Page:John Reed - Ten Days that Shook the World - 1919, Boni and Liveright.djvu/67

 in preventing its meeting,—well, then we are realists enough not to depend on that!”

Under date of October 29th I find entered in my notebook the following items culled from the newspapers of the day:

This is just a sample of the confused events of those feverish days, when everybody knew that something was going to happen, but nobody knew just what.

At a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet in Smolny, the night of October 30th, Trotzky branded the assertions of the bourgeois press that the Soviet contemplated armed insurrection as “an attempt of the reactionaries to discredit and wreck the Congress of Soviets… The Petrograd Soviet,” he declared, "had not ordered any vystuplennie. If it is necessary we shall do so, and we will be supported by the Petrograd garrison… They (the Government) are preparing a counter-revolution; and we shall answer with an offensive which will be merciless and decisive.”

It is true that the Petrograd Soviet had not ordered a demonstration, but the Central Committee of the Bolshevik