peace from their Governments they would be putting into their hands the sword that was necessary for the Social Revolution, in which cause they had, like many of their friends, spent the best years of their lives.
In their own country, at any rate, they had proved that they were right in their calculation. The struggle for peace, the failure to obtain it, shook the Government into the disastrous adventure of the Galician advance, shook it again with the Galician retreat, weakened it with every telegram from Allied countries that emphasized the continuance of the war. Each shock to the Government was also a shock for the Moderate Party in the Soviets. The struggle in Russia became, as the Bolsheviks wished it should become, a struggle between the classes, a struggle in which the issue became ever clearer between the working class and the privileged classes. The Government went to Moscow for moral support and came back without it. The Kornilov mutiny, a definite threat against the Soviets by a handful of the privileged classes (made in the guise of a patriotic movement and therefore supported by Kornilov himself and certain of the Allies), merely strengthened the organization it was intended to overthrow. Within the Soviets, the Moderate Party, which had already come by force of events to be a sort of annex of the bourgeoisie, grew weaker and weaker after this illustration of the danger of their policy. Just as the Government went to Moscow to seek support in a Conference, so the Moderate Party, feeling support slipping from under it, knowing that the next meeting of the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets would find it in a minority, treacherously sought new foothold in an artificial Democratic Assembly. Not even these tactics shook the actual fabric of the Soviets, and, when, in October, first Petrograd, then Moscow, showed a huge Bolshevik majority, the Bolshevik leaders were so confident that they had the country behind them that they made every single arrangement for the ejection of the Government openly over the telephone, and, notwithstanding, neither the Government nor the old moderate Executive Committee (no longer an executive) could muster authority to prevent them.
The point that I wish to make is this; that, from the first moment of the revolution to the present day the real authority of the Soviets has been unshaken. The October Revolution
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