The railways
were breaking down, food lessening, factories closing. The desperate
masses cried out that the bourgeoisie was sabotaging the life of the
people, causing defeat on the Front. Riga had been surrendered just
after General Kornilov said publicly, "Must we pay with Riga the
price of bringing the country to a sense of its duty?" [*]
[* See "Kornilov to Brest-Litvosk" by John Reed. Boni and Liveright
N.Y., 1919]
To Americans it is incredible that the class war should develop to
such a pitch. But I have personally met officers on the Northern
Front who frankly preferred military disaster to cooperation with the
Soldiers' Committees. The secretary of the Petrograd branch of the
Cadet party told me that the break-down of the country's economic
life was part of a campaign to discredit the Revolution. An Allied
diplomat, whose name I promised not to mention, confirmed this from
his own knowledge. I know of certain coal-mines near Kharkov which
were fired and flooded by their owners, of textile factories at
Moscow whose engineers put the machinery out of order when they left,
of railroad officials caught by the workers in the act of crippling
locomotives....
A large section of the propertied classes preferred the Germans to
the Revolution-even to the Provisional Government-and didn't hesitate
to say so. In the Russian household where I lived, the subject of
conversation at the dinner table was almost invariably the coming of
the Germans, bringing "law and order.
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