In one corner sat a man in the uniform of a captain, addressing the assembly, which interrupted him at every few words.
“You are no better than murderers!” he cried. “Shooting down your Russian brothers on the streets!”
“Last Sunday you did it, when the _yunkers_—”
“Well, didn’t they shoot us?” One man exhibited his arm in a sling. “Haven’t I got something to remember them by, the devils?”
The captain shouted at the top of his voice. “You should remain neutral! You should remain neutral! Who are you to destroy the legal Government? Who is Lenin? A German—”
“Who are you? A counter-revolutionist! A provocator!” they bellowed at him.
When he could make himself heard the captain stood up. “All right!” said he. “You call yourselves the people of Russia. But you’re _not_ the people of Russia. The _peasants_ are the people of Russia. Wait until the peasants—”
“Yes,” they cried, “wait until the peasants speak. We know what the peasants will say…. Aren’t they workingmen like ourselves?”
In the long run, everything depended upon the peasants. While the peasants had been politically backward, still they had their own peculiar ideas, and they constituted more than eighty per cent of the people of Russia. The Bolsheviki had a comparatively small following among the peasants; and a permanent dictatorship of Russia by the industrial workers was impossible…. The traditional peasant party was the Socialist Revolutionary party; of all the parties now supporting the Soviet Government, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were the logical inheritors of peasant leadership—and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were at the mercy of the organised city proletariat, desperately needed the backing of the peasants….
Meanwhile Smolny had not neglected the peasants. After the Land decree, one of the first actions of the new _Tsay-ee-kah_ had been to call a Congress of Peasants, over the head of the Executive Committee of the Peasants’ Soviets. A few days later was issued detailed Regulations for the _Volost_ (Township) Land Committees, followed by Lenin’s “Instruction to Peasants,” (See App. XII, Sect. 1) which explained the Bolshevik revolution and the new Government in simple terms; and on November 16th, Lenin and Miliutin published the “Instructions to Provincial Emissaries,” of whom thousands were sent by the Soviet Government into the villages.