Pereviazeff, resigned his functions two days after the arrest of Trotzky, and his place was taken by Nekrassoff, who, when asked by the Committees of soldiers and peasants who had begun by that time to be all powerful, to give the reasons which had induced the government to resort to this measure, became so embarrassed in his replies that these Committees insisted on Trotzky being set at liberty, which was done three days afterwards. Karensky then resigned his functions, and returned to Moscow whence, however, he was obliged to fly and seek a refuge in Kharkov, as soon as the Bolscheviki seized the government. The latter inaugurated a system of terrorism that claimed more victims than is known abroad, completed the disorganisation of the army, and at last started the negotiations which culminated in the shameful peace signed at Brest Litovsk. After three and a half years’ war and a Revolution, Russia as an independent nation ceased to exist, and became virtually, and to all appearance, a German province. [Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service, Inc._ PEACE DOCUMENT OF DELEGATES AT BREST-LITOVSK CONFERENCE] This is the story as it reads, and sad enough it sounds. Germany can look triumphantly on the success of her work and glory in it. Happily for Russia, for the world and for the cause of civilisation, it is only one chapter of it that has come to an end. Russia, the great Russia of the past, is not dead. She possesses far more vitality than she is given credit for, and she still has sound, true, and honest elements amidst her citizens. When attempting to judge her, one ought to think of the great French Revolution, and to remember that in France, also, it took years before its work was at last consolidated and set upon a sound basis. One must bear in mind that in France, too, a period of terrorism made people despair of the future and fear that the end of their Fatherland had come. Our Russian Revolution is hardly one year old, and though perhaps one will be aghast at what I am going to say, I think that she has not yet passed through that phase of real terror which is always a symptom of great upheavals such as Russia has undergone and is undergoing. We may see worse things yet; we may live to look upon the erection of a scaffold on one of the squares of Petrograd or of Moscow. But this will not mean that the end of Russia has come, nor that she has become, or will remain, a German province. The hatred of the Teuton, on the contrary, will grow as events progress and the great disillusion arrives. A few more months, and the peasants whom Trotzky, Lenine and their crew have lured with false promises will perceive that these demagogues have been unable to fulfil all that they had sworn to them they would do. They will realise that their lot has become under the rule of these new masters ten thousand times harder than was the case before, and they will be the first to rise against these deceivers.