Page:John Reed - Ten Days that Shook the World - 1919, Boni and Liveright.djvu/61

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Workers’ control over industrial production.

A faithfully and honestly elected Constituent Assembly.

It is interesting to reproduce here a passage from that same paper—the organ of those Bolsheviki so well known to the world as German agents:

The German kaiser, covered with the blood of millions of dead people, wants to push his army against Petrograd. Let us call to the German workmen, soldiers and peasants, who want peace not less than we do, to… stand up against this damned war!

This can be done only by a revolutionary Government, which would speak really for the workmen, soldiers and peasants of Russia, and would appeal over the heads of the diplomats directly to the German troops, fill the German trenches with proclamations in the German language… Our airmen would spread these proclamations all over Germany…

In the Council of the Republic the gulf between the two sides of the chamber deepened day by day.

“The propertied classes,” cried Karelin, for the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, “want to exploit the revolutionary machine of the State to bind Russia to the war-chariot of the Allies! The revolutionary parties are absolutely against this policy…”

Old Nicholas Tchaikovsky, representing the Populist Socialists, spoke against giving the land to the peasants, and took the side of the Cadets:

“We must have immediately strong discipline in the army… Since the beginning of the war I have not ceased to insist that it is a crime to undertake social and economic reforms in war-time. We are committing that crime, and yet I am not the enemy of these reforms, because I am a Socialist.”

Cries from the Left, “We don’t believe you!” Mighty applause from the Right…

Adzhemov, for the Cadets, declared that there was no neces-