Free Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed Page A

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 committe-rooms were filled with stacks of rifles, couriers came and went, the Red Guard [*] drilled.... In all the [* See Notes and Explanations]
    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....
     
    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 center 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 3: 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 organized, 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