Page:Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky - Third Anniversary of the Russian October Revolution (1921).djvu/4

4 Kerensky himself escaped from Petrograd to the front, and with the assistance of Cossacks attempted to regain his power and reconquer Petrograd. Cossack divisions under the command of the well known Tzarist, General Krassnov, approached Petrograd, attacking Gatshino. However, the armed workers of Petrograd, notwithstanding their lack of military training and bad organisation, defeated Krassnov's Cossacks and took the general himself prisoner. Victory was on the side of the Petrograd proletariat, and Kerensky had again to flee in disgrace.

At Moscow the triumph of the workers and soldiers was not so easy as in Petrograd. Here the forces of the bourgeoisie officers and of the followers of the old government were larger. Nevertheless, even here, the bourgeoisie defenders of the deposed government were finally besieged in the Kremlin and compelled to surrender. Thus in our second capital, too, the authority of the Soviets was established.

Neither was the change sudden in the rest of Russia where the ground was sufficiently prepared by the past struggles. At some places the power was actually in the hands of the workers even before the October Revolution, and the Commissaries of the Provisional Government exercised no authority there. Immediately the news of the revolution in Petrograd reached the provinces, the local Soviets of the workers and soldiers' delegates almost everywhere removed the commissaries of Kerensky's government, establishing in their stead the authority of the Soviets. The Provisional Government was so impotent and so despised by the toiling masses that their followers, practically speaking, offered no resistance.