The officer sighed. “They did not move. At first they said they would come out if they had infantry support. They said moreover that they had their men with Kerensky, and that they were doing their part… Then, too, they said that the Cossacks were always accused of being the hereditary enemies of democracy… And finally, ‘The Bolsheviki promise that they will not take away our land. There is no danger to us. We remain neutral.’”
During this talk people were constantly entering and leaving—most of them officers, their shoulder-straps torn off. We could see them in the hall, and hear their low, vehement voices. Occasionally, through the half-drawn portières, we caught a glimpse of a door opening into a bath-room, where a heavily-built officer in a colonel’s uniform sat on the toilet, writing something on a pad held in his lap. I recognised Colonel Polkovnikov, former commandant of Petrograd, for whose arrest the Military Revolutionary Committee would have paid a fortune.
“Our programme?” said the officer. “This is it. Land to be turned over to the Land Committees. Workmen to have full representation in the control of industry. An energetic peace programme, but not an ultimatum to the world such as the Bolsheviki issued. The Bolsheviki cannot keep their promises to the masses, even in the country itself. We won’t let them… They stole our land programme in order to get the support of the peasants. That is dishonest. If they had waited for the Constituent Assembly”
“It doesn’t matter about the Constituent Assembly!” broke in the officer. “If the Bolsheviki want to establish a Socialist state here, we cannot work with them in any event! Kerensky made the great mistake. He let the Bolsheviki know what he was going to do by announcing in the Council of the Republic that he had ordered their arrest…”
“But what,” I said, “do you intend to do now?”
