these were headed by the savage counter-revolutionists. The workers'
organizations and establishments of our party were being ruthlessly
crushed and demolished. Arrests, searches, assaults and even murders
came to be common occurrences. On the night of the 4th the then
Attorney-General, Pereverzev, handed over to the press "documents" which
were intended to prove that the Bolshevist party was headed by bribed
agents of Germany.

The leaders of the Social-Revolutionist and Menshevik parties have known
us too long and too well to believe these accusations. At the same time,
they were too deeply interested in their success to repudiate them
publicly. And even now one cannot recall without disgust that saturnalia
of lies which was celebrated broadcast in all the bourgeois and
coalition newspapers. Our organs were suppressed. Revolutionary
Petrograd felt that the provinces and the army were still far from being
with it. In workingmen's sections of the city a short period of
tyrannical infringements set in, while in the garrison repressive
measures were introduced against the disorganized regiments, and certain
of its units were disarmed. At the same time, the political leaders
manufactured a new ministry, with the inclusion of representatives of
third-rate bourgeois groups, which, although adding nothing to the
government, robbed it of its last vestige of revolutionary initiative.

Meanwhile events at the front ran their own course. The organic unity of
the army was shaken to its very depths. The soldiers were becoming
convinced that the great majority of the officers, who, at the beginning
of the revolution, bedaubed themselves with red revolutionary paint,
were still very inimical to the new regime. An open selection of
counter-revolutionary elements was being made in the lines. Bolshevik
publications were ruthlessly persecuted. The military advance had long