The material and psychological causes for the condition of the army are too deep to be disposed of by ministerial prose and poetry. The substitution of General Brussilov for General Alexiev means a change of these two officers, no doubt, but not a change in the army. The working up of the popular mind and of the army into an "offensive," and then the sudden dropping of this catchword in favor of the less definite catchword of a "preparation for an offensive," show that the Army and Navy Ministry is still as little capable of leading the nation to victory as M. Tereschenko's Department was of leading the nation to peace.
The picture of the importance of the Provisional Government reaches its climax in the labors of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which, to use the words of the most loyal Soviet of Peasants' Delegates, "with partiality" filled the officers of the local administrations with feudal landholders. The efforts of the active portion of the population gain for them the communal self-governments, by right of conquest, and, without waiting for the Constituent Assembly, are immediately stigmatized in the state-police jargon of the Dans as anarchy, and are greeted by the energetic opposition of the government which, by its very composition, is fully protected against all energetic action when it is really of creative character.
In the course of the last few days, this policy of general bankruptcy has found its most repulsive expression in the Cronstadt incident.[1] The vile and out-and-out corrupt campaign of the bourgeois press against Cronstadt, which is for them the symbol of revolutionary internationalism and of distrust in the government-coalition, both of which are emblems of the independent policy of the great masses of the people, not only took possession of the government and of the Soviet leaders, but turned Tseretelli and Skobeleff into ringleaders in the disgusting persecution of the Cronstadt sailors, soldiers and workers.
At a moment when revolutionary internationalism was systematically displacing patriotic Socialism in the factories and work-
- ↑ Early in June the sailors of the Baltic Fleet and the Cronstadt masses generally rose against the Provisional Government; the mildest epithet used against them, in the Russian and the foreign press, was "anarchists." The Cronstadt Council of Workers and Soldiers had, by a vote of 210 to 40, repudiated the Provisional Government, declaring it recognised only the authority of the Petrograd Council. This action was distorted into an attempt to secede from Russia. The Baltic sailors were an active revolutionary force in all stages of the Revolution,—against the Czarism, against the Provisional Government, and in the overthrow of Kerensky by the Bolsheviki.—L. C. F.
