Page:Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky - Third Anniversary of the Russian October Revolution (1921).djvu/8

 8 lords themselves, or in close touch with the bourgeois landlord class. And whilst the bourgeoisie and the landlords, having lost their heads, went into hiding after the Revolution, the officers, on the contrary, came out in the open, being well organised by the machinery of the Tzarist army. Apart from Alexeyev, the rising was led by General Kornilov, the same who, under Kerensky, moved his Savage Division on Petrograd to suppress the Petrograd Soviet. Against Alexeyev's army, composed of officers, came out the workers' Red Guard of Petrograd, Moscow, and the Donetz Basin, led by Comrade Antonoy-Ovseienko. Although these workers had no military training, and were opposed by the cream of the Tzarist army, the officers of the line, they nevertheless defeated the Tzarist generals, and took Rostov on the Don, carried by desperate dash and daring. The same Petrograd and Moscow workers defeated the troops of the Ukrainian Rada; that is, the Ukrainian bourgeois government, and took Kiev by storm. The workers from the Urals and the Volga defeated Doutov. The workers and soldiers from Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk defeated the counter-revolutionary Cadets at Irkutsk.

Thus the first attempt of our counter-revolution to come out against the government of the workers and peasants was crushed. So long as foreign capital could not come to the assistance of our bourgeoisie and landlords, it was easy for the workers and peasants of Soviet Russia to defeat them.

All this, however, was only the beginning of a capitalist campaign against the conquests of the October Revolution. After the failure of the first campaign a