Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/277

Rh in stature, but great in energy. Night and day he toiled, snatching an occasional wink of sleep in a small room above the Soviet, ready at a moment's notice to spring to the saddle or the typewriter. While his face was habitually drawn tight in lines of thought, he would often explode in a contagious burst of laughter. His speech was terse, on occasion flaming. But a bare fire-brand would never have done in such a powder-magazine as Vladivostok. By skill and tact he pulled the Soviet out of many ugly positions, into which its enemies had jockeyed it.

Respected by everybody, even by his bitter political opponents, Sukhanov was chosen President of the Soviet. He was thus the tip of the spearhead that the Bolshevik movement thrust out into the Pacific and the eastern world. He found himself, at 24, facing tasks that would have taxed the resources of a veteran diplomat.

But statecraft was in his blood. His father was a functionary of the old regime, charged with the arrest of Revolutionists. Among those he had found plotting against the Czar were his own daughter, and this son Constantin. Constantin was arrested. Bitter and cynical, the father had faced his son across the table of the tribunal.

It was by grace of his Imperial Majesty, Czar Nicholas II, that the elder Sukhanov had sat in the magistrate's place, with the white, blue and red flag of the autocracy behind the dais. When we