flattery and hatred, committed acts of
lynching, the Bolshevist leaders expressed sham regrets! Thus it was after
the death of Doukhonine, who was cut to pieces by the sailors; and thus it
was after the dastardly assassination of the Cadets, Shingariev and
Kokochkine, after the shootings _en masse_ and the drowning of the
officers.

It was under these conditions that the fight was carried on; and the brunt
of it, as I have already stated, was sustained by the Revolutionary
Socialist party and the National Soviet of Peasants' Delegates, and it was
against these two that the Bolsheviki were particularly infuriated. "Now it
is not the Cadets who are dangerous to us," said they, "but the
Socialist-Revolutionists--these traitors, these enemies of the people." The
most sacred names of the Revolution were publicly trampled under foot by
them. Their cynicism went so far as to accuse Breshkovskaya, "the
Grandmother of the Russian Revolution," of having sold out to the
Americans. Personally I had the opportunity to hear a Bolshevist orator, a
member of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workmen's and Soldiers'
Delegates, express this infamous calumny at a meeting organized by the
Preobrajenski Regiment. The Bolsheviki tried, by every means, to crush the
party, to reduce it to a clandestine existence. But the Central Committee
declared that it would continue to fight against violence--and that in an
open manner; it continued to issue a daily paper, only changing its title,
as in the time of Czarism, and thus continued its propaganda in the
factories, and helped to form public opinion, etc.

At the Fourth Congress of the party, which took place in December, the
delegates from the provinces, where the despotism of the Bolsheviki was
particularly violent, raised the question of introducing terrorist methods
in the fight against the Bolsheviki. "From the time that the party is
placed in a fight under conditions which differ nothing from those of
Czarism, ancient methods are to be resumed; violence must be opposed to
violence," they said. But the Congress spurned this means; the
Revolutionary Socialist party did not adopt the methods of terrorism; it
could not do it, because the Bolsheviki were, after all, followed by the
masses--unthinking, it is true, but the masses, nevertheless. It is by
educating them, and not by the use of violence, that they are to be fought
against. Terrorist acts could bring nothing but a bloody suppress