Ten Days That Shook the World - John Reed (some good books to read TXT) 📗
- Author: John Reed
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“I was already suspicious that something was going on. Automobiles full of officers kept coming, and all the Ministers were there. Ivan Pavlovitch told me what he had heard. It was half-past two in the morning. The secretary of the regimental Committee was there, so we told him and asked what to do.
“‘Arrest everybody coming and going!#’ he says. So we began to do it. In an hour we had some officers and a couple of Ministers, whom we sent up to Smolny right away. But the Military Revolutionary Committee wasn’t ready; they didn’t know what to do; and pretty soon back came the order to let everybody go and not arrest anybody else. Well, we ran all the way to Smolny, and I guess we talked for an hour before they finally saw that it was war. It was five o’clock when we got back to the Staff, and by that time most of them were gone. But we got a few, and the garrison was all on the march….”
A Red Guard from Vasili Ostrov described in great detail what had happened in his district on the great day of the rising. “We didn’t have any machineguns over there,” he said, laughing, “and we couldn’t get any from Smolny. Comrade Zalking, who was a member of the Uprava (Central Bureau) of the Ward Duma, remembered all at once that there was lying in the meeting-room of the Uprava a machinegun which had been captured from the Germans. So he and I and another comrade went there. The Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries were having a meeting. Well, we opened the door and walked right in on them, as they sat around the table-twelve or fifteen of them, three of us. When they saw us they stopped talking and just stared. We walked right across the room, uncoupled the machinegun; Comrade Zalkind picked up one part, I the other, we put them on our shoulders and walked out-and not a single man said a word!”
“Do you know how the Winter Palace was captured?” asked a third man, a sailor. “Along about eleven o’clock we found out there weren’t any more yunkers on the Neva side. So we broke in the doors and filtered up the different stairways one by one, or in little bunches. When we got to the top of the stairs the yunkers held us up and took away our guns. Still our fellows kept coming up, little by little, until we had a majority. Then we turned around and took away the yunkers’ guns….”
Just then the commandant entered-a merry-looking young non-commissioned officer with his arm in a sling, and deep circles of sleeplessness under his eyes. His eye fell first on the prisoner, who at once began to explain.
“Oh, yes,” interrupted the other. “You were one of the committee who refused to surrender the Staff Wednesday afternoon. However, we don’t want you, citizen. Apologies-” He opened the door and waved his arm for Count Tolstoy to leave. Several of the others, especially the Red Guards, grumbled protests, and the sailor remarked triumphantly, “Vot! There! Didn’t I say so?”
Two soldiers now engaged his attention. They had been elected a committee of the fortress garrison to protest. The prisoners, they said, were getting the same food as the guards, when there wasn’t even enough to keep a man from being hungry. “Why should the counter-revolutionists be treated so well?”
“We are revolutionists, comrades, not bandits,” answered the commandant. He turned to us. We explained that rumours were going about that the yunkers were being tortured, and the lives of the Ministers threatened. Could we perhaps see the prisoners, so as to be able to prove to the world-?”
“No,” said the young soldier, irritably. “I am not going to disturb the prisoners again. I have just been compelled to wake them up-they were sure we were going to massacre them…. Most of the yunkers have been released anyway, and the rest will go out tomorrow.” He turned abruptly away.
“Could we talk to the Duma commission, then?”
The Commandant, who was pouring himself a glass of tea, nodded. “They are still out in the hall,” he said carelessly.
Indeed they stood there just outside the door, in the feeble light of an oil lamp, grouped around the Mayor and talking excitedly.
“Mr. Mayor,” I said, “we are American correspondents. Will you please tell us officially the result of your investigations?”
He turned to us his face of venerable dignity.
“There is no truth in the reports,” he said slowly. “Except for the incidents which occurred as the Ministers were being brought here, they have been treated with every consideration. As for the yunkers, not one has received the slightest injury….”
Up the Nevsky, in the empty after-midnight gloom, an interminable column of soldiers shuffled in silence-to battle with Kerensky. In dim back streets automobiles without lights flitted to and fro, and there was furtive activity in Fontanka 6, headquarters of the Peasants’ Soviet, in a certain apartment of a huge building on the Nevsky, and in the Injinierny Zamok (School of Engineers); the Duma was illuminated….
In Smolny Institute the Military Revolutionary Committee flashed baleful fire, pounding like an over-loaded dynamo….
SATURDAY, November 10th….
Citizens!
The Military Revolutionary Committee declares that it will not tolerate any violation of revolutionary order….
Theft, brigandage, assaults and attempts at massacre will be severely punished….
Following the example of the Paris Commune, the Committee will destroy without mercy any looter or instigator of disorder….
Quiet lay the city. Not a hold-up, not a robbery, not even a drunken fight. By night armed patrols went through the silent streets, and on the corners soldiers and Red Guards squatted around little fires, laughing and singing. In the daytime great crowds gathered on the sidewalks listening to interminable hot debates between students and soldiers, business men and workmen.
Citizens stopped each other on the street.
“The Cossacks are coming?”
“No….”
“What’s the latest?”
