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Ten Days That Shook The World

By: John Reed

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed

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Title: Ten Days That Shook the World

Author: John Reed

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First Posted: December 16, 2000

Language: English

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[Redactor's Note: The book is composed of text, footnotes, and appendices.

The footnotes are included at the end of each chapter, while the Appendix No.
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Ten Days That Shook the

World by John Reed

Table of Contents
Preface.
Notes and Explanations.
Chapter 1. Background.
Chapter 2. The Coming
Storm. Chapter 3. On the
Eve.
Chapter 4. The Fall of the Provisional Government.
Chapter S. Plunging Ahead.
Chapter 6. The Committee for
Salvation. Chapter 7. The
Revolutionary Front.
Chapter 8. Counter-Revolution.
Chapter 9. Victory.
Chapter 10. Moscow.
Chapter 11. The Conquest of
Power. Chapter 12. The Peasants'
Congress. Appendices I - XII

Preface

This book is a slice of intensified history—history as I saw it. It does not

pretend to be anything but a detailed account of the November Revolution,
when the Bolsheviki, at the head of the workers and soldiers, seized the state
power of Russia and placed it in the hands of the Soviets.

Naturally most of it deals with “Red Petrograd,” the capital and heart of the
insurrection. But the reader must realize that what took place in Petrograd
was almost exactly duplicated, with greater or lesser intensity, at different
intervals of time, all over Russia.
In this book, the first of several which I am writing, I must confine myself to
a chronicle of those events which I myself observed and experienced, and
those supported by reliable evidence; preceded by two chapters briefly
outlining the background and causes of the November Revolution. I am aware
that these two chapters make difficult reading, but they are essential to an
understanding of what follows.

Many questions will suggest themselves to the mind of the reader. What is
Bolshevism? What kind of a governmental structure did the Bolsheviki set up?
If the Bolsheviki championed the Constituent Assembly before the November
Revolution, why did they disperse it by force of arms afterward? And if the
bourgeoisie opposed the Constituent Assembly until the danger of
Bolshevism became apparent, why did they champion it afterward?

These and many other questions cannot be answered here. In another volume,
“Kornilov to Brest-Litovsk,” I trace the course of the Revolution up to and
including the German peace. There I explain the origin and functions of the
Revolutionary organisations, the evolution of popular sentiment, the
dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the structure of the Soviet state, and
the course and outcome of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. ...

In considering the rise of the Bolsheviki it is necessary to understand that

Russian economic life and the Russian army were not disorganised on
November 7th, 1917, but many months before, as the logical result of a
process which began as far back as 1915. The corrupt reactionaries in control
of the Tsar's Court deliberately undertook to wreck Russia in order to make a
separate peace with Germany. The lack of arms on the front, which had
caused the great retreat of the summer of 1915, the lack of food in the army
and in the great cities, the break-down of manufactures and transportation in
1916—all these we know now were part of a gigantic campaign of sabotage.
This was halted just in time by the March Revolution.

For the first few months of the new régime, in spite of the confusion incident
upon a great Revolution, when one hundred and sixty millions of the world's
most oppressed peoples suddenly achieved liberty, both the internal situation
and the combative power of the army actually improved.

But the “honeymoon” was short. The propertied classes wanted merely a
political revolution, which would take the power from the Tsar and give it to
them. They wanted Russia to be a constitutional Republic, like France or the
United States; or a constitutional Monarchy, like England. On the other hand,
the masses of the people wanted real industrial and agrarian democracy.

William English Walling, in his book, “Russia's Message,” an account of the

Revolution of 1905, describes very well the state of mind of the Russian
workers, who were later to support Bolshevism almost unanimously:

They (the working people) saw it was possible that even under a free
Government, if it fell into the hands of other social classes, they might still
continue to starve....

The Russian workman is revolutionary, but he is neither violent, dogmatic,

nor unintelligent. He is ready for barricades, but he has studied them, and
alone of the workers of the world he has learned about them from actual
experience. He is ready and willing to fight his oppressor, the capitalist class,
to a finish. But he does not ignore the existence of other classes. He merely
asks that the other classes take one side or the other in the bitter conflict that
draws near. ...

They (the workers) were all agreed that our (American) political institutions
were preferable to their own, but they were not very anxious to exchange one
despot for another (i.e., the capitalist class). ...

The workingmen of Russia did not have themselves shot down, executed by
hundreds in Moscow, Riga and Odessa, imprisoned by thousands in every
Russian jail, and exiled to the deserts and the arctic regions, in exchange for
the doubtful privileges of the workingmen of Goldfields and Cripple Creek. ...

And so developed in Russia, in the midst of a foreign war, the Social

Revolution on top of the Political Revolution, culminating in the triumph of
Bolshevism.

Mr. A. J. Sack, director in this country of the Russian Information Bureau,

which opposes the Soviet Government, has this to say in his book, “The Birth
of the Russian Democracy”: The Bolsheviks organised their own cabinet, with
Nicholas Lenine as Premier and Leon Trotsky—Minister of Foreign Affairs.
The inevitability of their coming into power became evident almost
immediately
after the March Revolution. The history of the Bolsheviki, after the
Revolution, is a history of their steady growth. ...

Foreigners, and Americans especially, frequently emphasise the “ignorance” of

the Russian workers. It is true they lacked the political experience of the
peoples of the West, but they were very well trained in voluntary
organisation. In 1917 there were more than twelve million members of the
Russian consumers' Cooperative societies; and the Soviets themselves are a
wonderful demonstration of their organising genius. Moreover, there is
probably not a people in the world so well educated in Socialist theory and its
practical application.

William English Walling thus characterises them:

The Russian working people are for the most part able to read and write. For
many years the country has been in such a disturbed condition that they have
had the advantage of leadership not only of intelligent individuals in their
midst, but of a large part of the equally revolutionary educated class, who
have turned to the working people with their ideas for the political and social
regeneration of Russia. ...

Many writers explain their hostility to the Soviet Government by arguing that
the last phase of the Russian Revolution was simply a struggle of the
“respectable” elements against the brutal attacks of Bolshevism. However, it
was the propertied classes, who, when they realised the growth in power of
the popular revolutionary organisations, undertook to destroy them and to halt
the Revolution. To this end the propertied classes finally resorted to desperate
measures. In order to wreck the Kerensky Ministry and the Soviets,
transportation was disorganised and internal troubles provoked; to crush the
Factory-Shop Committees, plants were shut down, and fuel and raw materials
diverted; to break the Army Committees at the front, capital punishment was
restored and military defeat connived at.

This was all excellent fuel for the Bolshevik fire. The Bolsheviki retorted by
preaching the class war, and by asserting the supremacy of the Soviets.

Between these two extremes, with the other factions which whole-heanedly
or half-heartedly supported them, were the so-called “moderate” Socialists,
the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries, and several smaller parties.
These groups were also attacked by the propertied classes, but their power of
resistance was crippled by their theories.

Roughly, the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries believed that Russia

was not economically ripe for a social revolution—that only a political
revolution
was possible. According to their interpretation, the Russian masses were not
educated enough to take over the power; any attempt to do so would
inevitably bring on a reaction, by means of which some ruthless opportunist
might restore the old régime. And so it followed that when the “moderate”
Socialists were forced to assume the power, they were afraid to use it.

They believed that Russia must pass through the stages of political and
economic development known to Western Europe, and emerge at last, with the
rest of the world, into full-fledged Socialism. Naturally, therefore, they agreed
with the propertied classes that Russia must first be a parliamentary state—
though with some improvements on the Western democracies. As a
consequence, they insisted upon the collaboration of the propertied classes in
the Government.

From this it was an easy step to supporting them. The “moderate”

Socialists needed the bourgeoisie. But the bourgeoisie did not need the
“moderate” Socialists. So it resulted in the Socialist Ministers being
obliged to give way, little by little, on their entire program, while the
propertied classes grew more and more insistent.

And at the end, when the Bolsheviki upset the whole hollow compromise, the
Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries found themselves fighting on the
side of the propertied classes.... In almost every country in the world to-day the
same phenomenon is visible.

Instead of being a destructive force, it seems to me that the Bolsheviki were

the only party in Russia with a constructive program and the power to
impose it on the country. If they had not succeeded to the Government when
they did, there is little doubt in my mind that the armies of Imperial Germany
would have been in Petrograd and Moscow in December, and Russia would
again be ridden by a Tsar. . ..

It is still fashionable, after a whole year of the Soviet Government, to speak of

the Bolshevik insurrection as an “adventure.” Adventure it was, and one of the
most marvellous mankind ever embarked upon, sweeping into history at the
head of the toiling masses, and staking everything on their vast and simple
desires.
Already the machinery had been set up by which the land of the great estates
could be distributed among the peasants. The Factory-Shop Committees and
the Trade Unions were there to put into operation workers' control of
industry. In every village, town, city, district and province there were Soviets
of Workers',
Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, prepared to assume the task of local
administration.

No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is undeniable that the Russian

Revolution is one of the great events of human history, and the rise of the
Bolsheviki a phenomenon of world-wide importance. Just as historians search
the records for the minutest details of the story of the Paris Commune, so they
will want to know what happened in Petrograd in November, 1917, the spirit
which animated the people, and how the leaders looked, talked and acted. It
is with this in view that I have written this book.

In the struggle my sympathies were not neutral. But in telling the story of those
great days I have tried to see events with the eye of a conscientious reporter,
interested in setting down the truth.

J. R.
New York, January 1st 1919.

Notes and Explanations

To the average reader the multiplicity of Russian organisations—political

groups, Committees and Central Committees, Soviets, Dumas and Unions—
will prove extremely confusing. For this reason I am giving here a few brief
definitions and explanations.

Political Parties

In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, there were seventeen tickets in

Petrograd, and in some of the provincial towns as many as forty; but the
following summary of the aims and composition of political parties is limited
to the groups and factions mentioned in this book. Only the essence of their
programmes and the general character of their constituencies can be noticed.
...

1. Monarchists, of various shades, Octobrists, etc. These once-powerful

factions no longer existed openly; they either worked underground, or their
members joined the Cadets, as the Cadets came by degrees to stand for
their political programme. Representatives in this book, Rodzianko, Shulgin.
2. Cadets. So-called from the initials of its name, Constitutional Democrats.
Its official name is “Party of the People's Freedom.” Under the Tsar
composed of Liberals from the propertied classes, the Cadets were the great
party of political reform, roughly corresponding to the Progressive Party in
America. When the Revolution broke out in March, 1917, the Cadets
formed the first Provisional Government. The Cadet Ministry was
overthrown in April because it declared itself in favour of Allied imperialistic
aims, including the imperialistic aims of the Tsar's Government. As the
Revolution became more and more a social economic Revolution, the
Cadets grew more and more conservative. Its representatives in this book
are: Miliukov, Vinaver, Shatsky.

2a. Group o[Public Men. After the Cadets had become unpopular through
their relations with the Kornilov counter-revolution, the Group o[Public Men
was formed in Moscow. Delegates from the Group o[Public Men were
given portfolios in the last Kerensky Cabinet. The Group declared itself non-
panisan, although its intellectual leaders were men like Rodzianko and
Shulgin. It was composed of the more “modern” bankers, merchants and
manufacturers, who were intelligent enough to realise that the Soviets must
be fought by their own weapon—economic organisation. Typical of the
Group: Lianozov, Konovalov.

3. Populist Socialists, or Trudoviki (Labour Group). Numerically a small

party, composed of cautious intellectuals, the leaders of the Cooperative
societies, and conservative peasants. Professing to be Socialists, the Populists
really supported the interests of the petty bourgeoisie—clerks, shopkeepers,
etc. By direct descent, inheritors of the compromising tradition of the Labour
Group in the Fourth Imperial Duma, which was composed largely of peasant
representatives. Kerensky was the leader of the Trudoviki in the Imperial
Duma when the Revolution of March, 1917, broke out. The Populist Socialists
are a nationalistic party. Their representatives in this book are: Peshekhanov,
Tchaikovsky.

4. Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Originally Marxian Socialists. At

a party congress held in 1903, the party split, on the question of tactics, into
two factions—the Majority (Bolshinstvo), and the Minority (Menshinstvo).
From this sprang the names “Bolsheviki” and “Mensheviki”—“members of
the majority” and “members of the minority.” These two wings became two
separate parties, both calling themselves “Russian Social Democratic Labour
Party,” and both professing to be Marxians. Since the Revolution of 1905 the
Bolsheviki were really the minority, becoming again the majority in
September, 1917.
a.Mensheviki. This party includes all shades of Socialists who believe that
society must progress by natural evolution toward Socialism, and that the
working-class must conquer political power first. Also a nationalistic party.
This was the party of the Socialist intellectuals, which means: all the means
of education having been in the hands of the propertied classes, the
intellectuals instinctively reacted to their training, and took the side of the
propertied classes. Among their representatives in this book are: Dan, Lieber,
Tseretelli.

b. Mensheviki Internationalists. The radical wing of the Mensheviki,

internationalists and opposed to all coalition with the propertied classes; yet
unwilling to break loose from the conservative Mensheviki, and opposed to
the dictatorship of the working-class advocated by the Bolsheviki. Trotzky
was long a member of this group. Among their leaders: Martov, Martinov.

c. Bolsheviki. Now call themselves the Communist Party, in order to

emphasise their complete separation from the tradition of “moderate” or
“parliamentary” Socialism, which dominates the Mensheviki and the so-
called Majority Socialists in all countries. The Bolsheviki proposed
immediate proletarian insurrection, and seizure of the reins of Government,
in order to hasten the
coming of Socialism by forcibly taking over industry, land, natural resources
and financial institutions. This party expresses the desires chiefly of the
factory workers, but also of a large section of the poor peasants. The name
“Bolshevik” can not be translated by “Maximalist.” The Maximalists are a
separate group. (See paragraph 5b). Among the leaders: Lenin, Trotzky,
Lunatcharsky.

d. United SoCial Democrats InternatiORaliStS. Also called the Novaya Zhizn

(New Life) group, from the name of the very influential newspaper which
was its organ. A little group of intellectuals with a very small following
among the working-class, except the personal following of Maxim Gorky, its
leader. Intellectuals, with almost the same programme as the Mensheviki
Internationalists, except that the Novaya Zhizn group refused to be tied to
either of the two great factions. Opposed the Bolshevik tactics, but remained
in the Soviet Government. Other representatives in this book: Avilov,
Kramarov.

e.Yedinstvo. A very small and dwindling group, composed almost entirely of

the personal following of Plekhanov, one of the pioneers of the Russian
Social Democratic movement in the 80’s, and its greatest theoretician. Now an
old man, Plekhanov was extremely patriotic, too conservative even for the
Mensheviki. After the Bolshevik coup d'etat, Yedinstvo disappeared.
5. Socialist Revolutionary party. Called Essaires from the initials of their
name. Originally the revolutionary party of the peasants, the party of the
Fighting Organisations—the Terrorists. After the March Revolution, it was
joined by many who had never been Socialists. At that time it stood for the
abolition of private property in land only, the owners to be compensated in
some fashion. Finally the increasing revolutionary feeling of peasants forced
the Essaires to abandon the “compensation” clause, and led to the younger
and more fiery intellectuals breaking off from the main party in the fall of
1917 and forming a new party, the Le[t Socialist Revolutionary party. The
Essaires, who were afterward always called by the radical groups “Right
Socialist Revolutionaries,” adopted the political attitude of the Mensheviki,
and worked together with them. They finally came to represent the wealthier
peasants, the intellectuals, and the politically uneducated populations of
remote rural districts. Among them there was, however, a wider difference of
shades of political and economic opinion than among the Mensheviki. Among
their leaders mentioned in these pages: Avksentiev, Gotz, Kerensky,
Tchernov, “Babuschka” Breshkovskaya.

a.Le[t Socialist Revolutionaries. Although theoretically sharing the Bolshevik

programme of dictatorship of the working-class, at first were reluctant to
follow the ruthless Bolshevik tactics. However, the Le{t Socialist
Revolutionaries remained in the Soviet Government, sharing the Cabinet
portfolios, especially that of Agriculture. They withdrew from the Government
several times, but always returned. As the peasants left the ranks of the
Essaires in increasing numbers, they joined the Left Socialist Revolutionary
party, which became the great peasant party supporting the Soviet
Government, standing for confiscation without compensation of the great
landed estates, and their disposition by the peasants themselves. Among the
leaders: Spiridonova, Karelin, Kamkov, Kalagayev.

b. Maximalists. An off-shoot of the Socialist Revolutionary party in the

Revolution of 1905, when it was a powerful peasant movement, demanding
the immediate application of the maximum Socialist programme. Now an
insignificant group of peasant anarchists.

Parliamentary Procedure

Russian meetings and conventions are organised after the continental model
rather than our own. The first action is usually the election of officers and the
presidium.

The presidium is a presiding committee, composed of representatives of the

groups and political factions represented in the assembly, in proportion to
their numbers. The presidium arranges the Order of Business, and its members
can be called upon by the President to take the chair pro tern.

Each question vopros) is stated in a general way and then debated, and at the
close of the debate resolutions are submitted by the different factions, and
each one voted on separately. The Order of Business can be, and usually is,
smashed to pieces in the first half hour. On the plea of “emergency,” which
the crowd almost always grants, anybody from the floor can get up and say
anything on any subject. The crowd controls the meeting, practically the only
functions of the speaker being to keep order by ringing a little bell, and to
recognise speakers.
Almost all the real work of the session is done in caucuses of the different
groups and political factions, which almost always cast their votes in a body
and are represented by floor-leaders. The result is, however, that at every
important new point, or vote, the session takes a recess to enable the different
groups and political factions to hold a caucus.

The crowd is extremely noisy, cheering or heckling speakers, over-riding the

plans of the presidium. Among the customary cries are: “Prosim! Please! Go
on!” “Pravilno!” or “Eto vierno! That's true! Right!” “Do volno! Enough!”
“Dolor! Down with him!” “Posor! Shame!” and “Teesche! Silence! Not so
noisy!”

Popular Organisations

1. Soviet. The word soviet means “council.” Under the Tsar the Imperial
Council of State was called Gosudarstvennyi Soviet. Since the Revolution,
however, the term Soviet has come to be associated with a certain type of
parliament elected by members of working-class economic organisations—
the Soviet of Workers', of Soldiers', or of Peasants' Deputies. I have therefore
limited the word to these bodies, and wherever else it occurs I have
translated it “Council.”

Besides the local Soviets, elected in every city, town and village of Russia—
and in large cities, also Ward (Raionny) Soviets—there are also the oblastne
or gubiernsky (district or provincial) Soviets, and the Central Executive
Committee of the All-Russian Soviets in the capital, called from its initials
Tsay-ee-kah. (See
below, “Central Committees”).

Almost everywhere the Soviets of Workers' and of Soldiers' Deputies

combined very soon after the March Revolution. In special matters
concerning their peculiar interests, however, the Workers' and the Soldiers'
Sections continued to meet separately. The Soviets of Peasants' Deputies did
not join the other two until after the Bolshevik coup d'etat. They, too, were
organised like the workers and soldiers, with an Executive Committee of the
All-Russian Peasants' Soviets in the capital.

2. Trade Unions. Although mostly industrial in form, the Russian labour

unions were still called Trade Unions, and at the time of the Bolshevik
Revolution had from three to four million members. These Unions were also
organised in an All- Russian body, a sort of Russian Federation of Labour,
which had its Central Executive Committee in the capital.

3. Factory-Shop Committees. These were spontaneous organisations created in

the factories by the workers in their attempt to control industry, taking
advantage of the administrative break-down incident upon the Revolution.
Their function was by revolutionary action to take over and run the factories.
The Factory-Shop Committees also had their All-Russian organisation, with a
Central Committee at Petrograd, which co-operated with the Trade Unions.

4. Dumas. The word duma means roughly “deliberative body.” The old
Imperial Duma, which persisted six months after the Revolution, in a
democratised form, died a natural death in September, 1917. The City Duma
referred to in this book was the reorganised Municipal Council, often called
“Municipal Self- Government.” It was elected by direct and secret ballot, and
its only reason for failure to hold the masses during the Bolshevik Revolution
was the general decline in influence of all purely political representation in
the fact of the growing power of organisations based on economic groups.

5. Zemstvos. May be roughly translated “county councils.” Under the Tsar

semi- political, semi-social bodies with very little administrative power,
developed and controlled largely by intellectual Liberals among the land-
owning classes. Their most important function was education and social
service among the peasants. During the war the Zemstvos gradually took over
the entire feeding and clothing of the Russian Army, as well as the buying
from foreign countries, and work among the soldiers generally corresponding
to the work of the American Y. M.
C. A. at the Front. After the March Revolution the Zemstvos were
democratized, with a view to making them the organs of local government in
the rural districts. But like the City Dumas, they could not compete with the
Soviets.

6. Cooperatives. These were the workers' and peasants' Consumers'

Cooperative societies, which had several million members all over Russia
before the Revolution. Founded by Liberals and “moderate” Socialists, the
Cooperative movement was not supported by the revolutionary Socialist
groups, because it was a substitute for the complete transference of means of
production and distribution into the hands of the workers. After the March
Revolution the Cooperatives spread rapidly, and were dominated by Populist
Socialists, Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries, and acted as a
conservative political force until the Bolshevik Revolution. However, it was
the Cooperatives which fed Russia when the old structure of commerce and
transportation collapsed.

7. Army Committees. The Army Committees were formed by the soldiers at

the front to combat the reactionary influence of the old regime officers.
Every company, regiment, brigade, division and corps had its committee,
over all of which was elected the Army Committee. The Central Army
Committee cooperated with the General Staff. The administrative break-
down in the army incident upon the Revolution threw upon the shoulders of
the Army Committees most of the work of the Quartermaster's Department,
and in some cases, even the command of troops.

8. Fleet Committees. The corresponding organisations in the Navy.

Central Committees

In the spring and summer of 1917, All-Russian conventions of every sort of

organisation were held at Petrograd. There were national congresses of
Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Soviets, Trade Unions, Factory-Shop
Committees, Army and Fleet Committees—besides every branch of the
military and naval service, Cooperatives, Nationalities, etc. Each of these
conventions elected a Central Committee, or a Central Executive Committee,
to guard its particular interests at the seat of Government. As the Provisional
Government grew weaker, these Central Committees were forced to assume
more and more administrative powers.

The most important Central Committees mentioned in this book are:

Union o/ Unions. During the Revolution of 1905, Professor Miliukov and
other Liberals established unions of professional men—doctors, lawyers,
physicians, etc. These were united under one central organisation, the Union
oJ Unions. In 1905 the Union o/ Unions acted with the revolutionary
democracy; in 1917, however, the Union o/ Unions opposed the Bolshevik
uprising, and united the Government employees who went on strike against
the authority of the Soviets.

Tsay-ee-kah. All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of

Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. So called from the initials of its name.

Tsentroflot. “Centre-Fleet”—the Central Fleet Committee.

Vikzhel. All-Russian Central Committee of the Railway Workers' Union. So

called from the initials of its name.

Other Organisations

Red Guards. The armed factory workers of Russia. The Red Guards were
first formed during the Revolution of 1905, and sprang into existence again
in the days of March, 1917, when a force was needed to keep order in the
city. At that time they were armed, and all efforts of the Provisional
Government to disarm them were more or less unsuccessful. At every great
crisis in the Revolution the Red Guards appeared on the streets, untrained
and undisciplined, but full of Revolutionary zeal.

White Guards. Bourgeois volunteers, who emerged in the last stages of the
Revolution, to defend private property from the Bolshevik attempt to abolish
it. A great many of them were University students.

Tekhintsi. The so-called “Savage Division” in the army, made up of Mohametan

tribesmen from Central Asia, and personally devoted to General Kornilov. The
Tekhintsi were noted for their blind obedience and their savage cruelty in
warfare.

