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bourgeoisie, as well as the majority of the Allied diplomatic representatives, right from the very first day of the Revolution, committed an unpardonable mistake in not seeing the Revolution, or to speak more distinctly in seeing it only in the colours that suited them, and within such limits as they had prescribed for it in advance.
In other words, they restricted it to a rehabilitation of the Ministry, a „change of soverign“, at the most (and, mark you, this only for the sake of form, and without admitting that anything could be fundamentally affected by it) even to a change in the Regime, and becoming accustomed to the idea of the change (the evolution that the Press underwent is striking proof of this), which they considered as a purely formal one, they innocently prepared themselves to resume work, after an interval of a few hours interruption. They did not perceive (and later on they obstinately refused to do so), that the approaching events, events which were not yet unfolding themselves, but were simply beginning, were by no means a mere rehabilitation of a cabinet of which for long months they had been ardently dreaming, but that these events were rather a first cry of revolt arising from a whole people, a people who, so to speak, had just begun to see the light, and whose first act of authority was to declare in the face of the whole world that it wanted nothing more to do with the War. Victims of an extraordinary mirage, politicians, journalists, diplomats. (and behind these the public at large),—all went about muttering that „things now were only just starting“; that under the guidance of a Cadet Ministry, that is to say the élite of the Russian bourgeois intellectuals,
