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Updated: June 22, 2025
Two weeks later the second and third platoons came through the same march even faster, although it was forty degrees below zero on three days, for it was told at Archangel that the other half of "M" Company was in imminent danger of extermination. The last instructions for the march, given in the old Smolny barracks, are typical of march orders to American soldiers: "We march tomorrow on Pinega.
The army committees, the municipalities, the zemstvos continued to bombard the Smolny with threatening telegrams in which they declared outright war upon us and promised to sweep the insurgents out within a short time. Our telegrams, decrees and explanations did not reach the provinces, for the Petrograd Telegraph Agency refused to serve us.
The Bolsheviki, on their part, took their partizans to the Smolny, declared to be usurpers of the Soviet of Peasants' Delegates who pronounced themselves for the defense of the Constituante, and, with the aid of soldiers, ejected the former Executive Committee from their premises and took possession of their goods, the library, etc.
A cadet detachment from Oranienbaum nevertheless succeeded in getting by our military defence during the night and over the telephone we followed their further movements. The outer guard of the Smolny was strengthened by another company. Communications with all the detachments of the garrison went on continuously. The companies on guard in all the regiments were awake.
In fact, it is only a few blocks wide, but it is crescent shaped with one horn in Smolny a southern suburb having dock and warehouse areas and the other in Solombola on the north, a city half as large as Archangel and possessing saw-mills, shipyards, hospitals, seminary and a hard reputation, Archangel is convex westward, so that one must go out for some distance to view the whole expanse of the city from that direction.
So shall we become to England what the Smolny Institute is to Russia. Otherwise, in the end, we must be crushed."
The members of the Military Revolutionary Committee did not leave the Smolny during the entire week. They slept on sofas and only at odd intervals, wakened by couriers, scouts, cyclists, telegraph messengers and telephone calls. The night of the 24th-25th was the most restless.
Early in the morning the sailors rolled the machine gun with a deafening rumble over the cement floors of the long and half-dark corridors of the building. Out of the doors the frightened faces of the few S. R.'s and Mensheviks were looking and wondering. The Soviet held daily meetings in the Smolny and so did the Garrison Council.
All this was done by the workingmen of various factories. Several times our automobile was stopped on the way by Red Guard patrols who verified our permit. Since the first days of the October revolution, every automobile in town had been requisitioned, and no automobile could be ridden through the streets of the city or in the outskirts of the capital without a permit from the Smolny Institute.
Well-dressed men with shaven faces and marks of culture studied the Americans speculatively. Russian children began making acquaintance and offering their flattering Americanski Dobra. At Solombola, Smolny, Bakaritza, sounds of firing were heard daily, but the populace were quieted when told that it was not riot or Bolo attack but the Americans practising up with their ordnance.
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