country clamored for the tsar because "if they take away the tsar they will
also take away God and what will then become of the muzhik." In one place
at the front several regiments almost came to blows over this question. An
orator ended his eloquent speech by saying that "from now on Russia will
have but one monarch, the revolutionary proletariat." This phrase puzzled
the soldiers, they also misunderstood the word "monarch" which they thought
to be "monakh" (monk). They therefore concluded that it was planned to put
a monk on the throne, and an argument arose whether they would have a monk
or not. Some were in favor and others opposed. By the time it got to the
next regiment the question was whether they would have the monk Iliodor as
their ruler. It was no longer a question whether Russia was to have a tsar
but whether the tsar should be a monk or not, and whether it should be
Iliodor or some other one.

Strange to say, as evening came a kind of fear seized the population,
particularly the more ignorant. It was difficult for them to shake off the
terror of the old police; all the time that they were talking against the
tsar they had a feeling that they were doing wrong, and that some one was
denouncing them. It was hard for them to believe that all that they saw and
heard during the day was real and that the old regime was powerless. Some
one would start a rumor that a monarchist general with an army was marching
on the city and that he would kill and burn. Early Friday evening, March
16, as I was walking down the street, soldiers ran by me shouting for every
one to get under cover for several hundred police from Tsarskoe Selo were
coming and that there would be street fighting. Frightened mothers grabbed
their little ones and hurried home, storekeepers closed the shops, porters
barricaded the gates, housewives extinguished the lights, and the streets
became as dark and as silent as a cemetery. This lasted for an hour or more
and then came more soldiers announcing that all was well, that the supposed
policemen were revolutionary soldiers who had come to take the oath of