say, in the fact that these leaders of the official S.R. party should write in the editorial of their official organ, the Dielo Naroda (September 29) the following words:—
"… Scarcely anything has been done up to the present to put an end to the oppressive rule which still dominates the countryside in the very centre of Russia. … The law on the regulation of agrarian conditions, which has been laid down by the provisional government for a long time, and which had even passed through the purgatory of the judicial conference; this law is now pigeon-holed in the depths of some office or other. … Are we not right in stating that our republican government is still by no means free from the habits of the Tsarist administration, and that the brutal methods of Stolypine are still making themselves strongly felt in the proceedings of the revolutionary ministers"?
This is what the official S.R.'s are writing! The supporters of the coalition are obliged to recognise that after seven months of revolution in an agrarian country, "scarcely anything has been done to put an end to the oppressive rule" of the peasants by the big landed proprietors. And these same S.R.'s are obliged to apply the term Stolypinist to their colleague Kerensky and all his group of ministers.
Is it possible to imagine, coming from our opponents, a more eloquent testimony that the coalition is bankrupt; that the S.R.'s who tolerate Kerensky have become a party which is anti-popular, anti-peasant and counter-revolutionary; and, above all, that the whole revolution has reached a turning point?
A peasant rebellion, in an agrarian country, against the government of the socialist-revolutionary Kerensky, of the Mensheviks Nikitine and Gvozdiev, and of other ministers representing the interests of capital and of the landed seigneurs! A repression of this rebellion by a republican government by means of military measures!
In the face of such facts can any partisan of the proletariat deny that the crisis is about to burst forth, that the revolution is at a decisive turning point, that the victory of the government over the peasant rebellion now would sound the knell of the revolution, and would signify the definite victory of the Korniloff regime?
