...
For thirty-six hours now the Bolsheviki had been cut off from
provincial Russia and the outside world. The railway men and
telegraphers refused to transmit their despatches, the postmen would
not handle their mail. Only the Government wireless at Tsarskoye
Selo launched half-hourly bulletins and manifestoes to the four
corners of heaven; the Commissars of Smolny raced the Commissars of
the City Duma on speeding trains half across the earth; and two
aeroplanes, laden with propaganda, fled high up toward the Front....
But the eddies of insurrection were spreading through Russia with a
swiftness surpassing any human agency. Helsingfors Soviet passed
resolutions of support; Kiev Bolsheviki captured the arsenal and the
telegraph station, only to be driven out by delegates to the
Congress of Cossacks, which happened to be meeting there; in Kazan,
a Military Revolutionary Committee arrested the local garrison staff
and the Commissar of the Provisional Government; from far
Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, came news that the Soviets were in control
of the Municipal institutions; at Moscow, where the situation was
aggravated by a great strike of leather-workers on one side, and a
threat of general lock-out on the other, the Soviets had voted
overwhelmingly to support the action of the Bolsheviki in
Petrograd.... Already a Military Revolutionary Committee was
functioning.
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