Novotcherkask, November 8th.

In view of the revolt of the Bolsheviki, and their attempt to depose the Provisional Government and to seize the power in Petrograd... the Cossack Government declares that it considers these acts criminal and absolutely inadmissible. In consequence, the Cossacks will lend all their support to the Provisional Government, which is a government of coalition. Because of these circumstances, and until the return of the Provisional Government to power, and the restoration of order in Russia, I take upon myself, beginning November 7th, all the power in that which concerns the region of the Don.

Signed: ATAMAN KALEDIN

_President of the Government of the Cossack Troops._

_Prikaz_ of the Minister-President Kerensky, dated at Gatchina:

I, Minister-President of the Provisional Government, and Supreme Commander of all the armed forces of the Russian Republic, declare that I am at the head of regiments from the Front who have remained faithful to the fatherland.

I order all the troops of the Military District of Petrograd, who through mistake or folly have answered the appeal of the traitors to the country and the Revolution, to return to their duty without delay.

This order shall be read in all regiments, battalions and squadrons.

Signed: _Minister-President of the Provisional_

_Government and Supreme Commander_

A. F. KERENSKY.

Telegram from Kerensky to the General in Command of the Northern Front:

The town of Gatchina has been taken by the loyal regiments without bloodshed. Detachments of Cronstadt sailors, and of the Semionovsky and Ismailovsky regiments, gave up their arms without resistance and joined the Government troops.

I order all the designated units to advance as quickly as possible. The Military Revolutionary Committee has ordered its troops to retreat....

Gatchina, about thirty kilometers south-west, had fallen during the night. Detachments of the two regiments mentioned-not the sailors-while wandering captainless in the neighbourhood, had indeed been surrounded by Cossacks and given up their arms; but it was not true that they had joined the Government troops. At this very moment crowds of them, bewildered and ashamed, were up at Smolny trying to explain. They did not think the Cossacks were so near.... They had tried to argue with the Cossacks....

Apparently the greatest confusion prevailed along the revolutionary front. The garrisons of all the little towns southward had split hopelessly, bitterly into two factions-or three: the high command being on the side of Kerensky, in default of anything stronger, the majority of the rank and file with the Soviets, and the rest unhappily wavering.

Hastily the Military Revolutionary Committee appointed to command the defence of Petrograd an ambitious regular Army Captain, Muraviov, the same Muraviov who had organised the Death Battalions during the summer, and had once been heard to advise the Government that "it was too lenient with the Bolsheviki; they must be wiped out." A man of military mind, who admired power and audacity, perhaps sincerely....

Beside my door when I came down in the morning were posted two new orders of the Military Revolutionary Committee, directing that all shops and stores should open as usual, and that all empty rooms and apartments should be put at the disposal of the Committee....

For thirty-six hours now the Bolsheviki had been cut off from provincial Russia and the outside world. The railway men and telegraphers refused to transmit their despatches, the postmen would not handle their mail. Only the Government wireless at Tsarskoye Selo launched half-hourly bulletins and manifestoes to the four corners of heaven; the Commissars of Smolny raced the Commissars of the City Duma on speeding trains half across the earth; and two aeroplanes, laden with propaganda, fled high up toward the Front....

But the eddies of insurrection were spreading through Russia with a swiftness surpassing any human agency. Helsingfors Soviet passed resolutions of support; Kiev Bolsheviki captured the arsenal and the telegraph station, only to be driven out by delegates to the Congress of Cossacks, which happened to be meeting there; in Kazan, a Military Revolutionary Committee arrested the local garrison staff and the Commissar of the Provisional Government; from far Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, came news that the Soviets were in control of the Municipal institutions; at Moscow, where the situation was aggravated by a great strike of leather-workers on one side, and a threat of general lock-out on the other, the Soviets had voted overwhelmingly to support the action of the Bolsheviki in Petrograd.... Already a Military Revolutionary Committee was functioning.

Everywhere the same thing happened. The common soldiers and the industrial workers supported the Soviets by a vast majority; the officers, _yunkers_ and middle class generally were on the side of the Government-as were the bourgeois Cadets and the "moderate" Socialist parties. In all these towns sprang up Committees for Salvation of Country and Revolution, arming for civil war....

