Ten Days That Shook the World quotes

About the middle of December, 1917, a group of Socialist Revolutionary leaders paid a private visit to Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, and implored him not to mention the fact that they had been there, because they were “considered too far Right.”

“And to think,” said Sir George. “One year ago my Government instructed me not to receive Miliukov, because he was so dangerously Left!”

September and October are the worst months of the Russian year—especially the Petrograd year. Under dull grey skies, in the shortening days, the rain fell drenching, incessant.

September and October are the worst months of the Russian year—especially the Petrograd year.

Under dull grey skies, in the shortening days, the rain fell drenching, incessant.

The mud underfoot was deep, slippery and clinging, tracked everywhere by heavy boots, and worse than usual because of the complete breakdown of the Municipal administration. Bitter damp winds rushed in from the Gulf of Finland, and the chill fog rolled through the streets.

The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, carloads, trainloads of literature, saturating the land.

Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable.

And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts—but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorky. …

and when they saw us they started up, with their pinched faces and the flesh showing blue through their torn clothing, demanding eagerly,

“Did you bring anything to read?”

What though the outward and visible signs of change were many, what though the statue of Catherine the Great before the Alexandrinsky Theatre bore a little red flag in its hand, and others—somewhat faded—floated from all public buildings;

“Why don’t you speak about the lack of bread?” shouted another soldier.

“Man shall not live by bread alone,” answered Tchudnovsky, sternly.⁠ ⁠…

Followed him an officer, delegate from the Vitebsk Soviet, a Menshevik oboronetz. “It isn’t the question of who has the power.

“But I am the president of the Petrograd Soviet.”

“Well,” replied the soldier, “if you’re as important a fellow as that you must at least have one little paper.”

Trotsky was very patient. “Let me see the Commandant,” he said. The soldier hesitated, grumbling something about not wanting to disturb the Commandant for every devil that came along. He beckoned finally to the soldier in command of the guard. Trotsky explained matters to him.

The soldier hesitated, grumbling something about not wanting to disturb the Commandant for every devil that came along. He beckoned finally to the soldier in command of the guard. Trotsky explained matters to him. “My name is Trotsky,” he repeated.

“Trotsky?” The other soldier scratched his head. “I’ve heard the name somewhere,” he said at length. “I guess it’s all right. You can go on in, comrade.⁠ ⁠…”

In the corridor I met Karakhan, member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, who explained to me what the new Government would be like.

An armoured automobile went slowly up and down, siren screaming. On every corner, in every open space, thick groups were clustered; arguing soldiers and students. Night came swiftly down, the wide-spaced streetlights flickered on, the tides of people flowed endlessly. …

It is always like that in Petrograd just before trouble.⁠ ⁠…

The city was nervous, starting at every sharp sound. But still no sign from the Bolsheviki; the soldiers stayed in the barracks, the workmen in the factories.

“What side do you belong to?” I asked. “The Government?”

“No more Government,” one answered with a grin, “Slava Bogu! Glory to God!”

That was all I could get out of him. …

There was laughter. By waving assorted papers I managed to get around to the door of the press gallery. There an enormous smiling sailor stopped me, and when I showed my pass, just said,

“If you were Saint Michael himself, comrade, you couldn’t pass here!”

Through the glass of the door I made out the distorted face and gesticulating arms of a French correspondent, locked in. …

Always the methodical muffled boom of cannon through the windows, and the delegates, screaming at each other. …

So, with the crash of artillery, in the dark, with hatred, and fear, and reckless daring, new Russia was being born.

The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the United Social Democrats supported Martov’s proposition. It was accepted. A soldier announced that the All-Russian Peasants’ Soviets had refused to send delegates to the Congress; he proposed that a committee be sent with a formal invitation.

Kameniev jangled the bell, shouting, “Keep your seats and we’ll go on with our business!” And Trotsky, standing up with a pale, cruel face, letting out his rich voice in cool contempt,

“All these so-called Socialist compromisers, these frightened Mensheviki, Socialist Revolutionaries, Bund⁠—let them go! They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the garbage-heap of history!”

Riazanov, for the Bolsheviki, stated that at the request of the City Duma the Military Revolutionary Committee had sent a delegation to offer negotiations to the Winter Palace. “In this way we have done everything possible to avoid bloodshed. …”

Another sailor came up, very much irritated.

