changing its name to Soldatski Golos, appeared in an edition of a hundred thousand copies, bellowing rage and defiance:
The men who began their stroke of treachery in the night, who have suppressed the newspapers, will not keep the country in ignorance long. The country will know the truth! It will appreciate you, Messrs. the Bolsheviki! We shall see!…
As we came down the Nevsky a little after midday the whole street before the Duma building was crowded with people. Here and there stood Red Guards and sailors, with bayonetted rifles, each one surrounded by about a hundred men and women—clerks, students, shopkeepers, tchinovniki—shaking their fists and bawling insults and menaces. On the steps stood boy-scouts and officers, distributing copies of the Soldatski Golos. A workman with a red band around his arm and a revolver in his hand stood trembling with rage and nervousness in the middle of a hostile throng at the foot of the stairs, demanding the surrender of the papers… Nothing like this, I imagine, ever occurred in history. On one side a handful of workmen and common soldiers, with arms in their hands, representing a victorious insurrection—and perfectly miserable; on the other a frantic mob made up of the kind of people that crowd the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue at noon-time, sneering, abusing, shouting, “Traitors! Provocators! Opritchniki![* 1]”
The doors were guarded by students and officers with white arm-bands lettered in red, “Militia of the Committee of Public Safety”, and half a dozen boy-scouts came and went. Upstairs the place was all commotion. Captain Gomberg was coming down the stairs. “They’re going to dissolve the Duma,” he said. “The Bolshevik Commissar is with the Mayor now.” As we reached the top Riazanov came hurrying out. He had been to demand that the Duma recognise the Council
*
- ↑ Savage body-guards of Ivan the Terrible, 17th century.
