An Essay · Open Questions
On the 26th the Petrograd garrison fired on the crowd. On the 27th it refused. Why the Pavlovsky and Volynsky regiments mutinied, and why the mutiny of a company became the mutiny of an army overnight.
The easy version of the story is that the soldiers would not fire on their own people. It is a good story and it is in every textbook, and the trouble with it is that on Sunday, 26 February 1917 (11 March in the West), the soldiers fired. The training detachment of the Volynsky Guards reserve battalion, the best-disciplined men the battalion had, took up position on Znamenskaya Square at the far end of the Nevsky, and when the crowd would not disperse they shot into it and killed some forty people. The Pavlovsky detachment fired by the Catherine Canal. Other units fired elsewhere. By evening the Nevsky was empty, the crowds had gone home, and General Khabalov, who commanded the military district, telegraphed headquarters that order had been restored. He was right for about twelve hours. The next morning the Volynsky men who had done the shooting refused to do it again, killed the officer who ordered them, and by nightfall two-thirds of a garrison of 160,000 had gone over. The question is not why the soldiers would not shoot. They did. The question is why they would not shoot twice — and why a refusal in one barracks became, in a single day, the end of the army in the capital.
Begin with what the Petrograd garrison was, because it was not what its regimental names suggested. The Guards regiments — Pavlovsky, Volynsky, Preobrazhensky, Semyonovsky, Litovsky, Moskovsky — were at the front, where they had been since 1914, and where their trained men and their career officers had largely been killed. What remained in the capital under those names were the reserve battalions: depots whose job was to receive recruits, give them a few weeks' training, and send them to the front as replacement drafts. By early 1917 these battalions had swollen to twelve or fifteen thousand men apiece, quartered in barracks built for a fraction of that, sleeping in shifts and in corridors. The men were raw recruits, second-category reservists in their forties, convalescents returned from the front with wounds and with opinions, and — this is the detail that matters most — Petrograd factory workers who had been conscripted as punishment for the strikes of 1916. The barracks already contained the Vyborg side. In October 1916 soldiers of one regiment on that side had fired on the police in support of strikers, and nothing had been done about it.
Officers were the scarcest thing in the garrison. The regulars were at the front; the reserve battalions were run by young ensigns a few months out of accelerated courses, by wounded officers unfit for the line, and by a thin layer of elderly colonels. The only men with any real cohesion were the training detachments, the companies of NCO candidates, and it was precisely these that Khabalov's plan reserved for the last resort. Rations were short, boots and greatcoats were short, and every man knew that the next draft to the front was coming and that a battalion in disgrace would go first. A plan to bring Guards cavalry regiments back from the front to the capital had been dropped that winter — there was nowhere, Khabalov said, to quarter them — and so the regime's only instrument in its own capital was a mass of underfed, untrained, overcrowded men, led by strangers, who had every reason to want the war to end and none at all to want it continued.
It is worth pausing on this, because it answers the question that is really being asked when one asks why the garrison mutinied. The men had been standing in the regime's bread line too, and for longer. They had been asked for everything and given nothing: no training, no officers who knew their names, no purpose but the front, and a diet not much better than the queue's. When the order came to fire on the queue, it came to men who had no reason to believe the state that gave it would feed them, lead them, or keep them alive.
Khabalov's plan for disorder had three stages: first the police alone, then police with Cossacks, and only in extremity the infantry with live rounds. For three days, from Thursday the 23rd to Saturday the 25th, the plan held at stages one and two, and those three days did the damage. Cordons of soldiers stood across the bridges and the Nevsky with crowds pressed against them for hours. The crowds were not an army; they were women from the queues and men from the mills, and they talked. They told the soldiers they were their mothers and sisters, that they only wanted bread, that the soldiers' own families were in the lines. The soldiers, many of them from those same mills a few months earlier, did not need telling. The Cossacks, the regime's traditional instrument against crowds, let people through the cordons, rode slowly, and were cheered for it; on Saturday on Znamenskaya Square a Cossack cut down a police officer who was striking at the crowd, and the square roared. By Saturday night the troops and the crowd had an understanding, and the police — the pharaohs, as the city called them — were the only enemy either side acknowledged.
Then the Tsar's telegram arrived from Mogilev, ordering Khabalov to end the disorders by the next day, and Khabalov went to stage three.
