Page:John Reed - Ten Days that Shook the World - 1919, Boni and Liveright.djvu/350

 addressing the assembly, which interrupted him at every few words.

"You are no better than murderers!" he cried. "Shooting down your Russian brothers on the streets!"

"When did we do that?" asked a worker.

"Last Sunday you did it, when the yunkers——"

"Well, didn't they shoot us?" One man exhibited his arm in a sling. "Haven't I got something to remember them by, the devils?"

The captain shouted at the top of his voice. "You should remain neutral! You should remain neutral! Who are you to destroy the legal Government? Who is Lenin? A German—"

"Who are you? A counter-revolutionist! A provocator!" they bellowed at him.

When he could make himself heard the captain stood up. "All right!" said he. "You call yourselves the people of Russia. But you're not the people of Russia. The peasants are the people of Russia. Wait until the peasants—"

"Yes," they cried, "wait until the peasants speak. We know what the peasants will say.... Aren't they workingmen like ourselves?"

In the long run, everything depended upon the peasants. While the peasants had been politically backward, still they had their own peculiar ideas, and they constituted more than eighty per cent of the people of Russia. The Bolsheviki had a comparatively small following among the peasants; and a permanent dictatorship of Russia by the industrial workers was impossible.... The traditional peasant party was the Socialist Revolutionary party; of all the parties now supporting the Soviet Government, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were the logical inheritors of peasant leadership—and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were at the mercy of the organ-