“We will spank you!” he cried, energetically. “And if necessary we will shoot you too. Go home now, and leave us in peace!”

At this there was a great clamour of anger and resentment, Prokopovitch had mounted some sort of box, and, waving his umbrella, he made a speech:

Voices began to give commands, and in the thick gloom we made out a dark mass moving forward, silent but for the shuffle of feet and the clinking of arms. We fell in with the first ranks.

Like a black river, filling all the street, without song or cheer we poured through the Red Arch

, where the man just ahead of me said in a low voice: “Look out, comrades! Don’t trust them. They will fire, surely!”

In Petrograd the streetcars were running, the stores and restaurants open, theatres going, an exhibition of paintings advertised. … All the complex routine of common life—humdrum even in wartime—proceeded as usual.

Nothing is so astounding as the vitality of the social organism⁠—how it persists, feeding itself, clothing itself, amusing itself, in the face of the worst calamities.⁠ ⁠…

The air was full of rumours about Kerensky, who was said to have raised the Front, and to be leading a great army against the capital. Volia Naroda published a prikaz launched by him at Pskov:

There was something quiet and powerful in all this, which stirred the souls of men.

It was understandable why people believed when Lenin spoke.⁠ ⁠…

By crowd vote it was quickly decided that only representatives of political factions should be allowed to speak on the motion and that speakers should be limited to fifteen minutes.

Avilov tries to frighten us by the threat of a peace at our expense. And I answer that in any case, if Europe continues to be ruled by the imperialist bourgeoisie, revolutionary Russia will inevitably be lost. …

“There are only two alternatives; either the Russian Revolution will create a revolutionary movement in Europe, or the European powers will destroy the Russian Revolution!”

They greeted him with an immense crusading acclaim, kindling to the daring of it, with the thought of championing mankind. And from that moment there was something conscious and decided about the insurrectionary masses, in all their actions, which never left them.

Now, however, the Bolsheviki, in one night, had dissipated it, as one blows away smoke.

Old Russia was no more; human society flowed molten in primal heat, and from the tossing sea of flame was emerging the class struggle, stark and pitiless⁠—and the fragile, slowly-cooling crust of new planets.⁠ ⁠…

In Petrograd sixteen Ministries were on strike, led by the Ministries of Labour and of Supplies—the only two created by the all-Socialist Government of August.

A Duma delegate, pleading for neutrality. Him they listened to, muttering uneasily, feeling him not one of them.

Never have I seen men trying so hard to understand, to decide.

They never moved, stood staring with a sort of terrible intentness at the speaker, their brows wrinkled with the effort of thought, sweat standing out on their foreheads; great giants of men with the innocent clear eyes of children and the faces of epic warriors.

… Near us about fifty men were left stranded, stubbornly in favour, and even as the high roof shook under the shock of victorious roaring, they turned and rapidly walked out of the building—and, some of them, out of the Revolution. …

Imagine this struggle being repeated in every barracks of the city, the district, the whole front, all Russia.

Imagine the sleepless Krylenkos, watching the regiments, hurrying from place to place, arguing, threatening, entreating. And then imaging the same in all the locals of every labour union, in the factories, the villages, on the battleships of the far-flung Russian fleets;

“No,” responded the soldier who had brought the prisoner. “We must ask the commandant.”

“Oh, the commandant!” sneered the sailor. “What did you make a revolution for? To go on obeying officers?”

A praporshtchik of the Pavlovsky regiment was telling us how the insurrection started. “The polk (regiment) was on duty at the General Staff the night of the 6th. Some of my comrades and I were standing guard;

They had been elected a committee of the fortress garrison to protest. The prisoners, they said, were getting the same food as the guards, when there wasn’t even enough to keep a man from being hungry. “Why should the counterrevolutionists be treated so well?”

“We are revolutionists, comrades, not bandits,” answered the commandant.

He turned to us. We explained that rumours were going about that the yunkers were being tortured, and the lives of the Ministers threatened. Could we perhaps see the prisoners, so as to be able to prove to the world—?

“Do you know who I am?” Antonov produced a paper upon which was written that he had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of all the armies of the Russian Republic, and that everyone should obey him without question.

“I don’t care if you’re the devil himself,” said the soldier, hotly. “This machine belongs to the First Machine-Gun Regiment, and we’re carrying ammunition in it, and you can’t have it.⁠ ⁠…”

The difficulty, however, was solved by the appearance of an old battered taxicab, flying the Italian flag. (In time of trouble private cars were registered in the name of foreign consulates, so as to be safe from requisition.)

