A letter arrived with a familiar seal – the Milky Way poetry circle was evidently still in existence! His former colleagues had thought to write to him.
From the members of the Mlechny Put’ Poetry Collective
To Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin
Unanimously approved
You are a traitor to your class and to the cause of the peasants and workers you so speciously claim to embody! Living in the high society of Petersburg, your psyche has become split. Your outrageous touring of the aristocratic salons, your toadying to the nobility who have brought Russia to her knees, has distanced you from your roots. You are an individualist, absorbed in yourself and your unprincipled search for fame. We declare that we reject you and hereby break with you forever.
There followed the signatures of all the young poets Sergei had considered his friends in the early Moscow years.
He stuffed the letter into his pocket. It was three weeks before he replied.
When I first came to Petersburg, I was young and unknown. Like all of you, I was anxious to make my name as a poet and I was lucky. The capital’s littérateurs raised my reputation to the roof. It was they who took me to the salons, and they who insisted I recite to the aristocracy. But while all these people were praising me, I spent the nights on the streets and in doss-houses. I pushed away what they were offering me. I could have taken as much as I wanted from their purses, but I despised them. With all their riches and all they had, I considered it vile even to touch them.
When Klyuev came to visit him in the Tsarskoe Selo barracks, Sergei spoke at length about his dead friend Grisha Panfilov. He didn’t mention the letter from the Milky Way poets, but he pressed Klyuev to say what he thought Grisha, the revolutionary idealist, would think about the signs that his long-awaited revolt was finally in the making . . . and about Sergei’s own willingness to serve the tsarist institutions he had so detested.
Nevsky Prospect, St Petersburg’s main boulevard, was the city’s forum. Women gathered there to exchange news at the butchers, bakers and fishmongers. It was in the bread shops of the Nevsky that discontent turned to insurrection.
In February 1917 the war was in its third year, the economy had collapsed and housewives were spending hours queuing for bread that often never came. Their anger came to a head on Thursday, 23 February, International Women’s Day. Thousands of women left their places of work and joined forces with the bread queues. Delegations went to factories, banging on doors, pelting the windows with snowballs, urging the workers to down tools. They wanted bread, freedom and an end to the war.
Men from the Putilov engineering plant went on strike. Workers at the Lessner munitions factory declared they would refuse to fight for Russia until the regime accepted their demands for civil rights. What had begun as a protest about bread acquired an ominous momentum. By late afternoon, shop windows had been smashed. Women took what food there was; men pushed over tramcars and built barricades from paving stones.
In Tsarskoe Selo, they were preparing for the winter ball. A special train was bringing guests from the capital. Men dressed in knee breeches, buckled shoes and plumed hats, women in evening dresses and diamonds were collected at the station then whisked through the park in sleighs piled high with furs, through the swirling snow, past the frosted trees to the gates of the palace, illuminated by a thousand lights. Ethiopian guards in turbans offered the guests mulled wine as they stood in the receiving line. Carriages with beautifully groomed horses in the crimson and gold Imperial livery waited in the courtyard.
Sergei watched the comings and goings. It was common knowledge that the empress would not be there – she hadn’t been seen in public since the death of Rasputin – but the men were saying that Nicholas too would be absent, detained by the more pressing task of saving the country. There were reports from the city of clashes between demonstrators and police and of machine guns being deployed on the roofs of buildings. Detachments of Cossacks, the most feared of the tsarist troops, were patrolling the streets.
For Sergei, the music, the shouts of the revellers, the glare of the illuminations seemed a provocation. Life was not here. Life was on the streets.
When the music died down after midnight, he followed the line of departing guests. In his medical orderly’s uniform, he had little trouble finding a place on the train to Petrograd.
Nevsky Prospect, February 1917
The bridges were closed. In an effort to keep striking workers out of the city, the authorities had lifted the crossings over Petrograd’s rivers and canals. It was eight o’clock and the sun was rising before Sergei arrived at Nevsky Prospect. A crowd of men and women who looked as if they had been there all night were huddling round bonfires, sharing food and bottles of beer. A soldier in the uniform of the Semyonovsky Regiment gave him a mug of tea.
