The
reactionaries were using the State Bank as a political weapon; for
instance, when the _Vikzhel_ demanded money to pay the salaries of
the employees of the Government railroads, it was told to apply to
Smolny....
I went to the State Bank to see the new Commissar, a redhaired
Ukrainean Bolshevik named Petrovitch. He was trying to bring order
out of the chaos in which affairs had been left by the striking
clerks. In all the offices of the huge place perspiring volunteer
workers, soldiers and sailors, their tongues sticking out of their
mouths in the intensity of their effort, were poring over the great
ledgers with a bewildered air....
The Duma building was crowded. There were still isolated cases of
defiance toward the new Government, but they were rare. The Central
Land Committee had appealed to the Peasants, ordering them not to
recognise the Land Decree passed by the Congress of the Soviets,
because it would cause confusion and civil war. Mayor Schreider
announced that because of the Bolshevik insurrection, the elections
to the Constituent Assembly would have to be indefinitely postponed.
Two questions seemed to be uppermost in all minds, shocked by the
ferocity of the civil war; first, a truce to the bloodshed (See App.
IX, Sect. 3)-second, the creation of a new Government. There was no
longer any talk of "destroying the Bolsheviki"-and very little about
excluding them from the Government, except from the Populist
Socialists and the Peasants' Soviets.
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