ernment with the Social Revolutionist, Alexander Kerensky, at its head.
Kerensky, a typical right-wing Socialist reformer, played the capitalistic game of his predecessors and disregarded the revolutionary mood of the people. They demanded peace, and he organized a great military offensive against the Central Powers; they demanded bread, and he arrested the peasants who attempted to confiscate the nobles' land, and he helped the employers to defeat the city workers' trade unions; they demanded liberty, and he tried to crush the Soviets, persecuted the Bolsheviki,[1] and kept the capitalists in his coalition Government. But the revolution finally overcame him. His military offensive, built out of wind, went to smash, and the Germans poured into the country. The people, enraged by his all-round betrayal of the revolution, stormed against him and his Government; and he, sensing the inevitable collapse, fled from Petrograd on October 24, 1917. The next day the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, controlled by the Bolsheviki, took over the government of the country, with little resistance save in Moscow and one or two other places. This was the "October" revolution. And thus was all power delegated to the Soviets and the present dictatorship of the proletariat inaugurated.
The Bolsheviki, later known as the Communists, are a party of action, and immediately they achieved power they set about satisfying the people. The people demanded peace, and the Bolsheviki at once opened the peace negotiations that ended in the Brest-Litovsk treaty a few months later; the people demanded bread; and the Bolsheviki nationalized the land the very day they took hold of the Government and they nationalized the industries shortly afterward; the people demanded liberty, and the Bolsheviki destroyed every semblance of bourgeois government and gave all power to the proletarian Soviets. It was this speedy and fundamental action of the Bolsheviki that laid the basis of
- ↑ The world has the notion that Kerensky was overthrown because he soft-heartedly tolerated the Bolsheviki and permitted them to organize against him. Nothing is farther from the truth. He hated them deeply and persecuted them as much as he dared. At one time, in June and July, he had thousands of them in jail, among others Leon Trotzsky. He also demanded that Lenin, Zinoviev, and other radical leaders, then in hiding, give themselves up to "justice."
11
