Page:René Marchand - Why I Side with the Social Revolution (1920).pdf/21

 so much the more reason, their evolution towards Bolshevism, I clung tightly to my faith in the leader of the Provisional Government, whom I at that time considered the only person capable of making a stand against ambitions for dictatorship; and, consequently of saving Russia from a Civil War; or, briefly, of saving her from tragical hardships and a military disaster which would place her at the mercy of German Imperialism.

It was in this state of mind, and in this atmosphere of distress, that I lived through the latter weeks of the Provisional Government; the Korniloff affair, the fall of Riga, due rather to intrigue and treason amongst the officers than to the „shameful disloyalty“ of the soldiers. A number of articles were devoted to this subject in a journal, called the „Entente“, published at Petrograd in the French language, and these are some of the most remarkable and poignant that Ludovic Naudeau ever wrote I consider it a duty to state here that a large number of detachments, and especially the Lettish detachments, which later on were the first to pass over to Bolshevism, fought with a courage that was worthy of the highest praise. After this, the Provisional Government, feeling its authority grow weaker and weaker, convoced Parliament after the Moscow Assembly in an attempt to maintain itself until the Constitutient Assembly. Any objective observer would have at once seen that this attempt was only the death agonies of the Provisional Government, a sign of its impotence to guide the country until the Constituent Assembly. He would have understood that the ground was then prepared, by the