the old regime had done to Russia, and pointing out its criminal method of procedure even during the war. He indicated the war policy of the new Government in the following emphatic terms:
Revolutionary Russia will continue until a victorious end, unweariedly and unreservedly, in the struggle against the common enemy and its aggressive spirit which desires to achieve hegemony over Europe for the advantage of Prussian militarism.
The manifesto of Prince Lvov’s provisional Government, which was issued just afterwards, emphasized and supplemented these principles. Under these circumstances we in Paris were at first not alarmed by the difficulties which arose after the abdication of the Tsar and the Grand Duke Michael, nor even by the reports about the arrival of the first Russian revolutionaries and anarchists from abroad with the consent and assistance of the German Government. But after March 20th the political circles in Paris and London began to change their opinion of events in Russia. Their misgivings arose when the Petrograd Soviet of workmen and soldiers, which had soon taken upon itself the function of a subsidiary Government, began to exercise an influence both on the political and military policy of the Government itself. In the last week of March 1917 the conflict between the two tendencies had reached its height.
At first it looked as if Prince Lvov’s Government would emerge successfully from the contest. Its proclamation of March 30th that revolutionary Russia would resolve to establish an independent Poland, which was to include the Polish areas in Austria and Prussia, and that this independent State would be bound to Russia only by a military alliance, strengthened the authority of revolutionary Russia and its Government in all Western European States. In the middle of April the Allied Governments replied to Milyukov’s manifesto, “emphasizing . . . their entire solidarity with the plans of the Russian Government concerning the restoration of Poland in its unbroken territorial unity.” This was a source of fresh gratification to us. As I have already pointed out, we were so convinced of the indivisible connection between all Central European problems that we regarded every Polish success as a considerable advance for our own cause also. In the course of April and the first half of May, however, the Government
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