John Reed

“ Tsarskoye Selo-station was quiet, but knots of soldiers stood here and there talking in low tones and looking uneasily down the empty track in the direction of Gatchina. I asked some of them which side they were on. "Well," said one, "we don't exactly know the rights of the matter.... There is no doubt that Kerensky is a provocator, but we do not consider it right for Russian men to be shooting Russian men." ”

“ A revolution is a rising of all the people.... But here what have we? Nothing but a handful of poor fools deceived by Lenin and Trotzky.... Their decrees and their appeals will simply add to the museum of historical curiosities....
And Narodnoye Slovo (People'sWord-PopulistSocialist) :
"Workers' and Peasants' Government?" That is only a pipedream; nobody, either in Russia or in the countries of our Allies, will recognise this "Government"-or even in the enemy countries.... ”

“ Some soldiers were trying to fasten two military bicycles on the running-board. The chauffeur violently protested; the enamel would get scratched, he said. True, he was a Bolshevik, and the automobile was commandeered from a bourgeois; true, the bicycles were for the use of orderlies. But the chauffeur's professional pride was revolted.... So the bicycles were abandoned....
The People's Commissars for War and Marine were going to inspect the revolutionary front-wherever that was. Could we go with them? Certainly not. ”

“ You see, most of the soldiers in the garrison are Bolsheviki, and to-day, after the battle, they all went away in the direction of Petrograd, taking the artillery with them. You might say that none of the soldiers are for Kerensky; but some of them just don't want to fight at all. ”

“ The Minister-President had taken Tsarskoye Selo, we were told, and was already in the Petrograd campagna, five miles away. He would enter the city to-morrow-in a few hours. The Soviet troops in contact with his Cossacks were said to be going over to the Provisional Government. Tchernov was somewhere in between, trying to organise the "neutral" troops into a force to halt the civil war.
In the city the garrison regiments were leaving the Bolsheviki, they said. Smolny was already abandoned.... All the Governmental machinery had stopped functioning. ”

“ All the private banks were closed. The Ministries were on strike. Even now a committee from the Duma was making the rounds of business houses, collecting a fund to pay the salaries of the strikers.... ”