On a chilly winter’s day, I walked across a scrubby expanse of grass in northwest Moscow, about 4 miles from the Kremlin and just over the road from the Moscow Dynamo football stadium. The typical high-rise housing blocks of the Soviet era and a newly built sports complex defined the edges of the field. The place was quiet, apart from a few tramps drinking vodka. But in mid May 1896, Khodynka Field was noisy and crammed to bursting. Nearly 400,000 Muscovites had come here, attracted by the promise of free food and drink, and gifts to celebrate the coronation of the new tsar, Nicholas II.
The crowds had been building up for two days. Stalls doled out beer and sausages, pies and ice cream, souvenir coins and mugs. Singers and choirs provided entertainment, and fairground carousels were mobbed with excited children. Then, early on the morning of 18 May, it was announced that the newly crowned Nicholas and his young wife, the beautiful Princess Alexandra of Hesse, were on their way to greet their faithful subjects. The crowd became agitated; people began to rush forward. In his eyewitness account of what happened next, the journalist Vladimir Gilyarovsky refers to a deep ditch that cut Khodynka Field in two. It has been filled in now, but from Gilyarovsky’s description I spotted where it must have run, along the side of the new housing estate:
The crowd was pushing1 madly forwards. You couldn’t resist its momentum. The crush was building up and people were screaming … Then, as they poured down the sides of the ditch, there was a howl of horror: the opposite wall was tall and vertical, higher than a man’s head, and those at the front were being crushed … There was a mass of screaming people, desperately trying to lift their children out of danger, but more and more people were pouring in, falling onto the heads of those below – a second layer, and a third, until death, terrible death, was all around us. Blue, sweating faces, people vomiting, gasping for air, the cracking of bones, and corpses held upright by the crowd with nowhere to fall …
An estimated fourteen hundred men, women and children perished and many more were maimed for life. The authorities were informed of the disaster, but decided after agonised debate to press ahead with the coronation celebrations. Flickering newsreels of that day in May show Nicholas and Alexandra processing serenely through Red Square, surrounded by elegant men with bearded faces like their English relatives George V and today’s Prince Michael of Kent. In smart uniforms and flowing white dresses, the royal party are seen dancing gracefully under sunlit marquees.
Elsewhere in the city, rumours were beginning to spread. Newspapers were banned from writing about the Khodynka tragedy, but by the end of the day Muscovites were talking of ‘the calamity’, whispering that it was an omen, and declaring that ‘no good will come from the reign of this tsar2’.
By all accounts, Nicholas was not a hard-hearted man; he visited the injured in hospital and donated ninety thousand roubles to the families of the dead. But he was young – only 26 when his father’s unexpected death from kidney failure catapulted him to power – and largely inexperienced in the ways of state. ‘What shall become of me3, and of Russia?’ he is said to have asked.
The hardline conservatives who had guided Alexander III missed no opportunity to warn his impressionable son of the danger of making concessions that would weaken the monarchy. When a delegation of provincial assembly members came to Moscow to pledge their allegiance to the new tsar, they asked if he might graciously consider the introduction of a small measure of devolved authority, ceding certain powers to democratically elected local councils. Nicholas rejected the idea in a scathing speech:
I understand that some people4, carried away by senseless dreams, have been heard to suggest that local councils might be allowed to participate in the government of this country. I wish to make it clear that I am determined to maintain, for the good of the nation, the principle of absolute autocracy, as firmly and as resolutely as did my late lamented father …
Nicholas’s hostility towards representative democracy was not the result of ignorance. He had observed the Western parliamentary system at first hand during a visit to the British Houses of Parliament in 1895 and he had spoken to Queen Victoria, his wife’s grandmother, about the merits of constitutional monarchy. But the bombings and assassinations carried out by Russia’s revolutionary opposition had convinced him that reform must be resisted at all cost. The conservative Konstantin Pobedonostsev – who had served Nicholas’s father and was now the new tsar’s most trusted adviser – encouraged this view, but even he admitted privately that public opinion was unhappy with the tsar’s intransigence:
I fear the tsar’s speech5 has caused all sorts of muttering. I’m told our young people and the intelligentsia are agitated and annoyed with His Majesty … I think ordinary folk out in the country liked what he had to say … But some people had completely unrealistic expectations – God alone knows what they wanted him to do … and it all bodes ill for the future.
