Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/233

 strength, the masses are agitated and inflamed by the inactivity of the government, the high cost of living, the collapse of the July offensive. The Cadets leave the ministry, playing for time and issuing an ultimatum to the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki, leaving it to those "who are in power," though possessing no power, to liquidate the military defeat and the discontent of the masses.

The Bolsheviki, on July 15–16, abstain from action. This was acknowledged even by the representative of Dyelo Naroda in relating the incidents of July 15 in the Grenadier regiment. In the evening of July 16, the movement gets beyond bounds, and the Bolsheviki issue a proclamation about the necessity of imparting to the movement "a peaceful and organized" character. On July 17, the provocative shots of counter-revolutionary gangs increase the number of victims on both sides. We must emphasize that the promise of the Soviet Executive Committee to investigate the events, to issue bulletins twice daily, etc., remained an empty promise! Exactly nothngnothing [sic] was done by the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki, who did not even publish a casualty list of both sides.

On the night of July 17, the Bolsheviki issued a proclamation concerning the cessation of hostilities, and the same night it was published in Pravda. But, the same night, there arrives a counter-revolutionary army at Petrograd (evidently at the call or with the sanction of the Social-Revolutionists, Mensheviki and their Soviets, concerning which "delicate" point there has been a strict silence after the necessity of secrecy had passed). And on the same night, there begin massacres of the Bolsheviki by companies of Junkers, etc., acting under the instruction of the commander Polovtzev and the General Staff. On the night of July 18, they suppress the Pravda, on the 18th and 19th they destroy its printing shop, kill a worker, Voynoff, in broad daylight.

They hunt for and arrest the Bolsheviki and disarm the revolutionary regiments.

Who did all this? Neither the government nor the Soviets, but a counter-revolutionary military band gathered around the General Staff, acting in the name of "counter-espionage," putting into circulation the fabrications of Pereverdeff and Alexinsky to "arouse the savagery" of the troops, etc. The government is nowhere. The Soviets are nowhere. They tremble for their own fate: they receive a series of communications that the Cossacks may come and massacre them.

The "Black Hundred" and the Cadet press having instituted or-