A people's tragedy

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

29 General Brusilov in 1917, shortly after his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army. One of his subordinates described him as ‘a man of average height with gentle features and a natural easy-going manner but with such an air of commanding dignity that, when one looks at him, one feels duty-bound to love him and at the same time to fear him’.

30 Maxim Gorky in 1917. ‘It was impossible to argue with Gorky. You couldn’t convince him of anything, because he had an astonishing ability: not to listen to what he didn’t like, not to respond when a question was asked which he had no answer to’ (Nina Berberova). It was no doubt this ability which enabled Gorky to live in Lenin’s Russia.

31 Prince G. E. Lvov, democratic Russia’s first Prime Minister, in March 1917. During his four months in office Lvov’s hair turned white.

32 Sergei Semenov in 1917. The peasant activist was sufficiently well known in his native district of Volokolamsk to warrant this portrait.

33 Dmitry Os’kin (seated centre) with the Tula Military Commissariat in 1919. The story of his rise from the peasantry to the senior ranks of the Red Army was later told by Os’kin in two autobiographical volumes of 1926 and 1931. Like Kanatchikov’s autobiography, they were part of the Soviet genre of memoirs by the masses.

34 Alexander Kerensky in 1917. This was just one of many portraits of Kerensky circulated to the masses in postcard form as part of the cult of his personality.

35 Lenin harangues the crowd, 1918. The photographer was Petr Otsup, one of the pioneers of the Soviet school of photo-journalism.

36 Trotsky in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1906. Trotsky was a dapper dresser, even when in jail. Here, in the words of Isaac Deutscher, he looks more like ‘a prosperous western European fin-de-siècle intellectual just about to attend a somewhat formal reception [than] a revolutionary awaiting trial in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Only the austerity of the bare wall and the peephole in the door offer a hint of the real background.’

37 Alexandra Kollontai in 1921, when she threw her lot in with the Workers’ Opposition. Kollontai’s break with Lenin was especially significant because she had been the only senior Bolshevik to support his April Theses from the start.

BETWEEN REVOLUTIONS

38 The Tsar’s soldiers fire on the demonstrating workers in front of the Winter Palace, 9 January (‘Bloody Sunday’) 1905.

39 Demonstrators confront a group of mounted cossacks on the Nevsky Prospekt in 1905.

40 The opening of the State Duma in the Coronation Hall of the Winter Palace, 27 April 1906. The two Russias – autocratic and democratic – confronted each other on either side of the throne. On the left, the appointees of the crown; on the right, the Duma delegates.

41 The Tauride Palace, the citadel of Russia’s fragile democracy between 1906 and 1918.

42 Petr Stolypin in 1909. Many things about the Prime Minister – his provincial background and his brilliant intellect – made him an outsider to his own bureaucracy.

43 Patriotic volunteers pack parcels for the Front, Petrograd, 1915. The war campaign activated and politicized the public.

44 The smart set of Petrograd see in the New Year of 1917. Note the anglophilia, the whisky and champagne. This sort of ostentatious hedonism had become quite common among the upper classes; and at a time of enormous wartime hardships it was deeply resented by the workers.

45 Troops pump out a trench on the Northern Front. The poor construction of the trenches, a science which the tsarist Staff had never thought worth learning, was a major cause of the huge Russian losses in the First World War.

46 Cossacks patrol the streets of Petrograd, early February 1917. Recruited from the poorest regions of the Kuban and the Don, they soon joined the revolutionary crowds.

47 A ‘pharaon’ – the slang name for a policeman – is arrested by a group of soldiers during the February Days in Petrograd.

48 The destruction of tsarist symbols.

A group of Moscow workers playing with the stone head of Alexander II in front of a movie camera.

49 A crowd on the Nevsky Prospekt in Petrograd stand around a bonfire with torn-down tsarist emblems during the February Days. Here, too, the display for the camera was an important part of the event.

50 The crowd outside the Tauride Palace, 27 February 1917.

51 Soldiers on the Western Front receive the announcement of the abdication of Nicholas II.

IMAGES OF 1917

52 The First Provisional Government in the Marinsky Palace. Prince Lvov is seated in the centre, Miliukov is second from the right, while Kerensky is standing behind him. Note that the tsarist portraits (of Alexander II and Alexander III) have not been removed.

53 A rare moment of national unity: the burial of the victims of the February Revolution on the Mars Field in Petrograd, 23 March 1917.

54 A meeting of the Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies in the Catherine Hall of the Tauride Palace.