The early twilight of winter was falling. Heads up they tramped in the chill mud, irregular lines of four, without music, without drums. A red flag crudely lettered in gold, “Peace! Land!” floated over them.

They were very young. The expression on their faces was that of who know they are going to die.⁠ ⁠…

Half-fearful, half-contemptuous, the crowds on the sidewalk watched them pass, in hateful silence. …

We had dinner—an excellent dinner, better and cheaper than could be got in Petrograd—in the station restaurant. Nearby sat a French officer who had just come on foot from Gatchina. All was quiet there, he said. Kerensky held the town.

“Ah, these Russians,” he went on, “they are original! What a civil war! Everything except the fighting!”

We sallied out into the town. Just at the door of the station stood two soldiers with rifles and bayonets fixed. They were surrounded by about a hundred business men, Government officials and students, who attacked them with passionate argument and epithet.

Kameniev now spoke, describing the proceedings of the reconciliation conference. The armistice conditions proposed by the Mensheviki, he said, had been contemptuously rejected. Even the branches of the Railwaymen’s Union had voted against such a proposition. …

“Now that we’ve won the power and are sweeping all Russia,” he declared, “all they ask of us are three little things: 1. To surrender the power. 2. To make the soldiers continue the war. 3. To make the peasants forget about the land.⁠ ⁠…”

Lenin appeared for a moment, to answer the accusations of the Socialist Revolutionaries:

In his breast was a hole; through his clothes fresh blood came welling up with every heartbeat. His eyes were closed and his young, bearded face was greenish-white. Faintly and slowly he still breathed, with every breath sighing,

“Mir boudit! Mir boudit! (Peace is coming! Peace is coming!)”

Dybenko looked up as we came in. “Ah,” he said to Baklanov. “Comrade, will you go up to the Commandant’s headquarters and take charge? Wait; I will write you credentials.” He went to the typewriter and slowly picked out the letters.

The foremost sailor halted and scratched his head.

“This morning,” he said, “it was about half a kilometer down the road. But the damn thing isn’t anywhere now. We walked and walked and walked, but we couldn’t find it.”

They climbed into the truck, and we proceeded. It must have been about a mile further that Vladimir Nicolaievitch cocked his ear and shouted to the chauffeur to stop.

I took him by the arm. “Come!” I said. “Let’s go to that house. Someone there can surely read.” They hesitated. “No,” said one. The other looked me over. “Why not?” he muttered.

“After all, it is a serious crime to kill an innocent man.”

We walked up to the front door of the house and knocked. A short, stout woman opened it, and shrank back in alarm, babbling, “I don’t know anything about them! I don’t know anything about them!” One of my guards held out the pass.

Immense trucks like ours, columns of artillery, wagons, loomed up in the night, without lights, as we were. We hurtled furiously on, wrenched right and left to avoid collisions that seemed inevitable, scraping wheels, followed by the epithets of pedestrians.

Across the horizon spread the glittering lights of the capital, immeasurably more splendid by night than by day, like a dike of jewels heaped on the barren plain.

The old workman who drove held the wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming capital in an exultant gesture.

The old workman who drove held the wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming capital in an exultant gesture.

“Mine!” he cried, his face all alight. “All mine now! My Petrograd!”

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!”

Many of them were women—squat, strong proletarian women. Behind the dead came other women—women young and broken, or old, wrinkled women making noises like hurt animals, who tried to follow their sons and husbands into the Brotherhood Grave, and shrieked when compassionate hands restrained them.

The poor love each other so!

All the long day the funeral procession passed, coming in by the Iberian Gate and leaving the Square by way of the Nikolskaya, a river of red banners, bearing words of hope and brotherhood and stupendous prophecies, against a background of fifty thousand people—under the …

The lights came out. The last banners passed, and the last moaning women, looking back with awful intensity as they went. Slowly from the great Square ebbed the proletarian tide. …

I suddenly realised that the devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer, and for which it was a glory to die.⁠ ⁠…

“Yes,” they cried, “wait until the peasants speak. We know what the peasants will say. … Aren’t they workingmen like ourselves?”

In the long run, everything depended upon the peasants.

