The usurpers, with the words “Liberty and Socialism” on their lips, have set up a rule of arbitrary violence. They have arrested the members of the Provisional Government, closed the newspapers, seized the printing-shops….This power must be considered the enemy of the people and the Revolution; it is necessary to do battle with it, and to pull it down….
The Council of the Republic, until the resumption of its labours, invites the citizens of the Russian Republic to group themselves around the….local Committees for Salvation of Country and Revolution, which are organising the overthrow of the Bolsheviki and the creation of a Government capable of leading the country to the Constituent Assembly.
Dielo Naroda said:
A revolution is a rising of all the people…. But here what have we? Nothing but a handful of poor fools deceived by Lenin and Trotzky…. Their decrees and their appeals will simply add to the museum of historical curiosities….
And Narodnoye Slovo(People’s Word-Populist Socialist):
“Workers’ and Peasants’ Government?” That is only a pipedream; nobody, either in Russia or in the countries of our Allies, will recognise this “Government”—or even in the enemy countries….
The bourgeois press had temporarily disappeared….Pravada had an account of the first meeting of the new Tsay-ee-kah, now the parliament of the Russian Soviet Republic. Miliutin, Commissar of Agriculture, remarked that the Peasants’ Executive Committee had called an All-Russian Peasant Congress for December 13th.
“But we cannot wait,” he said. “We must have the backing of the peasants. I propose that we call the Congress of Peasants, and do it immediately….” The Left Socialist Revolutionaries agreed. An Appeal to the Peasants of Russia was hastily drafted, and a committee of five elected to carry out the project.
The question of detailed plans for distributing the land, and the question of Workers’ Control of Industry, were postponed until the experts working on them should submit a report.
Three decrees (See App. VII, Sect. 1) were read and approved: first, Lenin’s “General Rules For the Press,” ordering the suppression of all newspapers inciting to resistance and disobedience to the new Government, inciting to criminal acts, or deliberately perverting the news; the Decree of Moratorium for House-rents; and the Decree Establishing a Workers’ Militia. Also orders, one giving the Municipal Duma power to requisition empty apartments and houses, the other directing the unloading of freight cars in the railroad terminals, to hasten the distribution of necessities and to free the badly-needed rolling-stock….