When the decree abolishing the old courts was passed, a Military Revolutionary Tribunal became the chief judicial body. I was present at Smolney Institute to witness its birth in one of the stormiest of the stormy sittings of the Central Executive Committee. In the words of the decree, it was organized “to conduct a campaign against counter-revolutionary forces, and in order to settle cases emanating from campaigns against marauders, speculators, sabotagers, and other such merchants, officials, etc.” Petrograd greeted the day of its first sitting with apprehension, and pronounced it “the beginning of the terror.” On that day press and populace discussed little besides the guillotine. It was a crisp, cold winter Sunday, and as I crossed the great Dvortsovaya Bridge that spans the Neva, and crunched through the heavy snow to the palace of the Grand Duke Nicolai Nicolaievitch, I kept telling myself again and again that there could be no guillotine; that the world must have moved forward a little bit in that century and more which stretched between this Revolution and that of France. Countess Panina was the first prisoner at the bar. As Minister of Public Welfare in the Kerensky Cabinet, she was the first woman to be lifted to a place of official honor in Russia. When the Bolshevik Revolution overturned the government, Countess Panina had in her possession about ninety thousand rubles belonging to the Ministry of Education. Being a liberal and not a radical Socialist, she refused to recognize the authority of the People’s Commissaries, and declined to turn the money over to Bolshevist representatives. No woman of the liberal group was so highly esteemed as she. For years she had devoted her life to the improvement of social conditions for the workers. The Narodny Dom, the People’s House at Petrograd, where many of the revolutionary meetings were held, was the result of her labor. The people were torn with conflicting emotions when she was brought to trial. The music-room in the Grand Duke’s palace, where the favorites of other days entertained their royal patrons, had been chosen as the scene of the trial. It was a big, square auditorium, paneled in rarest wood and roofed with delicately tinted glass--all simple, beautiful, and subdued. Into this setting the revolutionists had introduced a semicircular table covered with shiny red leather and skirted with a flouncing of turkey red cloth. The electric lights had gone out, and the room was lit by two garish red glass lamps with green shades. The tribunal consisted of seven men--two peasants, two soldiers, two workmen, and the president, Jukoff. Most of them sat stiffly on the edges of green-brocaded silk chairs, and looked as thoroughly uncomfortable as if they were prisoners instead of the judges.