BATTLES ON THE BARRICADES*.
As we have already seen, correspondent reports most frequently mention barricades on Vasilyevsky Island, and to a lesser extent
on Nevsky Prospekt. According to the official government dispatch issued on January 10 (23rd),
a Monday, it stated: “The crowd was erecting barricades adorned with barbed-wire entanglements,
bearing red flags along the Shlisselburgskiy Trakt, then near the Narvskaya Gate, at the Trinity Bridge,
by Alexander Garden, and in the squares along Nevsky Prospekt. From the windows of neighboring houses,
stones were hurled and gunfire was directed at the troops. The crowd seized weapons from the police.
The Schöf Arms Factory was looted. In the First and Second Precincts of Vasilyevsky Island,
the crowd severed telegraph wires and toppled telegraph poles. The police station was utterly destroyed.”
A French correspondent telegraphed on Sunday at 2:50 p.m.: “The shooting continues. The troops, it seems,
have completely lost their composure. As I crossed the Neva River, I
This article was not published in Vorwärts. Ed.

RESSENTMENT TOWARD THE MILITARY
125 saw several signal fires and heard the thunderous roar of rifle volleys. On Vasilyevsky Island,
the barricades were illuminated by bonfires kindled by the strikers. I was unable to proceed any further.
The ominous sound of the bugle call signaled the order to fire. A battalion of soldiers, bayonets fixed,
launched an assault on the barricade constructed from overturned sledges. A veritable massacre ensued.
Around a hundred workers lay dead upon the battlefield. Some fifty wounded prisoners were led past me.
An officer pointed his pistol at me and ordered me to leave.”
Correspondents provide remarkably few detailed accounts of the barricade battles. This is understandable, since the correspondents
generally sought to keep themselves more or less at a safe distance from the most dangerous areas.
And of those who took part in the barricade battles, of course, only a very small number—perhaps just a single individual—survived.
There was even a report that artillery had been deployed against the barricades, though this claim, it seems, has not been confirmed.
207Sh”
RESSENTMENT TOWARD THE MILITARY.
All correspondents note that the crowd greeted officers and soldiers with cries of: “Executioners! Murderers! Bloodsuckers!”
It is reported that one elderly general, riding in a sleigh toward the troops, was stopped in his tracks.
The crowd shouted: “Are you riding over here to order them to shoot us?” The general instructed his coachman to continue on,
but he was struck in the head by some well-dressed gentleman clad in a sumptuous fur coat. The general was dragged from his sleigh
and slain by the mob. (This account is somewhat dubious, for the police and the government would likely have sought to publicize such a fact
in order to exploit it against the strikers. Yet no corroborating evidence for this incident has emerged.)
“At 8 p.m. on Sunday, about twenty members of the educated elite halted the sleigh of a highly august personage.
‘You murderer!’ they cried. ‘Get down from your sleigh, kneel, and beg for mercy!’ The nobleman refused to comply,
and the crowd spat in her face.”*
*
Further on, Lenin’s manuscript contains the articles “The Plan for the Petersburg Battle” and “The Tsar-Father and the Barricades.”
Both articles were published in No. 4 of Vorwärts and later included in Volume VII of the Collected Works, pp. 8–90. The article “The Tsar-Father and the Barricades”
contains a note crossed out by Lenin himself, which we reproduce below. Ed.