associates, Kaledin himself, the "well-beloved leader," could not let loose a movement of the masses! And nevertheless he went much more directly towards civil war than the Bolsheviks! Out to "stir up the Don," which purpose he did not conceal, he failed to rouse any mass disturbance in "his" region, in this Cossack area, utterly isolated from the Russian democracy! Very much the reverse: revolutionary explosions broke out among the proletarians in the very centre of the anti-Bolshevik Russian democratic stronghold.
We have no relevant information concerning the attitude of the various economic grades and groups of the Cossacks towards the democracy and the Kornilovian regime. We can only gather from certain indications that the majority of poor and middle-class Cossacks incline rather towards the democracy, and that only the officers and the most wealthy are entirely Kornilovian.
At all events, it is historically manifested after the experience of August 26 to 31 that the Cossack movement in support of the bourgeois counter-revolution is extremely weak.
There remains one final question, namely, the tenacity of the movement. In connection with the Bolshevik proletarian revolutionary movement, it has been proved that its adversaries carried on the ideological struggle with a great advantage of Press organs and methods of agitation. But they did not limit themselves there; they brought into action a furious campaign of calumnies at the same time as methods of repression, arrests by the hundred, pillage of our printing presses, suppression of our principal organ and of our other newspapers.[1] Events have demonstrated the result. There was a formidable strengthening of Bolshevism at the August elections in Petrograd, there was a pronounced growth of the international and left wing tendencies in the very heart of the Socialist Revolutionary[2] and Menshevik parties and an approach nearer to Bolshevism. Thus the tenacity of the proletarian revolutionary movement in republican Russia is shown to be very great. The united efforts of the Cadets, Social Revolutionaries and
- ↑ After the July days, amongst others, Trotsky, Kamenev, Lunasharsky, Kollontai, Raskolnikov, &c., were arrested. Pravda was shut down on July 5, afterwards the Pravda des Tranchees of Riga, the Bolshevik paper of Cronstadt, &c. The campaign of calumny, launched by Bourtsev, financed by the Allies, consisted in representing the Bolsheviks as German agents.
- ↑ In the S.R. organisation of Petrograd, for example, the Left had the majority from that time.
