CONQUERED CITY
5
them. We know who they are, the dirty...."
Blackened red flags hung at the doors of old blood-red pal–
aces, built by the master, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who had been much
taken with the elegancies of 18th century Italian architecture,
graceful and beribboned as shepherdesses. They had housed em–
presses' favorites, conquerors from Taurida and the Caucasus,
great nobles, masters over thousands of serfs, imbeciles, schemers,
and thieves, whom the Secret Chancellery had tortured for a day
before deporting to the eastern forests. When the guides of the
Board of Political Education spoke to the simple people who had
come to the capital to attend the go\'erning congress, they told
them those were the works of the architect Rastrelli. The visitors
naturally understood this to mean that they were "the works of a
man who had been shot," for shot in Russian _is
rastrellany.
The
more austere hotels and palaces of Napoleonic days, with their
lofty pediments resting on powerful columns, had the same red
rags at their doors. The various stages of the Empire were thus
symbolized on the avenues of imposing structures which made one
think, at night, of the tombs of the Pharaohs of a Theban dynasty.
But the ashes of this dynasty lay fresh in a turf-pit of the Urals;
and these tombs, the tombs of an empire in fact, bore the
inscription:
P.C.R.(b). COMMITTEE OF THE SECOND DISTRICT:–
R.S.F.S.R. PEOPLE'S COMMISSARIAT OF PUBLIC EDUCA–
TION, BUREAU OF EDUCATION OF BACKWARD CHIL–
DREN; - R.S.F.S.R. SCHOOL OF THE RED COMMANDERS
OF THE WORKERS' AND PEASANTS' ARMY. In these pal–
aces, dead because they were conquered, uncrowned because they
were no longer palaces, work was being done. In the vestibules,
often
in
the shadow of great stuffed bears which had once held
plates for visiting cards, machine guns squatted like beasts of
steel, mute but ready to bite. Typewriters resounded with their dry
clatter in rooms intended for princely comforts; a worn-out con–
queror, comrade Ryjik, slept in his boots, on the same divan, in
the same Louis Quinze study, where eighteen months before, an
old epicure of the august race of the Ruriks, entertained himself by
viewing naked young girls with a fascinated despair. Now that
epicure was stretched out somewhere, in an ammunition box,
naked, his beard unkempt, bullet-holes through both temples, rest-
