Page:Raymond Augustine McGowan - Bolshevism in Russia and America (1920).pdf/8

 8 tatorship of the class-conscious proletariat and they were educating the more militant section of the city workmen and soldiers to their way of thinking. At last they obtained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet of Workmen and Soldiers and a following elsewhere throughout Russia. The Soviets were the logical agency at hand for a Bolshevik revolution, and so the Bolshevik leaders made as their campaign cry, "All Power to the Soviets." Their strength in the Soviets, however, lay not among the peasants, but among the workmen of the large cities and among some of the soldiers.

The election for the Constituent Assembly, a democratically elected body, was called for November. The Bolsheviki saw that they must act quickly if they were to win. They called the Soviet Congress of Workmen and Soldiers to meet in Petrograd. At first the Executive Committee of the Soviets, which was not Bolshevik, countermanded the order; then, too late, it sent out another call for the Congress to convene. This helped the Bolsheviki who could rely also upon the growing strength and increased impatience of the workmen and the soldiers, and upon the general trust, outside their own ranks, in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly.

The Soviet Congress met. Only a sprinkling of peasants were present to represent their eighty per cent. of the Russian people. Not all of the workmen and soldiers were represented. But this small fraction of the Russian people declared during a night meeting of November 7th that a new type of Government ruled Russia and that they were the Government. Outside, a still smaller faction, the, Petrograd Soviet of Workmen and Soldiers—the Trades' Assembly and the garrison of one city—were deposing the Government and dispersing the Pre-Parliament.

The dictatorship of the militant vanguard of the proletariat had come. Kerensky's ill-starred drive upon Petrograd, street battles in Moscow and Kiev, civil war