A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

For the revolutionaries Bauman's murder was a powerful reminder of the regime's bloody habits. Overnight the Bolshevik became a martyr of the revolution. Later, under the Soviet regime, his name would be given to streets, schools, factories, and even a whole district of Moscow. But in fact Bauman was quite unworthy of such inflated honours. He was fond of practical jokes, and on one occasion had been so malicious to a sensitive party comrade, drawing a cruel cartoon of her as the Virgin Mary with a baby in her womb and a question mark asking who the baby looked like, that she was driven to hang herself. Many Social Democrats, including Martov, wanted Bauman expelled from the party. But Lenin disagreed on the grounds that he was a good party worker and that that was all that mattered in the end. The scandal continued to divide the party — it was one of the many personal clashes which came to define the ethical distinctions between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks after 1903 — until Bauman himself was arrested and imprisoned in the Taganka jail. Death cleansed Bauman of his sins. Through his martyrdom the Bolsheviks were able, for the first time, to play on the sympathies of a mass audience. For in the highly charged atmosphere of late October 1905 people from across the whole of the democratic spectrum saw in Bauman's corpse a symbol of the fate awaiting the revolution if they did not unite against reaction. And they turned out in their tens of thousands for his funeral.

If there was one thing the Bolsheviks really mastered, that was the art of burying their dead. Six herculean leather-clad comrades carried Bauman's coffin, draped in a scarlet pall, through the streets of Moscow. At their head was a Bolshevik dressed in Jesuitical-black with a palm branch in his hand which he swung from side to side in time with the music and his own slow steps. The party leaders followed with wreaths, red flags and heavy velvet banners, bearing the slogans of their struggle in ornate gold. They were flanked by an armed militia of students and workers. And behind them row upon row of mourners, some 100,000 in all, marched ten abreast in military formation. This religiouslike procession continued all day, stopping at various points in the city to pick up reinforcements. As it passed the Conservatory it was joined by a student orchestra, which played, over and over again, the funeral dirge of the revolution:

'You Fell Victim to a Fateful Struggle'. The measured heaviness of the marchers, their melancholy music and their military organization filled the streets with dark menace. As night fell, thousands of torches were lit, making the red flags glow. The graveside orations were emotional, defiant and uplifting. Bauman's widow called on the crowds to avenge her husband's death and, as they made their way back to the city centre, sporadic fighting broke out with Black Hundred gangs/¹⁵