Promising peace and freedom from militarism, they betrayed their Allies and played the game of their foes; they brought new wars upon the already war-weary nation and imposed upon it a militarism more brutal than the old. Promising freedom, they have developed a tyranny more brutal and oppressive than that of the Romanovs. Promising humane and just government, they instituted the Chresvychaikas and a vast, corrupt bureaucracy. Promising to so organize production that there should be plenty for all and poverty for none, they ruined industrial production, decreased agricultural production to a perilously low level and so that famine reigned in a land of plentiful resources, human and material. Promising to make the workers masters of the machines, free citizens in a great industrial democracy, they have destroyed the machines, forced the workers to take the places of beasts of burden, and made them bond-slaves.
The evidence is in: let the jury render its verdict.
FINIS
DOCUMENTS
I
Decree Regarding Grain Control
The disastrous undermining of the country’s food-supply, the serious heritage of the four years’ war, continues to extend more and more, and to be more and more acute. While the consuming provincial governments are starving, in the producing governments there are at the present moment, as before, large reserves of grain of the harvests of 1916 and 1917 not yet even threshed. This grain is in the hands of tight-fisted village dealers and profiteers, of the village bourgeoisie. Well fed and well provided for, having accumulated enormous sums of money obtained during the years of war, the village bourgeoisie remains stubbornly deaf and indifferent to the wailings of starving workmen and peasant poverty, and does not bring the grain to the collecting-points. The grain is held with the hope of compelling the government to raise repeatedly the prices of grain, at the same time that the holders sell their grain at home at fabulous prices to grain speculators.
An end must be put to this obstinacy of the greedy village grain-profiteers. The food experience of former years showed that the breaking of fixed prices and the denial of grain monopoly, while lessening the possibility of feasting for our group of capitalists, would make bread completely inaccessible to our many millions of workmen and would subject them to inevitable death from starvation.
The answer to the violence of grain-owners toward the starving poor must be violence toward the bourgeoisie.
Not a pood should remain in the hands of those holding the grain, except the quantity needed for sowing the fields and provisioning their families until the new harvest.
This policy must be put into force at once, especially since the German occupation of the Ukraine compels us to get along with grain resources which will hardly suffice for sowing and curtailed use.