Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Russian Revolution (1921).pdf/152



Once in awhile one has an experience that can never be forgotten so long as life lasts. That was my lot one day: I witnessed a great Russian mass demonstration. It seemed as though I saw the very soul of the revolution.

The demonstration, part of the ceremonies attending the opening of the Congress of the Third International in a day or two took place in the super-historic Red Square of Moscow. No more fitting scene for a revolutionary gathering can be imagined. The Red Square (the name was the same in the days of the Czars) is a large cobble-paved plaza about 150 yards wide by 300 yards long. Along one side of it runs the famous Kremlin wall, above which, in the interior, rise buildings literally bullet-riddled from the terrible fighting in the October revolution; while at its base, in a great common grave, lie hundreds of workers who gave up their lives in the revolutionary battles. Along the other side of the Red Square stretches an enormous arcade, likewise torn by bullets. Once it was a hive of intense capitalistic activity, but now its many shops and offices are tightly closed, and the painted names of their former parasitic occupants look down lugubriously upon an unsympathetic Moscow. At one end of the square there is a large revolutionary museum, and at the other end the celebrated church of St. Basel, the most beautiful building in Russia, if not in the whole world. Just in front of this church stands the great stone executioner's block where hundreds of victims of Ivan the Terrible and other Czars were beheaded. Merely to look about the famous Red Square is to get a thrill such as the New World cannot produce. But when one sees it filled with a surging, revolutionary proletariat, as it was on this day, one's feelings are indescribable.

The day started with a review of the Red Army Moscow garrison. About 10 o'clock the various units began to assemble and to arrange themselves in the Red Square. All branches of the military service were