The Left Social Revolutionaries want something so much
like anarchy that they have nothing to fear in a collapse of
the present system. They are for a partisan army, not a
regular army. They are against the employment of officers
who served under the old regime. They are against the
employment of responsible technicians and commercial
experts in the factories. They believe that officers and
experts alike, being ex-bourgeois, must be enemies of the
people, insidiously engineering reaction. They are opposed
to any agreement with the Allies, exactly as they were
opposed to any agreement with the Germans. I heard them
describe the Communists as "the bourgeois gendarmes of
the Entente," on the ground that having offered concessions
they would be keeping order in Russia for the benefit of
Allied capital. They blew up Mirbach, and would no doubt
try to blow up any successors he might have. Not wanting
a regular army (a low bourgeois weapon) they would welcome
occupation in order that they, with bees in their bonnets
and bombs in their hands, might go about revolting against it.
I did not see Spiridonova, because on February 11, the very
day when I had an appointment with her, the Communists
arrested her, on the ground that her agitation was dangerous
and anarchist in tendency, fomenting discontent without a
programme for its satisfaction. Having a great respect for
her honesty, they were hard put to it to know what to do
with her, and she was finally sentenced to be sent for a year
to a home for neurasthenics, "where she would be able to
read and write and recover her normality." That the
Communists were right in fearing this agitation was proved
by the troubles in Petrograd, where the workmen in some
of the factories struck, and passed Left Social
Revolutionary resolutions which, so far from showing that
they were awaiting reaction and General Judenitch, showed
simply that they were discontented and prepared to move to
the left.