Page:John Reed - Ten Days that Shook the World - 1919, Boni and Liveright.djvu/318

264 each time—whereupon the Vikzhel threatened an immediate general strike unless they were released…

Smolny was plainly powerless. The newspapers said that all the factories of Petrograd must shut down for lack of fuel in three weeks; the Vikzhel announced that trains must cease running by December first; there was food for three days only in Petrograd, and no more coming in; and the Army on the Front was starving… The Committee for Salvation, the various Central Committees, sent word all over the country, exhorting the population to ignore the Government decrees. And the Allied Embassies were either coldly indifferent, or openly hostile…

The opposition newspapers, suppressed one day and reappearing next morning under new names, heaped bitter sarcasm on the new regime. Even Novaya Zhizn characterised it as “a combination of demagoguery and impotence.”

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