Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/25

 Czar to the creation of the Russian Republic there were but three days. And during these three days not only Czarism, but the Douma, and the Zemtvos, and all the institutions more or less Liberal, which were the results of the movement of 1905, collapsed.

Our first visit on arriving at Petrograd was to the Tauride Palace, where the Soviet was sitting.

I had been there in June 1914, some weeks before the war. Maxim Kovalewsky, who died six months afterwards as a result of his captivity in Austria, had introduced me to President Rodzianko. I had signed the "Livre d'Or" immediately after the Dowager Empress, who had visited the Tauride Palace for the first time some days before. I had been photographed in the gardens—with Tscheidze, who is to-day President of the Soviet, with Skobeleff, now Minister of Labour, and with the four Socialist members of the Douma, who, to welcome me, had interrupted their discussions.

Even then, any one who visited Russia with his eyes open was bound to realize