Eye of the Storm

​Eye of the Storm 

By "Pyotr Veleiky the cat" (Michael McKenna) 

Soft warm snow fluttered down and tinted St Petersburg’s streets a light blue. The palace most certainly has changed. Before the revolution it had always been a quiet, cozy place, now it is flooded with bright lights, soldiers and students and workers of all kinds…Catherine the Great’s Hall has become a barracks, parade ground, lecture hall, hospital. A cradle for a brand new country…

My diet dried up in November…it’s too cold for the flies to come in and be my prey and the puddles of rain water are ice.

Fortunately a Socialist Revolutionary spotted me when supervising a janitor washing the floor and now I’m getting fat on milk and caviar from the basement. If a Bolshevik found me, I'm sure I'd have been thrown in the street or maybe even drowned in the Neva. 

Socialist Revolutionaries came to the city from the farms.  They recognize the value of any animal. Bolsheviks are an urban group, exiled to Siberia and now back in Petersburg. Instinctively I knew right away to avoid these Bolsheviks at all costs. They are mean. They've chased me but I always get away down a flight of stairs or some exit they aren't familiar with yet.

I notice these Bolsheviks like to type up endless paperwork overnight.  Clickety clack all night long on their steel Remington typewriters. They type up everything and make exact copies of everything they type. The most common form in their machines is an authorization for execution of some poor soul or a warrant for his arrest. Same thing. One wonders when they sleep.

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A thousand framed portraits of Lenin were just brought over from the Pravda Printing Press on Nevsky Prospekt and one each installed in every single room in the palace just before midnight last night. It's very strange to be stared at by this portrait. I stare back though.