Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed

Author:John Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

8 Counter-Revolution

Next morning, Sunday the eleventh, the Cossacks entered Tsarskoye Selo, Kerensky 38 himself riding a white horse and all the church-bells clamouring. From the top of a little hill outside the town could be seen the golden spires and many-coloured cupolas, the sprawling grey immensity of the capital spread along the dreary plain, and beyond, the steely Gulf of Finland.

There was no battle. But Kerensky made a fatal blunder. At seven in the morning he sent word to the Second Tsarskoye Selo Rifles to lay down their arms. The soldiers replied that they would remain neutral, but would not disarm. Kerensky gave them ten minutes in which to obey. This angered the soldiers; for eight months they had been governing themselves by committee, and this smacked of the old régime.… A few minutes later Cossack artillery opened fire on the barracks, killing eight men. From that moment there were no more ‘neutral’ soldiers in Tsarskoye.…

Petrograd woke to bursts of rifle-fire, and the tramping thunder of men marching. Under the high dark sky a cold wind smelt of snow. At dawn the Military Hotel and the Telegraph Agency had been taken by large forces of yunkers, and bloodily recaptured. The telephone station was besieged by sailors, who lay behind barricades of barrels, boxes, and tin sheets in the middle of the Morskaya, or sheltered themselves at the corner of the Gorokhovaya, and of St Isaac’s Square, shooting at anything that moved. Occasionally an automobile passed in and out, flying the Red Cross flag. The sailors let it pass.…

Albert Rhys Williams was in the Telephone Exchange. He went out with the Red Cross automobile which was ostensibly tull of wounded. After circulating about the city, the car went by devious ways to the Mikhailovsky yunker school, headquarters of the counter-revolution. A French officer, in the courtyard, seemed to be in command.… By this means ammunition and supplies were conveyed to the Telephone Exchange. Scores of these pretended ambulances acted as couriers and ammunition trains for the yunkers.

Five or six armoured cars, belonging to the disbanded British Armoured Car Division, were in their hands. As Louise Bryant was going along St Isaac’s Square one came rolling up from the Admiralty, on its way to the Telephone Exchange. At the corner of Ulitsa Gogolia, right in front of her, the engine stalled. Some sailors ambushed behind wood-piles began shooting. The machine-gun in the turret of the thing slewed around and spat a hail of bullets indiscriminately into the wood-piles and the crowd. In the archway where Miss Bryant stood seven people were shot dead, among them two little boys. Suddenly, with a shout, the sailors leaped up and rushed into the flaming open, closing around the monster, they thrust their bayonets into the loopholes again and again, yelling.… The chauffeur pretended to be wounded, and they let him go free – to run to the Duma and swell the tale of Bolshevik atrocities.… Among the dead was a British officer.…

Later the newspapers told of another French officer, captured in a yunker armoured car and sent to Peter-Paul.

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