All week long, not only in Russia but in many countries throughout the world, the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Bolshevist regime was celebrated.
Moscow, festooned in red, was the centre of proletarian manifestations. Here 30,000 field-grey soldiers marched past Mikhail Ivanovitch Kalinin, so-called President of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, who took the salute from the top of the Lenin tomb in Red Square. Behind the troops came 250,000 picked workers, preceded by a monster, two-headed green dragon. One of the heads represented, monocle & all, Sir Austen Chamberlain, British Foreign Secretary; the other, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini of Italy, with the Fascist swastika above his forehead.
Above an open window in a house near the Kremlin Gate that still bears the name of Trotsky there stretched a large red streamer in the centre of which was a large picture of L. D. Trotsky himself. Matters grew serious when at the open window there appeared the head of Trotsky in the flesh, not to mention the head of his brother-in-law, Leo Borisovitch Kam-ener. Some of the crowd jeered, others cheered. Then something attracted their attention.
That something turned out to be a man on the roof trying his utmost to tear the red streamer down. With a bellow like a bull's the giant Mura-lov, onetime commander of the Moscow garrison and Trotsky's most devoted follower, elbowed his way through the crowd, scaled the side of the house like a human fly, mounted the roof, caught the offender by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the trousers, carried him to the edge of the roof, and dropped him from a safe height to the ground, where, terrified, he scampered off.
Hour after hour the procession wended its way through the square. A short speech by M. Kalinin was the signal for the singing of the International, which was taken up by the miles of parading populace. Simultaneously, the Kremlin*guns roared salvos of blank shells for six minutes, their blue smoke spiraling upwards around the pinnacles of St. Basil's Church and over the tower of the Spasski Gate.
In Moscow's big parade every branch of the army took part, and there were Red sailors, too. Caucasian cavalry dashed by, their gleaming sabres at salute, their long black capes flowing behind; protection troops, wearing their round astrakhan caps, passed by, a little regiment of dwarfs, to the tune of the famed "Volga Boat song"; then came the Turkoman cavalry at a sharp trot, wearing their huge black shakos and great ponchos. Many of the civilian men and women wore weird costumes of the Middle Ages.
All this to celebrate the achievement of ten years of Bolshevist rule.
What is this achievement?
Last week, had a U. S. observer been in Russia (more particularly in Moscow) he might have noted, besides some noteworthy counterdemonstrations by the Oppositionists accompanied by fisty brawls, some of the following factors:
Voters. He might have been struck by the full meaning of the revolution: the substitution of one privileged class for another; for, today, in Communist Russia the workers are the aristocracy, and the former aristocracy and the bourgeoisie rank even lower than did the workers under the Tsars—they do not count at all. Only workers & peasants over the age of 18 can vote.