Death Battalions. Or Shock Battalions. The Women's Battalion is known to

the world as the Death Battalion, but there were many Death Battalions
composed of men. These were formed in the summer of 1917 by Kerensky,
for the purpose of strengthening the discipline and combative fire of the army
by heroic example. The Death Battalions were composed mostly of intense
young patriots.
These came for the most part from among the sons of the propertied classes.

Union o{Officers. An organisation formed among the reactionary officers in

the army to combat politically the growing power of the Army Committees.

Knights o[St. George. The Cross of St. George was awarded for distinguished
action in battle. Its holder automatically became a “Knight o[St. George.” The
predominant influence in the organisation was that of the supporters of the
military idea.

Peasants' Union. In 1905, the Peasants' Union was a revolutionary peasants'

organisation. In 1917, however, it had become the political expression of the
more prosperous peasants, to fight the growing power and revolutionary aims
of the Soviets of Peasants' Deputies.

Chronology and Spelling

I have adopted in this book our Calendar throughout, instead of the

former Russian Calendar, which was thirteen days earlier.

In the spelling of Russian names and words, I have made no attempt to

follow any scientific rules for transliteration, but have tried to give the
spelling which would lead the English-speaking reader to the simplest
approximation of their pronunciation.

Sources

Much of the material in this book is from my own notes. I have also relied,
however, upon a heterogeneous file of several hundred assorted Russian
newspapers, covering almost every day of the time described, of files of the
English paper, the Russian Daily News, and of the two French papers, Journal
de Russie and Entente. But far more valuable than these is the Bulletin de la
Presse issued daily by the French Information Bureau in Petrograd, which
reports all important happenings, speeches and the comment of the Russian
press. Of this I have an almost complete file from the spring of 1917 to the
end of January, 1918.

Besides the foregoing, I have in my possession almost every proclamation,

decree and announcement posted on the walls of Petrograd from the middle
of September, 1917, to the end of January, 1918. Also the official publication
of all Government decrees and orders, and the official Government publication
of the secret treaties and other documents discovered in the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs when the Bolsheviki took it over.

Ten Days That Shook The World

Chapter I

Background

Toward the end of September, 1917, an alien Professor of Sociology visiting

Russia came to see me in Petrograd. He had been informed by business men
and intellectuals that the Revolution was slowing down. The Professor wrote
an article about it, and then travelled around the country, visiting factory
towns and peasant communities—where, to his astonishment, the Revolution
seemed to be speeding up. Among the wage-earners and the land-working
people it was common to hear talk of “all land to the peasants, all factories
to the workers.” If the Professor had visited the front, he would have heard
the whole Army talking Peace. ...

The Professor was puzzled, but he need not have been; both observations
were correct. The property-owning classes were becoming more
conservative, the masses of the people more radical.

There was a feeling among business men and the intelligentsia generally that
the Revolution had gone quite far enough, and lasted too long; that things
should settle down. This sentiment was shared by the dominant “moderate”
Socialist groups, the oborontsi (See App. I, Sect. 1) Mensheviki and Socialist
Revolutionaries, who supported the Provisional Government of Kerensky.

On October 14th the official organ of the “moderate” Socialists said:

The drama of Revolution has two acts; the destruction of the old régime and
the creation of the new one. The first act has lasted long enough. Now it is
time to
go on to the second, and to play it as rapidly as possible. As a great
revolutionist put it, “Let us hasten, friends, to terminate the Revolution. He
who makes it last too long will not gather the fruits ”

Among the worker, soldier and peasant masses, however, there was a
stubborn feeling that the “first act” was not yet played out. On the front the
Army Committees were always running foul of officers who could not get
used to treating their men like human beings; in the rear the Land Committees
elected by the peasants were being jailed for trying to carry out Government
regulations concerning the land; and the workmen (See App. I, Sect. 2) in the
factories were fighting black-lists and lockouts. Nay, furthermore, returning
political exiles were being excluded from the country as “undesirable” citizens;
and in some cases, men who returned from abroad to their villages were
prosecuted and imprisoned for revolutionary acts committed in 1905.

To the multiform discontent of the people the “moderate” Socialists had one
answer: Wait for the Constituent Assembly, which is to meet in December.
But the masses were not satisfied with that. The Constituent Assembly was
all well and good; but there were certain definite things for which the Russian
Revolution had been made, and for which the revolutionary martyrs rotted in
their stark Brotherhood Grave on Mars Field, that must be achieved
Constituent Assembly or no Constituent Assembly: Peace, Land, and
Workers' Control of Industry. The Constituent Assembly had been postponed
and postponed—would probably be postponed again, until the people were
calm enough—perhaps to modify their demands! At any rate, here were eight
months of the Revolution gone, and little enough to show for it....

Meanwhile the soldiers began to solve the peace question by simply deserting,
the peasants burned manor-houses and took over the great estates, the
workers sabotaged and struck. ... Of course, as was natural, the
manufacturers, land- owners and army officers exerted all their influence
against any democratic compromise. ...

The policy of the Provisional Government alternated between ineffective

reforms and stern repressive measures. An edict from the Socialist Minister of
Labour ordered all the Workers' Committees henceforth to meet only after
working hours. Among the troops at the front, “agitators” of opposition
political parties were arrested, radical newspapers closed down, and capital
punishment applied—to revolutionary propagandists. Attempts were made to
disarm the Red
Guard. Cossacks were sent to keep order in the provinces. ...

These measures were supported by the “moderate” Socialists and their leaders
in the Ministry, who considered it necessary to cooperate with the propertied
classes. The people rapidly deserted them, and went over to the Bolsheviki,
who stood for Peace, Land, and Workers' Control of Industry, and a
Government of the working-class. In September, 1917, matters reached a
crisis. Against the overwhelming sentiment of the country, Kerensky and the
“moderate” Socialists succeeded in establishing a Government of Coalition with
the propertied classes; and as a result, the Mensheviki and Socialist
Revolutionaries lost the confidence of the people forever.

An article in Rabotchi Put (Workers’ Way) about the middle of October,

entitled “The Socialist Ministers,” expressed the feeling of the masses of the
people against the “moderate” Socialists:

Here is a list of their services.(See App. I, Sect. 3)

Tseretelli: disarmed the workmen with the assistance of General Polovtsev,

checkmated the revolutionary soldiers, and approved of capital punishment in
the army.

Skobeliev: commenced by trying to tax the capitalists 100% of their profits,

and finished—and finished by an attempt to dissolve the Workers' Committees
in the shops and factories.

Avksentiev: put several hundred peasants in prison, members of the

Land Committees, and suppressed dozens of workers' and soldiers'
newspapers.

Tchernov: signed the “Imperial” manifest, ordering the dissolution of the

Finnish Diet.

Savinkov: concluded an open alliance with General Kornilov. If this saviour

of the country was not able to betray Petrograd, it was due to reasons over
which he had no control.

Zarudny: with the sanction of Alexinsky and Kerensky, put some of the best
workers of the Revolution, soldiers and sailors, in prison.

Nikitin: acted as a vulgar policeman against the Railway Workers.

Kerensky: it is better not to say anything about him. The list of his services is
too long....

A Congress of delegates of the Baltic Fleet, at Helsingfors, passed a resolution

which began as follows:

We demand the immediate removal from the ranks of the Provisional

Government of the “Socialist,” the political adventurer—Kerensky, as one who
is scandalising and ruining the great Revolution, and with it the revolutionary
masses, by his shameless political blackmail on behalf of the bourgeoisie. ...

The direct result of all this was the rise of the Bolsheviki.. ..

Since March, 1917, when the roaring torrents of workmen and soldiers
beating upon the Tauride Palace compelled the reluctant Imperial Duma to
assume the supreme power in Russia, it was the masses of the people,
workers, soldiers and peasants, which forced every change in the course of
the Revolution. They hurled the Miliukov Ministry down; it was their Soviet
which proclaimed to the world the Russian peace terms—“No annexations,
no indemnities, and the right of self-determination of peoples”; and again, in
July, it was the spontaneous rising of the unorganised proletariat which once
more stormed the Tauride Palace, to demand that the Soviets take over the
Government of Russia.

The Bolsheviki, then a small political sect, put themselves at the head of the
movement. As a result of the disastrous failure of the rising, public opinion
turned against them, and their leaderless hordes slunk back into the Viborg
Quarter, which is Petrograd's St. Antoine. Then followed a savage hunt of the
Bolsheviki; hundreds were imprisoned, among them Trotzky, Madame
Kollontai and Kameniev; Lenin and Zinoviev went into hiding, fugitives from
justice; the Bolshevik papers were suppressed. Provocators and reactionaries
raised the cry that the Bolsheviki were German agents, until people all over
the world believed it.

But the Provisional Government found itself unable to substantiate its

accusations; the documents proving pro-German conspiracy were discovered to
be forgeries;[1] and one by one the Bolsheviki were released from prison
without trial, on nominal or no bail-until only six remained. The impotence
and indecision of the ever-changing Provisional Government was an argument
nobody could refute. The Bolsheviki raised again the slogan so dear to the
masses, “All Power to the Soviets!”—and they were not merely self-seeking,
for at that time the majority of the Soviets was “moderate” Socialist, their
bitter enemy.

[1] Part of the famous “Sisson Documents”.

But more potent still, they took the crude, simple desires of the workers,
soldiers and peasants, and from them built their immediate programme. And
so, while the oborontsi Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries involved
themselves in compromise with the bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviki rapidly
captured the Russian masses. In July they were hunted and despised; by
September the metropolitan workmen, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, and the
soldiers, had been won almost entirely to their cause. The September
municipal elections in the large cities (See App. I, Sect. 4) were significant;
only 18 per cent of the returns were Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary,
against more than 70 per cent in June. ...

There remains a phenomenon which puzzled foreign observers: the fact that
the Central Executive Committees of the Soviets, the Central Army and Fleet
Committees,[2] and the Central Committees of some of the Unions—notably,
the Post and Telegraph Workers and the Railway Workers—opposed the
Bolsheviki with the utmost violence. These Central Committees had all been
elected in the middle of the summer, or even before, when the Mensheviki
and Socialist Revolutionaries had an enormous following; and they delayed or
prevented any new elections. Thus, according to the constitution of the Soviets
of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, the All-Russian Congress should have
been called in September; but the Tsar-ee-kah[2] would not call the meeting,
on the ground that the Constituent Assembly was only two months away, at
which time, they hinted, the Soviets would abdicate. Meanwhile, one by one,
the Bolsheviki were winning in the local Soviets all over the country, in the
Union branches and the ranks of the soldiers and sailors. The Peasants'
Soviets remained still conservative, because in the sluggish rural districts
political consciousness developed slowly, and the Socialist Revolutionary party
had been for a generation the party which had agitated among the peasants.
............................................................................................But even among
the peasants a revolutionary wing was forming. It showed itself clearly in
October, when the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries split off, and
formed a new political faction, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

[2] See Notes and Explanations.

At the same time there were signs everywhere that the forces of reaction were
gaining confidence.(See App. I, Sect. S) At the Troitsky Farce theatre in
Petrograd, for example, a burlesque called Sins o the Tsar was interrupted by
a group of Monarchists, who threatened to lynch the actors for “insulting the
Emperor.” Certain newspapers began to sigh for a “Russian Napoleon.” It
was the usual thing among bourgeois intelligentzia to refer to the Soviets of
Workers’ Deputies (Rabotchikh Deputatov) as Sabatchikh Deputatov—Dogs’
Deputies.

On October 15th I had a conversation with a great Russian capitalist,

Stepan Georgevitch Lianozov, known as the “Russian Rockefeller”—a
Cadet by political faith.

“Revolution,” he said, “is a sickness. Sooner or later the foreign powers

must intervene here—as one would intervene to cure a sick child, and teach
it how to walk. Of course it would be more or less improper, but the nations
must realise the danger of Bolshevism in their own countries—such
contagious ideas as ‘proletarian dictatorship, and ‘world social revolution’...
There is a chance that this intervention may not be necessary.
Transponation is demoralised, the factories are closing down, and the
Germans are advancing. Starvation and defeat may bring the Russian
people to their senses............................................”

Mr. Lianozov was emphatic in his opinion that whatever happened, it would be
impossible for merchants and manufacturers to permit the existence of the
workers' Shop Committees, or to allow the workers any share in the
management of industry.

“As for the Bolsheviki, they will be done away with by one of two methods.
The Government can evacuate Petrograd, then a state of siege declared, and
the military commander of the district can deal with these gentlemen without
legal formalities. ... Or i , [or example, the Constituent Assembly mani[ests
any Utopian tendencies, it can be dispersed by [orce o[arms. ”

Winter was coming on—the terrible Russian winter. I heard business men
speak of it so: “Winter was always Russia's best friend. Perhaps now it will
rid us of Revolution.” On the freezing front miserable armies continued to
starve and die, without enthusiasm. The railways were breaking down, food
lessening, factories closing. The desperate masses cried out that the
bourgeoisie was sabotaging the life of the people, causing defeat on the Front.
Riga had been surrendered just after General Kornilov said publicly, “Must
we pay with Riga the price of
bringing the country to a sense of its duty?”[3]

[3] See “Kornilov to Brest-Litovsk” by John Reed. Boni and Liveright

N.Y., 1919.

To Americans it is incredible that the class war should develop to such a

pitch. But I have personally met officers on the Northern Front who frankly
preferred military disaster to cooperation with the Soldiers' Committees. The
secretary of the Petrograd branch of the Cadet party told me that the break-
down of the country's economic life was part of a campaign to discredit the
Revolution. An Allied diplomat, whose name I promised not to mention,
confirmed this from his own knowledge. I know of certain coal-mines near
Kharkov which were fired and flooded by their owners, of textile factories at
Moscow whose engineers put the machinery out of order when they left, of
railroad officials caught by the workers in the act of crippling locomotives.. ..

A large section of the propertied classes preferred the Germans to the Revolution
—even to the Provisional Government—and didn't hesitate to say so. In the
Russian household where I lived, the subject of conversation at the dinner
table was almost invariably the coming of the Germans, bringing “law and
order.”... One evening I spent at the house of a Moscow merchant; during tea
we asked the eleven people at the table whether they preferred “Wilhelm or
the Bolsheviki.” The vote was ten to one for Wilhelm...

The speculators took advantage of the universal disorganisation to pile up

fortunes, and to spend them in fantastic revelry or the corruption of
Government officials. Foodstuffs and fuel were hoarded, or secretly sent out of
the country to Sweden. In the first four months of the Revolution, for example,
the reserve food-supplies were almost openly looted from the great Municipal
warehouses of Petrograd, until the two-years' provision of grain had fallen to
less than enough to feed the city for one month.... According to the official
report of the last Minister of Supplies in the Provisional Government, coffee
was bought wholesale in Vladivostok for two rubles a pound, and the
consumer in Petrograd paid thirteen. In all the stores of the large cities were
tons of food and clothing; but only the rich could buy them.

In a provincial town I knew a merchant family turned speculator—

maradior (bandit, ghoul) the Russians call it. The three sons had bribed
their way out of military service. One gambled in foodstuffs. Another sold
illegal gold from the
Lena mines to mysterious parties in Finland. The third owned a controlling
interest in a chocolate factory, which supplied the local Cooperative societies
— on condition that the Cooperatives furnished him everything he needed.
And so, while the masses of the people got a quarter pound of black bread on
their bread cards, he had an abundance of white bread, sugar, tea, candy,
cake and butter.... Yet when the soldiers at the front could no longer fight
from cold, hunger and exhaustion, how indignantly did this family scream
“Cowards!”—how “ashamed” they were “to be Russians”... When finally the
Bolsheviki found and requisitioned vast hoarded stores of provisions, what
“Robbers” they were.

Beneath all this external rottenness moved the old-time Dark Forces,
unchanged since the fall of Nicholas the Second, secret still and very active.
The agents of the notorious Okhrana still functioned, for and against the Tsar,
for and against Kerensky—whoever would pay. ... In the darkness,
underground organisations
of all sorts, such as the Black Hundreds, were busy attempting to restore
reaction in some form or other.

In this atmosphere of corruption, of monstrous half-truths, one clear note

sounded day after day, the deepening chorus of the Bolsheviki, “All Power to
the Soviets! All power to the direct representatives of millions on millions of
common workers, soldiers, peasants. Land, bread, an end to the senseless war,
an end to secret diplomacy, speculation, treachery.. .. The Revolution is in
danger, and with it the cause of the people all over the world!”

The struggle between the proletariat and the middle class, between the
Soviets and the Government, which had begun in the first March days, was
about to culminate. Having at one bound leaped from the Middle Ages into the
twentieth century, Russia showed the startled world two systems of Revolution
—the political and the social—in mortal combat.

What a revelation of the vitality of the Russian Revolution, after all these
months of starvation and disillusionment! The bourgeoisie should have better
known its Russia. Not for a long time in Russia will the “sickness” of
Revolution have run its course....

Looking back, Russia before the November insurrection seems of another age,
almost incredibly conservative. So quickly did we adapt ourselves to the
newer, swifter life; just as Russian politics swung bodily to the Left—until the
Cadets were outlawed as “enemies of the people,” Kerensky became a
“counter-
revolutionist,” the “middle” Socialist leaders, Tseretelli, Dan, Lieber, Gotz and
Avksentiev, were too reactionary for their following, and men like Victor
Tchernov, and even Maxim Gorky, belonged to the Right Wing. ...

About the middle of December, 1917, a group of Socialist Revolutionary

leaders paid a private visit to Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador,
and implored him not to mention the fact that they had been there, because
they were “considered too far Right.”

“And to think,” said Sir George. “One year ago my Government instructed me
not to receive Miliukov, because he was so dangerously Left!”

September and October are the worst months of the Russian year—especially
the Petrograd year. Under dull grey skies, in the shortening days, the rain fell
drenching, incessant. The mud underfoot was deep, slippery and clinging,
tracked everywhere by heavy boots, and worse than usual because of the
complete break-down of the Municipal administration. Bitter damp winds
rushed in from the Gulf of Finland, and the chill fog rolled through the
streets. At night, for motives of economy as well as fear of Zeppelins, the
street-lights were few and far between; in private dwellings and apartment-
houses the electricity was turned on from six o'clock until midnight, with
candles forty cents apiece and little kerosene to be had. It was dark from
three in the afternoon to ten in the morning. Robberies and housebreakings
increased. In apartment houses the men took turns at all-night guard duty,
armed with loaded rifles. This was under the Provisional Government.

Week by week food became scarcer. The daily allowance of bread fell from a
pound and a half to a pound, then three quarters, half, and a quarter-pound.
Toward the end there was a week without any bread at all. Sugar one was
entitled to at the rate of two pounds a month—if one could get it at all,
which was seldom. A bar of chocolate or a pound of tasteless candy cost
anywhere from seven to ten rubles—at least a dollar. There was milk for
about half the babies in the city; most hotels and private houses never saw it
for months. In the fruit season apples and pears sold for a little less than a
ruble apiece on the street-corner....

For milk and bread and sugar and tobacco one had to stand in queue long
hours in the chill rain. Coming home from an all-night meeting I have seen
the kvost (tail) beginning to form before dawn, mostly women, some with
babies in their
arms.. .. Carlyle, in his French Revolution, has described the French people as
distinguished above all others by their faculty of standing in queue. Russia
had accustomed herself to the practice, begun in the reign of Nicholas the
Blessed as long ago as 1915, and from then continued intermittently until the
summer of 1917, when it settled down as the regular order of things. Think
of the poorly- clad people standing on the iron-white streets of Petrograd
whole days in the Russian winter! I have listened in the bread-lines, hearing
the bitter, acrid note of discontent which from time to time burst up through the
miraculous goodnature of the Russian crowd....

Of course all the theatres were going every night, including Sundays.
Karsavina appeared in a new Ballet at the Marinsky, all dance-loving Russia
coming to see her. Shaliapin was singing. At the Alexandrinsky they were
reviving Meyerhold's production of Tolstoy's “Death of Ivan the Terrible”;
and at that performance I remember noticing a student of the Imperial School
of Pages, in his dress uniform, who stood up correctly between the acts and
faced the empty Imperial box, with its eagles all erased.... The Krivoye
Zerkalo staged a sumptuous version of Schnitzler's “Reigen.”

Although the Hermitage and other picture galleries had been evacuated to
Moscow, there were weekly exhibitions of paintings. Hordes of the female
intelligentzia went to hear lectures on Art, Literature and the Easy
Philosophies. It was a particularly active season for Theosophists. And the
Salvation Army, admitted to Russia for the first time in history, plastered the
walls with announcements of gospel meetings, which amused and astounded
Russian audiences. . ..

As in all such times, the petty conventional life of the city went on, ignoring
the Revolution as much as possible. The poets made verses—but not about
the Revolution. The realistic painters painted scenes from medieval Russian
history
—anything but the Revolution. Young ladies from the provinces came up to
the capital to learn French and cultivate their voices, and the gay young
beautiful officers wore their gold-trimmed crimson bashliki and their elaborate
Caucasian swords around the hotel lobbies. The ladies of the minor
bureaucratic set took tea with each other in the afternoon, carrying each her
little gold or silver or jewelled sugar-box, and half a loaf of bread in her muff,
and wished that the Tsar were back, or that the Germans would come, or
anything that would solve the servant problem. ... The daughter of a friend of
mine came home one afternoon in hysterics because the woman street-car
conductor had called her “Comrade!”
All around them great Russia was in travail, bearing a new world. The
servants one used to treat like animals and pay next to nothing, were getting
independent. A pair of shoes cost more than a hundred rubles, and as wages
averaged about thirty-five rubles a month the servants refused to stand in
queue and wear out their shoes. But more than that. In the new Russia every
man and woman could vote; there were working-class newspapers, saying
new and startling things; there were the Soviets; and there were the Unions.
The izvoshtchiki (cab-drivers) had a Union; they were also represented in the
Petrograd Soviet. The waiters and hotel servants were organised, and refused
tips. On the walls of restaurants they put up signs which read, “No tips taken
here—” or, “Just because a man has to make his living waiting on table is no
reason to insult him by offering him a tip!”

At the Front the soldiers fought out their fight with the officers, and learned
self- government through their committees. In the factories those unique
Russian organisations, the Factory-Shop Committees,[4] gained experience
and strength and a realisation of their historical mission by combat with the
old order. All Russia was learning to read, and reading—politics, economics,
history—because the people wanted to know. ... In every city, in most towns,
along the Front, each political faction had its newspaper—sometimes several.
Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of
organisations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the
streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution
into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months,
went out every day tons, car-loads, train- loads of literature, saturating the
land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable.
And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction
that corrupts—but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of
Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorky.. ..

[4] See Notes and Explanations.

Then the Talk, beside which Carlyle's “flood of French speech” was a mere
trickle. Lectures, debates, speeches—in theatres, circuses, school-houses,
clubs, Soviet meeting-rooms, Union headquarters, barracks. ... Meetings in the
trenches at the Front, in village squares, factories.... What a marvellous sight
to see Putilovsky Zavod (the Putilov factory) pour out its forty thousand to
listen to Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody,
whatever they had to say, as long as they would talk! For months in
Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In
railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate,
everywhere. ...
And the All-Russian Conferences and Congresses, drawing together the men
of two continents—conventions of Soviets, of Cooperatives, Zemstvos,[5]
nationalities, priests, peasants, political parties; the Democratic Conference,
the Moscow Conference, the Council of the Russian Republic. There were
always three or four conventions going on in Petrograd. At every meeting,
attempts to limit the time of speakers voted down, and every man free to
express the thought that was in him. ...

[5] See Notes and Explanations.

We came down to the front of the Twelfth Army, back of Riga, where gaunt
and bootless men sickened in the mud of desperate trenches; and when they
saw us they started up, with their pinched faces and the flesh showing blue
through their torn clothing, demanding eagerly, “Did you bring anything to
read?”

