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formed an elongated court.
Until the summer, the Institute had been a school for young la-
dies of noble birth from all over Russia, but the Institute had now
been taken over by the St. Petersburg Soviet, with a sufficient bribe
to the proper officials, and an exorbitant rent. The students had been
crowded into the Smolny Convent snuggled into the north ell. For a
few minutes, the man admired the convent s dull blue dome with its
silver stars.
The square was busy with the coming and going of wagons, carts,
coaches, horse-drawn sleds, mounted men, some Hussars and Cos-
sacks, and a few smoking automobiles. The front entrance to the
Institute was protected with a well built fortification manned by sol-
diers with rifles and fixed bayonets on their shoulders. They guarded a
narrow passage that allowed a constant stream of people to enter and
leave.
Carefully watching the traffic, the man in the Cossack hat walked
across the square and passed through the fortification and the high
doors of the Institute.
Inside, the tumult of excited activity stirred up the man, and he de-
cided to walk around the building to observe a revolution in action. He
had just enough spare time. He looked down one vast, stuffy hallway
after another. Sparse electric lighting barely subdued the darkness, and
64 Rudy Rummel
the formerly white polished floors were now muddied by the heavy felt
boots of soldiers, sailors, revolutionaries, factory workers, and peas-
ants, the shiny black leather boots of professionals and government
officials, and the soft cloth boots of the heads of strike committees and
deputies from the soviets in Moscow, Riga, Samara, Tula, Kazan, and
elsewhere. Everyone seemed to have hurried business here.
Here and there were stacks of literature, including Iskra the Spark,
Nachalo The Beginning, and the Soviet organ Izvestia The News.
These were snatched up by passersby and could be found on tables and
benches everywhere.
Bone-weary soldiers and revolutionaries slept where they could,
some on benches and chairs in the rooms, others against the walls in the
hallways. The man knew some had been on their feet for more than
twenty-four hours.
He came to a large, columned cafeteria, and walked in. A long line
of people, each holding a bowl in one hand and a large wooden spoon
in the other, waited for a slice of black bread and a ladle full of steamy
cabbage soup. Some, disheveled and wearing ragged clothing, were
obviously very poor. The Institute was clearly open to the hungry of St.
Petersburg. Around the hall were long, rough wooden tables and
wooden benches at which people sat to eat. No one looked gloomy or
unhappy. Serious expressions dominated, but he saw occasional smiles
and scattered laughter. At a few tables, groups of men and a few
women appeared to be engaged in heated discussions.
The place reeked with the acidic smell of too many unwashed bod-
ies mixed with the oily, steamy odor of food. He quickly turned around
and returned to the hallway before he retched. At least here there was
only the stench of bodies.
Off another hallway near the entrance was a large, white room
with marble columns, a central crystal chandelier loaded with can-
dles, and silver candelabra scattered about a former ballroom. Now
it was the central meeting place for speeches and meetings of dele-
gates from the soviets all over Russia. As the man in the Cossack hat
looked in, he saw a crowd of people listening to an emaciated, hag-
gard, and unkempt peasant standing on a rostrum at one end of the
room. The peasant was nearly hysterical, his voice shrill. The man
suspected this was his first speech ever. A peasant cap covered dirty,
straw-colored hair that hung halfway to his shoulders, and his beard
stuck out in all directions.
The man moved closer to the rostrum so he could hear the peasant.
Red Terror Never Again 65
I tell you the truth. We are still starving to death by the thousands,
and the newly dead are being sold for food by scavengers. I saw it with
my own eyes. I tell the truth. We are slaves to landowners. We are
slaves to the rich. I tell you, we have had enough of this. We want food.
We want land; we will die for it. We want freedom. I tell you the truth.
We will not wait any longer. Tavarishi friends. We join you. We will
fight.
He bent over coughing into his hand, and it came away with blood
on it. Someone stepped onto the podium and helped the peasant to a
seat. After a loud murmur of voices, a worker mounted the rostrum.
Waving his arms, he began to speak so rapidly, his words ran into each
other.
I work at a Putiloff factory and I, with all my comrades, took it
over and tried to run the factory, but the owners and managers and
foreman all sabotaged the machines so that we could do nothing, and
they have shut down the mills so we will starve or submit to them and
again be beaten and whipped and work twelve hours a day for less than
one ruble, and my wife and children are dying for I cannot buy enough
food, and we live with three families in one room. We all have met, and
we will fight them . . . .
The man in the Cossack hat left the room and climbed the wide
stairs to the second floor. He looked into one classroom after another.
In all of them, people were busy at or around tables, with the rare wall
telephone ringing or being used. In some, men and women clacked
away on Russian converted Underwood typewriters, slapping the car-
riages back when little bells signaled that the carriages had reached
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