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| Victory! Workers and Soldiers outside the winter Palace, the day after the battle. Petrograd, 8.11.1917 |
...Mountains
of dirt and rock were piled high near the base of the wall. Climbing these we
looked down into two massive pits, ten or fifteen feet deep and fifty yards
long, where hundreds of soldiers and workers were digging in the light of huge
fires.
A young
student spoke to us in German. “The Brotherhood Grave,” he explained.
“Tomorrow we shall bury here five hundred proletarians who died for the
Revolution.”
He took us
down into the pit. In frantic haste swung the picks and shovels, and the
earth-mountains grew. No one spoke. Overhead the night was thick with stars,
and the ancient Imperial Kremlin wall towered up immeasurably.
“Here in
this holy place,” said the student, “holiest of all Russia, we shall bury our
most holy. Here where are the tombs of the Tsars, our Tsar -the People- shall
sleep….” His arm was in a sling, from a bullet-wound gained in the fighting. He
looked at it. “You foreigners look down on us Russians because so long we
tolerated a medieval monarchy,” said he. “But we saw that the Tsar was not the
only tyrant in the world; capitalism was worse, and in all the countries of the
world capitalism was Emperor…. Russian revolutionary tactics are best….”
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| "Fighting by a Police Station" Drawing by Ν. Samokish From series "Events of the February Revolution" ,1917 |
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| "July in Petrograd. Machine Gunners Call on the Workers of the Pulitov Plant to Support Their Protest Against th Provisional Government" P. Shillingovsky, 1935 |
...Already
through the Iberian Gate a human river was flowing, and the vast Red Square was
spotted with people, thousands of them. I remarked that as the throng passed
the Iberian Chapel, where always before the passerby had crossed himself, they
did not seem to notice it….
We forced
our way through the dense mass packed near the Kremlin wall, and stood upon one
of the dirt-mountains. Already several men were there, among them Muranov, the
soldier who had been elected Commandant of Moscow, a tall, simple-looking,
bearded man with a gentle face.
Through all
the streets to the Red Square the torrents of people poured, thousands upon
thousands of them, all with the look of the poor and the toiling. A military
band came marching up, playing the Internationale, and spontaneously the song
caught and spread like wind-ripples on a sea, slow and solemn. From the top of
the Kremlin wall gigantic banners unrolled to the ground; red, with great
letters in gold and in white, saying, “Martyrs of the Beginning of World Social
Revolution,” and “Long Live the Brotherhood of Workers of the World.”
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| Revolutionary forces occupy the Kremlin, November 1917. Painting of I. Mashkov. |
A bitter
wind swept the Square, lifting the banners. Now from the far quarters of the
city the workers of the different factories were arriving, with their dead.
They could be seen coming through the Gate, the blare of their banners, and the
dull red -like blood- of the coffins they carried. These were rude boxes, made of
unplanned wood and daubed with crimson, borne high on the shoulders of rough men
who marched with tears streaming down their faces, and followed by women who
sobbed and screamed, or walked stiffly, with white, dead faces. Some of the
coffins were open, the lid carried behind them; others were covered with gilded
or silvered cloth, or had a soldier’s hat nailed on the top. There were many
wreaths of hideous artificial flowers….
Through an
irregular lane that opened and closed again the procession slowly moved toward
us. Now through the Gate was flowing an endless stream of banners, all shades
of red, with silver and gold lettering, knots of crepe hanging from the top and
some Anarchist flags, black with white letters. The band was playing the
Revolutionary Funeral March, and against the immense singing of the mass of
people, standing uncovered, the paraders sang hoarsely, choked with sobs….
Between the
factory-workers came companies of soldiers with their coffins, too, and
squadrons of cavalry, riding at salute, and artillery batteries, the cannon
wound with red and black forever, it seemed. Their banners said, “Long live the
Third International!” or “We Want an Honest, General, Democratic Peace!”
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| The issue of the Izvestia of October 27, 1917 (9.11.1917) carrying the text of the Decree on Peace |
Slowly the
marchers came with their coffins to the entrance of the grave, and the bearers
clambered up with their burdens and went down into the pit. 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 back-ground
of fifty thousand people, under the eyes of the world’s workers and their
descendants forever….
One by one
the five hundred coffins were laid in the pits. Dusk fell, and still the
banners came drooping and fluttering, the band played the Funeral March, and
the huge assemblage chanted. In the leafless branches of the trees above the
grave the wreaths were hung, like strange, multi-coloured blossoms. Two hundred
men began to shovel in the dirt. It rained dully down upon the coffins with a
thudding sound, audible beneath the singing….
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
realized 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….
John Reed,
Moscow 16.11.1917
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| K.Yuon, "A New Planet" |
To the 98 years of the Great October...
