obliged to turn back.  But that did not check the other parades.  The peasant participants, united with the workers from Petrogradsky quarter, came to the Field of Mars; after having lowered their flags before the tombs of the Revolution of February and sung a funeral hymn to their memory, they installed themselves on Liteinaia Street.  New manifestants came to join them and the street was crowded with people.  At the corner of Fourstatskaia Street (one of the Streets leading to the Taurida Palace) they found themselves all at once assailed by shots from the Red Guards.

The Red Guard fired without warning, something that never before happened, even in the time of Czarism.  The police always began by inviting the participators to disperse.  Among the first victims was a member of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Peasants’ Delegates, the Siberian peasant, Logvinov.  An explosive bullet shot away half of his head (a photograph of his body was taken; it was added to the documents which were transferred to the Commission of Inquiry).  Several workmen and students and one militant of the Revolutionary Socialist party, Gorbatchevskaia, were killed at the same time.  Other processions of participants on their way to the Taurida Palace were fired into at the same time.  On all the streets leading to the palace, groups of Red Guards had been established; they received the order “Not to spare the cartridges.”  On that day at Petrograd there were one hundred killed and wounded.

It must be noted that when, at a session of the Constituent Assembly, in the Taurida Palace, they learned of this shooting, M. Steinberg, Commissioner of Justice, declared in the corridor that it was a lie, that he himself had visited the streets of Petrograd and had found everywhere that “all was quiet.”  Exactly as the Ministers of Nicholas Romanov after the suppressions said “Lie.  Lie,” so cried the Bolsheviki and the Revolutionary Socialists of the Left, in response to the question formally put on the subject of the shooting by a member of the Constituent Assembly.

The following day the Bolshevik organs and those of the Revolutionary Socialists of the Left passed over these facts in silence.  This silence they kept also on the 9th of January, the day on which literally all Petrograd assembled at the funeral of the victims.  Public indignation, however, obliged them in the end to admit that there had been some small groups of participants and to name a Commission of Inquiry concerning the street disorders which had taken place on January 5th.  This Commission was very dilatory in the performance of its duty and it is very doubtful if they ever came to any decision.

Analogous manifestations took place at Moscow, at Saratov and other cities; everywhere they were accompanied by shootings.  The number of victims was particularly considerable at Moscow.

X

At the Taurida Palace on the Day of the Opening of the Constituent Assembly