e Nicola Station--the main stretch of the Nevsky.
There was general roughing along this mile and a half of street which
could have been stopped at any time in fifteen minutes by closing the
streets. Instead, the police charged with increasing violence without
doing anything to prevent the people coming from other parts of town.
The idea was now unescapable that the police were inviting the people to
a quarrel.

[Sidenote: Rioting at the Nicola Station.]

[Sidenote: Evident Cossacks are with people.]

The Cossacks were sometimes riding pretty fast themselves, but never
with the violence of the police, and the cheering was continuous. At any
point I could tell by the quality of the howl that went up from the mob
whether it was being stirred by Cossacks or police. At the Nicola
Station the rioting was the roughest, the police freely using their
sabres. The crowd, though unarmed, stood its ground and howled back, and
when possible caught an isolated mounted policeman and disarmed him. In
one case the mob had already disarmed and was unseating a policeman, and
other sections of the mob were rushing up to have a turn at manhandling
him, when a single Cossack, with nothing in his hands, forced his way
through and rescued the policeman, amid the cheers of the same people
who were harassing him. It was quite evident that the people and the
Cossacks were on the same side, and only the unbelievable stupid old
Russian Government could have ignored it.

[Sidenote: Machine guns installed.]

At nightfall the crowd had had its fill of roughing, but Sunday was
evidently to be the real day. There would have been, of course, nothing
on the Nevsky, if properly policed, and I have been unable to understand
how the old Government, unless overconfident of its autocratic power and
disdainful of the people, could have let things go on. But though half
the regiments in Petrograd were on the point of revolt and their
sympathy with the people was evident even to a foreigner, Sunday was
mismanaged like the days before. It was even worse. The powers that
were had, as early as Friday, been so silly as to send armored motor
cars screeching up and down the Nevsky. Now they began installing
machine guns where they could play on the crowd. Up to this time I had
been a neutral, if disgusted, spectator, but now I hoped the police and
the whole imperial regime would pay bitterly for their insolence and
stupidity. The few corpses I encountered during th