Vast Russia was in a state of solution. As long ago as 1905 the process had begun; the March Revolution had merely hastened it, and giving birth to a sort of forecast of the new order, had ended by merely perpetuating the hollow structure of the old regime. Now, however, the Bolsheviki, in one night, had dissipated it, as one blows away smoke. Old Russia was no more; human society flowed molten in primal heat, and from the tossing sea of flame was emerging the class struggle, stark and pitiless-and the fragile, slowly-cooling crust of new planets....

In Petrograd sixteen Ministries were on strike, led by the Ministries of Labour and of Supplies-the only two created by the all-Socialist Government of August.

If ever men stood alone the "handful of Bolsheviki" apparently stood alone that grey chill morning, with all storms towering over them. (See App. VI, Sect. 1) Back against the wall, the Military Revolutionary Committee struck-for its life. _"De l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace_.... At five in the morning the Red Guards entered the printing office of the City Government, confiscated thousands of copies of the Appeal-Protest of the Duma, and suppressed the official Municipal organ-the _Viestnik Gorodskovo Samoupravleniya_ (Bulletin of the Municipal Self-Government). All the bourgeois newspapers were torn from the presses, even the _Golos Soldata,_ journal of the old _Tsay-ee-kah_-which, however, changing its name to _Soldatski Golos,_ appeared in an edition of a hundred thousand copies, bellowing rage and defiance:

The men who began their stroke of treachery in the night, who have suppressed the newspapers, will not keep the country in ignorance long. The country will know the truth! It will appreciate you, Messrs. the Bolsheviki! We shall see!...

As we came down the Nevsky a little after midday the whole street before the Duma building was crowded with people. Here and there stood Red Guards and sailors, with bayonetted rifles, each one surrounded by about a hundred men and women-clerks, students, shopkeepers, _tchinovniki_-shaking their fists and bawling insults and menaces. On the steps stood boy-scouts and officers, distributing copies of the _Soldatski Golos._ A workman with a red band around his arm and a revolver in his hand stood trembling with rage and nervousness in the middle of a hostile throng at the foot of the stairs, demanding the surrender of the papers.... Nothing like this, I imagine, ever occurred in history. On one side a handful of workmen and common soldiers, with arms in their hands, representing a victorious insurrection-and perfectly miserable; on the other a frantic mob made up of the kind of people that crowd the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue at noon-time, sneering, abusing, shouting, "Traitors! Provocators! _Opritchniki!_ [*]" [* Savage body-guards if Ian the Terrible, 17th century]

The doors were guarded by students and officers with white arm-bands lettered in red, "Militia of the Committee of Public Safety," and half a dozen boy-scouts came and went. Upstairs the place was all commotion. Captain Gomberg was coming down the stairs. "They're going to dissolve the Duma," he said. "The Bolshevik Commissar is with the Mayor now." As we reached the top Riazanov came hurrying out. He had been to demand that the Duma recognise the Council of peoples' Commissars, and the Mayor had given him a flat refusal.

In the offices a great babbling crowd, hurrying, shouting, gesticulating-Government officials, intellectuals, journalists, foreign correspondents, French and British officers.... "The City Engineer pointed to them triumphantly. "The Embassies recognise the Duma as the only power now," he explained. "For these Bolshevik murderers and robbers it is only a question of hours. All Russia is rallying to us....

In the Alexander Hall a monster meeting of the Committee for Salvation. Fillipovsky in the chair and Skobeliev again in the tribune, reporting, to immense applause, new adhesions to the Committee; Executive Committee of Peasants' Soviets, old _Tsay-ee-kah,_ Central Army Committee, _Tsentroflot,_ Menshevik, Socialist Revolutionary and Front group delegates from the Congress of Soviets, Central Committees of the Menshevik, Socialist Revolutionary, Populist Socialist parties. "Yedinstvo" group, Peasants' Union, Cooperatives, Zemstvos, Municipalities, Post and Telegraph Unions, _Vikzhel,_ Council of the Russian Republic, Union of Unions, [*] Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association.... [* See Notes and Explanations.]

".... The power of the Soviets is not democratic power, but a dictatorship-and not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but _against_ the proletariat. All those who have felt or know how to feel revolutionary enthusiasm must join now for the defence of the Revolution....

"The problem of the day is not only to render harmless irresponsible demagogues, but to fight against the counter-revolution.... If rumours are true that certain generals in the provinces are attempting to