Chapter XI: The Fall of the Winter Palace

However much the rest of Petrograd talked that night, there was one spot in the storm-tossed city where no words were wasted. This was the office of the Voina Revoliutsiony Komitiet (Military Revolutionary Committee), sprung suddenly and quietly into an existence shrouded in deep mystery.

Alex Gomberg, Russian product of New York’s East Side, with an American habit of providing against emergencies, suggested that it would be useless to attempt to get through the Bolshevik lines without a pass from this committee. Gomberg, odd little bundle of materialism and idealism, who had a deep love for the country of his adoption which his scoffing cynicism could not hide, never lost a chance to do a good turn to America or Americans. Though he could not resist the home call of revolution, he said he would rather be a messenger-boy in New York than President of Russia. As a friend of Trotzky, known to the members of the all-powerful committee, he undertook to arrange the necessary permits.

He led the way down the dimly lighted corridor to the farther end. A young fair-haired boy met us in an outer office, took our names and request, and disappeared into the next room, shutting the door behind him. We stared curiously after him. Beyond that door were the men who were directing the siege and capture of Petrograd--directing it so efficiently that in the days that followed, the enemies of the Bolsheviki insisted the committee was composed of Germans, because Russians were incapable of such perfect organization.

When the inside door opened again the fair-haired boy reappeared with the passes in his hand. Mine was typewritten on a bit of paper torn from a scratch-pad, numbered “Five,” and stated simply:

“The Military Revolutionary Committee of the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies allows Miss Bessie Beatty free passage all over the city.”

That scrap of paper was to prove the open sesame to many closed doors before the gray dawn of morning. It bore the blue seal of the committee, the only signature capable of commanding the slightest sign of respect from a Russian bayonet that night.

The Smolney Institute is excellently located to provide seclusion for a young women’s seminary, but in the middle of a cold night it seemed a long dark way from anywhere. Walking down the stairs, we speculated upon the improbability of finding an _izvostchik_ abroad at such an hour.

Down in the courtyard a huge motor-truck was cranking up for departure. Its only occupants were three sailors, a young Cossack soldier with a cape of shaggy black fur that hung to his heels, and a Red Guardsman. We hailed them, and Mr. Gomberg shouted a request to be taken to town. It was drowned by the sound of the engine. He repeated it in louder tones. The sailor looked dubiously at me and at Louise Bryant, the other woman member of the party.

“It’s a dangerous trip,” he said. “We are going out to distribute proclamations, and we are almost certain to be shot at.”

We looked at one another for a moment, considered that it was probably our only chance to reach the Winter Palace, and asked to be allowed to take the risk. Two strong hands came over the side to pull me up, and two sailors sitting on a board across the body of the truck arose to give us their seats. They held a hurried consultation, then asked us to stand again. They had decided that this exposed position would be too dangerous for women. The Cossack lad in the shaggy cape spread some proclamations on the floor of the car.

“Sit here,” he said, “and when the shooting begins you can lie flat on your backs and keep your heads low.”

A bundle of rifles lay on the floor under my knees, and as we started off over the cobbles I grabbed a chain and held fast to keep from being bumped out. The streets were like black cañons. Apparently there was not a human being abroad; yet every time the sailor tossed a handful of white leaflets into the air, men came darting mysteriously from doorways and courtyards to catch them.

The Cossack towered above me, rifle in hand, with eyes searching the dark for signs of danger. At the street intersections we slowed up, and groups of soldiers gathered around the bonfires crowded close to the truck for news from Smolney. They peered with curious and startled eyes into our unexpected faces, then hurried back to the circle of light around the blazing birch-wood logs. During one of these pauses Mr. Gomberg grabbed a proclamation and read it to us:

“TO RUSSIAN CITIZENS

“The power has gone over to the organ of the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, the War Revolutionary Committee, which is at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.

“The cause for which the people strive: immediate democratic peace, abolition of _pomieschik_ property on land, workmen’s control, the creation of a Soviet government--this business is done.

“Long live the Revolution of workmen, soldiers, and peasants.

“WAR REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE.”

It was one by the clock in the steeple of the Nicolaievski Station when we turned into the Nevsky. The great circle was deserted. Earlier in the day there had been fighting here, but no trace of it was visible now.

