Already a newer, more vital organ was forming. While Miliukov was formulating his ideas about the preservation of the dynasty, or in other words, the transfer of the autocracy to the bourgeois, the Soviet of workmen’s deputies, at first merely a small group of Duma labor members, had formulated quite other ideas, had declared that the revolution belonged to those who made it, not to those who stood aside and then sought to profit by it, and had stated that neither Miliukov nor the outworn Duma had the right to decide their future, who had won their freedom, but that that task should be undertaken by a constituent assembly which should represent all Russia. The subsequent history illustrated the necessary opportunism of all parties in a time of a revolution, since within a few weeks Miliukov and his party had declared for a republic, and, when the Constituent Assembly met, it had already earned for itself a place like that of the Duma among the relics of the past, and was gently set aside by the Soviet which had been the first cause of its summoning.
The Provisional Government and the Soviets.
There were thus formed two bodies, each of which claimed to represent the revolutionary nation. The first of these was the Provisional Government appointed by an Executive Committee of the Duma. It did thus indirectly represent that body, which, never fully representative of the people, had lost in the course of the war any claim to stand for anything except the bourgeois and privileged classes. The second of these was the Soviet of workmen’s and sailors’ deputies. Every thousand workmen had the right to send one member to the Soviet, and every company of soldiers. From the very first there could be no sort of doubt in the mind of any unprejudiced observer as to which of these two bodies best represented the Russian people. I do not think I shall ever again be so happy in my life as I was during those first days when I saw workingmen and peasant soldiers sending representatives of their own class and not of another. I remembered Shelley’s,
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