What though the outward and visible signs of change were many, what
though the statue of Catharine the Great before the Alexandrinsky Theatre
bore a little red flag in its hand, and others—somewhat faded—floated from
all public buildings; and the Imperial monograms and eagles were either torn
down or covered up; and in place of the fierce gorodovoye (city police) a
mild-mannered and unarmed citizen militia patrolled the streets—still, there
were many quaint anachronisms.

For example, Peter the Great's _Tabel o Rangov—_Table of Ranks—which

he rivetted upon Russia with an iron hand, still held sway. Almost everybody
from the school-boy up wore his prescribed uniform, with the insignia of the
Emperor on button and shoulder-strap. Along about five o'clock in the
afternoon the streets were full of subdued old gentlemen in uniform, with
portfolios, going home from work in the huge, barrack-like Ministries or
Government institutions, calculating perhaps how great a mortality among
their superiors would advance them to the coveted tchin (rank) of Collegiate
Assessor, or Privy Councillor, with the prospect of retirement on a
comfortable pension, and possibly the Cross of St. Anne. ...

There is the story of Senator Sokolov, who in full tide of Revolution came to
a meeting of the Senate one day in civilian clothes, and was not admitted
because he did not wear the prescribed livery of the Tsar's service!

It was against this background of a whole nation in ferment and disintegration

that the pageant of the Rising of the Russian Masses unrolled.
Chapter II
The Coming Storm

In September General Kornilov marched on Petrograd to make himself

military dictator of Russia. Behind him was suddenly revealed the mailed fist
of the bourgeoisie, boldly attempting to crush the Revolution. Some of the
Socialist Ministers were implicated; even Kerensky was under suspicion.
(See App. II, Sect. 1) Savinkov, summoned to explain to the Central
Committee of his party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, refused and was
expelled. Kornilov was arrested by the Soldiers' Committees. Generals were
dismissed, Ministers suspended from their functions, and the Cabinet fell.

Kerensky tried to form a new Government, including the Cadets, party of the
bourgeoisie. His party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, ordered him to exclude
the Cadets. Kerensky declined to obey, and threatened to resign from the
Cabinet if the Socialists insisted. However, popular feeling ran so high that for
the moment he did not dare oppose it, and a temporary Directorate of Five of
the old Ministers, with Kerensky at the head, assumed the power until the
question should be settled.

The Kornilov affair drew together all the Socialist groups—“moderates” as well
as revolutionists—in a passionate impulse of self-defence. There must be no
more Kornilovs. A new Government must be created, responsible to the
elements supporting the Revolution. So the Tsay-ee-kah invited the popular
organisations to send delegates to a Democratic Conference, which should
meet at Petrograd in September.

In the Tsay-ee-kah three factions immediately appeared. The Bolsheviki

demanded that the All-Russian Congress of Soviets be summoned, and that
they take over the power. The “centre” Socialist Revolutionaries, led by
Tchernov, joined with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, led by Kamkov and
Spiridonova,
the Mensheviki Internationalists under Martov, and the “centre” Mensheviki,[6]
represented by Bogdanov and Skobeliev, in demanding a purely Socialist
Government. Tseretelli, Dan and Lieber, at the head of the right wing
Mensheviki, and the right Socialist Revolutionaries under Avksentiev and Gotz,
insisted that the propertied classes must be represented in the new Government.

[6] See Notes and Explanations.

Almost immediately the Bolsheviki won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet,

and the Soviets of Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and other cities followed suit.

Alarmed, the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries in control of the Tsay-

ee- kah decided that after all they feared the danger of Kornilov less than the
danger of Lenin. They revised the plan of representation in the Democratic
Conference, (See App. II, Sect. 2) admitting more delegates from the
Cooperative Societies and other conservative bodies. Even this packed
assembly at first voted for a ÛO€IIifÏOn Government without the Cadets. Only
Kerensky's open threat of resignation, and the alarming cries of the
“moderate” Socialists that “the Republic is in danger” persuaded the
Conference, by a small majority, to declare in favour of the principle of
coalition with the bourgeoisie, and to sanction the establishment of a sort of
consultative Parliament, without any legislative power, called the Provisional
Council of the Russian Republic. In the new Ministry the propertied classes
practically controlled, and in the Council of the Russian Republic they
occupied a disproportionate number of seats.

The fact is that the Tsay-ee-kah no longer represented the rank and file of the
Soviets, and had illegally refused to call another All-Russian Congress of
Soviets, due in September. It had no intention of calling this Congress or of
allowing it to be called. Its official organ, Izviestia (News), began to hint that
the function of the Soviets was nearly at an end, (See App. II, Sect. 3) and
that they might soon be dissolved... At this time, too, the new Government
announced as part of its policy the liquidation of “irresponsible
organisations”—i.e. the Soviets.

The Bolsheviki responded by summoning the All-Russian Soviets to

meet at Petrograd on November 2, and take over the Government
of Russia. At the same time they withdrew from the Council of the
Russian Republic, stating that they would not participate in a
“Government of Treason to the People.” (See App. II, Sect. 4)
The withdrawal of the Bolsheviki, however, did not bring tranquillity to the ill-
fated Council. The propertied classes, now in a position of power, became
arrogant. The Cadets declared that the Government had no legal right to
declare Russia a republic. They demanded stern measures in the Army and
Navy to destroy the Soldiers' and Sailors' Committees, and denounced the
Soviets. On the other side of the chamber the Mensheviki Internationalists and
the Left Socialist Revolutionaries advocated immediate peace, land to the
peasants, and workers' control of industry—practically the Bolshevik
programme.

I heard Martov's speech in answer to the Cadets. Stooped over the desk of
the tribune like the mortally sick man he was, and speaking in a voice so
hoarse it could hardly be heard, he shook his finger toward the right
benches:

“You call us defeatists; but the real defeatists are those who wait for a more
propitious moment to conclude peace, insist upon postponing peace until
later, until nothing is left of the Russian army, until Russia becomes the
subject of bargaining between the different imperialist groups. You are
trying to impose
upon the Russian people a policy dictated by the interests of the bourgeoisie.
The question of peace should be raised without delay. ... You will see then
that not in vain has been the work of those whom you call German agents, of
those Zimmerwa1dists[7] who in all the lands have prepared the awakening of
the conscience of the democratic masses. ”

[7] Members of the revoloutionary internationalist wing of the Socialists of

Europe, so-called because of their participation in the International
Conference held at Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in 1915.

Between these two groups the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries

wavered, irresistibly forced to the left by the pressure of the rising
dissatisfaction of the masses. Deep hostility divided the chamber into
irreconcilable groups.

This was the situation when the long-awaited announcement of the

Allied Conference in Paris brought up the burning question of foreign
policy. ...

Theoretically all Socialist parties in Russia were in favour of the earliest

possible peace on democratic terms. As long ago as May, 1917, the Petrograd
Soviet, then under control of the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries, had
proclaimed the famous Russian peace-conditions. They had demanded that the
Allies hold a conference to discuss war-aims. This conference had been
promised for August;
then postponed until September; then until October; and now it was fixed for
November 10th.

The Provisional Government suggested two representatives—General

Alexeyev, reactionary military man, and Terestchenko, Minister of Foreign
Affairs. The Soviets chose Skobeliev to speak for them and drew up a
manifesto, the famous nakaz—(See App. II, Sect. 5) instructions. The
Provisional Government objected to Skobeliev and his nakaz; the Allied
ambassadors protested and finally Bonar Law in the British House of
Commons, in answer to a question, responded coldly, “As far as I know the
Paris Conference will not discuss the aims of the war at all, but only the
methods of conducting it...................................”

At this the conservative Russian press was jubilant, and the

Bolsheviki cried, “See where the compromising tactics of the
Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries have led them!”

Along a thousand miles of front the millions of men in Russia's armies stirred
like the sea rising, pouring into the capital their hundreds upon hundreds of
delegations, crying “Peace! Peace!”

I went across the river to the Cirque Moderne, to one of the great popular
meetings which occurred all over the city, more numerous night after night.
The bare, gloomy amphitheatre, lit by five tiny lights hanging from a thin wire,
was packed from the ring up the steep sweep of grimy benches to the very
roof— soldiers, sailors, workmen, women, all listening as if their lives
depended upon it. A soldier was speaking—from the Five Hundred and
Forty-eight Division, wherever and whatever that was:

“Comrades,” he cried, and there was real anguish in his drawn face and
despairing gestures. “The people at the top are always calling upon us to
sacrifice more, sacrifice more, while those who have everything are left
unmolested.

“We are at war with Germany. Would we invite German generals to serve on
our Staff? Well we're at war with the capitalists too, and yet we invite them
into our Government. ...

“The soldier says, ‘Show me what I am fighting for. Is it Constantinople, or is

it free Russia? Is it the democracy, or is it the capitalist plunderers? If you can
prove to me that I am defending the Revolution then I'll go out and fight
without
capital punishment to force me.’

“When the land belongs to the peasants, and the factories to the workers, and
the power to the Soviets, then we'll know we have something to fight for, and
we'll fight for it!”

In the barracks, the factories, on the street-corners, end less soldier speakers,
all clamouring for an end to the war, declaring that if the Government did not
make an energetic effon to get peace, the army would leave the trenches and
go home.

The spokesman for the Eighth Army:

“We are weak, we have only a few men left in each company. They must give
us food and boots and reinforcements, or soon there will be left only empty
trenches. Peace or supplies... either let the Government end the war or
support the Army ”

For the Forty-sixth Siberian Artillery:

“The officers will not work with our Committees, they betray us to the
enemy, they apply the death penalty to our agitators; and the counter-
revolutionary Government supports them. We thought that the Revolution
would bring peace. But now the Government forbids us even to talk of such
things, and at the same time doesn't give us enough food to live on, or
enough ammunition to fight with.”

From Europe came rumours of peace at the expense of Russia. (See

App. II, Sect. 6)...

News of the treatment of Russian troops in France added to the discontent.

The First Brigade had tried to replace its officers with Soldiers' Committees,
like their comrades at home, and had refused an order to go to Salonika,
demanding to be sent to Russia. They had been surrounded and starved, and
then fired on by artillery, and many killed. (See App. II, Sect. 7)...

On October 29th I went to the white-marble and crimson hall of the Marinsky
palace, where the Council of the Republic sat, to hear Terestchenko's
declaration of the Government's foreign policy, awaited with such terrible
anxiety by all the peace-thirsty and exhausted land.
A tall, impeccably-dressed young man with a smooth face and high cheek-
bones, suavely reading his careful, non-committal speech. (See App. II, Sect.
8) Nothing.... Only the same platitudes about crushing German militarism with
the help of the Allies—about the “state interests” of Russia, about the
“embarrassment” caused by Skobeliev's nakaz. He ended with the key-note:

“Russia is a great power. Russia will remain a great power, whatever

happens. We must all defend her, we must show that we are defenders of a
great ideal, and children of a great power.”

Nobody was satisfied. The reactionaries wanted a “strong” imperialist policy;

the democratic parties wanted an assurance that the Government would press
for peace.... I reproduce an editorial in Rabotchi i Soldat (Worker and
Soldier), organ of the Bolshevik Petrograd Soviet:

THE GOVERNMENT'S ANSWER TO THE TRENCHES

The most taciturn of our Ministers, Mr. Terestchenko, has actually told the
trenches the following:

1. We are closely united with our Allies. (Not with the peoples, but with
the Governments.)

2. There is no use for the democracy to discuss the possibility or impossibility

of a winter campaign. That will be decided by the Governments of our Allies.

3. The 1st of July offensive was beneficial and a very happy affair. (He did
not mention the consequences.)

4. It is not true that our Allies do not care about us. The Minister has in his
possession very important declarations. (Declarations? What about deeds?
What about the behaviour of the British fleet? (See App. II, Sect. 9) The
parleying of the British king with exiled counter-revolutionary General
Gurko? The Minister did not mention all this.)

5. The nakaz to Skobeliev is bad; the Allies don't like it and the
Russian diplomats don't like it. In the Allied Conference we must all
‘speak one language.’

And is that all? That is all. What is the way out? The solution is, faith in the
Allies and in Terestchenko. When will peace come? When the Allies permit.

That is how the Government replied to the trenches about peace!

Now in the background of Russian politics began to form the vague outlines of
a sinister power—the Cossacks. Novaya Zhizn (New Life), Gorky's paper,
called attention to their activities:

At the beginning of the Revolution the Cossacks refused to shoot down the
people. When Kornilov marched on Petrograd they refused to follow him.
From passive loyalty to the Revolution the Cossacks have passed to an active
political offensive (against it). From the back-ground of the Revolution they
have suddenly advanced to the front of the stage. ...

Kaledin, ataman of the Don Cossacks, had been dismissed by the Provisional
Government for his complicity in the Kornilov affair. He flatly refused to
resign, and surrounded by three immense Cossack armies lay at
Novotcherkask, plotting and menacing. So great was his power that the
Government was forced to ignore his insubordination. More than that, it was
compelled formally to recognise the Council of the Union of Cossack Armies,
and to declare illegal the newly- formed Cossack Section of the Soviets. ...

In the first part of October a Cossack delegation called upon Kerensky,

arrogantly insisting that the charges against Kaledin be dropped, and
reproaching the Minister-President for yielding to the Soviets. Kerensky agreed
to let Kaledin alone, and then is reported to have said, “In the eyes of the
Soviet leaders I am a despot and a tyrant. ... As for the Provisional
Government, not only does it not depend upon the Soviets, but it considers it
regrettable that they exist at all.”

At the same time another Cossack mission called upon the British ambassador,
treating with him boldly as representatives of “the free Cossack people.”

In the Don something very like a Cossack Republic had been established. The
Kuban declared itself an independent Cossack State. The Soviets of Rostov-
on- Don and Yekaterinburg were dispersed by armed Cossacks, and the
headquarters of the Coal Miners' Union at Kharkov raided. In all its
manifestations the Cossack movement was anti-socialist and militaristic. Its
leaders were nobles and great land-owners, like Kaledin, Kornilov, Generals
Dutov, Karaulov and Bardizhe, and it was backed by the powerful merchants
and bankers of Moscow. ...
Old Russia was rapidly breaking up. In Ukraine, in Finland, Poland, White
Russia, the nationalist movements gathered strength and became bolder. The
local Governments, controlled by the propertied classes, claimed autonomy,
refusing to obey orders from Petrograd. At Helsingfors the Finnish Senate
declined to loan money to the Provisional Government, declared Finland
autonomous, and demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops. The bourgeois
Rada at Kiev extended the boundaries of Ukraine until they included all the
richest agricultural lands of South Russia, as far east as the Urals, and began
the formation of a national army. Premier Vinnitchenko hinted at a separate
peace with Germany—and the Provisional Government was helpless. Siberia,
the Caucasus, demanded separate Constituent Assemblies. And in all these
countries there was the beginning of a bitter struggle between the authorities
and the local Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.. ..

Conditions were daily more chaotic. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were

deserting the front and beginning to move in vast, aimless tides over the face
of the land. The peasants of Tambov and Tver Governments, tired of waiting for
the land, exasperated by the repressive measures of the Government, were
burning manor-houses and massacring land-owners. Immense strikes and lock-
outs convulsed Moscow, Odessa and the coal-mines of the Don.
Transportation was paralysed; the army was starving and in the big cities
there was no bread.

The Government, torn between the democratic and reactionary factions, could
do nothing: when forced to act it always supported the interests of the
propertied classes. Cossacks were sent to restore order among the peasants, to
break the strikes. In Tashkent, Government authorities suppressed the Soviet. In
Petrograd the Economic Council, established to rebuild the shattered
economic life of the country, came to a deadlock between the opposing forces
of capital and labour, and was dissolved by Kerensky. The old régime military
men, backed by Cadets, demanded that harsh measures be adopted to
restore discipline in the Army and the Navy. In vain Admiral Verderevsky, the
venerable Minister of Marine, and General Verkhovsky, Minister of War,
insisted that only a new, voluntary, democratic discipline, based on
cooperation with the soldiers' and sailors' Committees, could save the army
and navy. Their recommendations were ignored.

The reactionaries seemed determined to provoke popular anger. The trial of

Kornilov was coming on. More and more openly the bourgeois press defended
him, speaking of him as “the great Russian patriot.” Burtzev's paper, Obshtchee
Dielo (Common Cause), called for a dictatorship of Kornilov, Kaledin and
Kerensky!

I had a talk with Bunzev one day in the press gallery of the Council of the
Republic. A small, stooped figure with a wrinkled face, eyes near-sighted
behind thick glasses, untidy hair and beard streaked with grey.

“Mark my words, young man! What Russia needs is a Strong Man. We

should get our minds off the Revolution now and concentrate on the
Germans.
Bunglers, bunglers, to defeat Kornilov; and back of the bunglers are the
German agents. Kornilov should have won. ”

On the extreme right the organs of the scarcely-veiled

Monarchists, Purishkevitch's Narodny Tribun (People's Tribune),
Novaya Rus (New Russia), and Zhivoye Slovo (Living Word),
openly advocated the extermination of the revolutionary
democracy. ...

On the 23rd of October occurred the naval battle with a German squadron in
the Gulf of Riga. On the pretext that Petrograd was in danger, the Provisional
Government drew up plans for evacuating the capital. First the great
munitions works were to go, distributed widely throughout Russia; and then the
Government itself was to move to Moscow. Instantly the Bolsheviki began to
cry out that the Government was abandoning the Red Capital in order to
weaken the Revolution. Riga had been sold to the Germans; now Petrograd
was being betrayed!

The bourgeois press was joyful. “At Moscow,” said the Cadet paper Ryetch
(Speech), “the Government can pursue its work in a tranquil atmosphere,
without being interfered with by anarchists.” Rodzianko, leader of the right
wing of the Cadet party, declared in Utro fiossii (The Morning of Russia) that
the taking of Petrograd by the Germans would be a blessing, because it
would destroy the Soviets and get rid of the revolutionary Baltic Fleet:

Petrograd is in danger (he wrote). I say to myself, “Let God take care
of Petrograd.” They fear that if Petrograd is lost the central
revolutionary organisations will be destroyed. To that I answer that I
rejoice if all these organisations are destroyed; for they will bring
nothing but disaster upon Russia. ...

With the taking of Petrograd the Baltic Fleet will also be destroyed.. But there
will be nothing to regret; most of the battleships are completely demoralised....

In the face of a storm of popular disapproval the plan of evacuation was

repudiated.

Meanwhile the Congress of Soviets loomed over Russia like a thunder-cloud,

shot through with lightnings. It was opposed, not only by the Government but
by all the “moderate” Socialists. The Central Army and Fleet Committees, the
Central Committees of some of the Trade Unions, the Peasants' Soviets, but
most of all the Tsay-ee-kah itself, spared no pains to prevent the meeting.
Izviestia and Golos Soldata (Voice of the Soldier), newspapers founded by
the Petrograd Soviet but now in the hands of the Tsay-ee-kah, fiercely assailed
it, as did the entire artillery of the Socialist Revolutionary party press, Dielo
Naroda (People's Cause) and Vofia Naroda (People's Will).

Delegates were sent through the country, messages flashed by wire to

committees in charge of local Soviets, to Army Committees, instructing them
to halt or delay elections to the Congress. Solemn public resolutions against
the Congress, declarations that the democracy was opposed to the meeting so
near the date of the Constituent Assembly, representatives from the Front,
from the Union of Zemstvos, the Peasants' Union, Union of Cossack
Armies, Union of Officers, Knights of St. George, Death Battalions,[8]
protesting..................................................................................The
Council
of the Russian Republic was one chorus of disapproval. The entire machinery
set up by the Russian Revolution of March functioned to block the Congress
of Soviets. . ..

[8] See Notes and Explanations.

On the other hand was the shapeless will of the proletariat—the workmen,
common soldiers and poor peasants. Many local Soviets were already
Bolshevik; then there were the organisations of the industrial workers, the
Fabritchno- Zavodskiye Comitiefi—Factory-Shop Committees; and the
insurgent Army and Fleet organisations. In some places the people, prevented
from electing their regular Soviet delegates, held rump meetings and chose
one of their number to go to Petrograd. In others they smashed the old
obstructionist committees and formed new ones. A ground-swell of revolt
heaved and cracked the crust which had been slowly hardening on the
surface of revolutionary fires dormant all those months. Only an spontaneous
mass-movement could bring about the All- Russian Congress of Soviets. ...
Day after day the Bolshevik orators toured the barracks and factories,
violently denouncing “this Government of civil war.” One Sunday we went, on
a top- heavy steam tram that lumbered through oceans of mud, between stark
factories and immense churches, to Obukhovsky Zavod, a Government
munitions-plant out on the Schlüsselburg Prospekt.

The meeting took place between the gaunt brick walls of a huge unfinished
building, ten thousand black-clothed men and women packed around a
scaffolding draped in red, people heaped on piles of lumber and bricks,
perched high upon shadowy girders, intent and thunder-voiced. Through the
dull, heavy sky now and again burst the sun, flooding reddish light through
the skeleton windows upon the mass of simple faces upturned to us.

Lunatcharsky, a slight, student-like figure with the sensitive face of an artist,

was telling why the power must be taken by the Soviets. Nothing else could
guarantee the Revolution against its enemies, who were deliberately ruining
the country, ruining the army, creating opportunities for a new Konilov.

A soldier from the Rumanian front, thin, tragical and fierce, cried, “Comrades!
We are starving at the front, we are stiff with cold. We are dying for no reason.
I ask the American comrades to carry word to America, that the Russians
will never give up their Revolution until they die. We will hold the fort with
all our strength until the peoples of the world rise and help us! Tell the
American workers to rise and fight for the Social Revolution!”

Then came Petrovsky, slight, slow-voiced, implacable: “Now is the time for
deeds, not words. The economic situation is bad, but we must get used to it.
They are trying to starve us and freeze us. They are trying to provoke us. But
let them know that they can go too far—that if they dare to lay their hands
upon the
organisations of the proletariat we will sweep them away like scum from the
face of the earth!”

The Bolshevik press suddenly expanded. Besides the two party papers,
Rabotchi Put and Soldat (Soldier), there appeared a new paper for the
peasants, Derevenskaya Byednota (Village Poorest), poured out in a daily
half-million edition; and on October 17th, Rabotchi i Soldat. Its leading article
summed up the Bolshevik point of view:

The fourth year's campaign will mean the annihilation of the army and the
country.... There is danger for the safety of Petrograd....Counter-revolutionists
rejoice in the people's misfortunes. ... The peasants brought to desperation
come out in open rebellion; the landlords and Government authorities
massacre them with punitive expeditions; factories and mines are closing
down, workmen are threatened with starvation. ... The bourgeoisie and its
Generals want to restore a blind discipline in the army.... Supported by the
bourgeoisie, the Kornilovtsi are openly getting ready to break up the meeting
of the Constituent Assembly. ...

The Kerensky Government is against the people. He will destroy the country....
This paper stands for the people and by the people—the poor classes, workers,
soldiers and peasants. The people can only be saved by the completion of the
Revolution... and for this purpose the full power must be in the hands of the
Soviets. ...

This paper advocates the following: All power to the Soviets—both in the
capital and in the provinces.

Immediate truce on all fronts. An honest peace between peoples.

Landlord estates—without compensation—to the peasants.

Workers' control over industrial production.

A faithfully and honestly elected Constituent Assembly.

It is interesting to reproduce here a passage from that same paper—the organ

of those Bolsheviki so well known to the world as German agents:

The German kaiser, covered with the blood of millions of dead people, wants
to push his army against Petrograd. Let us call to the German workmen,
soldiers and peasants, who want peace not less than we do, to... stand up
against this damned war!

This can be done only by a revolutionary Government, which would speak

really for the workmen, soldiers and peasants of Russia, and would appeal
over the heads of the diplomats directly to the German troops, fill the German
trenches with proclamations in the German language. ... Our airmen would
spread these proclamations all over Germany....

In the Council of the Republic the gulf between the two sides of the chamber
deepened day by day.

