Red Guards stood sentry at the door. At the head of the wide,
formal stairway, whose walls were plastered with announcements of
committee-meetings and addresses of political parties, we passed
through a series of lofty ante-rooms, hung with red-shrouded pictures
in gold frames, to the splendid state salon, with its magnificent
crystal lustres and gilded cornices. A low-voiced hum of talk,
underlaid with the whirring bass of a score of sewing machines,
filled the place. Huge bolts of red and black cotton cloth were
unrolled, serpentining across the parqueted floor and over tables, at
which sat half a hundred women, cutting and sewing streamers and
banners for the Funeral of the Revolutionary Dead. The faces of these
women were roughened and scarred with life at its most difficult;
they worked now sternly, many of them with eyes red from weeping....
The losses of the Red Army had been heavy.
At a desk in one corner was Rogov, an intelligent, bearded man with
glasses, wearing the black blouse of a worker. He invited us to march
with the Central Executive Committee in the funeral procession next
morning....
"It is impossible to teach the Socialist Revolutionaries and the
Mensheviki anything!" he exclaimed. "They compromise from sheer
habit. Imagine! They proposed that we hold a joint funeral with the
_yunkers!"_
[Graphic page-251 Questionairre for the Bourgeoioisie]
Distributed to all bourgeois households in Moscow by the Moscow
Military Revolutionary Commitee, so as to provide a basis for the
requisition of clothing for the Army and the poor workers.
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