“Put your heads down!” the Cossack ordered, catching sight of a group of unidentified men ahead.

We obeyed; but when they proved to be Bolshevist soldiers and Red Guardsmen, we peeped cautiously out again. At the bridge across the Moika Canal we were turned back by the barricade erected early in the afternoon, and by the command of the guard, who said there was firing just ahead and no one could pass. From the direction of the Winter Palace came the occasional _boom!_ of a big gun, followed by the short, sharp crack of the rifles.

Reluctantly we retraced our way. In front of the Kazan Cathedral the guards again ordered us to halt. In the darkness across the wide street, we saw a crowd of black figures lined up in marching order against the curb. We had come suddenly upon that little band of men and women who left Smolney to make a demonstration of passive resistance and die with their comrades at the Winter Palace. They had been joined by the Mayor of Petrograd, members of the City Duma, and the Jewish Bund. There were four or five hundred of them in all, and here, within a few blocks of their destination, they had been stopped.

In that crowd were many of the men and women who had been the firebrands of Russia, the Socialist revolutionists, the terrorists, who were quietly walking forth to oppose themselves unarmed to the force of these new revolutionists who, to their way of thinking, were murdering the cause of Russian freedom for which most of them had suffered years of imprisonment and the unspeakable hardships of exile in Siberia. Here and there in the crowd was a young officer or a cluster of students; but more of them were veterans who had grown gray in the service of revolution, and their faces were grim and set.

Standing a few feet away was a squad of soldiers. The commissaire in command of them raised his hand.

“We have orders from the Military Revolutionary Committee to let you go no farther,” he said.

A murmur ran through the crowd. The gray-haired veterans of the old days began to argue, and students and officers joined their entreaties.

The soldiers remained obdurate.

“What will you do if we go anyway?” asked Mayor Schreider of Petrograd. “Will you shoot us?”

“No,” replied the commissaire. “We have orders not to shoot you. But we have orders not to let you pass.”

He gave a quick command to his men, who fell back a distance of fifty feet and lined up across the Nevsky. They formed a solid human wall, stretching across the wide street from curb to curb. A block below there was another and yet more formidable wall composed of Red Guardsmen. The demonstrators looked at those husky young soldiers, and turned away in dismay.

“If we go forward,” said a gray-haired terrorist, once expert in the use of dynamite, “some one will be killed, and they will blame it on the switchman. They will say it was a case of mistaken orders, and no good will come to any one. We will go back, and try to persuade them to stop the slaughter.”

In regular marching order they departed as they had come--a sad and solemn procession, helpless in the face of this new, strange thing upsetting all their preconceived ideas of revolution.

We watched them go; then, anxious to press on, we presented our passes to the commissaire of soldiers, who motioned us forward with a “Pazhal’sta!” The wall broke, and we passed through without a word. The blue seal of the Military Revolutionary Committee had done for us what eloquence and argument could not do for the old revolutionists.

At the Moika the Red Guard halted us. Our passes made no appeal here. We looked suspiciously like bourgeois on the way to the Winter Palace, and must not be allowed to pass. We argued, and they discussed the advisability of arresting us. The idea did not especially appeal, so we retraced our steps to the Kazan Cathedral and the friendly commissaire. He detailed a man with special orders to take us through the lines to the Winter Palace.

Again the factory men with rifles slung over their shoulders regarded us with suspicion; but they took the word of the soldier and finally permitted us to pass.

It was quarter of three when we halted in the shadow of the great red arch and peered cautiously out into the dark square. There was a moment of silence; then three rifle shots shattered the quiet. We stood speechless, awaiting a return volley; but the only sound was the crunching of broken glass spread like a carpet over the cobblestones. The windows of the Winter Palace had been broken into bits.

Suddenly a sailor emerged from the black.

“It’s all over!” he said. “They have surrendered.”

We picked our way across the glass-strewn square, climbed the barricade erected that afternoon by the defenders of the Winter Palace, and followed the conquering sailors and Red Guardsmen into the mammoth building of dingy red stucco. On the strength of our blue-sealed passes, they permitted us to enter unquestioned. A commissaire of sailors motioned us to a bench beside the wall. A squad of sailors mounted the stairs to the council chamber, and placed the Provisional Government under arrest. Above us we could hear the sound of doors being broken open, while a searching squad went from room to room looking for hidden prisoners.