“The propertied classes,” cried Karelin, for the Left Socialist

Revolutionaries, “want to exploit the revolutionary machine of
the State to bind Russia to the war-chariot of the Allies! The
revolutionary parties are absolutely against this policy. ”

Old Nicholas Tchaikovsky, representing the Populist Socialists, spoke

against giving the land to the peasants, and took the side of the Cadets: “We
must have immediately strong discipline in the army. ... Since the beginning
of the war I have not ceased to insist that it is a crime to undertake social
and economic reforms in war-time. We are committing that crime, and yet I
am not the enemy of these reforms, because I am a Socialist.”

Cries from the Left, “We don't believe you!” Mighty applause from the Right. ...

Adzhemov, for the Cadets, declared that there was no necessity to tell the
army what it was fighting for, since every soldier ought to realise that the first
task was to drive the enemy from Russian territory.

Kerensky himself came twice, to plead passionately for national unity, once
bursting into tears at the end. The assembly heard him coldly, interrupting with
ironical remarks.

Smolny Institute, headquarters of the Tsay-ee-kah and of the Petrograd

Soviet, lay miles out on the edge of the city, beside the wide Neva. I went
there on a street-car, moving snail-like with a groaning noise through the
cobbled, muddy streets, and jammed with people. At the end of the line rose
the graceful smoke- blue cupolas of Smolny Convent outlined in dull gold,
beautiful; and beside it the great barracks like facade of Smolny Institute,
two hundred yards long and three lofty stories high, the Imperial arms
carved hugely in stone still insolent over the entrance. . ..

Under the old régime a famous convent-school for the daughters of the
Russian nobility, patronised by the Tsarina herself, the Institute had been
taken over by the revolutionary organisations of workers and soldiers. Within
were more than a hundred huge rooms, white and bare, on their doors
enamelled plaques still informing the passerby that within was “Ladies’ Class-
room Number 4” or “Teachers’ Bureau”; but over these hung crudely-lettered
signs, evidence of the vitality of the new order: “Central Committee of the
Petrograd Soviet” and
“Tsay-ee-kah” and “Bureau of Foreign Affairs”; “Union of Socialist Soldiers,”
“Central Committee of the All-Russian Trade Unions,” “Factory-Shop
Committees,” “Central Army Committee”; and the central offices and caucus-
rooms of the political parties....

The long, vaulted corridors, lit by rare electric lights, were thronged with
hurrying shapes of soldiers and workmen, some bent under the weight of huge
bundles of newspapers, proclamations, printed propaganda of all sorts. The
sound of their heavy boots made a deep and incessant thunder on the wooden
floor.... Signs were posted up everywhere: “Comrades! For the sake of your
health, preserve cleanliness!” Long tables stood at the head of the stairs on
every floor, and on the landings, heaped with pamphlets and the literature of
the different political parties, for sale. ...

The spacious, low-ceilinged refectory downstairs was still a dining-room. For

two rubles I bought a ticket entitling me to dinner, and stood in line with a
thousand others, waiting to get to the long serving-tables, where twenty men
and women were ladling from immense cauldrons cabbage soup, hunks of
meat and piles of kasha, slabs of black bread. Five kopeks paid for tea in a tin
cup. From a basket one grabbed a greasy wooden spoon.... The benches
along the wooden tables were packed with hungry proletarians, rolfing their
food, plotting, shouting rough jokes across the room. ...

[Graphic, page 33: text of placard in russian, translation follows]

COMRADES FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR HEALTH, PRESERVE CLEANLINESS.

Upstairs was another eating-place, reserved for the Tsay-ee-kah— though

every one went there. Here could be had bread thickly buttered and endless
glasses of tea. ...

In the south wing on the second floor was the great hall of meetings, the
former ball-room of the Institute. A lofty white room lighted by glazed-
white chandeliers holding hundreds of ornate electric bulbs, and divided by
two rows
of massive columns; at one end a dais, flanked with two tall many-branched
light standards, and a gold frame behind, from which the Imperial portrait had
been cut. Here on festal occasions had been banked brilliant military and
ecclesiastical uniforms, a setting for Grand Duchesses. . ..
Just across the hall outside was the office of the Credentials Committee for
the Congress of Soviets. I stood there watching the new delegates come in—
burly, bearded soldiers, workmen in black blouses, a few long-haired peasants.
The girl in charge—a member of Plekhanov's Fedinstvo[9] group—smiled
contemptuously. “These are very different people from the delegates to the
first Siezd (Congress),” she remarked. “See how rough and ignorant they look!
The Dark People. ...” It was true; the depths of Russia had been stirred, and it
was the bottom which came uppermost now. The Credentials Committee,
appointed by the old Tsay-ee-kah, was challenging delegate after delegate, on
the ground that they had been illegally elected. Karakhan, member of the
Bolshevik Central Committee, simply grinned. “Never mind,” he said, “When
the time comes we'll see that you get your seats ”

[9] See Notes and Explanations.

Rabotchi i Soldat said:

The attention of delegates to the new All-Russian Congress is called to

attempts of certain members of the Organising Committee to break up the
Congress, by asserting that it will not take place, and that delegates had
better leave Petrograd.... Pay no attention to these lies.... Great days are
coming....

It was evident that a quorum would not come together by November 2, so

the opening of the Congress was postponed to the 7th. But the whole
country was now aroused; and the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries,
realising that they were defeated, suddenly changed their tactics and began
to wire frantically to their provincial organisations to elect as many “moderate”
Socialist delegates as possible. At the same time the Executive Committee of
the Peasants' Soviets issued an emergency call for a Peasants' Congress, to
meet December 13th and offset whatever action the workers and soldiers
might take...

What would the Bolsheviki do? Rumours ran through the city that there
would be an armed “demonstration,” a vystuplennie—“coming out” of the
workers and soldiers. The bourgeois and reactionary press prophesied
insurrection, and urged the Government to arrest the Petrograd Soviet, or at
least to prevent the meeting of the Congress. Such sheets as Novaya Rus
advocated a general Bolshevik massacre.

Gorky's paper, Novaya Zhizn, agreed with the Bolsheviki that the reactionaries
were attempting to destroy the Revolution, and that if necessary they must be
resisted by force of arms; but all the parties of the revolutionary democracy
must present a united front.

As long as the democracy has not organised its principal forces, so long as
the resistance to its influence is still strong, there is no advantage in passing
to the attack. But if the hostile elements appeal to force, then the
revolutionary democracy should enter the battle to seize the power, and it will
be sustained by the most profound strata of the people. ...

Gorky pointed out that both reactionary and Government newspapers were
inciting the Bolsheviki to violence. An insurrection, however, would prepare
the way for a new Kornilov. He urged the Bolsheviki to deny the rumours.
Potressov, in the Menshevik Dren (Day), published a sensational story,
accompanied by a map, which professed to reveal the secret Bolshevik plan of
campaign.

As if by magic, the walls were covered with warnings, (See App. II, Sect. 10)
proclamations, appeals, from the Central Committees of the “moderate” and
conservative factions and the Tsay-ee-kah, denouncing any “demonstrations,”
imploring the workers and soldiers not to listen to agitators. For instance, this
from the Military Section of the Socialist Revolutionary pany:

Again rumours are spreading around the town of an intended vystuplennie.

What is the source of these rumours? What organisation authorises these
agitators who preach insurrection? The Bolsheviki, to a question addressed to
them in the Tsay- ee-kah, denied that they have anything to do with it. But
these rumours
themselves carry with them a great danger. It may easily happen that, not
taking into consideration the state of mind of the majority of the workers,
soldiers and peasants, individual hot-heads will call out part of the workers
and soldiers on the streets, inciting them to an uprising.... In this fearful time
through which revolutionary Russia is passing, any insurrection can easily
turn into civil war, and there can result from it the destruction of all
organisations of the proletariat, built up with so much labour.... The counter-
revolutionary plotters are planning to take advantage of this insurrection to
destroy the Revolution, open the front to Wilhelm, and wreck the Constituent
Assembly.... Stick stubbornly to your posts! Do not come out!

On October 28th, in the corridors of Smolny, I spoke with Kameniev, a little man
with a reddish pointed beard and Gallic gestures. He was not at all sure that
enough delegates would come. “If there is a Congress,” he said, “it will
represent the overwhelming sentiment of the people. If the majority is
Bolshevik, as I
think it will be, we shall demand that the power be given to the Soviets, and
the Provisional Government must resign ”

Volodarsky, a tall, pale youth with glasses and a bad complexion, was more
definite. “The ‘Lieber-Dans’ and the other compromisers are sabotaging the
Congress. If they succeed in preventing its meeting,—well, then we are realists
enough not to depend on that!”

Under date of October 29th I find entered in my notebook the following items
culled from the newspapers of the day:

Moghilev (General Staff Headquarters). Concentration here of loyal

Guard Regiments, the Savage Division, Cossacks and Death Battalions.

The bunkers of the Officers' Schools of Pavlovsk, Tsarskoye Selo and Peterhof
ordered by the Government to be ready to come to Petrograd. Oranienbaum
yunkers arrive in the city.

Part of the Armoured Car Division of the Petrograd garrism stationed in the Winter Palace.

Upon orders signed by Trotzky, several thousand rifles delivered by the

Government Arms Factory at Sestroretzk to delegates of the Petrograd
workmen.

At a meeting of the City Militia of the Lower Liteiny Quarter, a resolution

demanding that all power be given to the Soviets.

This is just a sample of the confused events of those feverish days, when
everybody knew that something was going to happen, but nobody knew just
what.

At a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet in Smolny, the night of October 30th,

Trotzky branded the assertions of the bourgeois press that the Soviet
contemplated armed insurention as “an attempt of the reactionaries to
discredit and wreck the Congress of Soviets.... The Petrograd Soviet,” he
declared, “had not ordered any uystuplennie. If it is necessary we shall do
so, and we will be supported by the Petrogruad garrison.... They (the
Government) are preparing a counter-revolution; and we shall answer with
an offensive which will be
merciless and decisive.”

It is true that the Petrograd Soviet had not ordered a demonstration, but the
Central Committee of the Bolshevik party was considering the question of
insurrection. All night long the 23d they met. There were present all the party
intellectuals, the leaders—and delegates of the Petrograd workers and garrison.
Alone of the intellectuals Lenin and Trotzky stood for insurrection. Even the
military men opposed it. A vote was taken. Insurrection was defeated!

Then arose a rough workman, his face convulsed with rage. “I speak for the
Petrograd proletariat,” he said, harshly. “We are in favour of insurrection. Have
it your own way, but I tell you now that if you allow the Soviets to be
destroyed, we're through with for!” Some soldiers joined him. ... And after that
they voted again—insurrection won.. ..

However, the right wing of the Bolsheviki, led by Riazanov, Kameniev and
Zinoviev, continued to campaign against an armed rising. On the morning of
October 31st appeared in Rabotchi Put the first instalment of Lenin's “Letter to
the Comrades,” (See App. II, Sect. 11) one of the most audacious pieces of
political propaganda the world has ever seen. In it Lenin seriously presented
the arguments in favour of insurrection, taking as text the objections of
Kameniev and Riazonov.

“Either we must abandon our slogan, ‘All Power to the Soviets,”’ he wrote,
“or else we must make an insurrection. There is no middle course ”

That same afternoon Paul Miliukov, leader of the Cadets, made a brilliant,
bitter speech (See App. II, Sect. 12) in the Council of the Republic, branding
the Skobeliev nakaz as pro-German, declaring that the “revolutionary
democracy” was destroying Russia, sneering at Terestchenko, and openly
declaring that he preferred German diplomacy to Russian. ... The Left benches
were one roaring tumult all through. ...

On its part the Government could not ignore the significance of the success
of the Bolshevik propaganda. On the 29th joint commission of the Government
and the Council of the Republic hastily drew up two laws, one for giving the
land temporarily to the peasants, and the other for pushing an energetic
foreign policy of peace. The next day Kerensky suspended capital punishment
in the army. That same afternoon was opened with great ceremony the first
session of the new
“Commission for Strengthening the Republican Régime and Fighting Against
Anarchy and Counter-Revolution”—of which history shows not the slightest
further trace.. .. The following morning with two other correspondents I
interviewed Kerensky (See App. II, Sect. 13)—the last time he received
journalists.

“The Russian people,” he said, bitterly, “are suffering from economic fatigue
— and from disillusionment with the Allies! The world thinks that the
Russian Revolution is at an end. Do not be mistaken. The Russian
Revolution is just beginning. ...” Words more prophetic, perhaps, than he
knew.

Stormy was the all-night meeting of the Petrograd Soviet the 30th of October,
at which I was present. The “moderate” Socialist intellectuals, officers,
members of Army Committees, the Tsay-ee-kah, were there in force. Against
them rose up workmen, peasants and common soldiers, passionate and
simple.

A peasant told of the disorders in Tver, which he said were caused by the
arrest of the Land Committees. “This Kerensky is nothing but a shield to the
pomieshfchiki (landowners),” he cried. “They know that at the Constituent
Assembly we will take the land anyway, so they are trying to destroy the
Constituent Assembly!”

A machinist from the Putilov works described how the superintendents were
closing down the departments one by one on the pretext that there was no fuel
or raw materials. The Factory-Shop Committee, he declared, had discovered
huge hidden supplies.

“It is a provocatzia,” said he. “They want to starve us—or drive us to violence!”

Among the soldiers one began, “Comrades! I bring you greetings from the
place where men are digging their graves and call them trenches!”

Then arose a tall, gaunt young soldier, with flashing eyes, met with a roar of
welcome. It was Tchudnovsky, reported killed in the July fighting, and now
risen from the dead.

“The soldier masses no longer trust their officers. Even the Army Committees,
who refused to call a meeting of our Soviet, betrayed us. ... The masses of the
soldiers want the Constituent Assembly to be held exactly when it was called
for, and those who dare to postpone it will be cursed—and not only platonic
curses
either, for the Army has guns too.. .”

He told of the electoral campaign for the Constituent now raging in

the Fifth Army. “The officers, and especially the Mensheviki and the
Socialist Revolutionaries, are trying deliberately to cripple the
Bolsheviki. Our papers are not allowed to circulate in the trenches.
Our speakers are arrested—”

“Why don't you speak about the lack of bread?” shouted another

soldier. “Man shall not live by bread alone,” answered Tchudnovsky,

sternly.... Followed him an officer, delegate from the Vitebsk Soviet, a

Menshevik
oboronetz. “It isn't the question of who has the power. The trouble is not with
the Government, but with the war.... and the war must be won before any
change—” At this, hoots and ironical cheers. “These Bolshevik agitators are
demagogues!” The hall rocked with laughter. “Let us for a moment forget the
class struggle—” But he got no farther. A voice yelled, “Don't you wish we
would!”

Petrograd presented a curious spectacle in those days. In the factories the

committee-rooms were filled with stacks of rifles, couriers came and went,
the Red Guard[10] drilled. ... In all the barracks meetings every night, and all
day long interminable hot arguments. On the streets the crowds thickened
toward gloomy evening, pouring in slow voluble tides up and down the
Nevsky, fighting for the newspapers. . .. Hold-ups increased to such an extent
that it was
dangerous to walk down side streets. ... On the Sadovaya one afternoon I saw
a crowd of several hundred people beat and trample to death a soldier
caught stealing.... Mysterious individuals circulated around the shivering
women who waited in queue long cold hours for bread and milk, whispering
that the Jews had cornered the food supply—and that while the people
starved, the Soviet members lived luxuriously. ...

[10] See Notes and Explanations.

At Smolny there were strict guards at the door and the outer gates,
demanding everybody's pass. The committee-rooms buzzed and hummed all
day and all night, hundreds of soldiers and workmen slept on the floor,
wherever they could find room. Upstairs in the great hall a thousand people
crowded to the uproarious sessions of the Petrograd Soviet....
Gambling clubs functioned hectically from dusk to dawn, with champagne
flowing and stakes of twenty thousand rubles. In the centre of the city at night
prostitutes in jewels and expensive furs walked up and down, crowded the
cafés. . ..

Monarchist plots, German spies, smugglers hatching schemes....

And in the rain, the bitter chill, the great throbbing city under grey skies
rushing faster and faster toward—what?
Chapter III
On the Eve

In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a

time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every
refusal to act excites their contempt. ...

The proposal to abandon Petrograd raised a hurricane; Kerensky's public denial

that the Government had any such intention was met with hoots of derision.

Pinned to the wall by the pressure of the Revolution (cried Rabotchi

Put), the Government of “provisional” bourgeois tries to get free by
giving out lying assurances that it never thought of fleeing from
Petrograd, and that it didn't wish to surrender the capital.. ..

In Kharkov thirty thousand coal miners organised, adopting the preamble of the
I. W. W. constitution: “The working class and the employing class have
nothing in common.” Dispersed by Cossacks, some were locked out by the
mine-owners, and the rest declared a general strike. Minister of Commerce
and Industry Konovalov appointed his assistant, Orlov, with plenary powers, to
settle the trouble. Orlov was hated by the miners. But the Tsay-ee-kah not
only supported his appointment, but refused to demand that the Cossacks be
recalled from the Don Basin. ...

This was followed by the dispersal of the Soviet at Kaluga. The Bolsheviki,
having secured a majority in the Soviet, set free some political prisoners.
With the sanction of the Government Commissar the Municipal Duma called in
troops from Minsk, and bombarded the Soviet headquarters with artillery. The
Bolsheviki yielded, but as they left the building Cossacks attacked them,
crying, “This is what we'll do to all the other Bolshevik Soviets, including
those of Moscow and Petrograd!” This incident sent a wave of panic rage
throughout
Russia. ...

In Petrograd was ending a regional Congress of Soviets of the North,

presided over by the Bolshevik Krylenko. By an immense majority it
resolved that all power should be assumed by the All-Russian Congress;
and concluded by greeting the Bolsheviki in prison, bidding them rejoice,
for the hour of their liberation was at hand. At the same time the first All-
Russian Conference of Factory-Shop Committees (See App. III, Sect. 1)
declared emphatically for the Soviets, and continued significantly,

After liberating themselves politically from Tsardom, the working-class wants

to see the democratic régime triumphant in the sphere of its productive
activity.
This is best expressed by Workers' Control over industrial production, which
naturally arose in the atmosphere of economic decomposition created by the
criminal policy of the dominating classes.. ..

The Union of Railwaymen was demanding the resignation of Liverovsky,

Minister of Ways and Communications....

In the name of the Tsay-ee-kah, Skobeliev insisted that the nakaz be presented at
the Allied Conference, and formally protested against the sending of
Terestchenko to Paris. Terestchenko offered to resign....

General Verkhovsky, unable to accomplish his reorganisation of the army, only

came to Cabinet meetings at long intervals....

On November 3d Burtzev's Obshtchee Dielo came out with great headlines:

Citizens! Save the fatherland!

I have just learned that yesterday, at a meeting of the Commission for

National Defence, Minister of War General Verkhovsky, one of the principal
persons responsible for the fall of Kornilov, proposed to sign a separate
peace, independently of the Allies.

That is treason to Russia!

Terestchenko declared that the Provisional Government had not even examined
Verkhovsky's proposition.
“You might think,” said Terestchenko, “that we were in a madhouse!”

The members of the Commission were astounded at the General's

words. General Alexeyev wept.

No! It is not madness! It is worse. It is direct treason to Russia!

Kerensky, Terestchenko and Nekrassov must immediately answer us

concerning the words of Verkhovsky.

Citizens, arise!

Russia is being
sold!

Save her!

What Verkhovsky really said was that the Allies must be pressed to offer
peace, because the Russian army could fight no longer. ...

Both in Russia and abroad the sensation was tremendous. Verkhovsky was
given “indefinite leave of absence for ill-health,” and left the Government.
Obshtchee Dielo was suppressed. ...

Sunday, November 4th, was designated as the Day of the Petrograd Soviet,
with immense meetings planned all over the city, ostensibly to raise money for
the organisation and the press; really, to make a demonstration of strength.
Suddenly it was announced that on the same day the Cossacks would hold a
Krestny Khod
—Procession of the Cross—in honour of the Ikon of 1612, through whose
miraculous intervention Napoleon had been driven from Moscow. The
atmosphere was electric; a spark might kindle civil war. The Petrograd Soviet
issued a manifesto, headed “Brothers—Cossacks!”

You, Cossacks, are being incited against us, workers and soldiers. This plan
of Cain is being put into operation by our common enemies, the oppressors,
the privileged classes—generals, bankers, landlords, former officials, former
servants of the Tsar. We are hated by all grafters, rich men, princes,
nobles,
generals, including your Cossack generals. They are ready at any moment to
destroy the Petrograd Soviet and crush the Revolution.. ..
On the 4th of November somebody is organising a Cossack religious
procession. It is a question of the free consciousness of every individual
whether he will or will not take part in this procession. We do not interfere in
this matter, nor do we obstruct anybody. ... However, we warn you, Cossacks!
Look out and see to it that under the pretext of a Krestni Khod, your Kaledins
do not instigate you against workmen, against soldiers. ...

The procession was hastily called off....

In the barracks and the working-class quarters of the town the

Bolsheviki were preaching, “All Power to the Soviets!” and agents
of the Dark Forces were urging the people to rise and slaughter the
Jews, shop-keepers, Socialist leaders....

On one side the Monarchist press, inciting to bloody repression—on the other
Lenin's great voice roaring, “Insurrection!.... We cannot wait any longer!”

Even the bourgeois press was uneasy. (See App. III, Sect. 2) Birjevya
Viedomosti (Exchange Gazette) called the Bolshevik propaganda an attack on
“the most elementary principles of society—personal security and the respect
for private property.”

[Graphic, page 46: Appeal of the Petrograd Soviet]

Appeal of the Petrograd Soviet to the Cosacks to call off their Krestny Khod
— the religious procession planned for November 4th (our calendar).
“Brothers— Cossacks!” it begins. “The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and
Soldiers' Deputies addresses you.”

But it was the “moderate” Socialist journals which were the most hostile.
(See App. III, Sect. 3) “The Bolsheviki are the most dangerous enemies of
the Revolution,” declared Diefo Naroda. Said the Menshevik Dren, “The
Government ought to defend itself and defend us.” Plekhanov's paper,
Yedinstvo (Unity) (See App. III, Sect. 4), called the attention of the
Government to the fact that the Petrograd workers were being armed, and
demanded stern measures against the Bolsheviki.

Daily the Government seemed to become more helpless. Even the Municipal
administration broke down. The columns of the morning papers were filled
with accounts of the most audacious robberies and murders, and the criminals
were
unmolested.

On the other hand armed workers patrolled the streets at night, doing battle
with marauders and requisitioning arms wherever they found them.

On the first of November Colonel Polkovnikov, Military Commander of

Petrograd, issued a proclamation:

Despite the difficult days through which the country is passing,

irresponsible appeals to armed demonstrations and massacres are still being
spread around Petrograd, and from day to day robbery and disorder
increase.

This state of things is disorganising the life of the citizens, and hinders the
systematic work of the Government and the Municipal Institutions.

In full consciousness of my responsibility and my duty before my

country, I command:

1. Every military unit, in accordance with special instructions and within

the territory of its garrison, to afford every assistance to the Municipality,
to the Commissars, and to the militia, in the guarding of Government
institutions.

2. The organisation of patrols, in co-operation with the District Commander

and the representatives of the city militia, and the taking of measures for the
arrest of criminals and deserters.

3. The arrest of all persons entering barracks and inciting to armed

demonstrations and massacres, and their delivery to the headquarters of
the Second Commander of the city.

4. To suppress any armed demonstration or riot at its start, with all armed
forces at hand.

5. To afford assistance to the Commissars in preventing unwarranted searches

in houses and unwarranted arrests.

6. To report immediately all that happens in the district under charge to the
Staff of the Petrograd Military District.

I call upon all Army Committees and organisations to afford their help to the
commanders in fulfilment of the duties with which they are charged.

