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Nicholas receives word after desperate word that he must alter course to survive. The British ambassador transgresses protocol to warn him he is on the brink of 'revolution and disaster'.
Nothing seems to stir behind those placid tsarry eyes.
hahaha this is gold
The tsarina is overcome with pious grief. The right are delighted, hoping Alexandra will now repair to an asylum, and that Nicholas will magically gain a resolve he has never had. But Rasputin, colourful as he was, was only ever a morbid symptom. His murder is not a palace coup. It is not a coup at all.
What will end the Russian regime is not the gruesome death of that pantomime figure too outlandish to be invented; nor is it the epochal tetchiness of Russian liberals; nor the outrage of monarchists at an inadequate monarch.
What will end it comes up from below.
after Rasputin is murdered
Peremptorily, Lashkevitch read out the tsar’s command to restore order. Once, perhaps, that might have persuaded them to submit. Now it was a provocation. There was a scuffle, shouts, alarm. Someone in the crowd of soldiers raised a weapon. Or perhaps, it has even been suggested, Lashkevitch raised his own gun in a panic and turned it on himself. Wherever it came from, a sudden shot sounded. The soldiers stared as the captain fell.
Something died with him. A hesitation.
The Volinsky soldiers roused the Litovsky and Preobrazhensky regiments from their barracks nearby. Officers from the Moscow regiment struggled to assert command. They were overpowered. The soldiers headed out into the city for the Vyborg district. This time it was they who sought to fraternise with the workers.
Under the gun-grey skies, the streets of Petrograd began to rage.
such a cool scene + writing
also makes me realise just how much Night Watch was inspired by this (all the soldiers refusing to shoot on civilians, etc)
7) abolition of officers' honorary titles and of officers' use of derogatory terms for their men.
this point in itself is worth keeping because it's a reminder of how much power language has in reinforcing hierarchies. the fact that the soldiers thought it mentioning makes that clear
Nomenclature was tangled: Russia that year was riddled with committees, caucuses, congresses, permanent and semi-permanent, standing and not-standing. Meetings proliferated ad well-minuted infinitum. [...]
I like this device
The situation had long ceased to be a matter of individuals, or even whole battalions, disobeying orders. Now there was mass movement of Russian troops in both directions: forward from the trenches, not belligerently but in more fraternisation, shouting greetings, picking a way through the landscape of cataclysm to share liquor and make-do conversation with the Germans they were supposed to kill; and, in vast numbers, in retreat from the front. Mass desertions. Thousands simply walked away.
The mood grew ugly. Chernov shrank precariously back as suspicious men and women surrounding him jostled closer to where he balanced. A big worker pushed his way through and came up close and shook his fist in Chernov’s face.
‘Take power, you son of a bitch,’ he bellowed, in one of most famous phrases of 1917, ‘when it’s given to you!
Troops radicalised or gave up hope or both in the grinding war. They wrote bitter, raging letters now to the country’s leaders. One soldier, Kuchlavok, and his regiment sent Izvestia a long, near-glossolalic sermon of despair that their revolution had been in vain, a deflected apocalypse, catastrophe without renewal.
Now another Saviour of the world must be born, to save the people from all the calamities in the making here on earth and to put an end to these bloody days, so that no beast of any kind living on the earth created not by princes and rulers but by God-given nature is wiped out, for God is an invisible being inhabiting whoever possesses a conscience and tells us to live in friendship, but no there are evil people who sow strife among us and poison us one against another pushing us to murder, who wish for others what they would not wish for themselves … They used to say that the war was foisted off on us by Nicholas. Nicholas has been overthrown, so who is foisting the war on us now?
With all the seriousness in the world, like burnt-out matches telling grim stories of the conflagration they will soon start, the ashes of Russia’s Provisional Government debated which of them to make dictator.
wow the imagery is beautiful
Dictator Kishkin rushed to the military headquarters to take command. His first action was to dismiss the chief of staff, Polkovnikov, and replace him with Bagratuni. This provoked the first crack in his absolute authority: miraculously resistant to awe at Kishkin’s power, Polkovnikov’s associates resigned en masse in protest at his scapegoating.
Some made it through the perforated MRC defence and went glumly home. Some sat staring out of the windows.
this is just so sad