The rifles taken from the military cadets were stacked in a heap in the hall, and a solid line of victorious sailors filed in and out of the palace. The desire for souvenirs, trophies of the hour, seemed to have seized them; but the palace apparently offered little choice. One sailor came down the stairs with a coat-hanger in his hand, and another carried a sofa cushion. The best a third could find was a candle. The commissaire stopped them at the door.

“No, no, tavarisch!” he said, holding out his hand. “Pazhal’sta, pazhal’sta, you must take nothing from here.”

He talked to them in a patient, reasonable tone, as one would speak to a child, and like children they gave up their plunder. One man, a soldier who had taken a blanket, protested.

“But I am cold,” he said.

“I can’t help it, tavarisch. If you take that, they will say we came to loot. And we did not come for loot: we came for revolution.”

At that moment there was a clatter on the stairs, and I turned to see the members of the Provisional Government file slowly down. Konovaloff, vice-president of the Cabinet and Minister of Trade and Industry, came first. Tretiakoff of Moscow, president of the Economic Council, followed. Behind him was the tall, dark, slender, handsome figure of the young Foreign Minister, Tereshchenko, who cast an amazed glance in my direction as he passed. Next in line came the little, frail, gray figure of Kishkin, Minister of Public Welfare, and after him two military men in uniform, General Manikovsky, Acting Minister of War, and General Borisoff. Among the others were practically all the remaining members of the Kerensky Cabinet.

Some of them walked with defiant step and heads held high. Some were pale, worn, and anxious. One or two seemed utterly crushed and broken. The strain of that day of anxious waiting, and that night under the capricious guns of the cruiser _Aurora_, coupled with the weeks when Cabinet crisis had followed Cabinet crisis, had proved too much for them.

They marched silently off across the square, and headed for the Fortress of Peter and Paul, rising grimly out of the darkness beyond the Neva.

I sat there silently watching them go, and wondering what this night’s work would mean in the future of Russia and the world. The _commissaire_ who had motioned us to the seat indicated that we might now go upstairs, and we passed quickly to the council chamber. We made our way through the shattered rooms, blazing now with a million lights from the twinkling crystal chandeliers. The silk curtains hung in shreds, and here and there on the walls was the ugly scar of a recent bullet. On the whole, the destruction was much less than we had expected to find it. The attacking force had gone about its work, determined to take the palace, but to take it with as little bloodshed as possible, and in the lulls between storms they had made frequent attempts to break the resistance by fraternization. None of the defenders had been killed, but six of the sailors who had fought in the open square had paid with their lives for their revolutionary ardor, and many others had been wounded.

As we passed the door of Kerensky’s office, formerly the study of the last of the Romanoffs, one of the palace care-takers spoke to the two soldiers standing guard outside.

“Take good care of this,” he said. “The library is very valuable.”

Later, Mr. Gomberg, anxious to test the guard, presented a pass and asked for admission.

“I am sorry,” said one of the soldiers, “but this pass is not good here. No one can enter this room to-night.”

Nicholas II, who only a few months before had sat behind the sealed door, was sleeping in exile on the edge of a Siberian swamp. Kerensky, his successor, was spending the night hours in a desperate effort to reach the front and rally the troops to prevent the very thing that had just happened. I recalled, with a little sigh of regret, that this day in this very spot I was to have lunched with the Minister-President of Russia.

In one of the rooms where we lingered for a few moments, looking curiously about us, a crowd of soldiers had gathered, and they were talking together excitedly. I noticed them, and once I caught the proletarian word of scorn, “Bourgeoisie!” But it never occurred to me that we could be the object of their discussion. Suddenly a young _commissaire_ came up to us.

“These men can not understand,” he said, “who you are, and why you are here. They are quite excited and angry about it. They think perhaps you may have come to rob. I told them I would question you, and if you had no right to be here we would arrest you.”

We presented our passes. He examined them, and turned to the men, who were by this time quite obviously casting unfriendly glances in our direction.

