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in essence Order Number 1 was a severe rebuke to traditional military authority – and it would remain so, as a clarion

most on the nascent Soviet commission had an analysis and sense that history was not yet theirs. That in this context there were, must be, limitations to and necessary brakes on their own role, their own power. As yet inchoate, this would be the start of a strange strain of self-limiting politics.

In he came, tense but confident, holding the attention of the room with a fervid speech begging the Soviet to acquiesce to this coalition

What they shared was a certainty that change, a revolution, was necessary, and ineluctable. They were in a new city, in eruption, on Red Monday. The old law was dying, the new not yet decided.