Death on the Nevskii Prospekt (15 page)

Centuries of European protest, of reform movements, of radical parties, of revolutions were distilled into a few pages of Russian and shouted through its capital on a sunny January day.
Powerscourt wondered about the dead man, Roderick Martin. Was his death in some way connected to the events of today, or to the causes behind the events? Were there clues to his death down there on
the streets, somewhere between the marchers and the military? The column approaching the bridge had burst into song.

Powerscourt thought to himself that the demonstrators were going to need all the help they could find, divine or human. He was beginning to feel very fearful about the outcome. The marchers were
not going to turn round and go home. Would the authorities allow this vast army into Palace Square? He doubted it.

They heard great shouts from behind them as Father Gapon worked his column into a religious fervour, using the same tactics he had employed at his mass rallies in the days before the march.

‘Do the police and soldiers,’ Gapon bellowed, ‘dare to stop us from passing, comrades?’

‘They do not dare!’ hundreds of voices shouted back.

‘Comrades, it is better for us to die for our demands than live as we have lived till now!’ Gapon again, at full volume.

‘Do you swear to die?’ he shouted at the faithful.

‘We swear!’ Hundreds and hundreds of people raised their hands and made the sign of the cross.

The marchers were much closer now. Peering through their binoculars, the party on the roof could make out individual faces very clearly, their unkempt beards, their dirty hair, the rough clothes
and even the calloused hands. Most were wearing white shirts. The colour red had been banned by the march organizers as too provocative. The children, sitting on their fathers’ shoulders,
seemed to think they were as safe as they would be at home. Older children climbed up lamp posts for a better view and screamed encouragement to their parents. Father Gapon’s column was
probably less than fifteen minutes from Palace Square, the column approaching the Troitsky Bridge a little longer.

Then they heard a different sound. Powerscourt checked his watch. It was twenty past one. At first he did not know what it was but Mikhail had swung round to stare at the marchers from
Putilov.

‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’ he said, grabbing Powerscourt by the arm and pointing dramatically to the south. He crossed himself three times. ‘It’s the cavalry, Lord
Powerscourt! By the Narva Gates! They’re going to charge! The horses’ hooves make a different noise on the ice,’ he went on hopelessly, as if that was going to change what was
just about to happen. ‘And look! Forming up behind them at the top end of Narva Square, lines and lines of infantry with their rifles at the ready. There’s going to be a massacre! God
help them all! God help Russia!’

Powerscourt remembered for the rest of his life the strange way the events seemed to unfold to his little party up there on the roof of the Stroganov Palace. He remembered people who had nearly
drowned telling him about their lives passing before their eyes in slow motion. The initial charge of the cavalry, sabres drawn to slash at their victims, seemed to take about half an hour. He
watched in horror through his binoculars as the dragoons hacked at the faces of the marchers. They seemed to prefer the uncovered flesh to the more obstinate resistance of greatcoats and trousers.
Soon the blood, bright and fresh, was staining the ice red. Many were killed on the spot, their heads half hacked off, arms almost severed from their trunks, faces mutilated, necks severed. Some of
the marchers turned and fled. Others carried on. Powerscourt thought he could just hear the voice of Father Gapon, shouting through the screams, ‘Do you swear to die?’ and the answer,
still audible in the midday air, ‘We swear!’ For too many of them, those were the last words they said in their lives. Their last wish was granted. For the infantry, the first rank
kneeling in the snow, fired two rounds over the heads of the marchers. Then they lowered their sights. Volley after volley crashed into the protesters. Powerscourt saw one little boy lifted off his
father’s shoulders and flung back ten or fifteen feet into the crowd, blood cascading from a great wound in his chest. Powerscourt hoped he was dead. He felt his arm being pummelled and the
word ‘bastards’ being shouted over and over again as Mikhail Shaporov wept for the destruction of his city. The commander of the infantry was giving his orders as if he was on parade,
‘Reload! Take Aim! Fire!’ and every volley brought another round of death to the hallowed ground round the Narva Gates. They might have been built to commemorate Napoleon’s defeat
in 1812. Today they were present to witness another, less glorious, moment of Russia’s history.

Eventually, when Powerscourt thought he could bear it no longer, the firing ceased. The dead and the dying were lying all over the square. Battalions of crows began circling overhead as if they
were unsure what sort of carrion might await them down below. The cavalry, not content with the shattered faces dying on the ground, pursued the marchers as they slouched back towards the working
class quarters of the city, their own districts where they might hope to find a place of greater safety. Many fell with wounds across their backs or slashed viciously across the neck to die on the
bloodied streets of St Petersburg.

Then it was the turn of the marchers approaching the Troitsky Bridge. Mikhail Shaporov was sobbing uncontrollably now, his hand still clasping Powerscourt’s arm. De Chassiron had gone
pale, almost white. This time the military performed their massacre in reverse order. Volley after volley of infantry fire tore into the head of the column, making its way deeper and deeper into
the press of men as the first ranks turned and ran or died where they stood. Then, when the march had turned into a rabble of confused and wounded people, some still trying to advance on the doomed
mission towards Palace Square, others wishing to flee back to their homes, the cavalry charged, the lancers screaming their hatred as they cut into the flesh and bones of men of a different class.
Powerscourt watched through his binoculars as one dragoon slashed at his victim, cutting him open from his eyes to the chin, and then, his teeth clenched in a grin and the hairs of his moustache
standing up on his elevated lip, let out a terrible shriek and spat at the dead man as he fell to the ground.

