It suddenly makes sense to me to keep a research diary here on my blog. I'm usually burnt out on my daily writing by 11:30 in the morning, and if I've made my thousand words, then I quit for the day. And yet I haven't been keeping track of the research  I do every day. Of course, I do a lot before I start writing, but I find there's always something else I need to learn while I'm in the midst of it. 

I'm currently writing Book 7 about the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 Petrograd (St. Petersburg). The Russians renamed the city when the war started in 1914 because they thought St. Petersburg sounded too Russian. later they changed the name to Leningrad, and now it's back to St. Petersburg. Personally, I like the name Petrograd. 

So, for today's plunge into rabbit holes, I spent some time looking at images of women who worked in telephone exchanges in 1917. So, when the Bolsheviks took over a palace owned by the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinksa, they converted her boudoir into a telephone exchange, at least according to one of my sources. By the way, I thought "boudoir" was a bedroom, but in actuality a boudoir is sitting room attached to a bedroom. 

So what was a telephone exchange and what did it look like in 1917? I wasn't sure. Well, here's a picture of a telephone exchange from the Alexander Palace during the reign of Nicholas that year.

Of course, the telephone exchange in the ballerina's palace would be much smaller, but this and other photos helped me describe it in the book. 

The other research I did today entailed spending time on marxists.org. This website has been an incredible resource for finding contemporary accounts of the events of 1917, using the words of the people who were there and witnessed that incredible historic year. 

I'll leave you with a description of the July Days from Leon Trotsky: 

Late in the night, or rather at about three o’clock in the morning, the Putilov factory approached the Tauride Palace – a mass of eighty thousand workers, many with wives and children. The procession had started at eleven o’clock in the evening, and other belated factories had joined it on the road. In spite of the late hour, there was such a mass of people at the Narva Gate as to suggest that nobody stayed home that night in the whole district. The women had exclaimed: “Everybody must go – we will watch the houses.” At a signal from the belfry of the Church of the Savior shots had rattled out as though from a machine gun. From below a volley was fired at the belfry.