Word: petrograd
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Full Cycle. With his journalist's eye, Author Moorehead does not overlook the story's gaudy set pieces, including the mass funeral of revolutionaries at which 1,000,000 people, or half the population of Petrograd, marched in silence (the dead were buried without religious services, but next day. in a shamefaced gesture, priests were brought to say prayers). And there is also the unforgettable picture of Lenin being transported-in Churchill's phrase "like a plague bacillus"-across Germany in the famous sealed train. Lenin made his associates retire to the train toilet to smoke...
...ordinary winter's day in Petrograd. There was neither sun nor wind, nor the specially translucent "Petrograd air." A heavy snow, long since fallen and not swept away, lay in the streets and on rooftops...
...single file. Each ticket of admission was studied by guards newly arrived from Finland and the Kronstadt naval base. There was a second checkup at the towering entrance to the palace, this time by units of a Latvian rifle brigade famed for its loyalty to Bolshevism and brought to Petrograd by Lenin because "the Russian peasant may vacillate if something happens-what's needed is proletarian firmness." At the entrance to the auditorium we passed under a third scrutiny. The footfalls of armed men and the clatter of weapons made the colonnaded hall sound like a barracks...
...filled up the center of the hall. On the right were a few scattered Deputies of the "national-bourgeois" groups. On the left sat the Moslem and Ukrainian Socialists, then came the Left SRs and, finally, the Bolsheviks. Lenin was there. Three nights before, while driving through Petrograd, he had been fired on by assassins and the man beside him had been wounded. But he appeared unruffled as he lolled on the steps of the platform, squeezing his hands convulsively together and, with his huge, blazing eyes, surveying the entire hall from one end to the other...
...sailors and Red soldiers now threw off all restraint. They leaped through the barriers, carried their rifles cocked along the corridors, stormed into the galleries. In their seats the Deputies were motionless, tragically mute. We were isolated from the world, just as the Tauride, Palace was isolated from Petrograd, and Petrograd from Russia. Surrounded by tumult, in the wilderness, we were given over to the will of the triumphant enemy...