The Executive Committee,
performing its duty toward the peasant workers, which duty was to hold
their flag with a firm hand, not fearing any violence, and not allowing
themselves to be intimidated by the bayonets and the bombs of the enemies
of the peasant workers, opened the session at the hour indicated.
The Bolshevist pretorians, however, violating the freedom of assembly,
broke into the hall and surrounded the office and members of the Conference
with bayonets drawn. Their leader, Kornilov, staff-commandant of the Red
Guards of the Rojdestvensky quarter, made a speech to the delegates, in
which he said that they were to go to the Smolny Institute, to the
Bolshevist Congress, assuring them that they had come to this Congress by
mistake; at the end he read a document ordering him to make a search of the
premises, to confiscate all papers, and to arrest all who would offer
resistance. In reply to this speech the delegates and the members of the
Executive Committee spoke in turn; they stigmatized vehemently the criminal
policy of the Bolshevist government, which dissolved the Constituent
Assembly, the true representation of the popular will, without having given
it the time to register a vote on the agricultural law; which shot down
workers participating in peaceful negotiations; which deprived the people
of the right of assembly to discuss their needs; which destroyed freedom of
speech and assembly and trampled in the dust the whole Russian Revolution.
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