Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/318

 but there was never any doubt of the outcome. The revolutionary masses secured a complete victory, the ministers of the Provisional Government were arrested, and Kerensky fled from Petrograd to the front to secure the adhesion of "loyal" troops, march upon Petrograd and crush the sevolutionrevolution [sic].

The All-Russian Congress of Soviets convened at the Smolny institute, confronted with the accomplished fact of the Provisional Government's overthrow. The Bolsheviki and the Social Revolutionists of the Left, representatives of the peasants who accepted the Bolsheviki program, dominated the Congress. While the armed revolutionary masses were completing the work of overthrowing the government and preparing to meet the attack of any troops that Kerensky might hurl at Petrograd, the Congress heatedly debated the problem of all power to the Soviets. A number of delegates, a small number, wished to ignore the successful revolution of the proletariat, and yield all government power to the Constituent Assembly, the Congress, in the meanwhile, to suspend its sessions while a new bourgeois-coalition government was organized. But their arguments were brushed aside, and the Congress decreed that the Soviets should be constituted as the government of Russia. The Congress elected a ministry in the form of a Council of People's Commissaires, with Lenin as President of the Council (Premier) and Trotzky as Commissaire of Foreign Affairs.

In the meanwhile, Kerensky had succeeded in rallying some