Sunday was the test, and the garrison passed it. Posted in the squares with ammunition issued and officers beside them, the training detachments fired when ordered. The Volynsky men fired on Znamenskaya; the Pavlovsky men fired by the Catherine Canal; there was firing on the Nevsky by other units. The crowds broke and scattered. Khabalov reported success. If the story of 1917 were a story of soldiers who would not shoot, it would have ended on the Sunday evening with the empire intact.
What happened instead happened in two barracks. Late on Sunday afternoon women who had been fired on came to the Pavlovsky barracks on the Field of Mars and told the men of the 4th company that their own regiment's detachment was shooting people on the canal. Something over a hundred men of the company broke into the rifle store, armed themselves, and marched out to stop it. They met mounted police near the canal and fired on them, killing or wounding several; they did not find their detachment. In the dark, surrounded by other units and harangued by the regimental chaplain and their officers, they went back to barracks and gave up their rifles. Nineteen men identified as ringleaders were sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress. That was the Pavlovsky mutiny. By the standard of any earlier reign it was a contained incident, over in an evening, and Khabalov reported it as such.
The Volynsky barracks were quieter and more dangerous. The training detachment that had fired on Znamenskaya came back that night and did not sleep. Its senior NCO was a sergeant named Timofei Kirpichnikov, and by his own account and others', the men sat up and talked about what they had done, and agreed, as a body, that they would not do it again. This is the point Allan Wildman insists on in the best study of the garrison, and it is the point the romantic version misses: the refusal was not a spasm. It was deliberated. Men who had killed forty people in the afternoon decided in the night that the next order would be refused, and they decided it together, so that no one would be refusing alone. At seven on Monday morning the detachment's commander, Staff Captain Lashkevich, came into the barracks, and the men answered his greeting with a roar. He argued, read them the Tsar's telegram, was shouted down, and left; crossing the courtyard he was shot in the back. Nobody has ever established by whom. Within the hour Kirpichnikov's men were in the neighbouring barracks of the Preobrazhensky and Litovsky battalions, and those battalions came out.
Here is the connection between the two barracks, and it is the heart of the matter. A soldier contemplating mutiny asks two questions. The first is whether he is willing. The second, and the one that decides it, is whether the others are — because a man who refuses alone is shot, and a company that refuses together is a revolution. Mutiny is a problem of coordination before it is a problem of conscience, and the regime's handling of the Pavlovsky affair solved it for the whole garrison. A company had armed itself against orders, marched through the city, fired on the police and killed some of them. The answer of the state was nineteen arrests and no executions, no court that night, no example made. The War Minister wanted a field court-martial; nothing came of it. By morning every barracks in Petrograd knew that a company could defy the order to fire, with rifles in hand and police dead, and pay for it with a few men in the fortress. The cost of mutiny had been priced, and it was low.
That is what the Volynsky men knew when they sat up talking, and what the Preobrazhensky and Litovsky men knew when the Volynsky came through their gates. It is why the mutiny spread by the hour rather than by the day. The numbers, as Hasegawa reconstructs them, tell the shape of it:
27 Feb, noon some 25,000 soldiers in revolt
27 Feb, evening some 67,000
28 Feb, evening some 127,000
1 March some 170,000 — effectively the whole garrison
Khabalov spent Monday trying to assemble a loyal force from the units that had not yet gone over, and found that the men would gather, and then melt. By evening he held the Admiralty with a thousand or two, and by Tuesday morning he had sent them home. The expedition the Tsar ordered under General Ivanov never reached the city. The Pavlovsky affair, meanwhile, was the thing the garrison remembered. The regime that had shown itself unable to make an example of one company was not going to be able to make an example of an army, and everyone with a rifle in Petrograd drew that conclusion at the same time.
The pattern is the one described in The Bread Line and the Scapegoat: a gesture in place of an act. Nineteen men in the fortress was a gesture. So was the order to fire, in its way — given once, on a Sunday, and then not followed by the thing that would have made it mean something, which was the visible will to give it again. The state asked its least reliable instrument to do its hardest job, and then flinched at the moment the instrument was watching to see whether it would.
