Page:John Reed - Ten Days that Shook the World - 1919, Boni and Liveright.djvu/248

202 concerned in the conspiracy, who shall be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal…

From Moscow, word that the yunkers and Cossacks had surrounded the Kremlin and ordered the Soviet troops to lay down their arms. The Soviet forces complied, and as they were leaving the Kremlin, were set upon and shot down. Small forces of Bolsheviki had been driven from the Telephone and Telegraph offices; the yunkers now held the centre of the city… But all around them the Soviet troops were mustering. Street-fighting was slowly gathering way; all attempts at compromise had failed… On the side of the Soviet, ten thousand garrison soldiers and a few Red Guards; on the side of the Government, six thousand yunkers, twenty-five hundred Cossacks and two thousand White Guards.

The Petrograd Soviet was meeting, and next door the new Tsay-ee-kah, acting on the decrees and orders which came down in a steady stream from the Council of People’s Commissars in session upstairs; on the Order in Which Laws Are to be Ratified and Published, Establishing an Eight-hour Day for Workers, and Lunatcharsky’s “Basis for a System of Popular Education”. Only a few hundred people were present at the two meetings, most of them armed. Smolny was almost deserted, except for the guards, who were busy at the hall windows, setting up machine-guns to command the flanks of the building.

In the Tsay-ee-kah a delegate of the Vikzhel was speaking:

“We refuse to transport the troops of either party… We have sent a committee to Kerensky to say that if he continues to march on Petrograd we will break his lines of communication…”

He made the usual plea for a conference of all the Socialist parties to form a new Government…

Kameniev answered discreetly. The Bolsheviki would be

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