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Updated: May 31, 2025
As always, the great majority of the representatives of the actual working class of Russia took the sane course. But the Bolsheviki were meanwhile holding mass meetings among the troops, preaching defeatism and surrender and urging the soldiers not to obey the orders of "bourgeois" officers.
But if we concluded the armistice which you are pleading for, this is what would happen: we should have the Ruthenians arrayed against us on one side and the Germans on the other. Now if the Ruthenians have brains, their forces will attack us at the same time as those of the Germans do. That is sound tactics. But if their strength is only on paper, they will give admission to the Bolsheviki.
The latter would accept only one kind of currency the expropriation of the private landowners without compensation and the transfer of all land into the hands of the peasant communes. The Bolsheviki themselves, as good Marxists, took no stock in the peasants' commune.
In the Central Executive Committee, the Left Social Revolutionists protested against the severity of our measures and insisted upon the necessity for compromises. They met with support on the part of some of the Bolsheviki. Three People's Commissaries gave up their portfolios and left the government. A few other party leaders sided with them in principle.
The Coalition Government fell to pieces, and a Directorate of Five, with almost dictatorial powers, still headed by Kerensky, assumed authority. The Bolsheviki now demanded the absolute and final renunciation of the principle of coalition, and the formation of a purely socialistic government.
It's a copy of the proclamation the Bolsheviki have made to the German soldiers, an' that they're givin' out in the German trenches." "By heck!" said the plumber. "What's in it?" "Why, it calls on them to rise against the Kaiser to do what the Russians have done." "Can you read German?" asked the other. "Naw," said Jimmie. "This is in English." "But what's it doin' in English?"
The Bolsheviki, at this time, were not sure of being able to hold their position; certain Commissaries of the People, soon after they were installed in power, handed in their resignation, being terrified by the torrents of blood that were shed at Moscow and by the cruelties which accompanied the coup d'état.
I can talk with the Bolsheviki because they do not know the difference between 'disinfection' and 'diphtheria, 'anthracite' and 'appendicitis' and can talk them round in all things, even up to persuading them not to put a bullet into me." And so we talked the members of the "Cheka" round to everything that we wanted.
Nothing could well be farther from the truth than the view taken by many amiable people who, while disavowing the actions of the Bolsheviki, seek to mitigate the judgment which mankind pronounces against them by the plea that, after all, they are extreme idealists, misguided, of course, but, nevertheless, inspired by a noble ideal; that they are trying, as John Brown and many others have tried, to realize a great ideal, but have been made incapable of seeing their ideal in its proper perspective, and, therefore, of making the compromises and adjustments which the transmutation of ideals to reality always requires.
In the mean time, in the country a fierce battle was raging against the Bolsheviki. It was not, on the part of their adversaries, a fight for power. If the Socialist-Revolutionists had wished they could have seized the power; to do that they had only to follow the example of those who were called "the Revolutionary Socialists of the Left."
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