir Mayakovsky shall conduct an election for representatives at the military vehicle school and organize vehicle repair.

B. Engelhardt

[177]

Having spent the night in an armchair, Shulgin was not rested, and in the morning there was nothing nice and hot to drink, and the looted Duma buffet was idle. But for some reason his soul was filled with the mood of the French Revolution.

This comparison was easily drawn. It had been on the minds of many yesterday evening as well, but today it surged forth with new strength. The distant, cold-blooded reader Shulgin had been taken as a confederate—perhaps even a victim?—of those, indeed frightening, days.

What of yesterday! Yesterday evening’s Duma crush was recalled now, perhaps, as a blissful sparseness. Yesterday people had merely been breaking through, whereas today, knowing no restraint, a grayish, brownish, blackish, senseless mass, a sticky human jam, had come thronging and thronging through the front door—and filled the entire palace with senseless joy, for its own senseless sojourn here. Yesterday, lost soldiers had at least been seeking a night’s shelter, afraid to return to their barracks, but what about today? All the offices and halls, down to the last corner, and even the rooms, had been occupied and taken over by the crowd, moving and mixing, that dull crowd, simply riffraff suppressing any sensible activity here. Russia had no government, and all spheres of life required direction and intervention, but the Duma Committee members not only couldn’t work, they couldn’t even find each other or simply move around the building.

Shulgin discovered that this mass had more or less one face, and a rather brutish face it was.

He quickly realized that he had already seen all this, read about this, but had not put his heart into it. After all, this had happened in France 128 years ago! When young people in small groups in the Ekaterininsky Hall attempted to sing the Marseillaise, the Russian version, muddling the tune—

Forswear the old world,

Shake its dust from our feet,

Shulgin heard the other, the first, the original Marseillaise and its horrifying words:

To arms, citizens!

Let us march! Let an impure blood

Water our furrows!

Whose impure blood did they have in mind? Back then it was shown it doesn’t stop at the royal milieu.

And now here we have the Tsar’s portrait torn to shreds. Revolting.

The Emperor’s full-length portrait hung for ten years behind the Duma tribune, a patient witness to all the speeches and obstructions, yet nonetheless a symbol of the state’s stability. And all of a sudden, this morning, they’d seen that soldiers’ bayonets had shredded the portrait, and scraps of it were hanging across the gilt frame.

These few insolent bayonet strikes had suddenly changed the entire picture. Not only had the Petrograd episode not subsided, this might be, might well be a great revolution.

Neither the entire Duma Committee nor Rodzyanko himself could protect the portrait or stop anything.

It occurred to Shulgin that this was how it had been in Kiev, he always remembered, eleven years ago. A crowd had broken into the City Duma, primarily Jews there, as the soldiers had not mutinied—and in the very same way they’d ripped all the portraits of emperors and poked out their eyes. A ginger Jewish student ran his head through the Emperor’s portrait and wearing the broken canvas had shouted frenziedly: Now I’m the Tsar! They’d broken the Tsar’s crown that was attached to the balcony, wrenched it off, and thrown it to the pavement in front of a crowd of ten thousand.

They were sitting out this human stampede in Rodzyanko’s large, luxurious office, where they were among their own and could discuss things.

Not that any decision whatsoever could be reached. Understandably, they needed to act and not let anarchy develop, but they didn’t know what to do or how to do it. For two full days their brains had failed to digest this enormous something that had come falling down on them—quite a lot more than they had been calling for, expecting, or wanting.

Who were they supposed to act against anyway? And who was to do the acting? As Shulgin had correctly warned them, they’d broken their lances, broken them for the glory of the people invested with the people’s trust, worthy, honest, and talented people—but where were they now? On the Provisional Committee, seemingly the Duma’s summit? But look around and there was nothing but mediocrity; it was just embarrassing. Fair enough, this was just a Committee and not the government, but who was talented and invested enough to be taken into the government?

And Rodzyanko’s elephantine hulk, what use was it? At times he’d been so stubborn with the Emperor himself, and now he couldn’t get that gaggle of pretenders and imposters, that council of so-called deputies who’d seized the building of the very Duma, off the budget commission.

Unlike all of them, conscious he was still young, subtle, agile, he who just eleven years ago had been a Kiev ensign, Shulgin was thirsting to stand out from the present discombobulation and to act.

