Chapter 312: The Old Style

Russia kept an older count of the days. The count this book keeps was already the one in use to the west. In 1917 the two stood thirteen days apart. On the eighth of March, in St. Petersburg, The city was called Petrograd. By the calendar the country kept, it was the twenty-third of February. Women came out. On that calendar it was International Women's Day. They came for bread. The garrison came over. Nicholas II was not in the city. On the fifteenth of March, at Pskov, The country dated the day the second of March. He abdicated for himself and for his son Alexei, And he named his brother Michael Alexandrovich to the crown. On the sixteenth, Michael refused it, Unless a constituent assembly, still to be elected, should confer it. The crown was offered. It was not taken. The reign ended on that refusal. A provisional government sat in the capital. Georgy Lvov was at the head of it, and then Alexander Kerensky. It kept the country in the war. The summer did not take the country out. The government did not last the autumn. On the sixteenth of April, Vladimir Lenin arrived in Petrograd. The country dated the day the third of April. Germany had let him cross in a sealed train. It wanted Russia out of the war. The permission is not the authorship of the night that came after. The next day he read the theses that bear April's name. No support for the provisional government. Power to the soviets. An end to the war. On the seventh of November the party took the city. The country dated the night the twenty-fifth of October. The revolution kept October for its name. Kerensky had gone. The cruiser Aurora, lying in the river, fired a blank as a signal. The Winter Palace was taken. A congress of soviets sat at the Smolny Institute. It passed a decree on peace, and a decree on land. A council of people's commissars was named, with Lenin at its head. That night is not the civil war. The civil war came after, and the dead of it were not few. In November the country elected a constituent assembly. The Socialist Revolutionaries returned the most deputies. The Bolsheviks did not. On the eighteenth of January, 1918, the assembly met At the Tauride Palace in Petrograd. The country dated the day the fifth of January. It sat once. On the nineteenth, the sixth of January in the country's count, The sitting was closed. The votes had been counted. The assembly was not let go on. Early that year the government decreed The church apart from the state and the school; A quarrel in one house: the party's creed Took the altar's offices, and the rule Of the dead and the bells; and then the worst: Priests shot, the churches closed, the flock dispersed. On the sixth of February, in this book's count, The same government ordered a change of days. Its decree, in the old count, was dated the twenty-fourth of January. The day after the thirty-first of January Was to be called the fourteenth of February. Thirteen date-names were never used. After that night the state's days and this book's days are one register. October remained the name. In the register that remained, the night is the seventh of November. On the third of March, at Brest, then called Brest-Litovsk, Russia signed itself out of the war, And signed away a wide territory in the west. That exit is what Germany had wanted from the train. The treaty records the want. It does not make the night a foreign order. In March the government left Petrograd for Moscow. The people of the house were still alive. In the night of the sixteenth of July, crossing into the seventeenth, At the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, they were killed. Nicholas II. Alexandra. Olga. Tatiana. Maria. Anastasia. Alexei. Four who served them were killed in the same room: Eugene Botkin, Anna Demidova, Alexei Trupp, Ivan Kharitonov. Yakov Yurovsky, commandant of the house, Read an order of the Ural soviet. A written order from Moscow, dated before the shooting, has not been found. On the eighteenth, Yakov Sverdlov told the central executive committee That its presidium approved what the Urals had done. On the nineteenth the paper said the former emperor had been shot, And that his family had been taken to a safe place. The children were already dead. The books used that winter say the state is a class's machine, And that after the class has won, the machine will wither. The withering is not what the winter did. The party took the ministries and kept them. It closed the assembly the country had just elected. It dropped the calendar and kept the old name of the day. Hold both numbers for the one night. The country called it the twenty-fifth of October. This book calls it the seventh of November. Say which count you are in. Do not let the name October stand in for the date. The reign ended in March, when a brother would not take a crown. The people of the house were killed in July, And the paper hid the children. Keep the names. Keep the day the register you chose actually holds. A theory is not a calendar. A state that has been taken has not withered.