The moderate liberal opposition, who sought to introduce democracy by constitutional means, feared the tsar’s stubbornness would play into the hands of the extremists. Viktor Obninsky was a leader of the Constitutional Democrats, known by their party’s initials as the KaDety or ‘Cadets’:
When he called our hopes6 for reform ‘senseless dreams’ there began to be a widespread disenchantment with Nicholas … It unified the opposition forces and made them even bolder … His speech was the first step on a slippery slope, and Nicholas is still sliding down it in the opinion of his subjects and of the whole civilised world.
Within a year, disturbances had broken out in Russian universities, and the authorities had to use force to quell the unrest. The Socialist Revolutionaries, or SRs – inheritors of the terrorist Narodnaya Volya movement – formed a ‘fighting detachment’ to disrupt government by targeted assassinations. They murdered senior government figures close to the tsar, including two consecutive ministers of the interior in 1902 and 1904, as well as scores of lesser officials. After blowing up Vyacheslav von Plehve, the second of the two interior ministers, the SRs issued a long-winded communiqué explaining the reasons behind their terror campaign. The assassination was the only means to end Russia’s repressive autocratic rule:
Von Plehve was the pillar7 that was supposed to prop up the crumbling wall of autocracy. He did everything to suppress the people, lavishing the people’s money on police, prisons and kangaroo courts. On his orders, troops were used to protect the autocracy against the robbed and oppressed people. Workers and peasants were beaten, cut down, shot and exiled to Siberia. All this was to reinforce the crumbling bastion of autocracy. It seemed as if justice had been driven off the face of the Earth, and that the dark reign of injustice would last in Russia for ever. But the power of the people is great. Surrounded by a wall of police, the minister thought he was beyond the reach of the people’s judgement. But that judgement came. The thunder of the people’s anger has struck this contemptible enemy. Von Plehve has paid with his life for the hunger, the misery, the robbery, the torture, the groans and the deaths of millions of working people. Von Plehve was one of the pillars that held up the wall of autocracy, a wall that blocked the people’s path to freedom and happiness. If you chop down the pillars, the wall will fall.
The security police infiltrated the terrorist organisations, but with perverse results. The men whom they thought were acting as their double agents were in fact using their privileged position to mount further assassinations. The most infamous of them8, Evno Azef, even helped murder his own employers in the Interior Ministry. With consummate cynicism, Azef played each side off against the other for an astounding nine years before finally being unmasked.
By the end of 1904, Russia was close to turmoil. Political violence was spreading, the economy was foundering, and harvest failures and a sharp rise in food prices were stirring discontent among the people. A strike at the Putilov engineering works in St Petersburg spread quickly to other factories, and within a month 100,000 workers had downed tools. St Petersburg was suffering from a winter of discontent, with electricity cuts and growing shortages of essential goods.
On Sunday 9 January 1905, a procession of around 20,000 workers, led by the priest and trade union organiser Father Georgy Gapon, defied a ban on demonstrations to march with a petition to the Winter Palace in the centre of St Petersburg. The petition asked Nicholas II to grant concessions to the hard-pressed labouring classes in language that was vivid but still respectful to the tsar:
Sire! We the workers9, our children, families and defenceless aged parents, have come to you to seek justice and protection. We are in deepest poverty and oppressed with labours beyond our strength. We are treated like slaves who must suffer in silence … Despotism and arbitrary rule are suffocating us. Sire, our strength is exhausted and our patience has run out. Things have become so terrible for us that we would prefer death to the unbearable torment we are being forced to suffer.
The ambiguous tone of the petition – both humble and threatening – reflected a strange duality in Father Gapon’s own character. He seems genuinely to have wanted the tsar to be the people’s saviour, to avoid revolution by granting them higher pay and better working conditions, civil liberties and a constituent assembly. Gapon had assured the authorities that the march would be peaceful – the workers carried icons and Nicholas’s portrait, and they sang patriotic hymns, including ‘God Save the Tsar’. But tension was high. When the march passed a designated point, nervous soldiers opened fire, leaving more than a hundred people dead in the snow.
The Russian prime minister, Count Sergei Witte, watched the massacre:
From my balcony10, I could see a large crowd moving along Kamenno-Ostrovsky Prospekt. It contained many women and children. Before ten minutes had passed, shots resounded in the direction of the Troitsky Bridge … A bullet whizzed past my head, another one killed the porter of the Alexander Lyceum. I saw a number of wounded being carried away from the scene in cabs, and then a crowd running in disorder, with crying women here and there. I learned afterwards that it had been decided not to allow the marchers to reach the Palace Square, but apparently instructions were not issued in time to the military authorities. There was no one present to speak to the workers and make an attempt to bring them to reason … The troops fired rashly and without rhyme or reason. There were hundreds of casualties … and the revolutionists triumphed: the workers were completely alienated from the tsar and his government.
