revolution of the people and sympathised. It was their chance of revolution against their own evils; they could not hold aloof. They saved the Revolution by joining the people. Protopopov was defeated by his miscalculation on the attitude of the Petrograd garrison. He knew and expected that some units would probably waver; but he never dreamt that the revolutionary contagion would spread so far and so fast. Nor will history blame him especially for want of insight: nobody expected the wonderful conversion that took place. It was a miracle. And the Tsar was defeated by a similar turning of the tables, when the soldiers at the front stood faithful not to him but to the Revolution.
By their support the soldiers saved the Revolution. But it was not they who initiated it. It was the workers. It was the workers who went out on to the streets to fight it out with Protopopov's police and (as they expected) with the garrison. The soldiers joined them; thus they liberated Russia from the brutal yoke of the reaction. But they did more. They upheld the Revolution as a revolution against the Monarchy, and resisted all attempts to degrade it into a mere overthrow of the existing Government. They vetoed the Duma's project of proclaiming Russia a Constitutional Monarchy. In a critical moment they upheld the character of the Revolution, opening wide the doors for a real regeneration of Russia.
We may now pass on to the very important question of the foundation and organisation of the institutions of the Revolution: the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates and the Provisional Government. The rapidity with which the Soviet came into being is simply marvellous, considering the complete absence of any kind of open and legal political organisation of workers up to the Revolution. The first manifesto of the Soviet to the workers and soldiers, calling on them to send delegates, was issued on Monday morning, at the very beginning of the soldiers' revolt. This manifesto formed a kind of rallying point for the revolutionary