In the Council of the Republic Kerensky declared that the Government was
fully aware of the Bolshevik preparations, and had sufficient force to cope with
any demonstration. (See App. III, Sect. 5) He accused Novaya bus and
Robotchi Put of both doing the same kind of subversive work. “But owing to
the absolute freedom of the press,” he added, “the Government is not in a
position to combat printed lies.[11]. ...” Declaring that these were two aspects
of the same propaganda, which had for its object the counter-revolution, so
ardently desired by the Dark Forces, he went on:

“I am a doomed man, it doesn't matter what happens to me, and I have

the audacity to say that the other enigmatic part is that of the
unbelievable provocation created in the city by the Bolsheviki!”

[11] This was not quite candid. The Provisional Government had
suppressed Bolshevik papers before, in July, and was planning to do so
again.

On November 2d only fifteen delegates to the Congress of Soviets had

arrived. Next day there were a hundred, and the morning after that a hundred
and seventy-five, of whom one hundred and three were Bolsheviki. Four
hundred
constituted a quorum, and the Congress was only three days off....

I spent a great deal of time at Smolny. It was no longer easy to get in. Double
rows of sentries guarded the outer gates, and once inside the front door there
was a long line of people waiting to be let in, four at a time, to be questioned
as to their identity and their business. Passes were given out, and the pass
system was changed every few hours; for spies continually sneaked
through....

[Graphic, page 49: Russian Pass to Reed, translation follows]

Pass to Smolny Institute, issued by the Military Revolutionary

Committee, giving me the right of entry at any time. (Translation)

Military Revolutionary Committee

attached to the
Petrograd Soviet of W. & S.
D. Commandant's office
16th November, 1917
No. 955
 Smolny Institute

PASS

Is given by the present to John Reed, correspondent of the American Socialist

press, until December 1, the right of free entry into Smolny Institute.
Commandant Adjutant

One day as I came up to the outer gate I saw Trotzky and his wife just ahead
of me. They were halted by a soldier. Trotzky searched through his pockets,
but could find no pass.

“Never mind,” he said finally. “You know me. My name is Trotzky.”

“You haven't got a pass,” answered the soldier stubbornly.

“You cannot go in. Names don't mean anything to me.”

“But I am the president of the Petrograd Soviet.”

“Well,” replied the soldier, “if you're as important a fellow as that you must
at least have one little paper.”

Trotzky was very patient. “Let me see the Commandant,” he said. The
soldier hesitated, grumbling something about not wanting to disturb the
Commandant for every devil that came along. He beckoned finally to the
soldier in command of the guard. Trotzky explained matters to him. “My
name is Trotzky,” he repeated.

“Trotzky?” The other soldier scratched his head. “I've heard the
name somewhere,” he said at length. “I guess it's all right. You can
go on in, comrade. ”

In the corridor I met Karakhan, member of the Bolshevik Central

Committee, who explained to me what the new Government would be like.

“A loose organisation, sensitive to the popular will as expressed through the

Soviets, allowing local forces full play. At present the Provisional
Government obstructs the action of the local democratic will, just as the
Tsar's Government did. The initiative of the new society shall come from
below.... The form of the
Government will be modelled on the Constitution of the Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party. The new Tsay-ee-kah, responsible to frequent
meetings of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, will be the parliament;
the various Ministries will be headed by coIfepia—committees—instead
of by Ministers, and will be directly responsible to the Soviets. ”

On October 30th, by appointment, I went up to a small, bare room in the attic

of Smolny, to talk with Trotzky. In the middle of the room he sat on a rough
chair at a bare table. Few questions from me were necessary; he talked
rapidly and steadily, for more than an hour. The substance of his talk, in his
own words, I give here:

“The Provisional Government is absolutely powerless. The bourgeoisie is in

control, but this control is masked by a fictitious coalition with the oborontsi
parties. Now, during the Revolution, one sees revolts of peasants who are tired
of waiting for their promised land; and all over the country, in all the toiling
classes, the same disgust is evident. This domination by the bourgeoisie is
only possible by means of civil war. The Kornilov method is the only way by
which the bourgeoisie can control. But it is force which the bourgeoisie
lacks....................................................................................................The
Army is with us. The conciliators and pacifists, Socialist Revolutionaries and
Mensheviki, have lost all authority—because the struggle between the peasants
and the landlords, between the workers and the employers, between the soldiers
and the officers, has become more bitter, more irreconcilable than ever. Only
by the concerted action of the popular mass, only by the victory of proletarian
dictatorship, can the Revolution be achieved and the people saved....

“The Soviets are the most perfect representatives of the people—perfect in their
revolutionary experience, in their ideas and objects. Based directly upon the
army in the trenches, the workers in the factories, and the peasants in the
fields, they are the backbone of the Revolution.

“There has been an attempt to create a power without the Soviets—and only
powerlessness has been created. Counter-revolutionary schemes of all sorts are
now being hatched in the corridors of the Council of the Russian Republic.
The Cadet party represents the counter-revolution militant. On the other side,
the Soviets represent the cause of the people. Between the two camps there
are no groups of serious importance. ... It is the lutte [inale. The bourgeois
counter- revolution organises all its forces and waits for the moment to attack
us. Our answer will be decisive. We will complete the work scarcely begun in
March,
and advanced during the Kornilov affair.....”

He went on to speak of the new Government's foreign policy:

“Our first act will be to call for an immediate armistice on all fronts, and a
conference of peoples to discuss democratic peace terms. The quantity of
democracy we get in the peace settlement depends on the quantity of
revolutionary response there is in Europe. If we create here a Government of
the Soviets, that will be a powerful factor for immediate peace in Europe; for
this Government will address itself directly and immediately to all peoples,
over the heads of their Governments, proposing an armistice. At the moment
of the conclusion of peace the pressure of the Russian Revolution will be in
the direction of ‘no annexations, no indemnities, the right of self-
determination of peoples, and a Federated Republic o[Europe....

“At the end of this war I see Europe recreated, not by the diplomats, but by
the proletariat. The Federated Republic of Europe—the United States of
Europe— that is what must be. National autonomy no longer suffices.
Economic evolution demands the abolition of national frontiers. If Europe is
to remain split into national groups, then Imperialism will recommence its
work. Only a Federated Republic of Europe can give peace to the world.”
He smiled—that fine, faintly ironical smile of his. “But without the action of the
European masses, these ends cannot be realised—now ”

Now while everybody was waiting for the Bolsheviki to appear suddenly on
the streets one morning and begin to shoot down people with white collars
on, the real insurrection took its way quite naturally and openly.

The Provisional Government planned to send the Petrograd garrison to the front.

The Petrograd garrison numbered about sixty thousand men, who had taken a
prominent part in the Revolution. It was they who had turned the tide in the
great days of March, created the Soviets of Soldiers' Deputies, and hurled
back Kornilov from the gates of Petrograd.

Now a large pan of them were Bolsheviki. When the Provisional

Government talked of evacuating the city, it was the Petrograd garrison
which answered, “If you are not capable of defending the capital, conclude
peace; if you cannot conclude peace, go away and make room for a People's
Government which can do both. ”
It was evident that any attempt at insurrection depended upon the attitude of
the Petrograd garrison. The Government's plan was to replace the garrison
regiments with “dependable” troops—Cossacks, Death Battalions. The Army
Committees, the “moderate” Socialists and the Tsay-ee-kah supported the
Government. A wide-spread agitation was carried on at the Front and in
Petrograd, emphasizing the fact that for eight months the Petrograd garrison
had been leading an easy life in the barracks of the capital, while their
exhausted comrades in the trenches starved and died.

Naturally there was some truth in the accusation that the garrison regiments
were reluctant to exchange their comparative comfort for the hardships of a
winter campaign. But there were other reasons why they refused to go. The
Petrograd Soviet feared the Government's intentions, and from the Front came
hundreds of delegates, chosen by the common soldiers, crying, “It is true we
need reinforcements, but more important, we must know that Petrograd and
the Revolution are well-guarded. ... Do you hold the rear, comrades, and we
will hold the front!”

On October 25th, behind closed doors, the Central Committee of the

Petrograd Soviet discussed the formation of a special Military Committee to
decide the whole question. The next day a meeting of the Soldiers' Section of
the Petrograd Soviet elected a Committee, which immediately proclaimed a
boycott of the bourgeois newspapers, and condemned the Tsay-ee-kah for
opposing the Congress of Soviets. On the 29th, in open session of the
Petrograd Soviet, Trotzky proposed that the Soviet formally sanction the
Military Revolutionary Committee. “We ought,” he said, “to create our special
organisation to march to battle, and if necessary to die....” It was decided to
send to the front two delegations, one from the Soviet and one from the
garrison, to confer with the Soldiers' Committees and the General Staff.

At Pskov, the Soviet delegates were met by General Tcheremissov,

commander of the Northern Front, with the curt declaration that he had
ordered the Petrograd garrison to the trenches, and that was all. The garrison
committee was not allowed to leave Petrograd. ...

A delegation of the Soldiers' Section of the Petrograd Soviet asked that a

representative be admitted to the Staff of the Petrograd District. Refused. The
Petrograd Soviet demanded that no orders be issued without the approval of
the Soldiers' Section. Refused. The delegates were roughly told, “We only
recognise
the Tsay-ee-kah. We do not recognise you; if you break any laws, we shall
arrest you.”

On the 30th a meeting of representatives of all the Petrograd regiments passed

a resolution: “The Petrograd garrison no longer recognises the Provisional
Government. The Petrograd Soviet is our Government. We wilf obey only the
orders o[the Petrograd Soviet, through the Military Revolutionary Committee.”
The local military units were ordered to wait for instructions from the Soldiers'
Section of the Petrograd Soviet.

Next day the Tsay-ee-kah summoned its own meeting, composed largely of
officers, formed a Committee to cooperate with the Staff, and detailed
Commissars in all quaners of the city.

A great soldier meeting at Smolny on the 3d resolved:

Saluting the creation of the Military Revolutionary Committee,

the Petrograd garrison promises it complete support in all its
actions, to unite more closely the front and the rear in the
interests of the Revolution.
The garrison moreover declares that with the revolutionary
proletariat it assures the maintenance of revolutionary order in
Petrograd. Every attempt at provocation on the part of the
Kornilovtsi or the bourgeoisie will be met with merciless resistance.

Now conscious of its power, the Military Revolutionary Committee

peremptorily summoned the Petrograd Staff to submit to its control. To all
printing plants it gave orders not to publish any appeals or proclamations
without the Committee's authorisation. Armed Commissars visited the Kronversk
arsenal and seized great quantities of arms and ammunition, halting a
shipment of ten thousand bayonets which was being sent to Novotcherkask,
headquarters of Kaledin. ...

Suddenly awake to the danger, the Government offered immunity if the

Committee would disband. Too late. At midnight November 5th Kerensky
himself sent Malevsky to offer the Petrograd Soviet representation on the Staff.
The Military Revolutionary Committee accepted. An hour later General
Manikovsky, acting Minister of war, countermanded the offer. ...

Tuesday morning, November 6th, the city was thrown into excitement by the
appearance of a placard signed, “Military Revolutionary Committee attached to
the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.”

To the Population of Petrograd. Citizens!

Counter-revolution has raised its criminal head. The Kornilovtsi are mobilising
their forces in order to crush the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and break
the Constituent Assembly. At the same time the pogromists may attempt to call
upon the people of Petrograd for trouble and bloodshed. The Petrograd
Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies takes upon itself the guarding of
revolutionary order in the city against counter-revolutionary and pogrom
attempts.

The Petrograd garrison will not allow any violence or disorders. The
population is invited to arrest hooligans and Black Hundred agitators and
take them to the Soviet Commissars at the nearest barracks. At the first
attempt of the Dark Forces to make trouble on the streets of Petrograd,
whether robbery or fighting, the criminals will be wiped off the face of the
earth!

Citizens! We call upon you to maintain complete quiet and self-possession.

The cause of order and Revolution is in strong hands.
List of regiments where there are Commissars of the Military
Revolutionary Committee....

On the 3rd the leaders of the Bolsheviki had another historic meeting behind
closed doors. Notified by Zalkind, I waited in the corridor outside the door;
and Volodarsky as he came out told me what was going on.

Lenin spoke: “November 6th will be too early. We must have an all-Russian
basis for the rising; and on the 6th all the delegates to the Congress will not
have arrived. ... On the other hand, November 8th will be too late. By that
time the Congress will be organised, and it is difficult for a large organised
body of people to take swift, decisive action. We must act on the 7th, the day
the Congress meets, so that we may say to it, ‘Here is the power! What are
you going to do with it?”’

In a certain upstairs room sat a thin-faced, long-haired individual, once an

officer in the armies of the Tsar, then revolutionist and exile, a certain
Avseenko, called Antonov, mathematician and chess-player; he was drawing
careful plans for the seizure of the capital.

On its side the Government was preparing. Inconspicuously certain of the

most loyal regiments, from widely-separated divisions, were ordered to
Petrograd.
The yunker artillery was drawn into the Winter Palace. Patrols of Cossacks
made their appearance in the streets, for the first time since the July days.
Polkovnikov issued order after order, threatening to repress all insubordination
with the “utmost energy.” Kishkin, Minister of Public Instruction, the worst-
hated member of the Cabinet, was appointed Special Commissar to keep
order in Petrograd; he named as assistants two men no less unpopular,
Rutenburg and Paltchinsky. Petrograd, Cronstadt and Finland were declared in
a state of siege— upon which the bourgeois Novoye Vremya (New Times)
remarked ironically:

Why the state of siege? The Government is no longer a power. It has no

moral authority and it does not possess the necessary apparatus to use force
......................................................................................................... In the
most favourable circumstances it can only negotiate with any one who
consents to parley. Its authority goes no farther. ...

Monday morning, the 5th, I dropped in at the Marinsky Palace, to see what
was happening in the Council of the Russian Republic. Bitter debate on
Terestchenko's foreign policy. Echoes of the Burtzev-Verkhovski affair. All the
diplomats present except the Italian ambassador, who everybody said was
prostrated by the Carso disaster....

As I came in, the Left Socialist Revolutionary Karelin was reading aloud
an editorial from the London Times which said, “The remedy for
Bolshevism is bullets!” Turning to the Cadets he cried, “That's what for
think, too!”

Voices from the Right, “Yes! Yes!”

“Yes, I know you think so,” answered Karelin, hotly. “But you haven't the
courage to try it!”

Then Skobeliev, looking like a matinée idol with his soft blond beard and
wavy yellow hair, rather apologetically defending the Soviet nakaz.
Terestchenko followed, assailed from the Left by cries of “Resignation!
Resignation!” He insisted that the delegates of the Government and of the
Tsay-ee-kah to Paris should have a common point of view—his own. A few
words about the restoration of discipline in the army, about war to victory
........................................................................................ Tumult, and over
the stubborn opposition of the truculent Left, the Council of the Republic
passed to the simple order of the day.

There stretched the rows of Bolshevik seats—empty since that first day when
they left the Council, carrying with them so much life. As I went down the
stairs it seemed to me that in spite of the bitter wrangling, no real voice from
the rough world outside could penetrate this high, cold hall, and that the
Provisional Government was wrecked—on the same rock of War and Peace
that had wrecked the Miliukov Ministry.... The doorman grumbled as he put
on my coat, “I don't know what is becoming of poor Russia. All these
Mensheviki and Bolsheviki and Trudoviki.... This Ukraine and this Finland
and the German imperialists and the English imperialists. I am forty-five
years old, and in all my life I never heard so many words as in this place.
...........................................................................”

In the corridor I met Professor Shatsky, a rat-faced individual in a dapper

frock- coat, very influential in the councils of the Cadet party. I asked him
what he thought of the much-talked-of Bolshevik vystuplennie. He shrugged,
sneering.

“They are cattle—canaille,” he answered. “They will not dare, or if they dare
they will soon be sent flying. From our point of view it will not be bad, for
then they will ruin themselves and have no power in the Constituent
Assembly.. ..
“But, my dear sir, allow me to outline to you my plan for a form of
Government to be submitted to the Constituent Assembly. You see, I am
chairman of a commission appointed from this body, in conjunction with the
Provisional Government, to work out a constitutional project. ... We will
have a legislative assembly of two chambers, such as you have in the
United States. In the lower chamber will be territorial representatives; in the
upper, representatives of the liberal professions, zemstvos, Cooperatives—
and Trade Unions..................................................................... ”

Outside a chill, damp wind came from the west, and the cold mud underfoot
soaked through my shoes. Two companies of bunkers passed swinging up the
Morskaya, tramping stiffly in their long coats and singing an oldtime crashing
chorus, such as the soldiers used to sing under the Tsar.. .. At the first cross-
street I noticed that the City Militiamen were mounted, and armed with
revolvers in bright new holsters; a little group of people stood silently staring
at them. At the corner of the Nevsky I bought a pamphlet by Lenin, “Will the
Bolsheviki be Able to Hold the Power?” paying for it with one of the stamps
which did duty for small change. The usual street-cars crawled past, citizens
and soldiers clinging to the outside in a way to make Theodore P. Shonts
green with envy.. .. Along the sidewalk a row of deserters in uniform sold
cigarettes and sunflower seeds. ...

Up the Nevsky in the sour twilight crowds were battling for the latest papers,
and knots of people were trying to make out the multitudes of appeals (See
App. III, Sect. 6) and proclamations pasted in every flat place; from the Tsay-
ee-kah, the Peasants' Soviets, the “moderate” Socialist parties, the Army
Committees— threatening, cursing, beseeching the workers and soldiers to
stay home, to support the Government. ...

An armoured automobile went slowly up and down, siren screaming. On every

corner, in every open space, thick groups were clustered; arguing soldiers and
students. Night came swiftly down, the wide-spaced street-lights flickered on,
the tides of people flowed endlessly. ... It is always like that in Petrograd just
before trouble. ...

The city was nervous, starting at every sharp sound. But still no sign from
the Bolsheviki; the soldiers stayed in the barracks, the workmen in the
factories. ... We went to a moving picture show near the Kazan Cathedral—a
bloody Italian film of passion and intrigue. Down front were some soldiers and
sailors, staring at the screen in childlike wonder, totally unable to comprehend
why there should
be so much violent running about, and so much homicide. ...

From there I hurried to Smolny. In room 10 on the top floor, the Military
Revolutionary Committee sat in continuous session, under the chairmanship of
a tow-headed, eighteen-year-old boy named Lazimir. He stopped, as he
passed, to shake hands rather bashfully.

“Peter-Paul Fortress has just come over to us,” said he, with a pleased grin.
“A minute ago we got word from a regiment that was ordered by the
Government to come to Petrograd. The men were suspicious, so they stopped
the train at Gatchina and sent a delegation to us. ‘What's the matter?’ they
asked. ‘What have you got to say? We have just passed a resolution, “All
Power to the Soviets.”’... The Military Revolutionary Committee sent back
word, ‘Brothers! We greet you in the name of the Revolution. Stay where you
are until further instructions!”’

All telephones, he said, were cut off: but communication with the factories and
barracks was established by means of military telephonograph apparatus. ...

A steady stream of couriers and Commissars came and went. Outside the door
waited a dozen volunteers, ready to carry word to the farthest quarters of the
city. One of them, a gypsy-faced man in the uniform of a lieutenant, said in
French, “Everything is ready to move at the push of a button. ”

There passed Podvoisky, the thin, bearded civillian whose brain conceived the
strategy of insurrection; Antonov, unshaven, his collar filthy, drunk with loss of
sleep; Krylenko, the squat, wide-faced soldier, always smiling, with his violent
gestures and tumbling speech; and Dybenko, the giant bearded sailor with the
placid face. These were the men of the hour—and of other hours to come.

Downstairs in the office of the Factory-Shop Committees sat Seratov,

signing orders on the Government Arsenal for arms—one hundred and
fifty rifles for each factory.... Delegates waited in line, forty of them....

In the hall I ran into some of the minor Bolshevik leaders. One showed me a
revolver. “The game is on,” he said, and his face was pale. “Whether we move
or not the other side knows it must finish us or be finished ”

The Petrograd Soviet was meeting day and night. As I came into the great
hall Trotzky was just finishing.
“We are asked,” he said, “if we intend to have a vystuplennie. I can give a
clear answer to that question. The Petrograd Soviet feels that at last the
moment has arrived when the power must fall into the hands of the Soviets.
This transfer of government will be accomplished by the All-Russian
Congress. Whether an armed demonstration is necessary will depend on...
those who wish to interfere with the All-Russian Congress.. ..

“We feel that our Government, entrusted to the personnel of the

Provisional Cabinet, is a pitiful and helpless Government, which only awaits
the sweep of the broom of History to give way to a really popular
Government. But we are trying to avoid a conflict, even now, to-day. We
hope that the All-Russian Congress will take... into its hands that power
and authority which rests upon the organised freedom of the people. If,
however, the Government wants to utilise the short period it is expected
to live—twenty-four, forty-eight, or seventy-two hours—to attack us, then
we shall answer with counter-attacks, blow for blow, steel for iron!”

Amid cheers he announced that the Left Socialist Revolutionaries had agreed
to send representatives into the Military Revolutionary Committee....

As I left Smolny, at three o'clock in the morning, I noticed that two rapid-
firing guns had been mounted, one on each side of the door, and that strong
patrols of soldiers guarded the gates and the near-by street-corners. Bill
Shatov[12] came bounding up the steps. “Well,” he cried, “We're off!
Kerensky sent the yunkers to close down our papers, Soldat and Rabotchi
Put. But our troops went down and smashed the Government seals, and now
we're sending detachments to seize the bourgeois newspaper offices!” Exultantly
he slapped me on the shoulder, and ran in....

[12] Well known in the American labor movement.

On the morning of the 6th I had business with the censor, whose office was
in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Everywhere, on all the walls, hysterical
appeals to the people to remain “calm.” Polkovnikov emitted prikaz after
prikaz:

I order all military units and detachments to remain in their barracks until
further orders from the Staff of the Military District. ... All officers who act
without orders from their superiors will be court-martialled for mutiny. I
forbid absolutely any execution by soldiers of instructions from other
organisations....
The morning papers announced that the Government had suppressed the
papers Novaya Rus, Zhivoye Slovo, Rabotchi Put and Soldat, and decreed
the arrest of the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet and the members of the
Military Revolutionary Committee....

As I crossed the Palace Square several batteries of yunker artillery came

through the Red Arch at a jingling trot, and drew up before the Palace. The
great red building of the General Staff was unusually animated, several
armoured automobiles ranked before the door, and motors full of officers were
coming and going.. .. The censor was very much excited, like a small boy at
a circus.
Kerensky, he said, had just gone to the Council of the Republic to offer his
resignation. I hurried down to the Marinsky Palace, arriving at the end of
that passionate and almost incoherent speech of Kerensky's, full of self-
justification and bitter denunciation of his enemies.

“I will cite here the most characteristic passage from a whole series of
articles published in Rabotchi Put by Ulianov-Lenin, a state criminal who is
in hiding and whom we are trying to find.... This state criminal has invited
the proletariat and the Petrograd garrison to repeat the experience of the
16th-18th of July, and insists upon the immediate necessity for an armed
rising. ... Moreover, other Bolshevik leaders have taken the floor in a series of
meetings, and also made an appeal to immediate insurrection. Panicularly
should be noticed the activity of the present president of the Petrograd
Soviet, Bronstein-Trotzky....

“I ought to bring to your notice... that the expressions and the style of a
whole series of articles in Rabotchi Put and Soldat resemble absolutely those
of Novaya Rus. ... We have to do not so much with the movement of such
and such political party, as with the exploitation of the political ignorance and
criminal instincts of a part of the population, a sort of organisation whose
object it is to provoke in Russia, cost what it may, an inconscient movement
of destruction and pillage; for given the state of mind of the masses, any
movement at Petrograd will be followed by the most terrible massacres, which
will cover with eternal shame the name of free Russia. ...

