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5o4
5o4 IN SPAIN AND IN EXILE [chap. xxv.
of which the Generalissimo naturally became the
President. This was announced throughout the country by
means of Government circulars and posters, whereas
Russian representatives abroad received instructions to
defer the notification of this important change to the
Governments to which they were accredited!
On two occasions during the summer of 1917
circumstances appeared to furnish Kerensky and his
collaborators with the opportunity and the means for restoring
a certain amount of authority to the Government and
for confounding the propaganda, more brazen day by
day, of the Lenins and the Trotskys. The first of these
occasions was when the Bolsheviks raised their shields
and resorted to violence with the help of a few regiments
of the Red Guard and the sailors from Cronstadt. This
pronunciamento failed lamentably although the
Government was only supported by a few hundreds of loyal
soldiers and by the officers present in the capital, who
performed feats of valour and energy. The Bolsheviks
were ignominiously defeated and had to give in. It
would seem as if after that the Government ought to
have proceeded to arrest the Bolshevist leaders and to
break up the greater part of the battalions of the Red
Guard, the ones that had mutinied in any case. But
Kerensky did nothing of the kind. Fearing a
"counterrevolution " he did not wish to deprive himself of the
Soviet and the Red Guard, which he still hoped to
domesticate.
The second occasion was when the members of the
four consecutive Dumas which had sat in Russia since
1906 and up to 1917, held a meeting in Moscow. Every
one thought that the object of this meeting was to
reconstitute a provisional assembly composed of
delegates of all parties and which would have acted until
the election and the convocation of the great Constituent.
But the sole results were some speeches by Kerensky, a
few triumphal processions at the head of which the
Dictator-Generalissimo marched round " his good town
of Moscow, " and a few solemn sittings in the Opera-
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