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of the revolt of the Russian people against the War, I might have reflected and have saved myself from a serious error.
The insurrection of the Cronstadt sailors at Petrograd in July, as well as the campaign conducted by the „Pravda“, where Lenin began to reveal himself in startling relief, the, retreat from Tarnopol, and the dislocation at the front,—all this, owing to some incomprehensible blunder, was attributed by me to facts of second rate importance; to such events, for instance, as the activities of „German agents“, in Russia, which though certainly capable of giving work to the police and the counter-espionnage were quite devoid, in the wide meaning of the word, of any political significance.
Nevertheless, Russian bourgeois public opinion, as well as the opinion of the majority of the Allied diplomatic corps, which again found itself in affectionate harmony with the former, began to think, both openly and secretly, of military dictatorship and of having recourse to the generals. Little by little they had become disenchanted with the Russian Revolution, inasmuch as it had ceased to be theirs!
This was the time when the campaign carried on in the press began to demand a „more energetic“ Government, and to put forward, amongst the candidates for the Presidency of the Council, the name of Admirai Kolchak. This tendency was to be observed particulary at the British Embassy, where, the first moment of astonishment having passed, an attempt was made for a return to the formula which had been studied and prepared in advance, and by which the Revolution was not permitted to exceed a change in the Ministry, which would