“Tavarischi,” he said, “these passes are stamped, just as my own is, with the blue seal. See it! You may be sure that if they had not the right they would not be here with this.”

The men examined the paper quizzically, and nodded. They took an informal vote upon the subject, and it was agreed that we should be allowed to go free.

A few minutes later we followed them down the stairs and out of the palace, the last people to leave except for the guards who were detailed to remain on duty. The next day a decree was passed making the mammoth red building a people’s museum, that it might be preserved from ever again becoming a point of dispute in political conflicts.

I did not see the women soldiers. They were in another wing of the palace. The following morning the city rang with stories of their abuse; but in the investigation that was made by Madame Torkova, one of the leaders of the Petrograd Duma, whose inclinations were decidedly anti-Bolshevik, most of these tales were disproved. Some of the women were taken to the headquarters of the Pavlovsky Regiment, and held there until relatives could bring them feminine wearing apparel. A few others, who had no way to obtain this, were allowed to go in their soldiers’ uniforms.

From a number of the girls I heard the story of that night. It seems that class feeling had for the moment wiped out every other instinct. As they marched them away in the dark, some of the men, in their excitement, took them by the arms and shook them, shouting:

“Why do you fight us? Why do you go against your own class? You are working-women. Why do you fight with the bourgeoisie and the counter-revolutionists?”

So effective was their propaganda that then, for the first time, a class breach was made in the ranks of the women soldiers, and some of them went over to the radicals as completely as any of the men had done.

With the surrender of the Winter Palace, the victory of the Bolsheviki was complete. The dictatorship of the proletariat had become a fact. The only power in Petrograd at dawn that morning was the power of the People’s Commissaries, headed by Nicolai Lenin and Leon Trotzky, and backed by the Russian fleet, the bayonets of the Petrograd garrison, and the Red Guard rifles.

Petrograd was stunned. No one had the remotest idea what was going to happen. “Where is Kerensky?” they asked. “Where is Korniloff? Where is Savinkoff? Where are the Cossacks?” Last, and worst of all, “Where are the Germans?”

Rumor was riding a mad steed. All sorts of wild reports swept through the city, but no word of verified fact came from the outside world. That morning the storm center shifted to the city Duma, which refused to acknowledge the victory of the Bolsheviki or accede to their demands. A Committee for the Salvation of the Country and the Revolution was quickly formed, and all the anti-Bolshevik groups gathered around it.

Early in the day, a Bolshevist representative called at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and demanded the secret treaties, declaring that he wished to inform the Russian people as to the aims of the war. He was told that ten thousand _dossiers_ were to be found in the archives of the ministry, and he was at liberty to examine all of them. He thanked his informant and left.

At the same hour Lenin called at the office of the _Izvestia_, official organ of the executive committee of the Council of Workmen and Soldiers, and announced that it would hereafter be in the hands of the Bolsheviki. He proposed to the editors to continue work under the new leadership. They refused, and Zenovieff, who only a few hours before had been a fugitive, was elevated to the position of chief.

Absolute quiet reigned in the city that day and the next, and such order as Russia had not known since the days immediately following the March Revolution, when the entire populace was lifted into a state of exaltation in which selfish desires played no part. Every soldier had been told that the honor of the new Revolution was in his hands. Every member of the Red Guard had been warned that provocation in all the time-tried Russian forms would be used by monarchists, counter-revolutionists, and German agents to discredit the cause of the workers. They were admonished to refrain from violence themselves, and to prevent looting wherever the slightest indication of it was found. Placards were posted upon the buildings urging precautions against disorder, and soldiers were on patrol duty at every street corner.

By Friday night the Committee of Salvation had succeeded in spreading the strikes in the various ministries until the Bolsheviki were almost completely isolated from the rest of the Russian _intelligentzia_. They made the city ring with stories of outrages--stories that later proved to be a fine fabric of falsification, worthy of Russian imagination. The leaders of the Council of the Republic, the Peasants’ Council, and even the Centroflot, Executive Committee of the Russian fleet, called upon the people to refuse to recognize the Soviet government, and announced that before long they would be able to establish a stable government themselves.

