At the first hotel we entered
an office illuminated by two candles.
"Yes, we have some very comfortable rooms, but all the windows are
shot out. If the _gospodin_ does not mind a little fresh air...."
Down the Tverskaya the shop-windows were broken, and there were
shell-holes and torn-up paving stones in the street. Hotel after
hotel, all full, or the proprietors still so frightened that all they
could say was, "No, no, there is no room! There is no room!" On the
main streets, where the great banking-houses and mercantile houses
lay, the Bolshevik artillery had been indiscriminately effective. As
one Soviet official told me, "Whenever we didn't know just where the
_yunkers_ and White Guards were, we bombarded their pocketbooks...."
At the big Hotel National they finally took us in; for we were
foreigners, and the Military Revolutionary Committee had promised to
protect the dwellings of foreigners.... On the top floor the manager
showed us where shrapnel had shattered several windows. "The
animals!" said he, shaking his first at imaginary Bolsheviki. "But
wait! Their time will come; in just a few days now their ridiculous
Government will fall, and then we shall make them suffer!"
We dined at a vegetarian restaurant with the enticing name, "I Eat
Nobody," and Tolstoy's picture prominent on the walls, and then
sallied out into the streets.
The headquarters of the Moscow Soviet was in the palace of the former
Governor-General, an imposing white building fronting Skobeliev
Square.
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