Those who are capable of speaking thus, either consciously trifle with truth or are incurable formalists who, being fully determined to take no account of the actual situation, in the highest degree a revolutionary one, desire stubbornly to have a guarantee that in the whole country the Bolshevik party has exactly half the votes plus one. Never throughout history has a revolutionary party had such a guarantee, and it is absolutely impossible that it should have. To bring forward objections of this kind is to jeer at your audience and to conceal your flight from reality.
The revolution affords incontrovertible evidence that the majority of the people, after the events of July, began to rally to the Bolsheviks. This was shown even before the Kornilov insurrection, by the elections at Petrograd on August 20, when the percentage of votes obtained by the Bolsheviks in the town itself (excluding the suburbs) rose from 20 per cent. to 33 per cent., and later, in September, by the municipal elections in the Moscow municipal districts, where the total percentage of the votes for the Bolsheviks increased from 11 per cent. to 49½ per cent. (a Moscow comrade whom I saw recently told me that the exact figure was 51 per cent.). It was also shown by the elections for the soviets. It was shown again by the fact that, in spite of their central council being entirely devoted to Avxentiev, the peasant soviets declared themselves by a majority to be against the coalition.[1] Now to be against the coalition, is in reality to follow the Bolsheviks. Further, communications which reach us from the front bear clearer and clearer witness that in spite of the slanders and attacks directed against the Bolsheviks by the Socialist Revolutionary or Menshevik leaders, officers, deputies, &c., the mass of the troops is coming over more and more strongly to their side.
Finally, what shows more clearly than any words, that the people are rallying to the Bolsheviks, is the peasant insurrection which is the most important fact to-day. For, whatever lies are told by the bourgeois press and its pathetic attendants, the perpetual procrastinators of the Novaia Zizn and others who shout "pogrom" and "anarchy," the insurrection is a fact. The movement of peasants in the province of Tambov has been an insurrection both in the physical and political sense of the word, an insurrection which has had splendid political results, the first of which has been the agree-
- ↑ Not at the democratic conference, but later, for instance, the soviet of peasant deputies at Petrograd on October 2.