‘Here,’ he said, handing him a length of red ribbon. ‘You’ll need one of these.’
Sergei saw that the soldiers in the group had tied ribbons to their lapels. He did the same.
‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.
‘Since yesterday. We’re waiting for the men from the Vyborg Side, strikers from the factories. They tried to come in over the Liteiny Bridge, but the police stopped them. They’re meant to be coming over the ice.’
As far as Sergei could see in both directions, the Nevsky was in the hands of the people. He asked where the troops were.
‘Ha! They were here yesterday, all right. Cossacks with whips, riding up and down trying to scare us. But when it came to it, they backed off; seems they didn’t want a fight. People have heard about it, so there’ll be even more of us today.’
Sergei said he was going to have a look around. The side streets leading off the Nevsky were filled with groups of serious-looking men and women, workers for the most part, almost certainly from the outlying factories, who had crossed the frozen Neva. Others – students, shopkeepers, office workers – had come as spectators but were drawn into conversation with the demonstrators and fired by their enthusiasm. For such a large gathering, there was very little noise, just a whispered hush of anticipation.
Sergei walked west towards the Admiralty. There were sandbags on top of the Singer Building and the stock exchange, but no sign of the machine guns people had been talking about. He was surprised by the absence of police; in normal times there were uniforms on every corner. There were plenty of soldiers, all with the red ribbon of insurrection in their buttonhole. When the crowd spotted one without a ribbon, they called out, ‘Brother! Come and join us! Be with the people!’
The noise began at lunchtime. The streets were packed and people sensed a tipping point. Individual voices were raised, men shouting jokes or humorous obscenities; then the women joined in. ‘I’m hungry, comrades! What about you?’ ‘I’m hungry, and so’s my baby!’ ‘What’re Nick and Alix eating – that’s what I’d like to know!’
Police observers on the Nevsky and the Liteiny told their commanders that 150,000 people were on the streets. The mood was threatening; only the army would have any chance of keeping them in check. The message was relayed to the palace, but word came back that the tsar was away, visiting military headquarters at the front.
There was a hiatus and the people seized on it. The raised voices were shouting orders now, giving a shape and a purpose to the inchoate human mass. It wasn’t organised, there were no professional revolutionaries, no dogma, no -isms; the crowd stirred organically and became a unified force. One group went north along Liteiny towards the Russian parliament in the Tauride Palace, while the main body continued east to Znamenskaya Square, congregating at the huge equestrian statue of Alexander III, the brooding symbol of immovable autocracy.
Orators climbed on to the statue’s plinth, whipping up the crowd’s anger at the death and sacrifice ‘the tsar’s war’ had inflicted on the nation, denouncing ‘Nick and Alix’ as bloodsucking leeches, sneering at their stupid, stuck-up bitches of daughters. A hunger march was becoming a revolution.
There were thousands in the square and not everyone heard what was being said, but it didn’t matter. All of them shared the same grievances and the same demands. Calls to overthrow the monarchy were being aired in public and the police were powerless to stop it.
When the crowds dispersed, late in the evening, there was more looting; more trams and carriages overturned, more skirmishes with the Cossacks. The statue of the old tsar, Alexander, was toppled and beheaded. The air had changed in Petrograd. It was the air of hope, the air of freedom now, and Sergei took in lungfuls. He wandered the streets, sat at bonfires, broke bread with his brothers and sisters. When they sang, a people’s version of the Marseillaise with ferocious new Russian words, he sang with them.
We renounce the old world!
We shake its dust from our feet!
We hate the golden idols,
We hate the palace of the tsar!
Arise, arise, you labouring masses!
Rise against the foe!
Forward! Forward!
Let the people’s vengeance go!
The greedy rich exploit your work,
They take your last piece of bread.
The tsar, the vampire, drinks from your veins;
The tsar, the vampire, drinks the people’s blood.
Arise, arise, you labouring masses!
