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Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/322

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284
THROUGH THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

make them hard and strong and unyielding. The Soviet is dead. Long live the Soviet!"

The crowd caught up the closing words in a tremendous demonstration, mingled with the strains of the "International." Then that haunting "Funeral Hymn of the Revolution" at once so plaintive and triumphant:

"You fell in the fatal fight
For the liberty of the people, for the honor of the people.
You gave up your lives and everything dear to you.
The time will come when your surrendered life will count.
The time is near: when tyranny falls, the people arise, great and free.
Farewell, brothers, you chose a noble path,
At your grave we swear to fight, for freedom and the people's happiness."

A resolution was read proclaiming the restoration of the Soviet, the objective of all the future struggles of the revolutionary proletariat and peasants of the Far East. At the call for the vote seventeen thousand hands shot into the air. They were the hands which had built the cars and paved the streets, forged the iron, held the plough, and swung the hammer. All kinds of hands they were: the big, rough hands of the old gruzchiki, the artisans', deft and sinewy, the knotted hands of the peasants, thick with callouses, and thousands of the frailer, whiter hands of the working women. By these hands the riches of the Far East had been wrought. They were no different from the scarred, stained hands of labor anywhere in all the world. Except in this regard: