At first the place filled with the intellectuals-those who lived near
the centre of the town. Nogin spoke, and most of his listeners were
plainly with him. It was very late before the workers arrived; the
working-class quarters were on the outskirts of the town, and no
street-cars were running. But about midnight they began to clump up
the stairs, in groups of ten or twenty-big, rough men, in coarse
clothes, fresh from the battle-line, where they had fought like
devils for a week, seeing their comrades fall all about them.
Scarcely had the meeting formally opened before Nogin was assailed
with a tempest of jeers and angry shouts. In vain he tried to argue,
to explain; they would not listen. He had left the Council of
People's Commissars; he had deserted his post while the battle was
raging. As for the bourgeois press, here in Moscow there was no more
bourgeois press; even the City Duma had been dissolved. (See App. X,
Sect. 4) Bukharin stood up, savage, logical, with a voice which
plunged and struck, plunged and struck.... Him they listened to with
shining eyes. Resolution, to support the action of the Council of
People's Commissars, passed by overwhelming majority. So spoke
Moscow....
[Graphic page-254 Pass to the Kremlin]
By this the Military Revolutionary Commitee requests to give a pass
for the purpose of investigating the Kremlin, the representatives of
the American Socialist party attached to the Socialist press,
comrades Reed and Bryant.
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