Against thieves, the dogs – the rich,
Against the evil vampire tsar!
Kill the cursed the criminals!
Bring on a better life!
In the early hours of the morning Sergei returned to barracks. No one had noticed he was missing. The Russian state was in chaos, surprised by the events on the streets.
For the rest of that day, Saturday 25 February, Petrograd was in the hands of the people. Perhaps remembering the consequences of allowing troops to fire on the Bloody Sunday marchers twelve years earlier, Nicholas II played a waiting game, hoping the protests would fizzle out.
They didn’t. The following day, a quarter of a million people converged on the capital chanting ‘Long live the revolution!’ Troops intercepted a column of marchers at the Moika Canal. As the crowds approached, the soldiers knelt and aimed their rifles. The people at the front saw what was happening and stopped, but those at the back were pushing them onwards. The soldiers fired two volleys and the front row of marchers fell to the ground. People fled, slipping in pools of blood.
With disorder escalating and no instructions from their political masters, Petrograd’s military commanders told the troops to fire at will. Two thousand people were gunned down.
The massacre disgusted many soldiers who’d been rushed back from the front to deal with the insurrection, and defections increased. On Monday, 27 February, the Petrograd garrison mutinied, murdering those officers who tried to stop them. Tsarist insignia were torn down, police arsenals looted and guns handed to the crowds. Even the Cossacks began to desert.
The Russian parliament telegraphed the absent tsar:
The situation is growing worse. Measures must be taken at once; tomorrow will be too late. The fate of the country and the monarchy is being decided. The government is powerless to stop the disorder. The garrison is in the throes of rebellion. They have joined the mobs. They are marching on the Interior Ministry and Parliament. Your Majesty, do not delay! If the agitation reaches the Army, the destruction of Russia is inevitable.
Nicholas seemed strangely detached. His letters to Alexandra, written in flawless English, made no reference to the fate that was descending on them:
Military Headquarters, 24 February. My sweet, darling sunshine! My brain is resting here – no ministers, no troublesome questions demanding thought . . . I got your telegram telling me of Olga and Baby having measles. I could not believe my eyes – this was so unexpected. At dinner I saw all the foreign generals – they were very sorry to hear this sad news. For all the children, and especially for Alexei, a change of climate is absolutely necessary after their recovery. We shall think this out in peace on my return home. I greatly miss my half-hourly game of patience every evening. I shall take up dominoes again in my spare time. Your loving little hubby, Nicky.
Tsar and empress, family snapshot
When the tsar finally plucked up courage to return to Petrograd, the railways had been cut by striking workers. His train was diverted, then shunted into a dead end. A delegation from parliament found him in a siding near Pskov. It was already 2 March, and in the intervening days Alexandra had been sending telegrams playing down the seriousness of the situation, urging her husband ‘not to sign any paper or constitution or other such horror’.
But the deputies told Nicholas he had no choice: only his abdication could defuse the people’s anger. The Romanov dynasty that had ruled since 1613 and celebrated its third centenary with great pomp just four years earlier came to an end with a royal proclamation written in a railway siding.
In the days of the great struggle against foreign enemies who for nearly three years have tried to enslave our fatherland, the Lord God has been pleased to send down on Russia a new heavy trial. In these decisive moments, We believe it Our duty to facilitate the consolidation of all national forces. We have thought it well to renounce the Throne of the Russian Empire and to lay down Our supreme power.
As We do not wish to part from Our beloved son, Alexei, We transmit the succession to Our brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail. We call on all faithful sons of the fatherland to fulfil their sacred duty and obey the new tsar in this heavy moment of national trials. May the Lord God help Russia!
Nicholas’s portrait was ripped from the wall of the parliament chamber. A provisional government would run the country until elections could be held.
Later, when revolution had altered the country’s history, Sergei would compose a new version of his role in it:
The revolution found me at the front in a disciplinary battalion. I had been sent there as a punishment for refusing to write poems in honour of the tsar. When the February revolution happened, I refused to serve in the army of Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government and threw down my rifle. I lived as a deserter, working with the Socialist Revolutionaries. I was in their combat brigade.
