Congress of Peasants which had placed itself on the side of the Constituent Assembly.  The Congress had been at first arranged for the 8th of January (the same day as the Bolshevik Congress of the Soviets), but, because of the events, it was postponed to the 10th.  The peasants who had come to this Congress knew perfectly well that they would have a fight to uphold, perhaps even to give their lives.  Their neighbors, their co-villagers, wept when they saw them set out, as if it were a question of men condemned to death.  That alone suffices to show to what degree were conscious these peasants who had come from all corners of the country to prepare themselves for the defense of the Constituent Assembly.

As soon as the Congress was opened sailors and Red Guards, armed with guns and hand-grenades, broke into the premises (11 Kirillovskaia Street), surrounded the house, poured into the corridors and the session hall, and ordered all persons to leave.

“In whose name do you order us, who are Delegates to the Peasants’ Congress of All-Russia, to disperse?” asked the peasants.

“In the name of the Baltic fleet,” the soldiers replied.

The peasants refused; cries of protest were raised.  One by one the peasant delegates ascended the tribune to stigmatize the Bolsheviki in speeches full of indignation, and to express the hopes that they placed in the Constituent Assembly.

The sailors listened.  They had come to disperse a counter-revolutionary Congress, and these speeches troubled them.  One sailor, not able to stand it any longer, burst into tears.

“Let me speak!” he shouted to the president.  “I hear your speeches, peasant comrades, and I no longer understand anything....  What is going on?  We are peasants, and you, too, are peasants.  But we are of this side, and you are of the other....  Why?  Who has separated us?  For we are brothers....  But it is as if a barrier had been placed between us.”  He wept and, seizing his revolver, he exclaimed, “No, I would rather kill myself!”

This session of the Congress presented a strange spectacle, disturbed by men who confessed that they did not know why they were there; the peasants sang revolutionary songs; the sailors, armed with guns and grenades, joined them.  Then the peasants knelt down to sing a funeral hymn to the memory of Logvinov, whose coffin was even yesterday within the room.  The soldiers, lowering their guns, knelt down also.

The Bolshevik authorities became excited; they did not expect such a turn to events.  “Enough said,” declared the chief; “we have come not to speak, but to act.  If they do not want to go to Smolny, let them get out of here.”  And they set themselves to the task.

In groups of five the peasants were conducted down-stairs, trampled on, and, on their refusal to go to Smolny, pushed out of doors during the night in the midst of the enormous city of which they knew nothing.