Parted red curtains; in the center, in a trench, a German soldier, eyes closed, hands in overcoat pockets, leans against one side of a trench, smoking a pipe, his rifle resting on the other side of the trench. To the right, a Red soldier, red from red fur hat to red boots, holds two rifles. To the left, a Russian soldier casts away his his hat, backpack, and rifle. Across the bottom of the stage it reads, 1918. Operett: "Trockij", Operetta Trotsky. A watercolor postcard by Schima Martos.
1918. Operett: "Trockij", Operetta Trotsky
"October 24, a gray morning, early. I roamed about the building from one floor to another, partly for the sake of movement and partly to make sure everything was in order and to encourage those who needed it. Along the stone floors of the interminable and still half-dark corridors of the Smolny, the soldiers were dragging their machine-guns, with a hearty clangor and tramping of feet—this was the new detachment I had summoned. The few Socialist-Revolutionists and Mensheviks still at the Smolny could be seen poking sleepy, frightened faces out at us. The music of the guns was ominous in their ears, and they left the Smolny in a hurry, one after the other. We were now in full command of the building that was preparing to rear a Bolshevik head over the city and the country."
Leon Trotsky writing of the morning of November 6, 1917 — October 24, Old Style. The Smolny, a former school for girls, had been the seat of the Soviet Executive Committee, a Committee in which Bolsheviks had been increasingly represented in the weeks before the October Revolution. Earlier in the morning, Trotsky had found the machine guns in the building poorly maintained, and had sent for the detachment he writes of. The Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky had determined to suppress the Bolsheviks on the 5th, and tried to do so on the 6th, but by the morning of the 7th the Bolsheviks would control Petrograd.
My Life: an Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon Trotsky, page 321, publisher: Dover Publications, Inc., publication date: 2007
1917-11-06, 1917, November, Smolny, the Smolny, machine gun, machine-gun, Bolshevik, Kerensky
