“convention” from the breath of hundreds of people.
Red flags fluttered in the February wind.
People from the villages streamed into town for news and instructions. “If only they’d hurry it up with our land,” said the peasants. All the streets around the
Elderly men with red armbands and revolvers at their belts—the people’s militia—stood at the intersections.
The astounding news would not cease. Nicholas abdicated the throne at the Pskov railway station. Passenger train service was interrupted throughout the country.
Prayer services were conducted in honor of the new government in Efre-mov’s churches. Almost all convicts were released from prison. Classes were suspended, and schoolgirls ran around the town ecstatically distributing orders and announcements of the commissar.
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On the fifth or sixth day, I met the shoemaker from Bogovo at the “convention.” He told me that Shuiskii, having learned of the revolution, was preparing to leave for the city. Just before leaving he climbed a ladder to the top of his tiled stove and pulled out from beneath the uppermost tile a small bag of gold coins; then he missed a step, fell, and was dead by evening. The shoemaker had come to town to hand over Shuiskii’s money to the commissar of the Provisional Government.
It was as if the town and people were no longer themselves. Russia had found its voice. Out of the blue, inspired orators appeared in tongue-tied Efre-mov. They were, for the most part, workers from the railway yard. Women cried their hearts out listening to them.
Gone was the typical dejected and sullen appearance of Efremov’s residents. Their faces grew younger, and their eyes thoughtful and kind.
They were passive townspeople no longer. They were all citizens now, and this word brought with it obligations.
And, as if on purpose, the days stayed sunny; crystalline ice thawed, and a warm breeze rustled the flags and carried joyous clouds over the little town. The breath of early spring was in the air—in the thick blue shadows, and in the damp nights that hummed with people’s voices.
I was in a frenzy. I was exhilarated. I could hardly grasp what would happen next. I couldn’t wait to go to Moscow, but the trains were not running yet.
“Wait and see,” Osipenko was saying to me, “this is only a prologue to the great events advancing on Russia. So try to keep a cool head and a warm heart. Save your strength.”
I went to Moscow on the very first train, carrying a pass signed by Kushelev, the commissar of the Provisional Government.
Nobody saw me off. There was no time for farewells.
The stanzas cited do not correspond to the standard text of the Marseillaise.
Roman Gul, We’re in Power Now
Roman Gul was born in Penza in 1896, a city he romanticized and loved. After World War I he served briefly in the White Army during the opening phase of the Russian Civil War of 1918–1920. Barely managing to survive the early Red Terror, he wound up an emigre. He spent many years in Berlin, Paris, and ultimately New York. He chronicled the cultural life of Russian emigres in Berlin and Paris in a two-volume memoir from which this selection is taken. He was well known as a novelist with several works, most notably
In those December days of 1917 Russia was at the height of its time of “damnation.” A previously unseen and unknown passion for universal destruction, universal extermination and a wild hatred for law, order, justice, peace, and tradition spewed forth from the bowels of the populace. Just as in [Dostoevsky’s novel]
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killed all who were “marked for annihilation.” After all, there were no longer courts and judges, prisons nor police. Everything was torn from its foundations, just as Shigalev and Verkhovenskii desired.
In Penza on the square in front of the railroad station a captain passing through the city was killed by a mob just because he hadn’t taken off his insignia. After stripping the dead man naked they whooped and laughed while dragging the large white body to and fro through the snow of Moscow Street. Then a drunken frenzied soldier bellowed “The power is ours now! The people’s.” They burned Grushetskii, the notary, alive in his estate, not allowing him to escape from the burning house. The landowner Skripkin was killed in his estate and his naked corpse was stuffed into a barrel of sauerkraut “just for amusement.” All this was done with wild laughter. “The power is ours now! The people’s.”
In hatred and passion for extermination they killed not only people, but also animals: the non-plebian, non- proletarian kind. In the horse-breeding farm of an acquaintance they broke the backs of the trotting horses with iron bars because they belonged to the “master.” During the plundering of our estate a “revolutionary little peasant” took our female trotter named Volga and, harnessing her to a plow, began to whip her maliciously. Let her croak, she was the master’s. . . . “Trotters are of use to masters, but now there ain’t no masters.” In another estate they cut out the tongue of a stud horse, and in
