...
The spacious, low-ceilinged refectory downstairs was still a
dining-room. For two rubles I bought a ticket entitling me to
dinner, and stood in line with a thousand others, waiting to get to
the long serving-tables, where twenty men and women were ladling
from immense cauldrons cabbage soup, hunks of meat and piles of
_kasha,_ slabs of black bread. Five kopeks paid for tea in a tin
cup. From a basket one grabbed a greasy wooden spoon.... The benches
along the wooden tables were packed with hungry proletarians,
wolfing their food, plotting, shouting rough jokes across the room....
[Graphic page-33 -- text of placard in russian, translation follows]
COMRADES
FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR HEALTH,
PRESERVE CLEANLINESS.
Upstairs was another eating-place, reserved for the _Tsay-ee-kah-_
though every one went there. Here could be had bread thickly
buttered and endless glasses of tea....
In the south wing on the second floor was the great hall of
meetings, the former ball-room of the Institute. A lofty white room
lighted by glazed-white chandeliers holding hundreds of ornate
electric bulbs, and divided by two rows of massive columns; at one
end a dais, flanked with two tall many-branched light standards, and
a gold frame behind, from which the Imperial portrait had been cut.
Here on festal occasions had been banked brilliant military and
ecclesiastical uniforms, a setting for Grand Duchesses.
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