It was a call the people did not heed. The masses had swung away from their leaders. They had their own very definite ideas as to what they wanted. The sailors were protesting violently that the Centrabalt did not represent the rank and file of the navy, and it was finally dissolved by order of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Soldiers from the ranks were charging their committees with counter-revolution, and shouting with fire in their eyes that their executives were putting off the army elections week after week because they knew they no longer had the faith of the men in the trenches and could not be reëlected. The same split had come between the peasants and their executives, and every rumor from the remote corners of Russia indicated that little villages, towns, and cities were following the lead of Petrograd, and rising in massed revolt.

The Bolsheviki had achieved a degree of success greater than they suspected. The leaders, exhausted by lack of sleep, depressed by the rejection of the _Intelligentzia_, and conscious of their inadequacy for the mere physical task of bringing bread to keep Petrograd alive, failed utterly to realize their strength. A heavy pall of discouragement settled on Smolney.

Word had come that the Cossacks were marching on the city, and that the citadel of the workers would be attacked the following morning. Petrograd poured out to fight. The factory gates opened wide, and that amazing army of the Red Guard, ununiformed, untrained, and certainly unequipped for battle with the traditional backbone of the Russian military, marched away to defend the “revolutionary capital” and the victory of the proletariat.

Women walked by the side of men, and small boys tagged along on the fringes of the procession. Some of the factory girls wore red crosses upon the sleeves of their thin jackets, and packed a meager kit-bag of bandages and first-aid accessories. More of them carried shovels with which to dig trenches. The fire of the Crusaders was in their eyes, and the faith of the Christian martyrs in their souls, as they marched down the Nevsky, singing as they went, oblivious to the bitter cold that blew in from the Baltic waters, and unafraid for the first time of that foe whose very name had been a terror to countless generations of beaten, broken human beings.

At ten o’clock Friday night my telephone rang, and a weary voice came over the wire. It was my Lettish friend, Jacob Peters.

“I am trying to translate something,” he said. “It is very important, and I do not know enough English. Could you find time to help me?”

“When?” I asked him.

“Now,” he said.

Half an hour later he knocked at my door. His face was gray with fatigue. He had not been in bed for three days, and he looked utterly crushed and discouraged.

“It is the decree of peace to the warring nations of the world,” he said. “We are going to send it out on the wireless in every language. They have given me the English translation. We have nobody to help us. It is terrible--there are so few of us who can do this sort of thing.”

We sat down at my typewriter, and Peters struggled with the difficult Russian words. Though he could speak Russian, his knowledge of the fine points of the language was none too good. He had to translate it first in his own mind into Lettish, and then into English, and his poor, tired brain nearly went mad with the task.

Slowly I took down the words. At the end of an hour the sum of our labors covered half a page of typewriting. We started glibly enough with the title:

THE DECREE OF PEACE

and continued:

The All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workmen’s, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies unanimously passed the following decree of peace, October 26-November 8.

The Workmen’s and Peasants’ Government, made by the Revolution of the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of October (old style), and sanctioned by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workmen’s, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies, asks the warring peoples and governments to start negotiations immediately for rightful and democratic peace; for rightful and democratic peace for which the majority of the worn-out, suffering, and war-weary workers are longing in all warring countries; peace for which the peasants and workers of Russia have been persistently asking since they overthrew the monarchy of the Tsar, that is, peace without annexations and contributions and self-definition of nations.

It was only the first paragraph. Peters looked despairingly at the long document in front of him, and rubbed his tired eyes.

“I guess it’s no use,” he said. “We couldn’t finish it if we worked all night. My Russian is not good enough. If we only had some translators! If we only had some stenographers!”

Here was this new government of the People’s Commissaries preparing a document that they confidently hoped would revolutionize the status of the struggling world, and there was no one to translate it but a Lett who had not been to bed for three days, and an American war correspondent.

When Peters got up to leave, he held out his hand.

“This may be the last time I will see you,” he said. “If we fail now, everything is lost. Up in my country the business is all in my name--my throat will be the first one cut.”

“Well, we have tried, anyway, and if we fail I know the day will come when the world will say that dark Russia did her best to bring peace to all the war-weary peoples!”