Shklovsky was a literary critic by profession, but he had been a political commissar in the Red Army during WWII. He would therefore have some familiarity with firearms.

Moreover, there would be little immediate propaganda advantage to be achieved so long after the event deliberately making up the smokeless story.

However, it is possible that Shklovsky added this colourful detail in order to dramatise the tension and danger of taking to the streets while in the sights of snipers.

The issue is whether or not the police were actually sniping demonstrators, with smokeless powder, or otherwise.

The snipers deliberately used smokeless ammunition so the people could not easily tell where the shooting had come from.

Instructive use of propaganda here. Smokeless ammunition had been in use for 30 years and, due to its inherent advantages and the fact that it made semi-automatic weapons feasible, it is unlikely that there were any black powder weapons left in the Russian arsenal by 1917.

… taking thirty rifles, began to march towards the Nevsky. Almost immediately, they ran into a mounted police patrol on the bank of the Griboyedov Canal. They fired at them, killing one policeman, until they ran out of cartridges …

That’s some marksmanship.

Therefore, the contingency of a regime-ending popular uprising in Feb rather than say July did little to undermine the willingness of the Mensheviks or the SRs to seize power.

But perhaps the Kerenskyists would have been less willing to wage even defensist war by July, thus sparing them the opprobrium of fighting suicidal battles.

Katz, Figes doesn’t really discuss the issues you raise regarding the timing of events and whether a postponed February might have meant an indefinitely deferred October, but he makes it quite clear elsewhere in the book that the Tsarist system had been strained beyond breaking point by the War and that the Tsarist regime under the last two Tsars, and its supporters, had foreclosed the possibility of regime-saving reform (for which the social base was extremely weak anyway).

Figes also argues at some length, and in several places, that the opportunity for the Bolsheviks to seize power, ostensibly in the name of the Soviets, was greatly enhanced by, amongst other things: (a) the unwillingness of the Soviets under Menshevik and SR leadership to take power and institute a democratic regime themselves rather than setting terms for the Provisional Government; (b) the Provisional Government’s decision to persist with a hopeless war effort and (c) the failure of the PG to address the land question.

Perhaps Figes is closer to Pipes and Conquest than he is to professor rat. This does not necessarily mean that he is close to Pipes and Conquest

Figes is a bourgeois …much like Engels, Marx and Lenin. I prefer Paul Avrich with documents on the revolution, then Maurice Brinton on self management and Gregor Maximoff on the Guillotine at work. Oh and Voline, Goldman, Arshinov and other active participants. Figes writes well but he is obviously closer to the Conquest and Pipes end of the spectrum than any genuine democratic or libertarian socialist point of view.

Orlando Figes is a good introduction, I suppose, but I’d like to see some more drilling down on this critical period. After all since xtians began killing in 300 AD they never really stopped and since Marxists began killing in february 1918 they never stopped since either. 1917 – good. 1918 – very, very bad.

I don’t know whether he does it elsewhere, but in this extract Figes doesn’t address the question of whether the events he so vividly describes determined not whether the Tsarist regime would fall but merely when it fell.

Figes talks about the propensity of the Tsar’s advisers in Petrograd to downplay the seriousness of the danger posed by hungry residents to public order.

Interestingly, Figes also quotes senior Bolshevik Shliapnikov voicing the opinion that disruption could easliy be quelled.

Yet Figes remains rather ambiguous in his conclusions about the actual level of danger posed by the hungry masses of Petrograd.

Furthermore, Figes suggests without explicitly stating it, that Chief of the Petrograd Military District General Khabalov’s execution of Nicholas’s order to use military force to ‘put down the disorders by tomorrow’ was fatal to the Tsarist regime.

Is Figes implying that if Khabalov had gone out on a foraging expedition in search of the wheat held up in a supply bottleneck and then distributing it to the people, then the uprising would perhaps have been staved off?

And if this particular uprising had simply been staved off, does this not imply that in the absence of improved conditions — an unlikely event in light of the increasingly dire military predicament of Russia — Petrograd was a rebellion waiting to happen?

In other words, how important is the actual timing of these events to the future course of the Revolution, notably the rise of the Bolsheviks?

To put it plainly, if the Petrograd uprising had occurred up to six months later, would the Bolsheviks have still succeeded?