The Government employees were all stopping
work....
It was war-war deliberately planned, Russian fashion; war by strike
and sabotage. As we sat there the chairman read a list of names and
assignments; so-and-so was to make the round of the Ministries;
another was to visit the banks; some ten or twelve were to work the
barracks and persuade the soldiers to remain neutral-"Russian
soldiers, do not shed the blood of your brothers!"; a committee was
to go and confer with Kerensky; still others were despatched to
provincial cities, to form branches of the Committee for Salvation,
and link together the anti-Bolshevik elements.
The crowd was in high spirits. "These Bolsheviki _will_ try to
dictate to the _intelligentzia?_ We'll show them!"... Nothing could be
more striking than the contrast between this assemblage and the
Congress of Soviets. There, great masses of shabby soldiers, grimy
workmen, peasants-poor men, bent and scarred in the brute struggle
for existence; here the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary
leaders-Avksentievs, Dans, Liebers,-the former Socialist
Ministers-Skobelievs, Tchernovs,-rubbed shoulders with Cadets like
oily Shatsky, sleek Vinaver; with journalists, students,
intellectuals of almost all camps. This Duma crowd was well-fed,
well-dressed; I did not see more than three proletarians among them
all....
News came. Kornilov's faithful _Tekhintsi_ [*] had slaughtered his
[* See Notes and Explanations]
guards at Bykhov, and he had escaped.
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