Pages: 126-126

EXASPERATION AGAINST THE MILITARY
125 saw several signal fires and heard the thunder of rifle volleys. On Vasilievsky Island the barricades were illuminated by bonfires lit by the strikers. I was unable to proceed further. The sinister sound of a trumpet call (trampet call) signified an order to fire. A battalion of soldiers, bayonets fixed, stormed the barricade made of felled sleighs. A veritable slaughter ensued. About a hundred workers lay dead on the battlefield. Fifty wounded prisoners were led past me. An officer threatened me with a pistol and ordered me to clear out."

The correspondents gave particularly few detailed descriptions of the barricade battles. This is understandable, since the correspondents tried to keep more or less at a distance from the dangerous areas. And of course, only the rarest and very few of the participants in the barricade battles survived. There was even a report that artillery had fired on the barricades, but this does not appear to be confirmed.

207

EXASPERATION AGAINST THE MILITARY.

All correspondents noted that the crowd greeted officers and soldiers with shouts of: Murderers! Assassins! Bloodsuckers! It is reported that an elderly general, traveling in a sleigh in the direction of the troops, was stopped. The crowd shouted: "Are you going to give them the order to shoot at us?" The general ordered the coachman to drive on, but received a blow to the head from a well-dressed gentleman in an expensive fur coat. The general was dragged from the sleigh and killed by the crowd. (This report is doubtful, because the police and government would probably have publicized such a fact in order to exploit it against the strikers. Meanwhile, no confirmations of such an event appeared.)

"At 8 o'clock on Sunday evening, about 20 people from educated society stopped the sleigh of a certain august personage. Murderer! they said to him. Get down from the sleigh, fall on your knees and beg for mercy! The personage refused to obey, and the crowd spat in his face."*

* Hereafter Lenin's manuscript contains the articles: "Plan of the Petersburg Battle" and "The Tsar-Batushka and the Barricades." Both articles were published in No. 4 of *Forward* and included in Vol. VII, 85-90 of the Works. The article "The Tsar-Batushka and the Barricades" has a note crossed out by Lenin, which we reproduce below. —Ed.