Page:Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky - The Aims of the Bolsheviki (1919).djvu/12

 lated into deeds, the two first-named parties, who had already betrayed the people for the sake of friendship with the bourgeoisie, parted company with the Bolsheviki, and on various occasions fought with arms against them and the peasants who followed them. For instance, the Provisional Government, which included Mensheviki and the Social Revolutionaries, Tseretelli and Tchernov, sent punitive expeditions to the district of Tambov; and it was the Right S.R.'s who organised the risings of the junkers in Moscow, Irkutsk, and other places.

At first these parties played the "wait and see" game with the peasants, saying that the land question would be settled when the Constituent Assembly met. But days, weeks, and months went by, and still the peasants did not get their land. Gradually the character of the Constituent Assembly became manifest, and it was not such as to reassure those who had once built their hopes on it. The elections were to take place at a time when all truly national organisations and newspapers, in the rear as well as at the front, had been destroyed by Kerensky's capitalist government; when, at the front, to please Russian and foreign capitalists, the soldiers were forced to resume the offensive and the death penalty had been reinstated; when free speech had been abolished and the prisons were crowded with working-class people. Under such circumstances, it was naturally a foregone conclusion that the power in the Constituent Assembly would be in the hands of the bourgeoisie and its allies, the Right Socialists.

When the masses of the people understood that they had been betrayed by the Right Socialist parties, and that these parties were delaying the settlement of the land question until the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, they rose and accomplished the October