rts to
defend the Constituent Assembly, binding themselves, on their part, in case
our efforts were insufficient, to rise in a body for its defense.

By reason of the disorganization of postal and telegraphic communications,
and because in different localities the calls of the Committee were held up
by the Bolshevist organizations, the instructions concerning the Congress
fixed for the 8th of January were not received in many provinces until
after considerable delay.

Some minutes before the opening of the Conference, which was to take place
on the premises of the Committee (11 Kirillovskaia Street), where the
delegates on hand had lodged, there arrived a detachment of sailors and Red
Guards armed with guns and bombs, who surrounded the house, guarding all
the entrances, and occupied all the apartments. The Executive Committee,
performing its duty toward the peasant workers, which duty was to hold
their flag with a firm hand, not fearing any violence, and not allowing
themselves to be intimidated by the bayonets and the bombs of the enemies
of the peasant workers, opened the session at the hour indicated.

The Bolshevist pretorians, however, violating the freedom of assembly,
broke into the hall and surrounded the office and members of the Conference
with bayonets drawn. Their leader, Kornilov, staff-commandant of the Red
Guards of the Rojdestvensky quarter, made a speech to the delegates, in
which he said that they were to go to the Smolny Institute, to the
Bolshevist Congress, assuring them that they had come to this Congress by
mistake; at the end he read a document ordering him to make a search of the
premises, to confiscate all papers, and to arrest all who would offer
resistance. In reply to this speech the delegates and the members of the
Executive Committee spoke in turn; they stigmatized vehemently the criminal
policy of the Bolshevist government, which dissolved the Constituent
Assembly, the true representation of the popular will, without having given
it the time to register a vote on the agricultural law; which shot down
workers participating in peaceful negotiations; which deprived the people
of the right of assembly to discuss their needs; which destroyed freedom of
speech and assembly and trampled in the dust the whole Russian Revolution.
The delegates, one after another, tried to explain to the Red Guards that
it was not the delegates that were deceived in coming to this conference,
but those who were g