“I don’t know anything. Where’s Kerensky?”
“They say only eight versts from Petrograd…. Is it true that the Bolsheviki have fled to the battleship Avrora?”
“They say so….”
Only the walls screamed, and the few newspapers; denunciation, appeal, decree….
An enormous poster carried the hysterical manifesto of the Executive Committee of the Peasant’ Soviets:
….They (the Bolsheviki) dare to say that they are supported by the Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies, and that they are speaking on behalf of the Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies….
Let all working-class Russia know that this is a LIE, AND THAT ALL THE WORKING PEASANTS-in the person of-the EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE ALL-RUSSIAN SOVIETS OF PEASANTS’ DEPUTIES-refutes with indignation all participation of the organised peasantry in this criminal violation of the will of the working-classes….
From the Soldier Section of the Socialist Revolutionary party:
The insane attempt of the Bolsheviki is on the eve of collapse. The garrison is divided…. The Ministries are on strike and bread is getting scarcer. All factions except the few Bolsheviki have left the Congress. The Bolsheviki are alone….
We call upon all sane elements to group themselves around the Committee for Salvation of Country and Revolution, and to prepare themselves seriously to be ready at the first call of the Central Committee….
In a hand-bill the Council of the Republic recited its wrongs:
Ceding to the force of bayonets, the Council of the Republic has been obliged to separate, and temporarily to interrupt its meetings.
The usurpers, with the words “Liberty and Socialism” on their lips, have set up a rule of arbitrary violence. They have arrested the members of the Provisional Government, closed the newspapers, seized the printing-shops….This power must be considered the enemy of the people and the Revolution; it is necessary to do battle with it, and to pull it down….
The Council of the Republic, until the resumption of its labours, invites the citizens of the Russian Republic to group themselves around the….local Committees for Salvation of Country and Revolution, which are organising the overthrow of the Bolsheviki and the creation of a Government capable of leading the country to the Constituent Assembly.
Dielo Narodasaid:
A revolution is a rising of all the people…. But here what have we? Nothing but a handful of poor fools deceived by Lenin and Trotzky…. Their decrees and their appeals will simply add to the museum of historical curiosities….
And Narodnoye Slovo(People’sWord-PopulistSocialist):
“Workers’ and Peasants’ Government?” That is only a pipedream; nobody, either in Russia or in the countries of our Allies, will recognise this “Government”-or even in the enemy countries….
The bourgeois press had temporarily disappeared…._Pravada_ had an account of the first meeting of the new Tsay-ee-kah, now the parliament of the Russian Soviet Republic. Miliutin, Commissar of Agriculture, remarked that the Peasants’ Executive Committee had called an All-Russian Peasant Congress for December 13th.
“But we cannot wait,” he said. “We must have the backing of the peasants. I propose that we call the Congress of Peasants, and do it immediately….” The Left Socialist Revolutionaries agreed. An Appeal to the Peasants of Russia was hastily drafted, and a committee of five elected to carry out the project.
The question of detailed plans for distributing the land, and the question of Workers’ Control of Industry, were postponed until the experts working on them should submit a report.
Three decrees (See App. VII, Sect. 1) were read and approved: first, Lenin’s “General Rules For the Press,” ordering the suppression of all newspapers inciting to resistance and disobedience to the new Government, inciting to criminal acts, or deliberately perverting the news; the Decree of Moratorium for House-rents; and the Decree Establishing a Workers’ Militia. Also orders, one giving the Municipal Duma power to requisition empty apartments and houses, the other directing the unloading of freight cars in the railroad terminals, to hasten the distribution of necessities and to free the badly-needed rolling-stock….
Two hours later the Executive Committee of the Peasants’ Soviets was sending broadcast over Russia the following telegram:
The arbitrary organisation of the Bolsheviki, which is called “Bureau of Organisation for the National Congress of Peasants,“is inviting all the Peasants’ Soviets to send delegates to the Congress at Petrograd….
The Executive Committee of the Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies declares that it considers, now as well as before, that it would be dangerous to take away from the provinces at this moment the forces necessary to prepare for elections to the Constituent Assembly, which is the only salvation of the working-class and the country. We confirm the date of the Congress of Peasants, December 13th.
At the Duma all was excitement, officers coming and going, the Mayor in conference with the leaders of the Committee for Salvation. A Councillor ran in with a copy of Kerensky’s proclamation, dropped by hundreds from an aeroplane low flying down the Nevsky, which threatened terrible vengeance on all who did not submit, and ordered soldiers to lay down their arms and assemble immediately in Mars Field.
The Minister-President had taken Tsarskoye Selo, we were told, and was already in the Petrograd campagna, five miles away. He would enter the city tomorrow-in a few hours. The Soviet troops in contact with his Cossacks were said to be going over to the Provisional Government. Tchernov was somewhere in between, trying to organise the “neutral” troops into a force to halt the civil war.
In the city the garrison regiments were leaving the Bolsheviki, they said. Smolny was already abandoned…. All the Governmental machinery had stopped functioning. The employees of the State Bank had refused to work under Commissars from Smolny, refused to pay out money to
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