“... By the admission of Ulianov-Lenin himself, the situation of the extreme left
wing of the Social Democrats in Russia is very favourable.” (Here Kerensky
read the following quotation from Lenin's article.):

Think of it!... The German comrades have only one Liebknecht, without
newspapers, without freedom of meeting, without a Soviet. ... They are
opposed by the incredible hostility of all classes of society—and yet the
German comrades try to act; while we, having dozens of newspapers,
freedom of meeting, the majority of the Soviets, we, the best-placed
international proletarians of the entire world, can we refuse to support the
German revolutionists and insurrectionary organisations?...

Kerensky then continued:

“The organisers of rebellion recognise thus implicitly that the most perfect
conditions for the free action of a political party obtain now in Russia,
administered by a Provisional Government at the head of which is, in the eyes
of this party, ‘a usurper and a man who has sold himself to the bourgeoisie,
the Minister-President Kerensky. ’

“... The organisers of the insurrection do not come to the aid of the German
proletariat, but of the German governing classes, and they open the Russian
front to the iron fists of Wilhelm and his friends. ... Little matter to the
Provisional Government the motives of these people, little matter if they act
consciously or unconsciously; but in any case, from this tribune, in full
consciousness of my responsibility, I quality such acts of a Russian political
party as acts of treason to Russia!

“... I place myself at the point of view of the Right, and I propose immediately
to proceed to an investigation and make the necessary arrests.” (Uproar from
the Left.) “Listen to me!” he cried in a powerful voice. “At the moment
when the state is in danger, because of conscious or unconscious treason, the
Provisional Government, and myself among others, prefer to be killed rather
than betray the life, the honour and the independence of Russia. ”

At this moment a paper was handed to Kerensky.

“I have just received the proclamation which they are distributing to the
regiments. Here is the contents.” Reading: “’The Petrograd Soviet o[ Workers’
and Soldiers’Deputies is menaced. We order immediately the regiments to
mobilise on a war [ooting and tO aWait new orders. All delay or non-executiOR
0[ this order will be considered as an act o[treason to the devolution. The
Military Revolutionary Committee. For the President, PodvoiSkf. The
Secretary, Antonov.’
“In reality, this is an attempt to raise the populace against the existing order of
things, to break the Constituent and to open the front to the regiments of the
iron fist of Wilhelm. ...

“I say ‘populace’ intentionally, because the conscious democracy and its Tsay-
ee- kah, all the Army organisations, all that free Russia glorifies, the good
sense, the honour and the conscience of the great Russian democracy, protests
against these things. ...

“I have not come here with a prayer, but to state my firm conviction that the
Provisional Government, which defends at this moment our new liberty—that
the new Russian state, destined to a brilliant future, will find unanimous
support except among those who have never dared to face the truth....

“... The Provisional Government has never violated the liberty of all citizens of
the State to use their political rights.... But now the Provisional
Government.... declares: in this moment those elements of the Russian nation,
those groups and parties who have dared to lift their hands against the free will
of the Russian people, at the same time threatening to open the front to
Germany, must be liquidated with decision!...

“Let the population of Petrograd understand that it will encounter a firm

power, and perhaps at the last moment good sense, conscience and honour
will triumph in the hearts of those who still possess them ”

All through this speech, the hall rang with deafening clamour. When the
Minister-President had stepped down, pale-faced and wet with perspiration,
and strode out with his suite of officers, speaker after speaker from the Left
and Centre attacked the Right, all one angry roaring. Even the Socialist
Revolutionaries, through Gotz:

“The policy of the Bolsheviki is demagogic and criminal, in their exploitation

of the popular discontent. But there is a whole series of popular demands
which have received no satisfaction up to now.... The questions of peace, land
and the democratization of the army ought to be stated in such a fashion that
no soldier, peasant or worker would have the least doubt that our Government
is attempting, firmly and infallibly, to solve them.. ..

“We Mensheviki do not wish to provoke a Cabinet crisis, and we are ready to
defend the Provisional Government with all our energy, to the last drop of our
blood—if only the Provisional Government, on all these burning questions, will
speak the clear and precise words awaited by the people with such
impatience...”

Then Martov, furious:

“The words of the Minister-President, who allowed himself to speak of

‘populace’ when it is question of the movement of important sections of the
proletariat and the army—although led in the wrong direction—are nothing but
an incitement to civil war.”

The order of the day proposed by the Left was voted. It amounted practically to
a vote of lack of confidence.

1. The armed demonstration which has been preparing for some days past has
for its object a coup d'etat, threatens to provoke civil war, creates conditions
favourable to pogroms and counterrevolution, the mobilization of counter-
revolutionary forces, such as the Black Hundreds, which will inevitably bring
about the impossibility of convoking the Constituent, will cause a military
catastrophe, the death of the Revolution, paralyse the economic life of the
country and destroy Russia;

2. The conditions favourable to this agitation have been created by delay in

passing urgent measures, as well as objective conditions caused by the war
and the general disorder. It is necessary before everything to promulgate at
once a decree transmitting the land to the peasants' Land Committees, and to
adopt an energetic course of action abroad in proposing to the Allies to
proclaim their peace terms and to begin peace-parleys;

3. To cope with Monarchist manifestations and pogromist movements, it is

indispensable to take immediate measures to suppress these movements, and
for this purpose to create at Petrograd a Committee of Public Safety,
composed of representatives of the Municipality and the organs of the
revolutionary democracy, acting in contact with the Provisional
Government....

It is interesting to note that the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries all

rallied to this resolution.... When Kerensky saw it, however, he summoned
Avksentiev to the Winter Palace to explain. If it expressed a lack of
confidence in the Provisional Government, he begged Avksentiev to form a
new Cabinet. Dan, Gotz and Avksentiev, the leaders of the “compromisers,”
performed their
last compromise. ... They explained to Kerensky that it was not meant as a
criticism of the Government!

At the corner of the Morskaya and the Nevsky, squads of soldiers with fixed
bayonets were stopping all private automobiles, turning out the occupants,
and ordering them toward the Winter Palace. A large crowd had gathered to
watch them. Nobody knew whether the soldiers belonged to the Government
or the Military Revolutionary Committee. Up in front of the Kazan Cathedral
the same thing was happening, machines being directed back up the Nevsky.
Five or six sailors with rifles came along, laughing excitedly, and fell into
conversation with two of the soldiers. On the sailors' hat bands were Avrora
and Zaria Svobody,— the names of the leading Bolshevik cruisers of the
Baltic Fleet. One of them said, “Cronstadt is coming!”... It was as if, in 1792,
on the streets of Paris, some one had said: “The Marseillais are coming!” For
at Cronstadt were twenty-five thousand sailors, convinced Bolsheviki and
not afraid to die....

Rabotchi i Soldat was just out, all its front page one huge proclamation:
SOLDIERS! WORKERS! CITIZENS!

The enemies of the people passed last night to the offensive. The Kornilovists
of the Staff are trying to draw in from the suburbs yunkers and volunteer
battalions. The Oranienbaum yunkers and the Tsarskoye Selo volunteers
refused to come out. A stroke of high treason is being contemplated against
the Petrograd
Soviet. ... The campaign of the counter-revolutionists is being directed against
the All-Russian Congress of Soviets on the eve of its opening, against the
Constituent Assembly, against the people. The Petrograd Soviet is guarding the
Revolution. The Military Revolutionary Committee is directing the repulse of
the conspirators' attack. The entire garrison and proletariat of Petrograd are
ready to deal the enemy of the people a crushing blow.

The Military Revolutionary Committee decrees:

1. All regimental, division and battle-ship Committees, together with the

Soviet Commissars, and all revolutionary organisations, shall meet in
continuous session, concentrating in their hands all information about the
plans of the conspirators.

2. Not one soldier shall leave his division without permission of the Committee.

3. To send to Smolny at once two delegates from each military unit and five
from each Ward Soviet.

4. All members of the Petrograd Soviet and all delegates to the All-
Russian Congress are invited immediately to Smolny for an
extraordinary meeting.

Counter-revolution has raised its criminal head.

A great danger threatens all the conquests and hopes of the soldiers and

workers. But the forces of the Revolution by far exceed those of its enemies.

The cause of the People is in strong hands. The conspirators will be

crushed. No hesitation or doubts! Firmness, steadfastness, discipline,

determination! Long live the Revolution!

The Military Revolutionary Committee.

The Petrograd Soviet was meeting continuously at Smolny, a centre of storm,

delegates falling down asleep on the floor and rising again to take part in the
debate, Trotzky, Kameniev, Volodarsky speaking six, eight, twelve hours a
day....

I went down to room 18 on the first floor where the Bolshevik delegates
were holding caucus, a harsh voice steadily booming, the speaker hidden
by the crowd: “The compromisers say that we are isolated. Pay no attention
to them. Once it begins they must be dragged along with us, or else lose
their following. ”

Here he held up a piece of paper. “We are dragging them! A message has
just come from the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries! They say that
they condemn our action, but that if the Government attacks us they will not
oppose the cause of the proletariat!” Exultant shouting....

As night fell the great hall filled with soldiers and workmen, a monstrous
dun mass, deep-humming in a blue haze of smoke. The old Tsay-ee-kah
had finally decided to welcome the delegates to that new Congress which
would mean its own ruin—and perhaps the ruin of the revolutionary order
it had built. At this meeting, however, only members of the Tsay-ee-kah
could vote....
It was after midnight when Gotz took the chair and Dan rose to speak, in a
tense silence, which seemed to me almost menacing.

“The hours in which we live appear in the most tragic colours,” he said. “The
enemy is at the gates of Petrograd, the forces of the democracy are trying to
organise to resist him, and yet we await bloodshed in the streets of the
capital, and famine threatens to destroy, not only our homogeneous
Government, but the Revolution itself....

“The masses are sick and exhausted. They have no interest in the Revolution. If
the Bolsheviki start anything, that will be the end of the Revolution...” (Cries,
“That's a lie!)” “The counter-revolutionists are waiting with the Bolsheviki to
begin riots and massacres.... If there is any vystuplennie, there will be no
Constituent Assembly....” (Cries, “Lie! Shame!”)

“It is inadmissible that in the zone of military operations the Petrograd

garrison shall not submit to the orders of the Staff.. .. You must obey the
orders of the Staff and of the Tsay-ee-kah elected by you. All Power to the
Soviets—that means death! Robbers and thieves are waiting for the moment
to loot and burn. ... When you have such slogans put before you, ‘Enter the
houses, take away the shoes and clothes from the bourgeoisie—”’ (Tumult.
Cries, “No such slogan! A lie! A lie!”) “Well, it may stan differently, but it
will end that way!

“The Tsay-ee-kah has full power to act, and must be obeyed.... We are not
afraid of bayonets.... The Tsay-ee-kah will defend the Revolution with its
body....................................................................................................... ”
(Cries, “It was a dead body long ago!”)

Immense continued uproar, in which his voice could be heard screaming, as he

pounded the desk, “Those who are urging this are committing a crime!”

Voice: “You committed a crime long ago, when you captured the power and
turned it over to the bourgeoisie!”

Gotz, ringing the chairman's bell: “Silence, or I'llhave you put out!”

Voice: “Try it!” (Cheers and whistling.)

“Now concerning our policy about peace.” (Laughter.) “Unfortunately Russia

can no longer support the continuation of the war. There is going to be peace,
but not permanent peace—not a democratic peace.... To-day, at the Council of
the
Republic, in order to avoid bloodshed, we passed an order of the day
demanding the surrender of the land to the Land Committees and immediate
peace negotiations. ...” (Laughter, and cries, “Too late!”)

Then for the Bolsheviki, Trotzky mounted the tribune, borne on a wave of
roaring applause that burst into cheers and a rising house, thunderous. His
thin, pointed face was positively Mephistophelian in its expression of malicious
irony.

“Dan's tactics prove that the masses—the great, dull, indifferent masses—are
absolutely with him!” (Titantic mirth.) He turned toward the chairman,
dramatically. “When we spoke of giving the land to the peasants, you were
against it. We told the peasants, ‘If they don't give it to you, take it
yourselves!’ and the peasants followed our advice. And now you advocate
what we did six months ago....

“I don't think Kerensky's order to suspend the death penalty in the army was
dictated by his ideals. I think Kerensky was persuaded by the Petrograd
garrison, which refused to obey him....

“To-day Dan is accused of having made a speech in the Council of the

Republic which proves him to be a secret Bolshevik. ... The time may come
when Dan will say that the flower of the Revolution participated in the rising
of July 16th and 18th.... In Dan's resolution to-day at the Council of the
Republic there was no mention of enforcing discipline in the army, although
that is urged in the propaganda of his party. ...

“No. The history of the last seven months shows that the masses have left
the Mensheviki. The Mensheviki and the Socialist Revolutionaries
conquered the Cadets, and then when they got the power, they gave it to
the Cadets.. ..

“Dan tells you that you have no right to make an insurrection. Insurrection is
the right of all revolutionists! When the down-trodden masses revolt, it is
their right. ”

Then the long-faced, cruel-tongued Lieber, greeted with groans and laughter.

“Engels and Marx said that the proletariat had no right to take power until it
was ready for it. In a bourgeois revolution like this.... the seizure of power by
the masses means the tragic end of the Revolution.... Trotzky, as a Social
Democratic theorist, is himself opposed to what he is now advocating.. ..”
(Cries,
“Enough! Down with him!”)

Martov, constantly interrupted: “The Internationalists are not opposed to the

transmission of power to the democracy, but they disapprove of the methods
of the Bolsheviki. This is not the moment to seize the power. ”

Again Dan took the floor, violently protesting against the action of the
Military Revolutionary Committee, which had sent a Commissar to seize the
office of Izviestia and censor the paper. The wildest uproar followed. Martov
tried to speak, but could not be heard. Delegates of the Army and the Baltic
Fleet stood up all over the hall, shouting that the Soviet was their
Government. ...

Amid the wildest confusion Ehrlich offered a resolution, appealing to the

workers and soldiers to remain calm and not to respond to provocations to
demonstrate, recognising the necessity of immediately creating a Committee of
Public Safety, and asking the Provisional Government at once to pass decrees
transferring the land to the peasants and beginning peace negotiations....

Then up leaped Volodarsky, shouting harshly that the Tsay-ee-kah, on the eve
of the Congress, had no right to assume the functions of the Congress. The
Tsay-ee- kah was practically dead, he said, and the resolution was simply a
trick to bolster up its waning power....

“As for us, Bolsheviki, we will not vote on this resolution!” Whereupon all the
Bolsheviki left the hall and the resolution was passed. ...

Toward four in the morning I met Zorin in the outer hall, a rifle slung from his
shoulder.

“We're moving!” (See App. III, Sect. 7) said he, calmly but with satisfaction.
“We pinched the Assistant Minister of Justice and the Minister of Religions.
They're down cellar now. One regiment is on the march to capture the
Telephone Exchange, another the Telegraph Agency, another the State Bank.
The Red Guard is out. ”

On the steps of Smolny, in the chill dark, we first saw the Red Guard—a
huddled group of boys in workmen's clothes, carrying guns with bayonets,
talking nervously together.

Far over the still roofs westward came the sound of scattered rifle fire, where the
yunkers were trying to open the bridges over the Neva, to prevent the
factory workers and soldiers of the Viborg quarter from joining the Soviet
forces in the centre of the city; and the Cronstadt sailors were closing them
again....

Behind us great Smolny, bright with lights, hummed like a gigantic hive....
Chapter IV
The Fall of the Provisional Government

Wednesday, November 7th, I rose very late. The noon cannon boomed from
Peter-Paul as I went down the Nevsky. It was a raw, chill day. In front of
the State Bank some soldiers with fixed bayonets were standing at the closed
gates.

“What side do you belong to?” I asked. “The Government?”

“No more Government,” one answered with a grin, “Slava Bogu! Glory to
God!” That was all I could get out of him....

The street-cars were running on the Nevsky, men, women and small boys
hanging on every projection. Shops were open, and there seemed even less
uneasiness among the street crowds than there had been the day before. A
whole crop of new appeals against insurrection had blossomed out on the
walls during the night—to the peasants, to the soldiers at the front, to the
workmen of Petrograd. One read:

FROM THE PETROGRAD MUNICIPAL DUMA:

The Municipal Duma informs the citizens that in the extraordinary meeting
of November 6th the Duma formed a Committee of Public Safety,
composed of members of the Central and Ward Dumas, and representatives
of the following revolutionary democratic organizations: The Tsay-ee-kah,
the All-Russian Executive Committee of Peasant Deputies, the Army
organisations, the Tsentropot, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and
Soldiers' Deputies (!), the Council of Trade Unions, and others.

Members of the Committee of Public Safety will be on duty in the building of

the Municipal Duma. Telephones No. 15-40, 223-77, 138-36.
November 7th, 1917.

Though I didn't realize it then, this was the Duma's declaration of war against
the Bolsheviki.

I bought a copy of Rabotchi Put, the only newspaper which seemed on sale,
and a little later paid a soldier fifty kopeks for a second-hand copy of Dren.
The Bolshevik paper, printed on large-sized sheets in the conquered office of
the Russkaya Vofia, had huge headlines: “ALL POWER—TO THE SOVIETS
OF WORKERS, SOLDIERS AND PEASANTS! PEACE! BREAD! LAND!”
The
leading article was signed “Zinoviev,”—Lenin’s companion in hiding. It began:

Every soldier, every worker, every real Socialist, every honest democrat realises
that there are only two alternatives to the present situation.

Either—the power will remain in the hands of the bourgeois-landlord crew,

and this will mean every kind of repression for the workers, soldiers and
peasants, continuation of the war, inevitable hunger and death. . ..

Or—the power will be transferred to the hands of the revolutionary workers,

soldiers and peasants; and in that case it will mean a complete abolition of
landlord tyranny, immediate check of the capitalists, immediate proposal of a
just peace. Then the land is assured to the peasants, then control of industry is
assured to the workers, then bread is assured to the hungry, then the end of
this nonsensical war!...

Dren contained fragmentary news of the agitated night. Bolsheviki capture of

the Telephone Exchange, the Baltic station, the Telegraph Agency; the
Peterhof yunkers unable to reach Petrograd; the Cossacks undecided; arrest of
some of the Ministers; shooting of Chief of the City Militia Meyer; arrests,
counter-arrests, skirmishes between clashing patrols of soldiers, yunkers and
Red Guards. (See App. IV, Sect. 1)

On the corner of the Morskaya I ran into Captain Gomberg, Menshevik

oboronetz, secretary of the Military Section of his party. When I asked him if
the insurrection had really happened he shrugged his shoulders in a tired
manner and replied, “Tchorf znayef! The devil knows! Well, perhaps the
Bolsheviki can seize the power, but they won't be able to hold it more than
three days. They haven't the men to run a government. Perhaps it's a good
thing to let them try—that will furnish them ”
The Military Hotel at the corner of St. Isaac's Square was picketed by armed
sailors. In the lobby were many of the smart young officers, walking up and
down or muttering together; the sailors wouldn't let them leave. ...

Suddenly came the sharp crack of a rifle outside, followed by a scattered burst
of firing. I ran out. Something unusual was going on around the Marinsky
Palace, where the Council of the Russian Republic met. Diagonally across
the wide square was drawn a line of soldiers, rifles ready, staring at the hotel
roof.

“Provacatzia! Shot at us!” snapped one, while another went running toward the
door.

At the western corner of the Palace lay a big armoured car with a red flag
flying from it, newly lettered in red paint: “S.R.S.D.” psoviet Rabotchikh
Soldatskikh Deputatov); all the guns trained toward St. Isaac's. A barricade had
been heaped up across the mouth of Novaya Ulitza—boxes, barrels, an old
bed-spring, a wagon. A pile of lumber barred the end of the Moika quay.
Shon logs from a neighbouring wood-pile were being built up along the front
of the building to form breastworks....

“Is there going to be any fighting?” I asked.

“Soon, soon,” answered a soldier, nervously. “Go away, comrade, you'll get
hurt. They will come from that direction,” pointing toward the Admiralty.

“Who will?”

“That I couldn't tell you, brother,” he answered, and spat.

Before the door of the Palace was a crowd of soldiers and sailors. A sailor
was telling of the end of the Council of the Russian Republic. “We walked in
there,” he said, “and filled all the doors with comrades. I went up to the
counter- revolutionist Kornilovitz who sat in the president's chair. ‘No more
Council, I says. ‘Run along home now!”’

There was laughter. By waving assorted papers I managed to get around to

the door of the press gallery. There an enormous smiling sailor stopped me,
and when I showed my pass, just said, “If you were Saint Michael himself,
comrade, you couldn't pass here!” Through the glass of the door I made out
the distorted face and gesticulating arms of a French correspondent, locked
in....
Around in front stood a little, grey-moustached man in the uniform of a
general, the centre of a knot of soldiers. He was very red in the face.

“I am General Alexeyev,” he cried. “As your superior officer and as a member

of the Council of the Republic I demand to be allowed to pass!” The guard
scratched his head, looking uneasily out of the corner of his eye; he beckoned
to an approaching officer, who grew very agitated when he saw who it was
and saluted before he realised what he was doing.

“Vashe Vuisokoprevoskhoditelstvo—yow: High Excellency—” he stammered,

in the manner of the old régime, “Access to the Palace is strictly forbidden—I
have no right—”

An automobile came by, and I saw Gotz sitting inside, laughing apparently
with great amusement. A few minutes later another, with armed soldiers on the
front seat, full of arrested members of the Provisional Government. Peters,
Lettish member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, came hurrying
across the Square.

“I thought you bagged all those gentlemen last night,” said I, pointing to them.

“Oh,” he answered, with the expression of a disappointed small boy. “The

damn fools let most of them go again before we made up our minds ”

Down the Voskressensky Prospect a great mass of sailors were drawn up, and
behind them came marching soldiers, as far as the eye could reach.

We went toward the Winter Palace by way of the Admiralteisky. All the
entrances to the Palace Square were closed by sentries, and a cordon of
troops stretched clear across the western end, besieged by an uneasy throng of
citizens. Except for far-away soldiers who seemed to be carrying wood out of
the Palace courtyard and piling it in front of the main gateway, everything
was quiet.

We couldn't make out whether the sentries were pro-Government or pro-

Soviet. Our papers from Smolny had no effect, however, so we approached
another part of the line with an imponant air and showed our American
passports, saying “Official business!” and shouldered through. At the door of
the Palace the same old shveitzari, in their brass-buttoned blue uniforms
with the red-and-gold collars, politely took our coats and hats, and we went
up-stairs. In the dark, gloomy corridor, stripped of its tapestries, a few old
attendants were lounging
about, and in front of Kerensky's door a young officer paced up and down,
gnawing his moustache. We asked if we could interview the Minister-president.
He bowed and clicked his heels.

“No, I am sorry,” he replied in French. “Alexander Feodorvitch is extremely

occupied just now....” He looked at us for a moment. “In fact, he is not
here............................................................................................................ ”

“Where is he?”

“He has gone to the Front. (See App. IV, Sect. 2) And do you know, there
wasn't enough gasoline for his automobile. We had to send to the English
Hospital and borrow some.”

“Are the Ministers here?”

“They are meeting in some room—I don't know where.’

“Are the Bolsheviki coming?”

“OI course. Certainly, they are coming. I expect a telephone call every minute
to say that they are coming. But we are ready. We have bunkers in the front of
the Palace. Through that door there.”

“Can we go in there?”

“No. Certainly not. It is not permitted.” Abruptly he shook hands all around
and walked away. We turned to the forbidden door, set in a temporary
partition dividing the hall and locked on the outside. On the other side were
voices, and somebody laughing. Except for that the vast spaces of the old
Palace were silent as the grave. An old shveitzar ran up. “No, barin, you
must not go in there.”

“Why is the door locked?”