The remnant of the marchers, those not yet bloodied by the Tsar, and the stragglers of the other columns met up on Nevskii Prospekt, and made a last doomed effort to reach Palace Square. A huge
body of cavalry and several cannons had been drawn up at the edge to blast or slash any marchers impertinent enough to reach it into eternity. But the crowd, swollen now by students and onlookers,
began to push forward once again. Soldiers were ordered to disperse the marchers using whips and the flats of their sabres. When that proved unsuccessful, they began firing once more. Powerscourt
watched in horror as a young girl who had climbed on to an iron fence was crucified to it by a hail of bullets. The screams of the wounded and the dying carried up to the roof of the Stroganov
Palace. A small boy who had mounted an equestrian statue was hurled into the air by a volley of artillery. Other children were hit and fell from the trees where they had been perching to get a
better view. It was twenty to two, just a few short minutes before their intended rendezvous with the Tsar. The great crowds, sullen now and silent, their anger growing, began to trudge home, many
of them helping wounded comrades on their way. Only when the dead lay thick on the ground and the shattered stragglers turned to retreat back up the Nevskii Prospekt did the firing cease. The
lancers harried them on their way, slashing the faces of any brave or foolhardy enough to press onwards towards the Winter Palace. Powerscourt watched one cavalryman collect a great mass of papers
at the end of his lance. Powerscourt had no idea what he was doing until two of his colleagues dragged a dying man towards the paper. The lancers smeared it with his blood. Then they made a hole in
the ice of the Neva and thrust the remains of the proclamations down into the swirling waters beneath. The demands for the vote, for freedom of speech, for a constituent assembly, for equality
before the law, all the dreams of Father Gapon and his hundred and fifty thousand supporters ended up stuffed down a hole in the river. The ink would have gone long before the proclamations made
landfall, if they ever did.

‘They’ll never forgive him for this,’ Mikhail said. ‘Never. As long as this city survives, as long as the last of the marchers survive, as long as their children and
grandchildren survive, the people of St Petersburg will remember this day and hate the man who caused all the suffering.’ He was still holding on to Powerscourt. His face was wet with
tears.

‘Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt, ‘perhaps we could provide some help for the wounded down below. The palace here must have some bandages, we could bring water, vodka perhaps as a
disinfectant, whatever the women in the palace think would be best. But I think we should do it quickly.’

And so, as the afternoon wore on, a small party tried to bring what help they could to the dying and the wounded, an Irish peer, a Russian aristocrat and a fastidious diplomat who cared nothing
for his appearance as he tried to bring some comfort to the dying. Powerscourt made himself one promise that afternoon: that, whatever it took, he would get to the bottom of the strange death of
Roderick Martin.

That evening, out at the Alexander Palace in his village called Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar did not disturb his routine for the unfortunate events in his capital. He had his afternoon walk, and tea
as usual with his family. Then they all spent a busy half-hour sticking their latest photographs into their albums. That evening after supper he read aloud to them from a book his librarian had
ordered specially from London. Every evening when he could, the Tsar read aloud to his wife and children. He had not bothered to tell his family about the terrible events in St Petersburg. Much
better, he thought, to take their imaginations to a different country altogether, to the West Country of England, to the strange case involving an enormous dog and Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson
and a treacherous bog.

Later that evening there were sporadic disturbances in St Petersburg. Barricades were set up, slogans shouted at the soldiers who continued patrolling the streets. When the workers reached their
homes, many of them bleeding to death from their wounds, or carried to their pathetic hovels on makeshift stretchers, they realized the full horror of what had happened. Fathers, husbands, sons,
wives, daughters, so many were lost in the massacre. Hope, the hope that had led them on to the streets, the hope that tomorrow might be better than today or yesterday, that hope had died with the
blood on the ice. The more perceptive understood that night what else they had lost. Faith in the Tsar, the father of his people, the protector of his flock, the true shepherd of his subjects, all
that had gone with the sabres and the bullets and the corpses littering the streets that led to the Winter Palace. A new watchword went out, travelling round the streets behind the Narva Gates
where Father Gapon had marched from, to the Vyborg side with its factories and its squalor, to Petrograd and to Vasilevsky Island. Men spoke the slogan only to those they knew they could trust.
‘Death to the Tsar!’ The marchers had already decided what to call this day. They christened it Bloody Sunday. The blood was the blood of their comrades who lost their lives to death on
the Nevskii Prospekt.

That evening the writer Maxim Gorky sent a message to the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in New York. ‘St Petersburg, Bloody Sunday, 9th January 1905,’ the
message read. ‘The Russian Revolution has begun.’

Natasha Bobrinsky sat as quietly as she could at the back of the room while the Tsar read
The Hound of the Baskervilles
to his family. Surely, she thought to herself,
the Tsar must know what had happened in his city earlier that day. Tsars are meant to know everything. Surely he must have told his wife. Why didn’t they tell the children some version of
events, however sanitized? The girls would hear about it from the servants soon enough. Word had reached the Tsar’s village by about four o’clock in the afternoon. The driver of one of
the afternoon trains to Tsarskoe Selo had seen the final massacre on the Nevskii Prospekt and had brought the news with him. Natasha felt tenser than she had ever felt in her life. She knew her
face was very pale. This day, she thought, must be a turning point. Nothing in Russia would ever be the same after the day when the Tsar’s soldiers mowed down their fellow citizens on the
streets of the capital as if they were barbarian invaders from afar. As she listened to that soft voice reading on, about the Stapletons, about the escaped prisoner on the moor and the terrible
dangers of the Grimpen Mire, Natasha fell into a reverie where most of the Russian land mass toppled slowly into the Gulf of Finland and St Petersburg, her elegant, sparkling, beloved St
Petersburg, began to sink slowly beneath the waters of the Neva, the great spires of the churches and the Admiralty the last to disappear. Maybe the great Hound is the symbol of Revolution, Natasha
said to herself as she came round, come to devour the people who look after him and crush their bones in his fearful embrace.