Bloody Sunday, as it became known, had a profound effect on public opinion. Like the marchers, the vast majority of Russians had regarded the tsar as their friend and protector; the peasants called him their ‘Little Father’, second in veneration only to God himself. So the massacre of those who had come to seek his help was seen as a fatal betrayal.
Ironically, Nicholas was not at the Winter Palace, having been persuaded by advisers not to accept the demonstrators’ petition. (His diaries after the event speak of his pain at the killings but fail to condemn the military for opening fire.) Adding to the confusion was the possibility that Father Gapon was himself playing a double game. He had certainly had dealings with the secret police and reported to them on the activities of the trade union movement he helped to found and run. The Socialist Revolutionaries believed he was a provocateur, and popular ballads began to circulate accusing Gapon of leading the people to their death to discredit the political opposition. (‘He pretended to be the people’s11 friend,’ run the lyrics, ‘but then he scarpered with a shout of onwards friends to freedom! … as he took to his heels and ran.’) Suspicion about Gapon was widespread, but it seems in hindsight that his motives were not as malicious as the Socialist Revolutionaries believed. Count Witte himself confirms in his memoirs that Gapon had ‘gone native’:
[The government] began to12 organise workmen’s societies … to try to keep the labouring masses under the influence of the department of police. The task of organisation was entrusted to Father Gapon, who succeeded in gaining the confidence of the governor of St Petersburg. Then, of course, the inevitable happened. The preaching of the socialists and anarchists radicalised the workmen, and they began to strive to implement the extreme programme of socialism. Not only was Gapon unable to stem this movement, but he, too, became infected with the revolutionary spirit …
After the disaster of Bloody Sunday, Gapon fled abroad to Geneva and London. Early in 1906, he returned to Russia and approached13 the leadership of the Socialist Revolutionaries, denying he was a traitor. He tried to persuade the others to join him in his contacts with the police, but the SRs disbelieved him and after a ‘revolutionary trial’ they condemned Father Gapon to death and hanged him.
Bloody Sunday sparked two years of strikes and unrest throughout the Russian Empire. Workers, peasants, students, ethnic minorities and soldiers and sailors staged angry protests, to which the government responded with arrests and executions. For Russia’s revolutionaries, discouraged after the failure of the Going to the People movement, Bloody Sunday was a welcome, if unexpected boost. Many of their leaders had been languishing in exile and one of them, Vladimir Ulyanov – now known by his revolutionary name of Lenin – gleefully welcomed its effect on revolutionary consciousness among the Russian people:
Before the uprising14 the proletariat had been happy enough with the government … [Then] the troops crushed unarmed workers, women and children. They shot people as they lay on the ground. With unutterable cynicism, they pronounced that they ‘had taught them a good lesson’. The slaughter of 9 January changed everything. Even those Petersburg workers who had believed in the tsar started to call for the immediate overthrow of the regime.
For Nicholas II and his government, trouble at home was joined by disaster abroad.
By the 1890s, the Russian Empire stretched from Poland in the west and Afghanistan in the south to Vladivostok and Kamchatka in the east. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway had emboldened Nicholas to seek further territory in Manchuria, and when this raised the prospect of conflict with Japan he rejected his ministers’ advice to seek a negotiated settlement. Nicholas’s refusal to back down suggests he was happy to provoke a war that most observers assumed Russia would win with ease. His prime minister, Count Witte, wrote that the tsar was expecting a quick victory to divert attention from his problems at home:
At heart, His Majesty15 was for an aggressive policy, but, as usual, his mind was a house divided against itself. He kept on changing his policy from day to day … He became involved in the Far Eastern adventure because of his youth, his natural animosity against Japan … and, finally, because of a hidden craving for a victorious war … Suffice it to say that he alone is to be blamed for that most unhappy decision …
In early 1904, a surprise Japanese attack had inflicted severe damage on the Russian naval force at Port Arthur in Manchuria. In a panic, Nicholas responded by sending the Baltic fleet on an 18,000-mile journey around the world to come to their rescue. But the Russian warships had got only as far as the coast of north Yorkshire when disaster struck. Their commander mistook16 a gaggle of British trawlers fishing close to Dogger Bank for Japanese torpedo boats and ordered the fleet to open fire. In the panic that followed, two Russian ships signalled that they had been hit by torpedoes and the battleship Borodino reported it had been boarded by Japanese marines. Four trawlers were hit, and one sank with the loss of three English lives. Britain was gripped by national outrage that led to demands for war against Russia. An inquiry determined that much worse damage had been avoided solely because the Russians were so drunk that they ended up firing at each other.
