As we looked, suddenly an armoured automobile
appeared around the corner of the Mikhailovsky, its guns sluing this
way and that. Immediately the crowd began to run, as Petrograd
crowds do, falling down and lying still in the street, piled in the
gutters, heaped up behind telephone-poles. The car lumbered up to
the steps of the Duma and a man stuck his head out of the turret,
demanding the surrender of the _Soldatski Golos._ The boy-scouts
jeered and scuttled into the building. After a moment the automobile
wheeled undecidedly around and went off up the Nevsky, while some
hundreds of men and women picked themselves up and began to dust
their clothes....
Inside was a prodigious running-about of people with armfuls of
_Soldatski Golos,_ looking for places to hide them....
A journalist came running into the room, waving a paper.
"Here's a proclamation from Krasnov!" he cried. Everybody crowded
around. "Get it printed-get it printed quick, and around to the
barracks!"
By the order of the Supreme Commander I am appointed commandant of
the troops concentrated under Petrograd.
Citizens, soldiers, valorous Cossacks of the Don, of the Kuban, of
the Transbaikal, of the Amur, of the Yenissei, to all you who have
remained faithful to your oath I appeal; to you who have sworn to
guard inviolable your oath of Cossack-I call upon you to save
Petrograd from anarchy, from famine, from tyranny, and to save
Russia from the indelible shame to which a handful of ignorant men,
bought by the gold of Wilhelm, are trying to submit her.
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