"In the name of the Baltic fleet," the soldiers replied.

The peasants refused; cries of protest were raised. One by one the peasant
delegates ascended the tribune to stigmatize the Bolsheviki in speeches
full of indignation, and to express the hopes that they placed in the
Constituent Assembly.

The sailors listened. They had come to disperse a counter-revolutionary
Congress, and these speeches troubled them. One sailor, not able to stand
it any longer, burst into tears.

"Let me speak!" he shouted to the president. "I hear your speeches, peasant
comrades, and I no longer understand anything.... What is going on? We are
peasants, and you, too, are peasants. But we are of this side, and you are
of the other.... Why? Who has separated us? For we are brothers.... But it
is as if a barrier had been placed between us." He wept and, seizing his
revolver, he exclaimed, "No, I would rather kill myself!"

This session of the Congress presented a strange spectacle, disturbed by
men who confessed that they did not know why they were there; the peasants
sang revolutionary songs; the sailors, armed with guns and grenades, joined
them. Then the peasants knelt down to sing a funeral hymn to the memory of
Logvinov, whose coffin was even yesterday within the room. The soldiers,
lowering their guns, knelt down also.

The Bolshevik authorities became excited; they did not expect such a turn
to events. "Enough said," declared the chief; "we have come not to speak,
but to act. If they do not want to go to Smolny, let them get out of here."
And they set themselves to the task.

In groups of five the peasants were conducted down-stairs, trampled on,
and, on their refusal to go to Smolny, pushed out of doors during the night
in the midst of the enormous city of which they knew nothing.

Members of the Executive Committee were arrested, the premises occupied by
sailors and Red Guards, the objects found therein stolen.

The peasants found shelter in the homes of the inhabitants of Petrograd,
who, indignant, offered them hospitality; a certain number were lodged in
the barracks of the Preobrajenski Regiment. The sailors, who but a few
minutes before had sung a funeral hymn to Logvinov, and wept when they saw
that they understood nothing, now became the docile executors of the orders
of the Bolsheviki. And when they were asked, "Why do you do this?" they
answered as in the time, still recent, of Czarism: "It is the order. No
need to talk."