“To keep the soldiers in,” he answered. After a few minutes he said something
about having a glass of tea and went back up the hall. We unlocked the door.

Just inside a couple of soldiers stood on guard, but they said nothing. At the
end of the corridor was a large, ornate room with gilded cornices and
enormous crystal lustres, and beyond it several smaller ones, wainscoted with
dark wood. On both sides of the parquetted floor lay rows of dirty mattresses
and blankets,
upon which occasional soldiers were stretched out; everywhere was a litter of
cigarette-butts, bits of bread, cloth, and empty bottles with expensive French
labels. More and more soldiers, with the red shoulder-straps of the yunker-
schools, moved about in a stale atmosphere of tobacco-smoke and unwashed
humanity. One had a bottle of white Burgundy, evidently filched from the
cellars of the Palace. They looked at us with astonishment as we marched
past, through room after room, until at last we came out into a series of great
state-salons, fronting their long and dirty windows on the Square. The walls
were covered with huge canvases in massive gilt frames—historical battle-
scenes............................................................................................ “12
October 1812” and “6 November 1812” and “16/28 August 1813.”....One had a
gash across the upper right hand corner.

The place was all a huge barrack, and evidently had been for weeks, from the
look of the floor and walls. Machine guns were mounted on window-sills, rifles
stacked between the mattresses.

As we were looking at the pictures an alcoholic breath assailed me from the

region of my left ear, and a voice said in thick but fluent French, “I see, by the
way you admire the paintings, that you are foreigners.” He was a short, puffy
man with a baldish head as he removed his cap.

“Americans? Enchanted. I am Stabs—Capitan Vladimir Artzibashev, absolutely

at your service.” It did not seem to occur to him that there was anything
unusual in four strangers, one a woman, wandering through the defences of
an army awaiting attack. He began to complain of the state of Russia.

“Not only these Bolsheviki,” he said, “but the fine traditions of the Russian
army are broken down. Look around you. These are all students in the
officers' training schools. But are they gentlemen? Kerensky opened the
officers' schools to the ranks, to any soldier who could pass an examination.
Naturally there are many, many who are contaminated by the Revolution.
..................................................................................”

Without consequence he changed the subject. “I am very anxious to go away

from Russia. I have made up my mind to join the American army. Will you
please go to your Consul and make arrangements? I will give you my
address.” In spite of our protestations he wrote it on a piece of paper, and
seemed to feel better at once. I have it still—“Oranien-baumskaya Shkola
Praporshtchikov 2nd, Staraya Peterho[.”
“We had a review this morning early,” he went on, as he guided us through the
rooms and explained everything. “The Women's Battalion decided to remain
loyal to the Government.”

“Are the women soldiers in the Palace?”

“Yes, they are in the back rooms, where they won't be hurt if any trouble
comes.” He sighed. “It is a great responsibility,” said he.

For a while we stood at the window, looking down on the Square before the
Palace, where three companies of long-coated bunkers were drawn up under
arms, being harangued by a tall, energetic-looking officer I recognised as
Stankievitch, chief Military Commissar of the Provisional Government. After a
few minutes two of the companies shouldered arms with a clash, barked three
sharp shouts, and went swinging off across the Square, disappearing through
the Red Arch into the quiet city.

“They are going to capture the Telephone Exchange,” said some one. Three
cadets stood by us, and we fell into conversation. They said they had entered
the schools from the ranks, and gave their names—Robert Olev, Alexei
Vasilienko and Erni Sachs, an Esthonian. But now they didn't want to be
officers any more, because officers were very unpopular. They didn't seem to
know what to do, as a matter of fact, and it was plain that they were not
happy.

But soon they began to boast. “If the Bolsheviki come we shall show them
how to fight. They do not dare to fight, they are cowards. But if we should
be overpowered, well, every man keeps one bullet for himself. ”

At this point there was a burst of rifle-fire not far off. Out on the Square all
the people began to run, falling flat on their faces, and the izvoshfchiki,
standing on the corners, galloped in every direction. Inside all was uproar,
soldiers running here and there, grabbing up guns, rifle-belts and shouting,
“Here they come!
Here they come!” ... But in a few minutes it quieted down again. The
izvoshfchiki came back, the people lying down stood up. Through the Red
Arch appeared the yunkers, marching a little out of step, one of them supported
by two comrades.

It was getting late when we left the Palace. The sentries in the Square had
all disappeared. The great semi-circle of Government buildings seemed
deserted. We went into the Hotel France for dinner, and right in the middle
of soup the
waiter, very pale in the face, came up and insisted that we move to the
main dining-room at the back of the house, because they were going to put
out the lights in the café. “There will be much shooting,” he said.

When we came out on the Morskaya again it was quite dark, except for one
flickering street-light on the corner of the Nevsky. Under this stood a big
armored automobile, with racing engine and oil-smoke pouring out of it. A
small boy had climbed up the side of the thing and was looking down the
barrel of a machine gun. Soldiers and sailors stood around, evidently waiting
for something. We walked back up to the Red Arch, where a knot of soldiers
was gathered staring at the brightly-lighted Winter Palace and talking in loud
tones.

“No, comrades,” one was saying. “How can we shoot at them? The
Women's Battalion is in there—they will say we have fired on Russian
women.”

As we reached the Nevsky again another armoured car came around the
corner, and a man poked his head out of the turret-top.

“Come on!” he yelled. “Let's go on through and attack!”

The driver of the other car came over, and shouted so as to be heard above
the roaring engine. “The Committee says to wait. They have got artillery
behind the wood-piles in there. ”

Here the street-cars had stopped running, few people passed, and there were
no lights; but a few blocks away we could see the trams, the crowds, the
lighted shop-windows and the electric signs of the moving-picture shows—life
going on as usual. We had tickets to the Ballet at the Marinsky Theatre—all
theatres were open—but it was too exciting out of doors....

In the darkness we stumbled over lumber-piles barricading the Police Bridge,

and before the Stroganov Palace made out some soldiers wheeling into
position a three-inch field-gun. Men in various uniforms were coming and
going in an aimless way, and doing a great deal of talking. ...

Up the Nevsky the whole city seemed to be out promenading. On every

corner immense crowds were massed around a core of hot discussion.
Pickets of a dozen soldiers with fixed bayonets lounged at the street-
crossings, red-faced old men in rich fur coats shook their fists at them, smartly-
dressed women screamed epithets; the soldiers argued feebly, with
embarrassed grins...............................................................Armoured cars
went up and down the street, named after the first Tsars—Oleg, Rurik,
Svietoslav—and daubed with huge red letters, “R. S. D. R. P.” (Rossiskaya
Parfia)[13]. At the Mikhailovsky a man appeared with an armful of
newspapers, and was immediately stormed by frantic people, offering a
rouble, five roubles, ten roubles, tearing at each other like animals. It was
Rabotchi i Soldat, announcing the victory of the Proletarian Revolution, the
liberation of the Bolsheviki still in prison, calling upon the Army front and
rear for support... a feverish little sheet of four pages, running to enormous
type, containing no news. ...

[13] (Russian Social Democratic Labor Party).

On the corner of the Sadovaya about two thousand citizens had gathered,
staring up at the roof of a tall building, where a tiny red spark glowed and
waned.

“See!” said a tall peasant, pointing to it. “It is a provocator. Presently he will
fire on the people. ...” Apparently no one thought of going to investigate.

The massive facade of Smolny blazed with lights as we drove up, and from
every street converged upon it streams of hurrying shapes dim in the gloom.
Automobiles and motorcycles came and went; an enormous elephant-coloured
armoured automobile, with two red flags flying from the turret, lumbered out
with screaming siren. It was cold, and at the outer gate the Red Guards had
built themselves a bon-fire. At the inner gate, too, there was a blaze, by the
light of which the sentries slowly spelled out our passes and looked us up and
down. The canvas covers had been taken off the four rapid-fire guns on each
side of the doorway, and the ammunition-belts hung snakelike from their
breeches. A dun herd of armoured cars stood under the trees in the court-yard,
engines going. The long, bare, dimly-illuminated halls roared with the thunder
of feet, calling, shouting.... There was an atmosphere of recklessness. A
crowd came pouring down the staircase, workers in black blouses and round
black fur hats, many of them with guns slung over their shoulders, soldiers in
rough dirt-coloured coats and grey fur shapki pinched flat, a leader or so—
Lunatcharsky, Kameniev— hurrying along in the centre of a group all talking
at once, with harassed anxious faces, and bulging portfolios under their arms.
The extraordinary meeting of the Petrograd Soviet was over. I stopped
Kameniev—a quick moving little man, with a wide, vivacious face set close to
his shoulders. Without preface he read in rapid French a copy of the
resolution just passed:
The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, saluting the
victorious Revolution of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison, particularly
emphasises the unity, organisation, discipline, and complete cooperation shown
by the masses in this rising; rarely has less blood been spilled, and rarely has
an insurrection succeeded so well.

The Soviet expresses its firm conviction that the Workers' and Peasants'
Government which, as the government of the Soviets, will be created by the
Revolution, and which will assure the industrial proletariat of the support of
the entire mass of poor peasants, will march firmly toward Socialism, the
only means by which the country can be spared the miseries and unheard-of
horrors of war.

The new Workers' and Peasants' Government will propose immediately a just
and democratic peace to all the belligerent countries.

It will suppress immediately the great landed property, and transfer the land to
the peasants. It will establish workmen's control over production and
distribution of manufactured products, and will set up a general control over
the banks, which it will transform into a state monopoly.

The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies calls upon the
workers and the peasants of Russia to support with all their energy and all
their devotion the Proletarian Revolution. The Soviet expresses its conviction
that the city workers, allies of the poor peasants, will assure complete
revolutionary order, indispensable to the victory of Socialism. The Soviet is
convinced that the proletariat of the countries of Western Europe will aid us in
conducting the cause of Socialism to a real and lasting victory.

“You consider it won then?”

He lifted his shoulders. “There is much to do. Horribly much. It is

just beginning. ”

On the landing I met Riazanov, vice-president of the Trade Unions, looking

black and biting his grey beard. “It's insane! Insane!” he shouted. “The
European working-class won't move! All Russia—” He waved his hand
distractedly and ran off. Riazanov and Kameniev had both opposed the
insurrection, and felt the lash of Lenin's terrible tongue. ...
It had been a momentous session. In the name of the Military
Revolutionary Committee Trotzky had declared that the Provisional
Government no longer existed.

“The characteristic of bourgeois governments,” he said, “is to deceive the

people. We, the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, are
going to try an experiment unique in history; we are going to found a power
which will have no other aim but to satisfy the needs of the soldiers, workers,
and peasants.”

Lenin had appeared, welcomed with a mighty ovation, prophesying world-

wide Social Revolution.... And Zinoviev, crying, “This day we have paid our
debt to the international proletariat, and struck a terrible blow at the war, a
terrible body- blow at all the imperialists and particularly at Wilhelm the
Executioner.........................................................................................”

Then Trotzky, that telegrams had been sent to the front announcing the
victorious insurrection, but no reply had come. Troops were said to be
marching against Petrograd—a delegation must be sent to tell them the truth.

Cries, “You are anticipating the will of the All-Russian Congress of

Soviets!”

Trotzky, coldly, “The will of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets has been
anticipated by the rising of the Petrograd workers and soldiers!”

So we came into the great meeting-hall, pushing through the clamorous mob
at the door. In the rows of seats, under the white chandeliers, packed
immovably in the aisles and on the sides, perched on every window-sill, and
even the edge of the platform, the representatives of the workers and soldiers
of all Russia waited in anxious silence or wild exultation the ringing of the
chairman's bell. There was no heat in the hall but the stifling heat of
unwashed human bodies. A foul blue cloud of cigarette smoke rose from the
mass and hung in the thick air.
Occasionally some one in authority mounted the tribune and asked the
comrades not to smoke; then everybody, smokers and all, took up the cry
“Don't smoke, comrades!” and went on smoking. Petrovsky, Anarchist
delegate from the Obukhov factory, made a seat for me beside him. Unshaven
and filthy, he was reeling from three nights' sleepless work on the Military
Revolutionary Committee.

On the platform sat the leaders of the old Tsay-ee-kah—toy the last time
dominating the turbulent Soviets, which they had ruled from the first days,
and which were now risen against them. It was the end of the first period of
the Russian revolution, which these men had attempted to guide in careful
ways. ... The three greatest of them were not there: Kerensky, flying to the
front through country towns all doubtfully heaving up; Tcheidze, the old
eagle, who had contemptuously retired to his own Georgian mountains,
there to sicken with consumption; and the high-souled Tseretelli, also
mortally stricken, who, nevertheless, would return and pour out his beautiful
eloquence for a lost cause. Gotz sat there, Dan, Lieber, Bogdanov, Broido,
Fil1ipovsky,—white-faced, hollow-eyed and indignant. Below them the
second siezd of the All-Russian Soviets boiled and swirled, and over their
heads the Military Revolutionary Committee functioned white-hot, holding in
its hands the threads of insurrection and striking with a long arm. ... It was
10.40 P. M.

Dan, a mild-faced, baldish figure in a shapeless military surgeon's uniform,

was ringing the bell. Silence fell sharply, intense, broken by the scuffling and
disputing of the people at the door. ...

“We have the power in our hands,” he began sadly, stopped for a moment,
and then went on in a low voice. “Comrades! The Congress of Soviets in
meeting in such unusual circumstances and in such an extraordinary moment
that you will understand why the Tsay-ee-kah considers it unnecessary to
address you with a political speech. This will become much clearer to you if
you will recollect that I am a member of the Tsay-ee-kah, and that at this very
moment our party comrades are in the Winter Palace under bombardment,
sacrificing themselves to execute the duty put on them by the Tsay-ee-kah.”
(Confused uproar.)

“I declare the first session of the Second Congress of Soviets of

Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies open!”

The election of the presidium took place amid stir and moving about.
Avanessov announced that by agreement of the Bolsheviki, Left Socialist
Revolutionaries and Mensheviki Internationalists, it was decided to base the
presidium upon proportionality. Several Mensheviki leaped to their feet
protesting. A bearded soldier shouted at them, “Remember what you did to
us Bolsheviki when we were the minority!” Result—14 Bolsheviki, 7
Socialist Revolutionaries, 3 Mensheviki and 1 Internationalist (Gorky's
group). Hendelmann, for the right and centre Socialist Revolutionaries, said
that they refused to take part in the presidium; the same from Kintchuk, for
the Mensheviki; and from the
Mensheviki Internationalists, that until the verification of certain
circumstances, they too could not enter the presidium. Scattering applause and
hoots. One voice, “Renegades, you call yourselves Socialists!” A
representative of the Ukrainean delegates demanded, and received, a place.
Then the old Tsay-ee-kah stepped down, and in their places appeared Trotzky,
Kameniev, Lunatcharsky, Madame Kollentai, Nogin. ... The hall rose,
thundering. How far they had soared, these Bolsheviki, from a despised and
hunted sect less than four months ago, to this supreme place, the helm of
great Russia in full tide of insurrection!

The order of the day, said Kameniev, was first, Organisation of Power;
second, War and Peace; and third, the Constituent Assembly. Lozovsky,
rising, announced that upon agreement of the bureau of all factions, it was
proposed to hear and discuss the report of the Petrograd Soviet, then to give
the floor to members of the Tsay-ee-kah and the different parties, and finally to
pass to the order of the day.

But suddenly a new sound made itself heard, deeper than the tumult of the
crowd, persistent, disquieting,—the dull shock of guns. People looked
anxiously toward the clouded windows, and a sort of fever came over them.
Martov, demanding the floor, croaked hoarsely, “The civil war is beginning,
comrades!
The first question must be a peaceful settlement of the crisis. On principle and
from a political standpoint we must urgently discuss a means of averting civil
war. Our brothers are being shot down in the streets! At this moment, when
before the opening of the Congress of Soviets the question of Power is being
settled by means of a military plot organised by one of the revolutionary parties
—” for a moment he could not make himself heard above the noise, “All of
the revolutionary parties must face the fact! The first vopros (question)
before the Congress is the question of Power, and this question is already
being settled by force of arms in the streets!... We must create a power which
will be recognised by the whole democracy. If the Congress wishes to be the
voice of the revolutionary democracy it must not sit with folded hands before
the developing civil war, the result of which may be a dangerous outburst of
counter- revolution.... The possibility of a peaceful outcome lies in the
formation of a united democratic authority. ... We must elect a delegation to
negotiate with the other Socialist parties and organisation. ”

Always the methodical muffled boom of cannon through the windows, and
the delegates, screaming at each other. ... So, with the crash of artillery, in
the dark, with hatred, and fear, and reckless daring, new Russia was being
born.
The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the United Social Democrats supported
Martov's proposition. It was accepted. A soldier announced that the All-
Russian Peasants' Soviets had refused to send delegates to the Congress; he
proposed that a committee be sent with a formal invitation. “Some delegates
are present,” he said. “I move that they be given votes.” Accepted.

Kharash, wearing the epaulets of a captain, passionately demanded the floor.

“The political hypocrites who control this Congress,” he shouted, “told us we
were to settle the question of Power—and it is being settled behind our
backs, before the Congress opens! Blows are being struck against the Winter
Palace, and it is by such blows that the nails are being driven into the coffin
of the political party which has risked such an adventure!” Uproar. Followed
him Gharra: “While we are here discussing propositions of peace, there is a
battle on in the streets. . .. The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviki
refuse to be involved in what is happening, and call upon all public forces to
resist the attempt to capture the power. ...” Kutchin, delegate of the 12th
Army and representative of the Troudoviki: “I was sent here only for
information, and I am returning at once to the Front, where all the Army
Committees consider that the taking of power by the Soviets, only three
weeks before the Constituent Assembly, is a stab in the back of the Army and
a crime against the people—!” Shouts of “Lie! You lie!”... When he could be
heard again, “Let's make an end of this adventure in Petrograd! I call upon
all delegates to leave this hall in order to save the country and the
Revolution!” As he went down the aisle in the midst of a deafening noise,
people surged in upon him, threatening................................Then
Khintchuk,
an officer with a long brown goatee, speaking suavely and persuasively: “I
speak for the delegates from the Front. The Army is imperfectly represented
in this Congress, and furthermore, the Army does not consider the Congress of
Soviets necessary at this time, only three weeks before the opening of the
Constituent—” shouts and stamping, always growing more violent. “The Army
does not consider that the Congress of Soviets has the necessary authority—”
Soldiers began to stand up all over the hall.

“Who are you speaking for? What do you represent?” they cried.

“The Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of the Fifth Army, the Second F
— regiment, the First N— Regiment, the Third S— Rifles.. .”

“When were you elected? You represent the officers, not the soldiers! What do
the soldiers say about it?” Jeers and hoots.
“We, the Front group, disclaim all responsibility for what has happened and is
happening, and we consider it necessary to mobilise all self-conscious
revolutionary forces for the salvation of the Revolution! The Front group will
leave the Congress. . .. The place to fight is out on the streets!”

Immense bawling outcry. “You speak for the Staff—not for the

Army!” “I appeal to all reasonable soldiers to leave this Congress!”

“Kornilovitz! Counter-revolutionist! Provocator!” were hurled at

him.

On behalf of the Mensheviki, Khintchuk then announced that the only

possibility of a peaceful solution was to begin negotiations with the
Provisional Government for the formation of a new Cabinet, which would find
support in all strata of society. He could not proceed for several minutes.
Raising his voice to a shout he read the Menshevik declaration:

“Because the Bolsheviki have made a military conspiracy with the aid of the
Petrograd Soviet, without consulting the other factions and parties, we find it
impossible to remain in the Congress, and therefore withdraw, inviting the other
groups to follow us and to meet for discussion of the situation!”
“Deserter!” At intervals in the almost continuous disturbance Hendelman, for
the Socialist Revolutionaries, could be heard protesting against the
bombardment of the Winter Palace.... “We are opposed to this kind of
anarchy................................................................................. ”

Scarcely had he stepped down than a young, lean-faced soldier, with flashing
eyes, leaped to the platform, and dramatically lifted his hand:

“Comrades!” he cried and there was a hush. “My {amilia (name) is Peterson
—I speak for the Second Lettish Rifles. You have heard the statements of two
representatives of the Army committees; these statements would have some
value i{their authors had been representatives o[the Army—” Wild applause.
“But they do not represent the soldiers!” Shaking his fist. “The Twelfth Army
has been insisting for a long time upon the re-election of the Great Soviet and
the Army Committee, but just as your own Tsay-ee-kah, our Committee
refused to call a meeting of the representatives of the masses until the end of
September, so that the reactionaries could elect their own false delegates to
this Congress. I tell you now, the Lettish soldiers have many times said, ‘No
more resolutions!
No more talk! We want deeds—the Power must be in our hands!’ Let these
impostor delegates leave the Congress! The Army is not with them!”

The hall rocked with cheering. In the first moments of the session, stunned by
the rapidity of events, startled by the sound of cannon, the delegates had
hesitated. For an hour hammer-blow after hammer-blow had fallen from that
tribune, welding them together but beating them down. Did they stand then
alone? Was Russia rising against them? Was it true that the Army was
marching on Petrograd? Then this clear-eyed young soldier had spoken, and in
a flash they knew it for the truth. ... This was the voice of the soldiers—the
stirring millions of uniformed workers and peasants were men like them, and
their thoughts and feelings were the same...

More soldiers ... Gzhelshakh; for the Front delegates, announcing that they
had only decided to leave the Congress by a small majority, and that the
Bolshevik members had not even taken part in the vote, as they stood for
division according to political parties, and not groups. “Hundreds of delegates
from the Front,” he said, “are being elected without the participation of the
soldiers because the Army Committees are no longer the real representatives
of the rank and file....” Lukianov, crying that officers like Kharash and
Khintchuk could not represent the Army in this congress,—but only the high
command. “The real
inhabitants of the trenches want with all their hearts the transfer of Power
into the hands of the Soviets, and they expect very much from it!”... The
tide was turning.

Then came Abramovitch, for the Bund, the organ of the Jewish Social
Democrats—his eyes snapping behind thick glasses, trembling with rage.

“What is taking place now in Petrograd is a monstrous calamity! The Bund

group joins with the declaration of the Mensheviki and Socialist
Revolutionaries and will leave the Congress!” He raised his voice and hand.
“Our duty to the Russian proletariat doesn't permit us to remain here and be
responsible for these crimes. Because the firing on the Winter Palace doesn't
cease, the Municipal Duma together with the Mensheviki and Socialist
Revolutionaries, and the Executive Committee of the Peasants' Soviet, has
decided to perish with the Provisional Government, and we are going with
them! Unarmed we will expose our breasts to the machine guns of the
Terrorists. ... We invite all delegates to this Congress—” The rest was lost in a
storm of hoots, menaces and curses which rose to a hellish pitch as fifty
delegates got up and pushed their way
out.. ..

Kameniev jangled the bell, shouting, “Keep your seats and we'll go on with
our business!” And Trotzky, standing up with a pale, cruel face, letting out his
rich voice in cool contempt, “All these so-called Socialist compromisers,
these frightened Mensheviki, Socialist Revolutionaries, Bund—let them go!
They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the garbage-heap of
history!”

Riazanov, for the Bolsheviki, stated that at the request of the City Duma the
Military Revolutionary Committee had sent a delegation to offer negotiations
to the Winter Palace. “In this way we have done everything possible to avoid
blood-shed.. .”

We hurried from the place, stopping for a moment at the room where the
Military Revolutionary Committee worked at furious speed, engulfing and
spitting out panting couriers, despatching Commissars armed with power of
life and death to all the corners of the city, amid the buzz of the
telephonographs.
The door opened, a blast of stale air and cigarette smoke rushed out, we
caught a glimpse of dishevelled men bending over a map under the glare of a
shaded electric-light.... Comrade Josephov-Dukhvinski, a smiling youth with
a mop of pale yellow hair, made out passes for us.
When we came into the chill night, all the front of Smolny was one huge
park of arriving and departing automobiles, above the sound of which could be
heard the far-off slow beat of the cannon. A great motor-truck stood there,
shaking to the roar of its engine. Men were tossing bundles into it, and others
receiving them, with guns beside them.

