21 December 1917. Zinaida Gippius

Non-fiction

Project 1917 is a series of events that took place a hundred years ago as described by those involved. It is composed only of diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers and other documents

Zinaida Gippius

Sergievskaya 83, Petrograd, Russian Republic

I have been working on "The Evening Bell" (this kind of newspaper paper used to be distributed in the printing house of "Rechi" ["Pronouncements"]) and I haven't been calling in here. And well it's the same old same old. Pogroms and the Permanent's firing (yesterday night it was rattling so much that I gave a start and Dima went to the sentry).

But everything is already battered and drunk, which means that soon it will quiet down. Leftovers. In the South, it seems that the war is not only with Kazakhs, but also with Rada. The Bolsheviks have even managed to have an argument with Vekshel'. They have introduced censorship in Moscow. They're going too far... or maybe not? German troops are always arriving, swarming around and are not shy to do so. The German embassy is being repaired. If it were not for the tedium, perhaps waiting wouldn't be all that bad. But the tiring flash of huge unpleasantnesses brings about boredom - a yawningly repulsive one.

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Comment

✍ Also today

Vladimir Lenin

Comrade Antonov who is leaving for Moscow and then for the South to conduct military action against Kaledin shall provide daily reports to the Council of People's Commissars via direct line (personally or delegate it to his aide) and inform us on who he, or other military authorities, is appointing responsible for managing separate operations.

Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars

V. Ulyanov (Lenin)

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1 Comment

Alexander Blok

57, Ofitserskaya street, Petrograd, Russian Republic

Can the intelligentsia work with the Bolsheviks? It can, and it must. I am not well-informed about politics and do not presume to make judgements about how the intelligentsia and the Bolsheviks may reach an agreement. But the deep impetus driving this agreement will be musical. See more

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Alfred Knox

This was, however, only a local remedy. “ The freest army in the world ” turned its attention to private cellars, and for weeks there was drunken shooting every day in one district or another. The Left Press wrote that this cellar-looting was the result of bourgeois propaganda, which of course was nonsense. It was simply the natural result of removing all control from armed men, of continuing to feed them, and of giving them nothing to do.

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Nicholas II

Tobolsk, Russian Republic

During the morning on my walk I saw two infantrymen ofthe First Battalion coming from Tsarskoe Selo in order to verify the truth of rumors concerning us and about the detachment here. One of these infantrymen had served in our house. It was clear and 21 degrees of frost.

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