Page:John Reed - Ten Days that Shook the World - 1919, Boni and Liveright.djvu/307

Rh excited as if with a new game, they waited until the firing slackened, and then tried to run across the street… Many were killed, but the rest dashed backward and forward, laughing, daring each other…

Late in the evening I went to the Dvorianskoye Sobranie—the Nobles’ Club—where the Moscow Bolsheviki were to meet and consider the report of Nogin, Rykov and the others who had left the Council of People’s Commissars.

The meeting-place was a theatre, in which, under the old régime, to audiences of officers and glittering ladies, amateur presentations of the latest French comedy had once taken place.

At first the place filled with the intellectuals—those who lived near the centre of the town. Nogin spoke, and most of his listeners were plainly with him. It was very late before the workers arrived; the working-class quarters were on the outskirts of the town, and no street-cars were running. But about midnight they began to clump up the stairs, in groups of ten or twenty—big, rough men, in coarse clothes, fresh from the battle-line, where they had fought like devils for a week, seeing their comrades fall all about them.

Scarcely had the meeting formally opened before Nogin was assailed with a tempest of jeers and angry shouts. In vain he tried to argue, to explain; they would not listen. He had left the Council of People’s Commissars; he had deserted his post while the battle was raging. As for the bourgeois press, here in Moscow there was no more bourgeois press; even the City Duma had been dissolved. Bukharin stood up, savage, logical, with a voice which plunged and struck, plunged and struck… Him they listened to with shining eyes. Resolution, to support the action of the Council of People’s Commissars, passed by overwhelming majority. So spoke Moscow…

Late in the night we went through the empty streets and under the Iberian Gate to the great Red Square in front of

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