While the peasants had been politically backward, still they had their own peculiar ideas, and they constituted more than eighty percent of the people of Russia. The Bolsheviki had a comparatively small following among the peasants;

“Why did public opinion change toward Kerensky? The savages set up gods to which they pray, and which they punish if one of their prayers is not answered. … That is what is happening at this moment. …

Yesterday Kerensky; today Lenin and Trotsky; another tomorrow.⁠ ⁠…

“We have proposed to both Kerensky and the Bolsheviki to retire from the power. Kerensky has accepted—today he announced from his hiding-place that he has resigned as Premier; but the Bolsheviki wish to retain the power, and they do not know how to use it.

Near Smolny the Red Guard was lined up on both sides of the street, wild with delight. The other old peasant spoke to his comrade,

“I am not tired,” he said. “I walked on air all the way!”

On the steps of Smolny about a hundred Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies were massed, with their banner, dark against the blaze of light streaming out between the arches. Like a wave they rushed down, clasping the peasants in their arms and kissing them;

Even the voting of the Constituent Assembly will not do away with hunger, or beat Wilhelm. … The issue of hunger and of surrendering Petrograd cannot be decided by waiting for the Constituent Assembly.

Hunger is not waiting. The peasants’ Revolution is not waiting. The Admirals who ran away did not wait.

“Blind people are surprised that hungry people, betrayed by admirals and generals, do not take an interest in voting.

“Let us forget everything except that there is no way out but by the dictatorship of the proletariat—either that or the dictatorship of Kornilov.

“Let us wait, comrades, for⁠—a miracle!”

“Everyone admits, it seems, that the defence of the country is our principal task, and that, to assure it, we must have discipline in the Army and order in the rear.

“Yes, I know,” interrupted Kerensky, quizzically.

“Abroad the Revolution is no longer fashionable!”

“What is your explanation of why the Russians have stopped fighting?”

“

Kerensky? A public executioner of peasants!

“Kerensky? A strangler of workers!

Their just demands ought to be satisfied at once and at any cost. The proletariat of the schools has in vain demanded an increase of salary to one hundred rubles per month.

It would be a disgrace any longer to keep in poverty the teachers of the overwhelming majority of the Russian people.

But a real democracy cannot stop at mere literacy, at universal elementary instruction. It must endeavour to organise a uniform secular school of several grades. The ideal is, equal and if possible higher education for all the citizens.

However needful it may be to curtail other articles of the people’s budget, the expenses on education must stand high.

A large educational budget is the pride and glory of a nation.

The free and enfranchised peoples of Russia will not forget this.

Instruction and Education: One must emphasise the difference between instruction and education.

Instruction is the transmission of ready knowledge by the teacher to his pupil. Education is a creative process.

The personality of the individual is being “educated” throughout life, is being formed, grows richer in content, stronger and more perfect.

The city labourer, according to his own fashion, the rural toiler according to his, will each build his clear world-conception permeated with the class-idea of the workers.

There is no more superb or beautiful phenomenon than the one of which our nearest descendants will be both witnesses and participants: The building by collective Labour of its own general, rich and free soul.

Instruction will surely be an important but not a decisive element. What is more important here is the criticism, the creativeness of the masses themselves; for science and art have only in some of their parts a general human importance.

“What class of society do you belong to?” they asked him.

“I am a revolutionist,” answered Plekhanov, “who for forty years has devoted his life to the struggle for liberty!”

“Anyway,” said a workman, “you have now sold yourself to the bourgeoisie!”

“Anyway,” said a workman, “you have now sold yourself to the bourgeoisie!”

The workers no longer knew Plekhanov, pioneer of the Russian Social Democracy!

“The detachments at Gatchina, deceived by Kerensky, have laid down their arms and decided to arrest Kerensky. That chief of the counterrevolutionary campaign has fled.

The workingmen are being emancipated from the whims and arbitrary will of the capitalists, for henceforth there will be established the control of the workers over mills and factories.

Everything living and capable of life is being emancipated from the hateful shackles.

There remain only the peoples of Russia, who have suffered and are suffering oppression and arbitrariness, and whose emancipation must immediately be begun, whose liberation must be effected resolutely and definitely.

Countess Panina was arrested and brought to trial before the first Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. The trial is described in the chapter on “Revolutionary Justice” in my forthcoming volume, Kornilov to Brist-Litovsk.

The prisoner was sentenced to “return the money, and then be liberated to the public contempt.” In other words, she was set free!

From Drug Naroda (Menshevik), November 18th: