Ten Days That Shook The World (24 page)

A commission composed of members of all parties was immediately appointed, and with the Mayor, sent to Peter Paul to investigate. As we followed them out, the Duma was appointing another commission to meet Kerensky--to try and avoid bloodshed when he entered the capital....

It was midnight when we bluffed our past the guards at the gate of the fortress, and went forward under the faint glimmer of rare electric lights along the side of the church where lie the tombs of the Tsars, beneath the slender golden spire and the chimes, which, for months, continued to play Bozhe Tsaria Khrani [*] every day at [* "God Save the Tsar."

noon.... The place was deserted; in most of the windows there were not even lights. Occasionally we bumped into a burly figure stumbling along in the dark, who answered questions with the usual, "Ya nieznayu."

Pass from the Department of Prisons of the Soviet Government to visit freely all prisons of Petrograd and Cronstadt. (Translation)

Commissar

Chief Bureau of Prisons

6th of November, 1917.

        No. 213

Petrograd, Smolny

Institute, room No. 56-

                      PASS

To the representative of the American Socialist press, JOHN REED, to visit all places of confinement in the cities of Petrograd and Cronstadt, for the purpose of generally investigating the condition of the prisoners, and for thorough social information for the purpose of stopping the flood of newspaper lies against democracy.

       Chief Commissar

       Secretary

On the left loomed the low dark outline of Trubetskoi Bastion, that living grave in which so many martyrs of liberty had lost their lives or their reason in the days of the Tsar, where the Provisional Government had in turn shut up the Ministers of the Tsar, and now the Bolsheviki had shut up the Ministers of the Provisional Government.

A friendly sailor led us to the office of the commandant, in a little house near the Mint. Half a dozen Red Guards, sailors and soldiers were sitting around a hot room full of smoke, in which a samovar steamed cheerfully. They welcomed us with great cordiality, offering tea. The commandant was not in; he was escorting a commission of "sabotazhniki" (sabotageurs) from the City Duma, who insisted that the yunkers were all being murdered. This seemed to amuse them very much. At one side of the room sat a bald-headed, dissipated-looking little man in a frock-coat and a rich fur coat, biting his mustache and staring around him like a cornered rat. He had just been arrested. Somebody said, glancing carelessly at him, that he was a Minister or something.... The little man didn't seem to hear it; he was evidently terrified, although the occupants of the room showed no animosity whatever toward him.

I went across and spoke to him in French. "Count Tolstoy," he answered, bowing stiffly. "I do not understand why I was arrested. I was crossing the Troitsky Bridge on my way home when two of these-of these-persons held me up. I was a Commissar of the Provisional Government attached to the General Staff, but in no sense a member of the Government..."

"Let him go," said a sailor. "He's harmless...."

"No," responded the soldier who had brought the prisoner. "We must ask the commandant."

"Oh, the commandant!" sneered the sailor. "What did you make a revolution for? To go on obeying officers?"

A praporshtchik of the Pavlovsky regiment was telling us how the insurrection started. "The polk (regiment) was on duty at the General Staff the night of the 6th. Some of my comrades and I were standing guard; Ivan Pavlovitch and another man-I don't remember his name-well, they hid behind the window-curtains in the room where the Staff was having a meeting, and they heard a great many things. For   any things. For   |          | example, they heard orders to bring the Gatchina yunkers to Petrograd by night, and an order for the Cossacks to be ready to march in the morning.... The principal points in the city were to be occupied before dawn. Then there was the business of opening the bridges. But when they began to talk about surrounding Smolny, then Ivan Pavlovitch couldn't stand it any longer. That minute there was a good deal of coming and going, so he slipped out and came down to the guard-room, leaving the other comrade to pick up what he could.

"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 machine-guns 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 machine gun 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 machine-gun; 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 rumors 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 to-morrow." 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....

Chapter 7: The Revolutionary Front

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 organized 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 labors, invites the citizens of the Russian Republic to group themselves around the....local Committees for Salvation of Country and Revolution, which are organizing the overthrow of the Bolsheviki and the creation of a Government capable of leading the country to the Constituent Assembly.

Dielo Naroda said:

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 Trotsky.... Their decrees and their appeals will simply add to the museum of historical curiosities....

And Narodnoye Slovo (People's Word-Populist Socialist):

"Workers' and Peasants' Government?" That is only a pipe dream; nobody, either in Russia or in the countries of our Allies, will recognize 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.