of our party and the Council of People’s Commissars, Kameniev, Zinoviev, Nogin, Rykov, Miliutin and a few others left yesterday, November 17th, the Central Committee of our party, and the last three, the Council of People’s Commissars…
The comrades who left us acted like deserters, because they not only abandoned the posts entrusted to them, but also disobeyed the direct instructions of the Central Committee of our party, to the effect that they should await the decisions of the Petrograd and Moscow party organisations before retiring. We blame decisively such desertion. We are firmly convinced that all conscious workers, soldiers and peasants, belonging to our party or sympathising with it, will also disapprove of the behaviour of the deserters…
Remember, comrades, that two of these deserters, Kameniev and Zinoviev, even before the uprising in Petrograd, appeared as deserters and strike-breakers, by voting at the decisive meeting of the Central Committee, October 23d, 1917, against the insurrection; and even after the resolution passed by the Central Committee, they continued their campaign at a meeting of the party workers… But the great impulse of the masses, the great heroism of millions of workers, soldiers and peasants, in Moscow, Petrograd, at the front, in the trenches, in the villages, pushed aside the deserters as a railway train scatters saw-dust…
Shame upon those who are of little faith, who hesitate, who doubt, who allow themselves to be frightened by the bourgeoisie, or who succumb before the cries of the latter’s direct or indirect accomplices! There is not a shadow of hesitation in the masses of Petrograd, Moscow, and the rest of Russia…
… We shall not submit to any ultimatums from small groups of intellectuals which are not followed by the masses, which are practically only supported by Kornilovists, Savinkovists, yunkers, and so forth…
The response from the whole country was like a blast of hot storm. The insurgents never got a chance to “say openly their opinion to the masses of workers and soldiers.” Upon the Tsay-ee-kah rolled in like breakers the fierce popular condemnation of the “deserters”. For days Smolny was
