V. Lvov. But, apart from that blunder, the chief advisers of Kornilov, were Zavoiko, a minor bureaucrat of the old regime, crafty and plausible, but devoid of insight and authority, and Aladine, a noisy half-educated demagogue, a member of the First Duma, who had turned Nationalist and had nothing to recommend him but his posing as the mouthpiece of the secret diplomacy of the Entente. However this may be, the intended coup d'etat miscarried completely and made the situation only worse. Kerensky assumed the part of a heroic defender of the Revolution against a military conspiracy, all the various Social- istic groups joined him in the outcry against the would-be dictator, the army did not rise to support the general, who wanted to reestablish discipline and unity of command, the leader of the cavalry corps, which had advanced to the outskirts of Pet- rograd, shot himself, and Kornilov and his principal supporters Danikine and Lukomsky were arrested and charged with treason. The outcome of the whole affair was a recrudescence of revolutionary zeal, and a violent rush to the Left. In the country the panic produced by Kornilov's attempt expressed itself in wholesale massacres.
The victorious Kerensky did not realize that he had thrown away the last chance of salvation from the rising tide of anarchy and terrorism. He appointed himself commander-in-chief and imagined that he was strong enough to defeat the onslaught from the Left as well as from the Right. Yet he received warn- ing after warning of the crumbling away of political organiza- tion. The central executive of the Soviet had been effected by the landslide towards the Left. They called a Democratic Conference in Petrograd from which all bourgeois elements were excluded: the membership was restricted to delegations from Soviets, trade unions, cooperative societies and peasants' communes. This Assembly, in which the various Socialist groups had entirely their own way, could not even agree on a resolution calling for a Coalition Government capable of defend- ing Russia in the hour of supreme danger. A motion in the sense was first passed and then rejected in consequence of the reluctance to admit Cadets and adherents of Kornilov to any share in the Government.
In contrast with this confusion of ideas and lack of resolution the extremists were quite clear in their minds, and the snake of Bolshevism was lifting its head again. Trotsky, who had been let out of prison, was more popular than ever, when he dis- coursed on the necessity of forming a Government of the Soviets and appealing for peace to the proletarian masses of the world. At the new elections to the Executive of the Soviets of Workmen, Peasants and Soldiers, he was elected President against Cheidze. This meant that the dualistic system was recognized to be obso- lete, and the Provisional Government with Kerensky at its head was to be discarded in favour of a concentration of power in the hands of the Extremists. A motion condemning Kerensky and his Government was passed by the Soviet Executive.
Kerensky tried to parry the blows by supplementing a totter- ing Coalition Ministry with a Council of the Republic composed of representatives of all the political parties, principal associa- tions and institutions. This body met at Petrograd on Oct. 20. Jt gave a measure of its capacity for political action by starting a long discussion on the question of the active or passive defence of Russia against the ever-increasing German menace. Although the Bolsheviks ostentatiously left the Council as a protest against the presence of " bourgeois " elements and the " counter- revolutionary " policy of the Council, the remaining parties were unable to agree on any definite and patriotic motion. The Internationalist delusions of many Socialists were strong enough to prevent any firm declaration directed against the Germans. Five motions were made, and all five were rejected one after the other. Defencists like Plekhanov were powerless against the Internationalists led by Martov.
The Bolshevist Usurpation. The time of the Bolshevists had come. In the first days of Nov. 1917 the Soviet under Trot- sky's leadership formed a military Revolutionary Committee, and on the 3rd, the authority of that Committee was recog- nized by the Petrograd garrison. Then steps were openly taken
to form an armed force dependent on the Soviet and independ- ent of the Provisional Government. By the side of this force, which was considered not to be entirely trustworthy, the sailors of the Baltic fleet could be counted upon implicity: they had long ago thrown in their lot with the advocates of civil war and terrorism. Kerensky assured his ministers, and proclaimed loudly to the population that he had taken the necessary meas- ures to suppress any attempt at a revolt. In reality he had no troops at his disposal except a couple of battalions of military cadets and one company of women. The commander-in-chief of the Russian army relied on speeches against machine-guns, as the Chinese generals of 1860 had relied on painted dragons against the rifles of the English and French expeditionary force. The result was a similar one. On Nov. 7, Bolshevik sailors surrounded the Winter Palace, and after a brief scrap with the women arrested the ministers, the premier and commander-in- chief having disappeared in good time. A lieutenant with some soldiers drove out the Council of the Republic. The Cadet battalions were overpowered, and their remnants massacred by the soldiery and the mob. A small force of Cossacks under Gen. Krasnov skirmished for a few days against the sailors and armed workmen on the outskirts of Petrograd, but even- tually concluded an armistice and withdrew. In Moscow the struggle was fierce, and Cadets held out for some time in the Kremlin together with a few loyal battalions. But there, too, defenders of the Government submitted to superior gun-power, lack of supplies and the discouraging influence of discussions and treachery. All along the front the demoralized soldiery rose against their officers and massacred them in the name of the Revolution. The commander-in-chief at headquarters, Duk- honin, was dragged out by a mob of soldiers and murdered.
The first act of the Bolshevik dictators was to satisfy the craving of the masses corrupted by them: private property was abolished, with the reservation that the land of the peasants and Cossacks was not to be confiscated. At the same time the new Soviet Government addressed to all the belligerent States the proposal to conclude peace. The Entente Powers were invited to join in direct negotiations with the Central Empires; failing this, Soviet Russia would conclude a separate peace. The advanced Socialists had no scruples as to the " letting down " of Allies who had been struggling for three years against the German Junkers: what they were chiefly afraid of was an Allied victory.
The same contempt for truth, duty and justice, was displayed in the domain of home politics. The coup d'etat had left one institution still standing the Constituent Assembly in process of formation. The Bolsheviks had clamoured for its immediate convocation, and accused all the parties with the criminal design of delaying or preventing its meeting. They were now at the head and could not forthwith stop the elections. These had been prepared laboriously by idealistic doctrinaires by staunch believers in universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage. All citizens of both sexes who had attained the age of 20 were to take part in it. To make the arrangements absolutely perfect, the principle of proportionate representation had also been introduced in a somewhat peculiar form. The various parties were to present lists containing as many names as there were seats allotted to the electoral district. The attribution of these seats to the parties was to be made in proportion to the number of votes cast in support of each list, the candidates taking places in the order of their seniority in the parties nomination. The absurdity of these mechanical devices had been already demonstrated by the municipal and rural elections, but the defects of the latter were greatly intensified in the case of the Constituent Assembly. Ignorant peasants were led off to record their votes for long lists of men whom they did not know and in support of platforms they did not understand. The extreme parties did not shrink from any kind of violence and fraud to bring in their nominees. Nevertheless, some sort of elections were actually held, right in the midst of revolutionary chaos, in the months of Nov. and Dec. The result was that the Social Revolutionaries got a large majority, thanks to the votes