Right then he heard a conversation about how there’d been a call at dawn from the Peter and Paul Fortress. The commandant had expressed a desire to speak with State Duma deputies—and here they still hadn’t sent anyone. He’d heard! And in his romantic soul the entire scene suddenly unfolded and took on a different light. After all, if this resembled the French Revolution, then it resembled it in this, too! The Peter and Paul Fortress was the Bastille! And this repulsive crowd was just about to get the notion to take the Peter and Paul Fortress by storm! To liberate the perhaps nonexistent or few prisoners there and execute the commandant’s service. He had to hurry to effectively avert this horror!

It had come in handy that he’d spent the night here; he hadn’t suffered in that armchair in vain. He started proposing to Rodzyanko and everyone on the Committee that they send him. He hastened to convince them for fear they would send someone else. Everyone was so befuddled, though, that they didn’t even appreciate the importance of this step, and they nodded willingly, good thing they had a volunteer.

He dashed into the bracing cold before he’d finished buttoning up.

Before, to drive through the city—he would never have been able to get a motorcar. But now they brought one up at once. A quarter of Petrograd’s vehicles seemed to be parked in front of the Tauride, awaiting the honor of taking someone somewhere. (While the other three quarters were racing through the city to gunfire and shouts.)

But they brought him one with a little red flag and bristling bayonets: there wasn’t the least room for anyone to latch onto that didn’t already have a soldier with a bayonet. The door was opened for Shulgin by a prompt officer with epaulets removed who’d been appointed from the Military Commission.

Shulgin, the famed monarchist, didn’t even notice that he’d headed out to take the Peter and Paul Fortress under a red flag.

He wouldn’t have gone had it not been for the grandeur of his mission, the analogies. But the entire French Revolution got rolling because of the storming of the Bastille. He had to avert such an unfortunate development, to free the political prisoners in front of the crowd and show it the empty cells.

Shulgin didn’t recognize the streets: such unusual figures, with lots of red patches from bows and armbands; unusual traffic. People weren’t walking, they were thronging down Shpalernaya toward the Duma. There were simply a lot of armed men, soldiers and civilians, not in any kind of formation, on foot and in trucks.

The District Court was still smoldering—red-hot ruins, ashes, smoke from being doused.

It was clear, frosty and sunny, and the Neva opened up from the French Embankment, sparkling with snow, being traversed here and there by small black figures.

From the Trinity Bridge he could see the long, gray, articulated wall of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the cathedral’s cupolas, and the bell tower’s soaring, immortal gold spire. And the imperial standard on one tower, a black eagle on a yellow field: the dynasty’s resting place.

A great moment. His heart was pounding.

Across the bridge, not far away, the mosque’s blue cupola came into view. In an open area, on the way to the fortress, there was a crowded rally, and a student was shouting from a truck about freedom, freedom, freedom—and everyone was listening as if to something long-awaited.

But they weren’t crossing the little bridge over the canal to the fortress, where there were paired sentries on the other side.

And alongside them, an awaiting officer. Before Shulgin’s companion could wave his handkerchief, the officer was already hurrying toward them. "How good you’ve come! We’ve been waiting for you eagerly! Please, the

commandant is expecting you!"

Right then they were overtaken by someone from the crowd, someone wearing an officer’s greatcoat but without epaulets. . . . There was no room, but he squeezed onto the running board between the revolutionary soldiers.

The sentries gawked.

They drove through the outside gates. And passed under the St. Peter Gate.

At the cathedral they turned and drove up to the chief commandant’s residence.

Inside it was dark and cramped, an antique structure.

Finally, here was the commandant, an adjutant general covered in medals but not very military-looking, rather podgy. And several officers with him. Everyone was uneasy.

Shulgin, narrow of build and slender, presented himself in a pleasant tone, saying he was a State Duma deputy and sent by the State Duma Committee.

Agitated, completely losing the imposing dignity of his service and rank, the old general tried to convince the young deputy with the pointed gaze and pointed mustache:

"Deputy, sir. . . . Please, do not think we are opposed to the State Duma. On the contrary, we are very glad that at such a dangerous time there is at least some kind of authority. . . . We declined to invite General Khabalov’s detachment here. . . . But how does the State Duma view this?

Reviews for March 1917

[lapsus16 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

At his best! Great series, read the other 2 volumes first. A War and Peace for the 1900's