“The measures taken against the freedom of the press should be modified. They had their reason during the struggle, but now they have no further excuse. The press should be free, except for appeals to riot and insurrection.”
In a storm of hisses and hoots from his own party, Larin offered the following resolution:
The decree of the Council of People’s Commissars concerning the Press is herewith repealed.
Measures of political repression can only be employed subject to decision of a special tribunal, elected by the Tsay-ee-kah proportionally to the strength of the different parties represented; and this tribunal shall have the right also to reconsider measures of repression already taken.
This was met by a thunder of applause, not only from the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, but also from a part of the Bolsheviki.
Avanessov, for the Leninites, hastily proposed that the question of the Press be postponed until after some compromise between the Socialist parties had been reached. Overwhelmingly voted down.
“The revolution which is now being accomplished,” went on Avanessov, “has not hesitated to attack private property; and it is as private property that we must examine the question of the Press….”
Thereupon he read the official Bolshevik resolution:
The suppression of the bourgeois press was dictated not only by purely military needs in the course of the insurrection, and for the checking of counter-revolutionary action, but it is also necessary as a measure of transition toward the establishment of a new régime with regard to the Press—a régime under which the capitalist owners of printing-presses and of paper cannot be the all-powerful and exclusive manufacturers of public opinion.
We must further proceed to the confiscation of private printing plants and supplies of paper, which should become the property of the Soviets, both in the capital and in the provinces, so that the political parties and groups can make use of the facilities of printing in proportion to the actual strength of the ideas they represent—in other words, proportionally to the number of their constituents.