Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of
organisations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the
factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted,
burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny
Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons,
car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia
absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And
it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap
fiction that corrupts-but social and economic theories, philosophy,
the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorky....
Then the Talk, beside which Carlyle's "flood of French speech" was a
mere trickle. Lectures, debates, speeches-in theatres, circuses,
school-houses, clubs, Soviet meeting-rooms, Union headquarters,
barracks.... Meetings in the trenches at the Front, in village squares,
factories.... What a marvellous sight to see Putilovsky Zavod (the
Putilov factory) pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social
Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever
they had to say, as long as they would talk! For months in Petrograd,
and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In
railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu
debate, everywhere....
And the All-Russian Conferences and Congresses, drawing together the
men of two continents-conventions of Soviets, of Cooperatives,
Zemstvos, [*] nationalities, priests, peasants, political parties; the
[* See Notes and Explanations]
Democratic Conference, the Moscow Conference, the Council of the
Russian Republic.
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