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 Kerenski gained the victory over Lenin before the latter could gain the upper hand. The weak attitude of the victor soon furnished proof that the vanquished represented a great power, and that circumstances were in his favour. The Government hastened to inform those who were arrested that they would not be treated as criminals but as counter-revolutionaries. People who had instigated murder, theft and robbery, were to be treated in the same way as those who attempted to form an opposition during an election for the restitution of law and order, from which it was obvious that the first-named were regarded with fear and trembling. The prisoners were allowed to have intercourse in prison with their partisans.

Such was the position when the Government, under pressure of the passive resistance of society and the pressure of the Entente, recognized its position to be untenable. The French military plenipotentiary, Vix, desired to lay down a line of demarcation that was unfavourable to us. The Government did not dare to shoulder the responsibility either of accepting or refusing these conditions, and wanted to give way to a purely social democratic government, whose ostensible purpose was the refusal of the demands of the Entente and the preparation of armed resistance. The decision of the Government was logical to the extent that the power was already de facto exclusively in the hands of the Social Democrats, and that there was no real power behind the bourgeois elements of the Cabinet of Karolyi. When these bourgeois elements