Page:John Reed - Ten Days that Shook the World - 1919, Boni and Liveright.djvu/300

248 grievances before their own Soviet; and further along was Bukharin, a short, red-bearded man with the eyes of a fanatic—“more Left than Lenin,” they said of him…

Then the three strokes of the bell and we made a rush for the train, worming our way through the packed and noisy aisle… A good-natured crowd, bearing the discomfort with humorous patience, interminably arguing about everything from the situation in Petrograd to the British Trade-Union system, and disputing loudly with the few boorzhui who were on board. Before we reached Moscow almost every car had organised a Committee to secure and distribute food, and these Committees became divided into political factions, who wrangled over fundamental principles…

The station at Moscow was deserted. We went to the office of the Commissar, in order to arrange for our return tickets. He was a sullen youth with the shoulder-straps of a Lieutenant; when we showed him our papers from Smolny, he lost his temper and declared that he was no Bolshevik, that he represented the Committee of Public Safety… It was characteristic—in the general turmoil attending the conquest of the city, the chief railway station had been forgotten by the victors…

Not a cab in sight. A few blocks down the street, however, we woke up a grotesquely-padded izvostchik asleep upright on the box of his little sleigh. “How much to the centre of the town?”

He scratched his head. “The barini won’t be able to find a room in any hotel,” he said. “But I’ll take you around for a hundred rubles…” Before the Revolution it cost two! We objected, but he simply shrugged his shoulders. “It takes a good deal of courage to drive a sleigh nowadays,” he went on. We could not beat him down below fifty… As we sped along the silent, snowy half-lighted streets, he recounted his

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