Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/31

 One must have lived through these early days of the uprising to understand the enthusiasm of the first weeks of a great Revolution.

Every Sunday, from morning until night, processions passed constantly, bearing flowers and wreaths of everlastings to the Champs de Mars, where the dead of the Revolution have been buried. On the Newsky Perspective or on the Novoïe Vremia, or even at the Crédit Lyonnais or the Bank of Siberia, the red flag was flying, and holiday crowds were gathering for the sole pleasure of fraternizing, purchasing books that even yesterday were forbidden them, and breathing the air of liberty. In the Conservatoire, in the House of the People, in the Imperial Theatres, concerts and lectures were always going on. The music was generally excellent, and thousands of auditors applauded, until late in the night, the leading orators of the Revolution.

It would have been difficult often to tell with whom the political sympathies of the assembly lay. Maximalists and Minimalists, Bolcheviks and Mencheviks, Léninists and Kerensky's supporters or partisans of Pleka-