barracks.... Meetings in the trenches at the Front, in village squares,
factories.... What a marvellous sight to see Putilovsky Zavod (the
Putilov factory) pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social
Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever
they had to say, as long as they would talk! For months in Petrograd,
and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In
railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu
debate, everywhere....

And the All-Russian Conferences and Congresses, drawing together the
men of two continents-conventions of Soviets, of Cooperatives,
Zemstvos, [*] nationalities, priests, peasants, political parties; the
[* See Notes and Explanations]
Democratic Conference, the Moscow Conference, the Council of the
Russian Republic. There were always three or four conventions going
on in Petrograd. At every meeting, attempts to limit the time of
speakers voted down, and every man free to express the thought that
was in him....

We came down to the front of the Twelfth Army, back of Riga, where
gaunt and bootless men sickened in the mud of desperate trenches; and
when they saw us they started up, with their pinched faces and the
flesh showing blue through their torn clothing, demanding eagerly,
"Did you bring anything to _read?"_

What though the outward and visible signs of change were many, what
though the statue of Catharine the Great before the Alexandrinsky
Theatre bore a little red flag in its hand, and others-somewhat
faded-floated from all public buildings; and the Imperial monograms
and eagles were either torn down or covered up; and in place of the