The _yunkers_ and
White Guards held the Kremlin and the centre of the town, beaten
upon from all sides by the troops of the Military Revolutionary
Committee. The Soviet artillery was stationed in Skobeliev Square,
bombarding the City Duma building, the Prefecture and the Hotel
Metropole. The cobblestones of the Tverskaya and Nikitskaya had been
torn up for trenches and barricades. A hail of machine-gun fire
swept the quarters of the great banks and commercial houses. There
were no lights, no telephones; the bourgeois population lived in the
cellars.... The last bulletin said that the Military Revolutionary
Committee had delivered an ultimatum to the Committee of Public
Safety, demanding the immediate surrender of the Kremlin, or
bombardment would follow.
"Bombard the Kremlin?" cried the ordinary citizen. "They dare not!"
From Vologda to Chita in far Siberia, from Pskov to Sevastopol on
the Black Sea, in great cities and little villages, civil war burst
into flame. From thousands of factories, peasant communes, regiments
and armies, ships on the wide sea, greetings poured into
Petrograd-greetings to the Government of the People.
The Cossack Government at Novotcherkask telegraphed to Kerensky,
_"The Government of the Cossack troops invites the Provisional
Government and the members of the Council of the Republic to come,
if possible, to Novotcherkask, where we can organise in common the
struggle against the Bolsheviki.
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