Not, then, because men will not fire on their own. They had, the day before, and Russian soldiers had fired on Russian crowds in 1905 and on the Lena goldfields in 1912 and on the Petersburg strikers in the summer of 1914, and they would fire on Kronstadt and on Tambov and on Novocherkassk under other masters. They refused because the regime had, in the space of a week, done everything required to produce a refusal. It had filled its barracks with the city's own workers and fed them badly. It had let them stand for three days beside the crowd until the crowd had faces. It had then made them kill, and given them a night to think about it with no officer they trusted in the room. And it had shown them, through the Pavlovsky, that refusal would not be punished in a way anyone need fear. Each of these alone had happened before without a revolution. All of them together, in one week, in one city, with the Tsar five hundred miles away refusing to answer his telegrams, had not.
There is a last irony, and it belongs to Kirpichnikov. The Provisional Government's commander in Petrograd, Kornilov, pinned a St George Cross on him as the first soldier of the revolution. When the Bolsheviks took the city in October, Kirpichnikov made his way south to the Volunteer Army, and presented himself to General Kutepov, a former Preobrazhensky officer, who had him shot. The man who refused the second order was executed by the men who thought he should have obeyed it — the only side, in the whole affair, that ever did make an example.
The garrison revolt occupies a great many chapters of March 1917, and Kirpichnikov gets more of them than any other soldier: the night of talk, the morning in the barracks, the march on the neighbouring battalions. The outline follows the record and Kirpichnikov's own account, which was taken down in 1917 when he was briefly a celebrity and which is self-serving in the obvious way. But the reader should notice where the novel's weight falls. Solzhenitsyn mourns the officers. Lashkevich's death is rendered as a murder, which it was; the garrison in the streets is rendered as a mob loosed on the city — drunk, looting the arsenal, shooting at nothing — which, by the evening of the 27th, much of it was. What is harder to find in the novel is the deliberation. Wildman's soldiers decide; Solzhenitsyn's are swept. That is a choice about where agency lies, and it is consistent with the whole design of the book, in which the revolution is a thing that happens because no one with authority will act. It is a defensible reading. It is not the only one, and the evidence of the Volynsky night sits awkwardly with it.
Three questions to ask of any dramatized scene:
Who could have recorded this? The Volynsky night has essentially one source, Kirpichnikov, telling his story to admirers a few weeks later. The agreement not to fire is attested; the words are his.
Who benefits from this version? A sergeant being decorated as the first soldier of the revolution had reason to describe a principled decision rather than a panic, and to leave open who shot Lashkevich.
Does it match the documents? The Tsar's telegram to Khabalov, Khabalov's reports to headquarters, the arrest of the nineteen Pavlovsky men, and the hour-by-hour growth of the mutiny are documented from the government's side and can be checked. What was said in the barracks cannot.
Further reading: Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1: The Old Army and the Soldiers' Revolt, March–April 1917 (Princeton, 1980), the essential study of the garrison and of the soldiers' decision; Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution, Petrograd 1917 (1981; expanded edition 2017), for the hour-by-hour sequence and the numbers; George Katkov, Russia 1917: The February Revolution (1967); Semion Lyandres, The Fall of Tsarism (Oxford, 2013); Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), chapter 8; Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy (1996), part two; and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, March 1917, Books 1–2, tr. Marian Schwartz (Notre Dame, 2017–19). Kirpichnikov's own account was published in Petrograd in 1917 and is drawn on by all of the above.
A note on certainty: The sequence — Khabalov's three-stage plan, the Tsar's telegram of the 25th, the firing of the 26th, the Pavlovsky 4th company's revolt and the arrest of nineteen men, the Volynsky refusal and Lashkevich's death on the morning of the 27th, and the spread of the mutiny through the garrison — is documented and agreed across the literature. Dates are Old Style, with the Western date at first mention. Numbers are less firm: the size of the garrison, the strength of the reserve battalions, the dead on Znamenskaya and the hourly totals of mutineers are reconstructions, given here in round figures following Hasegawa, and other accounts vary. The character of the Volynsky "night of talk" rests principally on Kirpichnikov's testimony; that an agreement was reached is accepted by Wildman and Hasegawa, but its tone and content are his. Who shot Lashkevich is unknown. The claim that the leniency shown the Pavlovsky mutineers was decisive is this essay's argument, following Wildman's emphasis on coordination, not a finding stated in the sources. The description of Solzhenitsyn's chapters comes from the reading and from published accounts of the novel, not from a passage-by-passage check. This piece was drafted with Claude's help from the sources listed and has not been verified line by line.
Reads alongside The Bread Line and the Scapegoat, on the same five days seen from the ministries and the Duma; and The Ticket to Kiev, on the Red Wheel's method. One of the Essays & Open Questions in the Russian History guide.