On 14 May 1905, the Russian fleet entered the Straits of Tsushima, between Korea and Japan. The memoirs of Vladimir Kostenko, a ship’s engineer on the cruiser Oryol, describe the grim sequence of events that followed. An outmoded, underequipped fleet, untrained peasants manning the guns and a series of blunders by the men in charge, led by Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, were about to trigger the worst naval defeat in Russian history:
Our ships were crowded together17 in a single, inflexible column. As the Japanese approached, the commander of the Oryol disobeyed orders and fired a single shot. The enemy vessels immediately retaliated. The Japanese were quick to encircle us. The battleship Suvorov was the first to be hit … and we soon followed. The Oslyabya was hit in the prow and we in the stern. The enemy’s cruisers were firing at us from 6-inch guns, steadily intensifying their fire. The Suvorov and the Oslyabya were subjected to a hail of shells and suffered horrific damage. The Oslyabya sank within ten minutes … the Suvorov was literally a wall of flames. And then it was our turn. The Borodino went down; then the Alexander III … We continued firing as well as we could until Admiral Nyebogatov gave the signal that the Russian fleet was surrendering.
By the time the smoke cleared, the Russians had lost eight battleships and four cruisers, with 4,000 men dead and 7,000 taken prisoner. The Japanese, led by Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō, lost just three torpedo boats. It was an unmitigated disaster for the tsar and his state. Vladimir Kostenko summed up the indignation felt in virtually every part of Russian society:
While there is no18 doubting the bravery and dedication of our sailors, all their heroism and self-sacrifice counted for nothing. Our best ships went down one after another in agony and flames. Only now do we see what an unparalleled crime was committed by those who so heedlessly sent us to our deaths. Our decrepit, degenerate tsarist monarchy was blindly hoping for a miracle, but instead it begot the catastrophe of Tsushima. It is tsarism that has been smashed by the guns of Admiral Tõgõ! It is tsarism that bears the shame of this defeat. Tsushima stands as the boundary between two eras of our history, the final, indisputable demonstration of the bankruptcy of the whole absolutist system!
Within weeks of the Tsushima disaster, discontent began to spread through the armed forces. In the southern port of Odessa, sailors of the Black Sea fleet staged a protest against the harsh conditions and cruel discipline to which they were subjected. According to the version of the story made famous by Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film, sailors on the battleship Potemkin brought things to a head in early June. Served with maggot-infested meat, the ratings protested and were threatened with a firing squad, sparking a mutiny that spread to the whole fleet and even to the inhabitants of Odessa itself. The film’s most celebrated scene shows tsarist troops slaughtering innocent civilians on the steps that lead to the docks. The drama is compelling and Battleship Potemkin is a powerful film; it was banned in Britain until 1954 on the grounds that it might foment social unrest. But as with so many revolutionary legends, the Potemkin events were almost certainly less dramatic than their subsequent portrayal. In Russia, the victors’ history has never lacked for self-aggrandisement.
What is undisputed is that defeat at Tsushima sent shockwaves through the nation. It brought financial and territorial losses and personal humiliation for Nicholas II. Revolutionary groups were emboldened and even the poet Konstantin Balmont, leader of the normally other-worldly Symbolists, weighed in with a bitter elegy:
Our tsar is Tsushima19, a bloody stain;
The stink of gunpowder and smoke,
Where reason goes dim.
Our tsar is blind poverty,
Prison and firing squads.
Tsar of the gallows, doubly low,
Who makes promises he dare not keep;
A coward who thinks with a stammer.
But just you wait: the hour of reckoning is near.
He whose reign began with Khodynka
Will end it on the scaffold.
After the events of Bloody Sunday and the disaster of Tsushima, Nicholas was forced to rethink his unbending insistence on absolute autocracy. He offered concessions in the hope of defusing the building revolutionary tension. Had he taken such steps at the outset of his reign, he might have been successful. But now his concessions were perceived as a grudging response to irresistible pressure from the people, rather than the voluntary act of a reforming monarch. If the people could force the government to concede this much, many concluded, another push might bring the whole edifice crashing to the ground.