Secondly, the facts concerning the parties; with no statistics of the strength of the parties, attendance at meetings, &c., we can only measure the participation of the masses therein by the results of the money collections in support of each. From all accounts the Bolshevik workers have shown extraordinary heroism and collected comparatively considerable sums for the Pravda, for suppressed or suspended newspapers, &c. We have always published the accounts of our collections.[1] This is not the case with the Cadets. It is obviously the wealth of the rich that supports their party. There is no trace among them of any active aid from the masses.
Finally, in comparing the movements of April 20–21 and of July 3-4 on the one hand, and the escapade of Kornilov on the other, it is demonstrated that in civil war the Bolsheviks always openly reveal their enemy to the masses: the bourgeoisie, the big landed proprietors and the capitalists. The troops behind Kornilov, on the contrary, were deceived in the literal sense of the word, and this deception was laid bare after the first encounter of the "barbarian division" and other Kornilovian battalions with the Petersburgians.[2]
Let us consider now the facts concerning the strength of the workers and the bourgeoisie in civil war. The strength of the Bolsheviks rests in the numbers of the proletarians, in their consciousness; it also depends on the sympathy of the "lower orders" (that is to say, the workers and poor peasants) and of the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks towards Bolshevik slogans. It is these slogans which on April 20 and 21, June 18, and July 3 and 4 in Petrograd won over the majority of the effective revolutionary masses. Here we have an indisputable fact.
Further, the comparison of the data provided by the mass movements with those concerning the elections entirely confirms, in connection with Russia, that observation which is frequently made in the West: the strength of the revolutionary proletariat from the point of view of its influence on the masses and on their
- ↑ In May and June the subscription for the printing of the Pravda came to about 200,000 roubles. The same in Moscow for the Social Democrat.
- ↑ Kornilov made his troops believe that there was a Bolshevik revolt in Petrograd. As soon as they were disabused by the Soviet propagandists sent from Petrograd to meet them, they refused to fight. The enterprise was thus settled without a single shot. General Krasnov, who was in command of the cavalry corps that marched on Petrograd, recounts these events in his memoirs.
