local Soviets all over the country, in the Union branches and the
ranks of the soldiers and sailors. The Peasants' Soviets remained
still conservative, because in the sluggish rural districts political
consciousness developed slowly, and the Socialist Revolutionary party
had been for a generation the party which had agitated among the
peasants.... But even among the peasants a revolutionary wing was
forming. It showed itself clearly in October, when the left wing of
the Socialist Revolutionaries split off, and formed a new political
faction, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

At the same time there were signs everywhere that the forces of
reaction were gaining confidence.(See App. I, Sect. 5) At the
Troitsky Farce theatre in Petrograd, for example, a burlesque called
_Sins of the Tsar_ was interrupted by a group of Monarchists, who
threatened to lynch the actors for "insulting the Emperor." Certain
newspapers began to sigh for a "Russian Napoleon." It was the usual
thing among bourgeois _intelligentzia_ to refer to the Soviets of
Workers' Deputies (Rabotchikh Deputatov) as _Sabatchikh_
Deputatov-Dogs' Deputies.

On October 15th I had a conversation with a great Russian capitalist,
Stepan Georgevitch Lianozov, known as the "Russian Rockefeller"-a
Cadet by political faith.

"Revolution," he said, "is a sickness. Sooner or later the foreign
powers must intervene here-as one would intervene to cure a sick
child, and teach it how to walk. Of course it would be more or less
improper, but the nations must realise the danger of Bolshevism in
their own countries-such contagious ideas as 'proletarian
dictatorship,' and 'world social revolution'... There is a chance that