Page:Albert Rhys Williams - The Red Funeral in Vladivostok (1917).djvu/5

 Consulate and fifty rods before him were the waters of the Golden Horn with the frowning guns of the Allied Fleet. He wrenched himself away from his grief andwith an ever mounting passion of earnestness he spoke, closing with the words which shall henceforth be the rallying-cry for the workers in Vladivostok and the Far East:—

"Here, before the Red Staff Building where our comrades gruzshchiki were slain, we swear by these red coffins that hold them, by their wives and children that weep for them, by the red banners which float over them, that the Soviet for which they died shall be the thing for which we live—or if need be—like them, die. Henceforth the return of the Soviet shall be the goal of all our sacrifice and devotion. To that end we shall fight with every means. The bayonets have been wrested from our hands, but when the day comes and we have no guns we shall fight with sticks and clubs, and when these are gone then with our bare fists and bodies. Now it is for us to fight only with our minds and spirits. Let us make them hard and strong and unyielding. The Soviet is dead. Long live the Soviet!"

The crowd caught up the closing words in a tremendous demonstration, mingled with the strains of the 'International':—

Arise ye prisoners of starvation,

Arise ye wretched of the earth,

For Justice thunders condemnation

A better world’s in birth"

The resolution proclaiming the restoration of the Soviet, the objective of all the future struggles of the revolutionary proletariat and peasants of the Far East, was read. At the call for the vote seventeen thousand hands shot into the air. They were the hands which had built the cars and paved the streets, forged the iron, held the plough, and swung the hammer. All kinds of hands they were: the big, rough hand of the old gruzshchiki, the artisans' deft and sinewy, the knotted hands of the peasants, thick with callouses, and thousands of the frailer, whiter hands of the working-women. By these hands the riches of the Far East had been wrought. They were no different from the scarred, stained hands of labour anywhere in all the world. Except in this regard. For a time they had held the power. The Government had been within their grasp. Four days ago it had been wrested from their grasp but the feel of it was still within their hands—these hands raised now in solemn pledge to take that power again

A sailor striding down from the hilltop, pushed through the crowd and climbed upon the platform. "Comrades!" he cried joyously. "We are not alone. I ask you to look away to the flags flying over there on the American battleship. You