Old Russia was rapidly breaking up. In Ukraine, in Finland, Poland,
White Russia, the nationalist movements gathered strength and became
bolder. The local Governments, controlled by the propertied classes,
claimed autonomy, refusing to obey orders from Petrograd. At
Helsingfors the Finnish Senate declined to loan money to the
Provisional Government, declared Finland autonomous, and demanded
the withdrawal of Russian troops. The bourgeois Rada at Kiev
extended the boundaries of Ukraine until they included all the
richest agricultural lands of South Russia, as far east as the
Urals, and began the formation of a national army. Premier
Vinnitchenko hinted at a separate peace with Germany-and the
Provisional Government was helpless. Siberia, the Caucasus, demanded
separate Constituent Assemblies. And in all these countries there
was the beginning of a bitter struggle between the authorities and
the local Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies....

Conditions were daily more chaotic. Hundreds of thousands of
soldiers were deserting the front and beginning to move in vast,
aimless tides over the face of the land. The peasants of Tambov and
Tver Governments, tired of waiting for the land, exasperated by the
repressive measures of the Government, were burning manor-houses and
massacring land-owners. Immense strikes and lock-outs convulsed
Moscow, Odessa and the coal-mines of the Don. Transportation was
paralysed; the army was starving and in the big cities there was no
bread.

The Government, torn between the democratic and reactionary
factions, could do nothing: when forced to act it always supported
the interests of the propertied classes. Cossacks were sent to