Comrade soldiers and Cossacks, on us falls the duty of assuring real revolutionary order.
All revolutionary Russia and the entire world have their eyes on us….
At two o’clock the Land Decree was put to vote, with only one against and the peasant delegates wild with joy…. So plunged the Bolsheviki ahead, irresistible, over-riding hesitation and opposition—the only people in Russia who had a definite programme of action while the others talked for eight long months.
Now arose a soldier, gaunt, ragged and eloquent, to protest against the clause of the nakaz tending to deprive military deserters from a share in village land allotments. Bawled at and hissed at first, his simple, moving speech finally made silence. “Forced against his will into the butchery of the trenches,” he cried, “which you yourselves, in the Peace decree, have voted senseless as well as horrible, he greeted the Revolution with hope of peace and freedom. Peace? The Government of Kerensky forced him again to go forward into Galicia to slaughter and be slaughtered; to his pleas for peace, Terestchenko simply laughed…. Freedom? Under Kerensky he found his Committees suppressed, his newspapers cut off, his party speakers put in prison…. At home in his village, the landlords were defying his Land Committees, jailing his comrades…. In Petrograd the bourgeoisie, in alliance with the Germans, were sabotaging the food and ammunition for the Army…. He was without boots, or clothes…. Who forced him to desert? The Government of Kerensky, which you have overthrown!” At the end there was applause.
But another soldier hotly denounced it: “The Government of Kerensky is not a screen behind which can be hidden dirty work like desertion! Deserters are scoundrels, who run away home and leave their comrades to die in the trenches alone! Every deserter is a traitor, and should be punished….” Uproar, shouts of “Do volno! Teesche!” Kameniev hastily proposed to leave the matter to the Government for decision. (See App. V, Sect. 4)
At 2.30 A. M. fell a tense hush. Kameniev was reading the decree of the Constitution of Power:
Until the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, a provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government is formed, which shall be named the Council of People’s Commissars. (See App. V, Sect. 5)
The administration of the different branches of state activity shall be intrusted to commissions, whose composition shall be regulated to ensure the carrying out of the programme of the Congress, in close union with the mass-organisations of working-men, working-women, sailors, soldiers, peasants and clerical employees. The governmental power is vested in a collegium made up of the chairmen of these commissions, that is to say, the Council of People’s Commissars.
Control over the activities of the People’s Commissars, and the right to replace them, shall belong to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and its Central Executive Committee.
Still silence; as he read the list of Commissars, bursts of applause after each name, Lenin’s and Trotzky’s especially.