That a people who had for months suffered from a severe and unmerited shortage of food, who had seen every civil liberty taken out of their hands, and had been forced to surrender every Minister who had their welfare at heart, and had then been fired on for a space of four days by police who numbered at least 28,000 should, when their hour of vengence came, permit no violence, and control in themselves every impulse of greed and unlicensed possession, must always remain one of the great records of history.

(Appendix B, Hugh Walpole's official account of the first Russian revolution).