Week by week food became scarcer.... For milk and bread and sugar and tobacco one had to stand in a queue for long hours in the chill rain.... Think of the poorly clad people standing on the iron-white streets of Petrograd for whole days in the Russian winter! I have listened in the bread-lines, hearing the bitter, acrid note of discontent which from time to time burst through the miraculous good nature of the Russian crowd.

Cabs and horse-drawn carriages began to disappear. Streetcar service was erratic. The railway stations filled with vagrants and deserting soldiers, often drunk, sometimes threatening. The police force had vanished in the first days of the Revolution. Now "revolutionary order" was disintegrating. Holdups and robberies became the order of the day. Politically, signs of deterioration were everywhere. Kerensky moved into the Winter Palace and slept in the Tsar's bed, but most of the time he was whirling about the country, his frenzy and oratory less and less effective.

A wave of reaction runs through the city. Insurgent regiments are disarmed. The death penalty is restored. The Bolshevik papers are suppressed. Forged documents attesting the Bolsheviks as German agents are handled to the press. Leaders like Trotsky and Kollontai are thrown into prison. Lenin and Zinoviev are driven into hiding. In all quarters sudden seizures, assaults and murder of workingmen.