A poet’s metier is to reinvent reality. Sergei’s greatest verse would be wrought from the reimagining of his own life, Yesenin the man refashioned into a complex lyric persona, walking the paths of joy and despair. So fully would he embrace this nexus of life and art that the former would come to be valued merely as material for the latter, until in the end he would feel compelled to live out the destiny his poetry foretold.
But that was in the future. In February 1917 there was no evidence of any Sergei Yesenin in the tsar’s punishment battalions or, indeed, in the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionaries.
There was, on the contrary, evidence that he returned to army life in Tsarskoe Selo, that he helped to treat casualties from the fighting in Petrograd and that the experience deepened his anguish. Things that had been dependable were falling apart. The scared little boy raising his hand, eager to please, had been awed by the splendour of the empress; a princess in a white dress had made him a bowl of borshch; he had fallen for a vision of eternal beauty, but it had been an illusion.
He was forced into a brooding reappraisal of his life, of his feelings for Russia, patriotism and justice. The old order was lost; the thought of the future screwed his stomach into a knot.
The puddles shine blue today
And the breeze whispers in my hand;
But like you, I know that no one
Needs the firmament’s green land.
In the world of material things,
We live all times alone.
You, like the oak in the springtime,
Drink the white of your days ’til it’s gone.
You love, I know, I know,
You love the gentle soul’s caress.
But the way to heaven is barred
By the seal of our earthliness.
There’s eternal distance before us,
The way there thought-filled and hard.
Beyond the hills our shelter –
A dirt-filled village churchyard.
When he sent his poems to friends, they read them as letters of farewell.
Listen to me, my filthy heart!
Listen to me, you heart of a dog!
I’m on to you, on to you like a thief;
And in my hand I have a knife.
Sooner or later, I know it,
I’ll stick the cold steel in your ribs.
I’ve no longer any yearning to travel
The eternal, stinking distance ahead.
Let fools and charlatans chatter,
About dreams and goals and rewards.
If there’s anything on earth or beyond it,
It’s emptiness. And that’s all.
When Klyuev tried to talk to him, Sergei pushed him away.
‘My life will be short,’ he said. ‘You know how to battle against life, but I shrink before it.’
A provisional government was formed, led by liberals, moderate socialists and Constitutional Democrats, all well-intentioned, all committed to freedom and democracy. But these were the men who had previously agreed to collaborate with the tsar’s ideas for a constitutional monarchy and that didn’t go down well. A minister sent to address a rally of railway workers heard his government denounced to his face.
What do we think of this new Provisional Government, comrades? Does it have representatives of the people in it? Fat chance! Look, it’s led by a prince. I ask you, why did we even bother making a revolution? We’ve suffered at the hands of princes and counts for long enough . . . and these new ministers, they’re all landowners. Maybe we shouldn’t let this fellow out of here – what do you say, comrades?
The minister fled. The Provisional Government was on shaky ground. Another, more radical centre of power was emerging – the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.
Factories all over Russia had elected councils known as soviets, as had many army units. Most of the revolutionary groups were represented in them – Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and a handful of Bolsheviks. Where the Provisional Government wanted a parliamentary democracy, the Soviets wanted a revolutionary dictatorship, land to the people and an immediate end to the war. For much of 1917 the Provisional Government and the Soviets vied for power.
The war continued. Sergei was still in the army. But by mid-March the army was no longer the one he had joined. The Provisional Government was weeding out unreliable elements and selecting new officers. On 17 March Brigadier Lohman handed him an official document.
Attestation. Yesenin, Sergei Alexandrovich. Military Orderly, Train No. 143. Has fulfilled all obligations and duties with soldierly integrity. Present notice confirms that soldier Yesenin is suitable for promotion to the rank of Ensign.
Signed: Guchkov, Minister of War
Sergei hesitated. The collapse of the old world and a future pregnant with cruelty and reprisals filled him with dread. On 20 March, he laid down his rifle and walked out of barracks for the last time.