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Such a law had been solemnly. promised to the peasantry at the All-Russian Congress of Peasants' Soviets in Petrograd, but it remained only a promise. Tchernov was unable to fulfill it either in May, or in June. Only, at the moment of the elemental wave of revolutionary explosion on July 3–4, when the Cadets left the Ministry—only then was the law put in force. But it proved to be a solitary measure, incapable of seriously aiding the peasants in their struggle with the landlords for possession of the soil.
Meanwhile the «revolutionary democrat» Kerensky, this newlyfledged member of the Social-Revolutionist party, was brilliantly accomplishing at the front the counter-revolutionary task of resuming the imperialistic, predatory, war; the task in which Gutchkov, the despised of the people, had utterly failed. Kerensky was intoxicated with his own eloquence; the imperialists who used him burned incense to him—he was flattered, worshipped. And all this fer his loyal, devoted service to the capitalists—exhorting the «revolutionary armies» to consent to a renewal of a war avowedly waged in fulfilment of Tsar Nicholas' treaties with the capitalists of England and France—a war to conquer for the Russian capitalists Constantinople and Lemberg, Erzerum and Trebizond.
Thus passed the second phase of the Russian revolution, from May 6 to June 9. The counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie having strengthened its po-
