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

provincial agents for the first three months of the revolution summarized this process:

the widespread myth that the Russian peasant is devoted to the Tsar and that he 'cannot live' without him has been destroyed by the universal joy and the relief of the peasants upon discovering that in reality they can live without the Tsar, without whom they were told they 'could not live'.. . Now the peasants say: 'The Tsar brought himself down and brought us to ruin.'⁵⁹

Once their initial fear had been removed, the peasants welcomed the revolution. The news from the capital was joyously greeted by huge assemblies in the village fields. 'Our village', recalls one peasant, 'burst into life with celebrations. Everyone felt enormous relief, as if a heavy rock had suddenly been lifted from our shoulders.' Another peasant recalled the celebrations in his village on the day it learned of the Tsar's abdication: 'People kissed each other from joy and said that life from now on would be good. Everyone dressed in their best costumes, as they do on a big holiday. The festivities went on for three days.' Many villages held religious processions to thank the Lord for their newly won freedoms, and offered up prayers for the new government. For many peasants, the revolution appeared as a sacred thing, while those who had laid down their lives for the people's freedom were seen by the peasants as modern-day saints. Thus the villagers of Bol'she-Dvorskaya volost in the Tikhvinsk district of Petrograd province held a 'service of thanksgiving for the divine gift of the people's victory and the eternal memory of those holy men who fell in the struggle for freedom'. The parishioners of Osvyshi village in Tver province

offered, as they put it, 'fervent prayers to thank the Lord for the divine gift of the people's victory . . . and since this great victory was achieved by sacrifice, we held a requiem for all our fallen brothers'. It was often with the express purpose of reciprocating this sacrifice that many villages sent donations, often amounting to several hundred roubles, to the authorities in Petrograd for the benefit of those who had suffered losses in the February Days.⁶⁰

The February Revolution was, in its essence, a revolution against monarchy. The new democracy to which it gave birth defined itself by the negation of all things tsarist. In the rhetoric of its leaders the Tsar was equated with the dark oppression of old Russia, while his removal was associated with enlightenment and progress. The symbols and emblems of the revolution — printed in the press and the pamphlet literature — were the images of a broken chain, of the radiant sun appearing from behind the clouds, and of a toppled throne and crown.⁶¹

The revolution was accompanied by the nationwide destruction of all signs and symbols of imperial power. During the February Days the crowds in Petrograd tore down the imperial double-headed eagles which hung from many buildings (sometimes even blowing them up with explosives);* removed imperial signs from shopfronts and streets; smashed tsarist statues; took out portraits of the tsars from government buildings (Repin's famous portrait of Nicholas II was torn down from the tribune of the Tauride Palace), and burned all these in bonfires on the streets. The imperial coats of arms on the iron fence around the Winter Palace were covered up with red material — as were all the statues too large to destroy. During March and April many towns held symbolic re-enactments of the February Days, usually known as 'Festivals of Freedom', in which these tsarist emblems and insignia — sometimes reinstalled especially for the event — were torn down once again. In Moscow the elephantine statue of Alexander III was dismantled by a team of workers using ropes and dynamite. In provincial towns statues of the tsars were also destroyed, although here there were sometimes conflicts when these statues had been paid for out of civic funds and had come to represent a certain civic pride. In Vladimir, for example, there was a dispute between the socialists and the merchants over the town's statue of Alexander II. After a series of long street debates,' recalls a local resident, 'it was decided to strike a compromise: the statue would not be destroyed but, in order not to offend the revolutionary morals of the people, the figure of the Tsar would be covered up with a large brown sack.' Much of this iconoclasm was carnivalesque. Thus, for example, in the February Days a crowd paraded through the Petrograd streets with a straw effigy of Nicholas II in police uniform which they then burned in a comic ceremony. But such destruction could easily turn

* Several US eagles were also taken down mistakenly.

violent. A eunuch was lynched by the same crowd simply because such effeminate types were thought to be the lackeys of the court.⁶²

This symbolic revolution was also enacted on the personal level. People made a conscious effort to distance themselves from the old regime and to identify themselves with the new democracy. Soldiers renounced their hard-won tsarist medals, and often sent them to the Petrograd Soviet so that it could melt them down and put the silver to the use of the people's cause. Hundreds of people with surnames such as Romanov, Nemets (German) or Rasputin, appealed to the Chancellery for the right to have them changed. One such Romanov, Fedor Andreevich, a peasant of Koltovskii village in Penza province, claimed that his surname had become 'a source of shame' and wanted it changed to Lvov — the surname of the Prime Minister.⁶³

The revolution was accompanied by a boom of anti-tsarist pamphlets, postcards, plays and films, as the old laws on censorship were removed. The pamphlets, in particular, were hugely popular, some of them selling in their millions. They all traded in the rumours of the war years: that the Empress was working for the Germans; that she was the lover of Rasputin; that the Tsar had given his throne to this 'holy devil', and so on. Most of their titles were sexually suggestive — The Secrets of the Romanovs; The Gay Days of Rasputin; The Night Orgies of Rasputin — as was much of their dialogue. In The Night Orgies, for example, Protopopov asks Madame Vyrubova if Rasputin has an 'enormous talent'. 'Oh, I know,' she answers, 'an enormous, enormous talent.'⁶⁴ Many of the pamphlets were semi- pornographic and were illustrated with cartoons of the royals rolling around in bed with Rasputin. By making the link between the sexual corruption of the court and the diseased condition of Russia explicit, this propaganda played a vital role (still to be investigated by historians) in debunking the myth and the mystique of the Tsar as a divine king. During the course of 1917 it shaped the popular image of the monarchy as an alien force of darkness and corruption, an image which ruled out the possibility of a restoration and thus largely undermined the counter- revolution in the years to come.

So, politically, the monarchy was dead. All its main institutions of support — the bureaucracy, the police, the army and the Church — collapsed virtually overnight. It was a sign of how far they had been weakened, and of how far they had become alienated from the Tsar, during the years before 1917. The Tsar was the lynchpin of the monarchy — he was at the same time, as it were, an officer, a priest, a district governor and a policeman — and once he had been removed the whole system came crashing down. The army commanders soon declared their allegiance to the Provisional Government. Many of them had been linked with its leaders through the opposition movement of the war; while those who were opposed to the revolution knew that it would break the army to resist it. The Church was undermined by its own internal revolution.

In the countryside there was a strong anti- clerical movement: village communities took away the church lands, removed priests from the parishes and refused