Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/272

 guarded move on the part of Milyukov, Kerensky, or Tseretelli threatened to upset the whole business. And daily the alternatives appeared with greater and greater inevitability: either the Soviet must assume power, or the capitalist government will sweep aside the Soviet. An external shock was all that was needed to destroy the equilibrium of the whole structure. This external shock to a system that was doomed from within came in the form of the events of July 16–18. The petit bourgeois "idyl," constructed on an "amicable" union of two mutually exclusive systems, received its death-blow. And Tseretelli was enabled to set down in his memoirs that his plan for the salvation of Russia had been thwarted by the Machine-Gun Regiment.