“Where are you going?” I shouted.

“Down-town—all over—everywhere!” answered a little workman,

grinning, with a large exultant gesture.

We showed our passes. “Come along!” they invited. “But there'll probably be
shooting—” We climbed in; the clutch slid home with a raking jar, the great
car jerked forward, we all toppled backward on top of those who were
climbing in; past the huge fire by the gate, and then the fire by the outer gate,
glowing red on the faces of the workmen with rifles who squatted around it,
and went bumping at top speed down the Suvorovsky Prospect, swaying
from side to side..................................................................................One
man tore the wrapping from a bundle and began to hurl handfuls of papers
into the air. We imitated him, plunging down through the dark street with a
tail of white papers floating and eddying out behind. The late passerby
stooped to pick them up; the patrols around bonfires on the corners ran out
with uplifted arms to catch them. Sometimes armed men loomed up ahead,
crying “Shtoi!” and raising their guns, but our chauffeur only yelled something
unintelligible and we hurtled on....

I picked up a copy of the paper, and under a fleeting street-light read:

TO THE CITIZENS OF RUSSIA!

The Provisional Government is deposed. The State Power has passed into the
hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers'
Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of
the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.

The cause for which the people were fighting: immediate proposal of a
democratic peace, abolition of landlord property-rights over the land, labor
control over production, creation of a Soviet Government—that cause is
securely achieved.

LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION OF WORKMEN, SOLDIERS AND PEASANTS!

Military Revolutionary Committee

Petrograd SOviet o[ Workers' and Soldiers’Deputies.

[Graphic, page 96: Proclamation in Russian, title follows]

Proclamation of the Fall of the Provisional Government issued by the Military

Revolutionary Committee on the night of November 7th (our calendar), which
we helped to distribute from a motor-truck just after the surrender of the Winter
Palace.

A slant-eyed, Mongolian-faced man who sat beside me, dressed in a goat-skin

Caucasian cape, snapped, “Look out! Here the provocators always shoot from
the windows!” We turned into Znamensky Square, dark and almost deserted,
careened around Trubetskoy's brutal statue and swung down the wide Nevsky,
three men standing up with rifles ready, peering at the windows. Behind us the
street was alive with people running and stooping. We could no longer hear the
cannon, and the nearer we drew to the Winter Palace end of the city the
quieter and more deserted were the streets. The City Duma was all brightly
lighted.
Beyond that we made out a dark mass of people, and a line of sailors, who
yelled furiously at us to stop. The machine slowed down, and we climbed
out.

It was an astonishing scene. Just at the corner of the Ekaterina Canal, under
an arc-light, a cordon of armed sailors was drawn across the Nevsky,
blocking the way to a crowd of people in column of fours. There were about
three or four hundred of them, men in frock coats, well-dressed women,
officers—all sorts and conditions of people. Among them we recognised many
of the delegates from the Congress, leaders of the Mensheviki and Socialist
Revolutionaries; Avksentiev, the lean, red-bearded president of the Peasants'
Soviets, Sarokin, Kerensky's spokesman, Khintchuk, Abramovitch; and at the
head white-bearded old Schreider, Mayor of Petrograd, and Prokopovitch,
Minister of Supplies in the Provisional Government, arrested that morning and
released. I caught sight of Malkin, reporter for the Russian Daily News.
“Going to die in the Winter Palace,” he shouted cheerfully. The procession
stood still, but from the front of it came loud argument. Schreider and
Prokopovitch were bellowing at the big sailor who seemed in command.

“We demand to pass!” they cried. “See, these comrades come from the
Congress of Soviets! Look at their tickets! We are going to the
Winter Palace!”

The sailor was plainly puzzled. He scratched his head with an enormous
hand, frowning. “I have orders from the Committee not to let anybody go to
the Winter Palace,” he grumbled. “But I will send a comrade to telephone to
Smolny................................................................................................... ”

“We Insist upon passing! We are unarmed! We will march on whether you
permit us or not!” cried old Schreider, very much excited.

“I have orders—” repeated the sailor sullenly.

“Shoot us if you want to! We will pass! Forward!” came from all sides. “We
are ready to die, if you have the heart to fire on Russians and comrades! We
bare our breasts to your guns!”

“No,” said the sailor, looking stubborn, “I can't allow you to pass.”

“What will you do if we go forward? Will you shoot?”

“No, I'm not going to shoot people who haven't any guns. We won't
shoot unarmed Russian people. ”

“We will go forward! What can you do?”

“We will do something,” replied the sailor, evidently at a loss. “We can't let
you pass. We will do something.”

“What will you do? What will you do?”

Another sailor came up, very much irritated. “We will spank you!” he cried,
energetically. “And if necessary we will shoot you too. Go home now, and
leave us in peace!”

At this there was a great clamour of anger and resentment, Prokopovitch had
mounted some sort of box, and, waving his umbrella, he made a speech:

“Comrades and citizens!” he said. “Force is being used against us! We cannot
have our innocent blood upon the hands of these ignorant men! It is beneath
our dignity to be shot down here in the street by switchmen—” (What he
meant by “switchmen” I never discovered.) “Let us return to the Duma and
discuss the
best means of saving the country and the Revolution!”

Whereupon, in dignified silence, the procession marched around and back up

the Nevsky, always in column of fours. And taking advantage of the diversion
we slipped past the guards and set off in the direction of the Winter Palace.

Here it was absolutely dark, and nothing moved but pickets of soldiers and
Red Guards grimly intent. In front of the Kazan Cathedral a three-inch field-
gun lay in the middle of the street, slewed sideways from the recoil of its
last shot over the roofs. Soldiers were standing in every doorway talking in
low tones and peering down toward the Police Bridge. I heard one voice
saying: “It is possible that we have done wrong. ...” At the corners patrols
stopped all passersby—and the composition of these patrols was interesting,
for in command of the regular troops was invariably a Red Guard The
shooting had ceased.

Just as we came to the Morskaya somebody was shouting: “The yunkers have
sent word they want us to go and get them out!” Voices began to give
commands, and in the thick gloom we made out a dark mass moving
forward, silent but for the shuffle of feet and the clinking of arms. We fell in
with the first ranks.

Like a black river, filling all the street, without song or cheer we poured
through the Red Arch, where the man just ahead of me said in a low voice:
“Look out, comrades! Don't trust them. They will fire, surely!” In the open we
began to run, stooping low and bunching together, and jammed up suddenly
behind the pedestal of the Alexander Column.

“How many of you did they kill?” I

asked. “I don't know. About ten. ”

After a few minutes huddling there, some hundreds of men, the army seemed
reassured and without any orders suddenly began again to flow forward. By
this time, in the light that streamed out of all the Winter Palace windows, I
could see that the first two or three hundred men were Red Guards, with
only a few scattered soldiers. Over the barricade of firewood we clambered,
and leaping down inside gave a triumphant shout as we stumbled on a heap
of rifles thrown down by the bunkers who had stood there. On both sides of the
main gateway the doors stood wide open, light streamed out, and from the
huge pile came not the slightest sound.
Carried along by the eager wave of men we were swept into the right hand
entrance, opening into a great bare vaulted room, the cellar of the East wing,
from which issued a maze of corridors and stair-cases. A number of huge
packing cases stood about, and upon these the Red Guards and soldiers fell
furiously, battering them open with the butts of their rifles, and pulling out
carpets, curtains, linen, porcelain plates, glassware. . .. One man went strutting
around with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder; another found a plume
of ostrich feathers, which he stuck in his hat. The looting was just beginning
when somebody cried, “Comrades! Don't touch anything! Don't take anything!
This is the property of the People!” Immediately twenty voices were crying,
“Stop! Put everything back! Don't take anything! Property of the People!”
Many hands dragged the spoilers down. Damask and tapestry were snatched
from the arms of those who had them; two men took away the bronze clock.
Roughly and hastily the things were crammed back in their cases, and self-
appointed sentinels stood guard. It was all utterly spontaneous. Through
corridors and up stair-cases the cry could be heard growing fainter and fainter
in the distance, “Revolutionary discipline! Property of the People. ”

We crossed back over to the left entrance, in the West wing. There order was
also being established. “Clear the Palace!” bawled a Red Guard, sticking his
head through an inner door. “Come, comrades, let's show that we're not thieves
and bandits. Everybody out of the Palace except the Commissars, until we get
sentries posted.”

Two Red Guards, a soldier and an officer, stood with revolvers in their hands.
Another soldier sat at a table behind them, with pen and paper. Shouts of
“All out! All out!” were heard far and near within, and the Army began to
pour through the door, jostling, expostulating, arguing. As each man appeared
he was seized by the self-appointed committee, who went through his
pockets and looked under his coat. Everything that was plainly not his
property was taken away, the man at the table noted it on his paper, and it
was carried into a little room. The most amazing assortment of objects were
thus confiscated; statuettes, bottles of ink, bed-spreads worked with the
Imperial monogram, candles, a small oil-painting, desk blotters, gold-handled
swords, cakes of soap, clothes of every description, blankets. One Red Guard
carried three rifles, two of which he had taken away from yunkers; another
had four portfolios bulging with written documents. The culprits either sullenly
surrendered or pleaded like children. All talking at once the committee
explained that stealing was not worthy of the people's champions; often those
who had been caught turned around and began
to help go through the rest of the comrades. (See App. IV, Sect. 3)

Yunkers came out, in bunches of three or four. The committee seized upon
them with an excess of zeal, accompanying the search with remarks like,
“Ah, Provocators! Kornilovists! Counter-revolutionists! Murderers of the
People!” But there was no violence done, although the yunkers were terrified.
They too had their pockets full of small plunder. It was carefully noted down
by the scribe, and piled in the little room. ... The bunkers were disarmed.
“Now, will you take up arms against the People any more?” demanded
clamouring voices.

“No,” answered the bunkers, one by one. Whereupon they were allowed to go
free.

We asked if we might go inside. The committee was doubtful, but the big Red
Guard answered firmly that it was forbidden. “Who are you anyway?” he
asked. “How do I know that you are not all Kerenskys? (There were five of
us, two women.)

“Pazhal'st’, touarishtchi! Way, Comrades!” A soldier and a Red Guard

appeared in the door, waving the crowd aside, and other guards with fixed
bayonets. After them followed single file half a dozen men in civilian dress—
the members of the Provisional Government. First came Kishkin, his face
drawn and pale, then Rutenberg, looking sullenly at the floor; Terestchenko
was next, glancing sharply around; he stared at us with cold fixity. ... They
passed in silence; the victorious insurrectionists crowded to see, but there
were only a few angry mutterings. It was only later that we learned how the
people in the street wanted to lynch them, and shots were fired—but the
sailors brought them safely to
Peter-Paul. . ..

In the meanwhile unrebuked we walked into the Palace. There was still a
great deal of coming and going, of exploring new-found apartments in the vast
edifice, of searching for hidden garrisons of yunkers which did not exist. We
went upstairs and wandered through room after room. This part of the Palace
had been entered also by other detachments from the side of the Neva. The
paintings, statues, tapestries and rugs of the great state apartments were
unharmed; in the offices, however, every desk and cabinet had been ransacked,
the papers scattered over the floor, and in the living rooms beds had been
stripped of their coverings and ward-robes wrenched open. The most highly
prized loot was clothing, which the working people needed. In a room where
furniture was
stored we came upon two soldiers ripping the elaborate Spanish leather
upholstery from chairs. They explained it was to make boots with. ...

The old Palace servants in their blue and red and gold uniforms stood
nervously about, from force of habit repeating, “You can't go in there, barin! It
is forbidden
—” We penetrated at length to the gold and malachite chamber with crimson
brocade hangings where the Ministers had been in session all that day and
night, and where the shveitzari had betrayed them to the Red Guards. The
long table covered with green baize was just as they had left it, under arrest.
Before each empty seat was pen and ink and paper; the papers were
scribbled over with beginnings of plans of action, rough drafts of proclamations
and manifestos.
Most of these were scratched out, as their futility became evident, and the rest
of the sheet covered with absent-minded geometrical designs, as the writers sat
despondently listening while Minister after Minister proposed chimerical
schemes. I took one of these scribbled pages, in the hand writing of
Konovalov, which read, “The Provisional Government appeals to all classes to
support the Provisional Government—”

All this time, it must be remembered, although the Winter Palace was
surrounded, the Government was in constant communication with the Front
and with provincial Russia. The Bolsheviki had captured the Ministry of War
early in the morning, but they did not know of the military telegraph office in
the attic, nor of the private telephone line connecting it with the Winter
Palace. In that attic a young officer sat all day, pouring out over the country a
flood of appeals and proclamations; and when he heard that the Palace had
fallen, put on his hat and walked calmly out of the building. ...

Interested as we were, for a considerable time we didn't notice a change in

the attitude of the soldiers and Red Guards around us. As we strolled from
room to room a small group followed us, until by the time we reached the
great picture- gallery where we had spent the afternoon with the bunkers, about
a hundred men surged in after us. One giant of a soldier stood in our path,
his face dark with sullen suspicion.

[Graphic, page 104: Doodling by Konavalov, title follows]

Facsimile of the beginning of a proclamation, written in pencil by A.I.

Konovalov, Minister of Commerce and Industry in he Provisional Government,
and then scratched out as the hopelessness of the situation became more and
more evident. The geometrical figure beneath was probably idly drawn while
the Ministers were waiting for the end.

“Who are you?” he growled. “What are you doing here?” The others massed
slowly around, staring and beginning to mutter. “Provocatori!” I heard
somebody say. “Looters!” I produced our passes from the Military
Revolutionary Committee. The soldier took them gingerly, turned them upside
down and looked at them without comprehension. Evidently he could not
read. He handed them back and spat on the floor. “Bumagi! Papers!” said he
with contempt. The mass slowly began to close in, like wild cattle around a
cowpuncher on foot.
Over their heads I caught sight of an officer, looking helpless, and shouted to
him. He made for us, shouldering his way through.

“I'm the Commissar,” he said to me. “Who are you? What is it?” The others
held back, waiting. I produced the papers.

“You are foreigners?” he rapidly asked in Franch. “It is very dangerous.. ” Then
he turned to the mob, holding up our documents. “Comrades!” he cried.
“These people are foreign comrades—from America. They have come here to
be able to tell their countrymen about the bravery and the revolutionary
discipline of the proletarian army!”

“How do you know that?” replied the big soldier. “I tell you they are
provocators! They say they came here to observe the revolutionary discipline
of the proletarian army, but they have been wandering freely through the
Palace, and how do we know they haven't got their pockets full of loot?”

“Pravilno!” snarled the others, pressing forward.

“Comrades! Comrades!” appealed the officer, sweat standing out on his

forehead. “I am Commissar of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Do you
trust me? Well, I tell you that these passes are signed with the same names
that are signed to my pass!”

He led us down through the Palace and out through a door opening onto the
Neva quay, before which stood the usual committee going through pockets...
“You have narrowly escaped,” he kept muttering, wiping his face.

“What happened to the Women's Battalion?” we asked.

“Oh—the women!” He laughed. “They were all huddled up in a back room.
We had a terrible time deciding what to do with them—many were in
hysterics, and so on. So finally we marched them up to the Finland Station
and put them on a train for Levashovo, where they have a camp. (See
App. IV, Sect. 4)..............................................................................”

We came out into the cold, nervous night, murmurous with obscure armies on
the move, electric with patrols. From across the river, where loomed the darker
mass of Peter-Paul, came a hoarse shout. ... Underfoot the sidewalk was
littered with broken stucco, from the cornice of the Palace where two shells
from the battleship Avrora had struck; that was the only damage done by the
bombardment. ...

It was now after three in the morning. On the Nevsky all the street-lights
were again shining, the cannon gone, and the only signs of war were Red
Guards and soldiers squatting around fires. The city was quiet—probably
never so quiet in its history; on that night not a single hold-up occurred, not a
single robbery.

But the City Duma Building was all illuminated. We mounted to the galleried
Alexander Hall, hung with its great, gold-framed, red-shrouded Imperial
portraits. About a hundred people were grouped around the platform, where
Skobeliev was speaking. He urged that the Committee of Public Safety be
expanded, so as to unite all the anti-Bolshevik elements in one huge
organisation, to be called the Committee for Salvation of Country and
Revolution. And as we looked on, the Committee for Salvation was formed—
that Committee which was to develop into the most powerful enemy of the
Bolsheviki, appearing, in the next week, sometimes under its own partisan
name, and sometimes as the strictly non-partisan Committee of Public
Safety....

Dan, Gotz, Avkesntiev were there, some of the insurgent Soviet delegates,
members of the Executive Committee of the Peasants' Soviets, old
Prokopovitch, and even members of the Council of the Republic—among
whom Vinaver and other Cadets. Lieber cried that the convention of Soviets
was not a legal convention, that the old Tsay-ee-kah was still in office.
............................................................................................ An appeal to
the
country was drafted.

We hailed a cab. “Where to?” But when we said “Smolny,” the izvoshtchik
shook his head. “Niet!” said he, “there are devils. ...” It was only after weary
wandering that we found a driver willing to take us—and he wanted thirty
rubles, and stopped two blocks away.
The windows of Smolny were still ablaze, motors came and went, and
around the still-leaping fires the sentries huddled close, eagerly asking
everybody the latest news. The corridors were full of hurrying men, hollow-
eyed and dirty. In some of the committee-rooms people lay sleeping on the
floor, their guns beside them. In spite of the seceding delegates, the hall of
meetings was crowded with people, roaring like the sea. As we came in,
Kameniev was reading the list of arrested Ministers. The name of
Terestchenko was greeted with thunderous applause, shouts of satisfaction,
laughter; Rutenburg came in for less; and at the mention of Paltchinsky, a
storm of hoots, angry cries, cheers burst forth......................................It
was announced that Tchudnovsky had been appointed Commissar of the
Winter Palace.

Now occurred a dramatic interruption. A big peasant, his bearded face

convulsed with rage, mounted the platform and pounded with his fist on the
presidium table.

“We, Socialist Revolutionaries, insist upon the immediate release of the

Socialist Ministers arrested in the Winter Palace! Comrades! Do you know
that four comrades who risked their lives and their freedom fighting against
tyranny of the Tsar, have been flung into Peter-Paul prison—the historical
tomb of Liberty?” In the uproar he pounded and yelled. Another delegate
climbed up beside him, and pointed at the presidium.

“Are the representatives of the revolutionary masses going to sit quietly here
while the Okhrana of the Bolsheviki tortures their leaders?”

Trotzky was gesturing for silence. “These ‘comrades’ who are now caught
plotting the crushing of the Soviets with the adventurer Kerensky—is there any
reason to handle them with gloves? After July 16th and 18th they didn't use
much ceremony with us!” With a triumphant ring in his voice he cried, “Now
that the oborontsi and the faint-hearted have gone, and the whole task of
defending and saving the Revolution rests on our shoulders, it is particularly
necessary to work—work—work! We have decided to die rather than give up!”

Followed him a Commissar from Tsarskoye Selo, panting and covered with the
mud of his ride. “The garrison of Tsarskoye Selo is on guard at the gates of
Petrograd, ready to defend the Soviets and the Military Revolutionary
Committee!” Wild cheers. “The Cycle Corps sent from the front has arrived at
Tsarskoye, and the soldiers are now with us; they recognise the power of the
Soviets, the necessity of immediate transfer of land to the peasants and
industrial control to the workers. The Fifth Battalion of Cyclists, stationed at
Tsarskoye, is ours. ”

Then the delegate of the Third Cycle Battalion. In the midst of delirious
enthusiasm he told how the cycle corps had been ordered three days be[ore
from the South-west front to the “defence of Petrograd.” They suspected,
however, the meaning of the order; and at the station of Peredolsk were met by
representatives of the Fifth Battalion from Tsarskoye. A joint meeting was
held, and it was discovered that “among the cyclists not a single man was
found willing to shed the blood of his brothers, or to support a Government of
bourgeois and land- owners!”

Kapelinski, for the Mensheviki Internationalists, proposed to elect a special

committee to find a peaceful solution to the civil war. “There isn't any
peaceful solution!” bellowed the crowed. “Victory is the only solution!” The
vote was overwhelmingly against, and the Mensheviki Internationalists left the
Congress in a Whirlwind of Jocular insults. There was no longer any panic
fear. ...
Kameniev from the platform shouted after them, “The Mensheviki
Internationalists claimed ‘emergency’ for the question of a ‘peaceful solution,
but they always voted for suspension of the order of the day in favour of
declarations of factions which wanted to leave the Congress. It is evident,”
finished Kameniev, “that the withdrawal of all these renegades was decided
upon beforehand!”

The assembly decided to ignore the withdrawal of the factions, and proceed to
the appeal to the workers, soldiers and peasants of all Russia:

TO WORKERS, SOLDIERS AND PEASANTS

The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers'

Deputies has opened. It represents the great majority of the Soviets. There are
also a number of Peasant deputies. Based upon the will of the great majority
of the workers', soldiers and peasants, based upon the triumphant uprising of
the Petrograd workmen and soldiers, the Congress assumes the Power.

The Provisional Government is deposed. Most of the members of the

Provisional Government are already arrested.
The Soviet authority will at once propose an immediate democratic peace to
all nations, and an immediate truce on all fronts. It will assure the free
transfer of landlord, crown and monastery lands to the Land Committees,
defend the soldiers rights, enforcing a complete democratisation of the Army,
establish workers' control over production, ensure the convocation of the
Constituent Assembly at the proper date, take means to supply bread to the
cities and articles of first necessity to the villages, and secure to all
nationalities living in Russia a real right to independent existence.

The Congress resolves: that all local power shall be transferred to the Soviets
of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, which must enforce
revolutionary order.

The Congress calls upon the soldiers in the trenches to be watchful and
steadfast. The Congress of Soviets is sure that the revolutionary Army will
know how to defend the Revolution against all attacks of Imperialism, until
the new Government shall have brought about the conclusion of the
democratic peace which it will directly propose to all nations. The new
Government will take all necessary steps to secure everything needful to the
revolutionary Army, by means of a determined policy of requisition and
taxation of the propertied classes, and also to improve the situation of
soldiers' families.

The Kornilovitz-Kerensky, Kaledin and others, are endeavouring to lead

troops against Petrograd. Several regiments, deceived by Kerensky, have sided
with the insurgent People.

Soldiers! Make active resistance to the Kornilovitz-Kerensky! Be on guard!

Railway men! Stop all troop-trains being sent by Kerensky against

Petrograd!

Soldiers, Workers, Clerical employees! The destiny of the Revolution and

democratic peace is in your hands!

Long live the Revolution!

The All-RLlSSian Congress o[Soviets o[ Workers' and Soldiers’Deputies.

Delegates [rom the Peasants’SOviets.

It was exactly 5:17 A.M. when Krylenko, staggering with fatigue, climbed to the
tribune with a telegram in his hand.

“Comrades! From the Northern Front. The Twelfth Army sends greetings
to the Congress of Soviets, announcing the formation of a Military
Revolutionary Committee which has taken over the command of the
Northern Front!” Pandemonium, men weeping, embracing each other.
“General Tchermissov has recognised the Committee-Commissar of the
Provisional Government Voitinsky has resigned!”

So. Lenin and the Petrograd workers had decided on insurrection, the
Petrograd Soviet had overthrown the Provisional Government, and thrust the
coup d'etat upon the Congress of Soviets. Now there was all great Russia to
win—and then the world! Would Russia follow and rise? And the world—
what of it? Would the peoples answer and rise, a red world-tide?

Although it was six in the morning, night was yet heavy and chill. There was
only a faint unearthly pallor stealing over the silent streets, dimming the watch-
fires, the shadow of a terrible dawn grey-rising over Russia....