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478
REVOLUTION [chap. xxiv.
and the German agents on their side hastened the
outbreak of the riot. The victory of the Revolution was, at
the vital moment, brought about by some of the reserve
regiments of the Guard going over to the rioters; these
regiments having been recruited—in defiance of the rules
strictly observed up till 1916—a few months before the
Revolution from amongst the working classes of the capital.
Naturally, the men of these regiments, not yet inured
to discipline and commanded by young officers who
themselves were novices, ended by going over to the
side of their brothers and comrades.
From that moment, Petrograd was entirely at the
mercy of a soldiery drunk with success, with the
flattery lavished on it and with the alcohol seized on at
every opportunity. M. Alexander Gutchkoff, the new
Minister of War (the first civilian in this role that
Russia has ever seen), was loudly clapped when with his
own hands he pinned " la croix des braves " on the
breast of the first soldier who had had the courage to kill
his officer by shooting him in the back. This same
Gutchkoff was scouted, reviled and dismissed, when he
wished to take measures to dispatch gradually to the
front the useless surplus of the garrison of
Petrograd. The Government had to give in and to promise
that all these soldiers should remain in the capital as
recognised guardians of popular rights and of the
Revolution. On that day the Provisional Government
signed its own death-warrant.
Since then the Soviets and those who were secretly
directing them, i.e. the German agents, had become the actual
masters of Russia. All those who had greeted the fall
of the Tsarinian regime with enthusiasm, and who from
the very first adopted the cause of the Revolution; all
those who rallied to it to increase the number of sane
elements, this entire coalition of the best intellectual
forces of the country whence came the majority of the
Provisional Government; all these men, I say, found
themselves from the outset on the edge of the real power.
All the actual power was exclusively in the hands of the
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