The day after Krylenko, the chief of the army, started negotiations for an armistice conference, I heard Trotzky begin his speech about the men with whom he was to negotiate in a fashion quite new in the annals of foreign diplomacy. “Comrades,” he said, “the bloody Kaiser and his generals have entered into negotiations with our comrade Krylenko, but not out of feelings of deep sympathy for Russia and the Russian revolution. If Germany could have had her own way she would have attempted more than once to seize revolutionary Russia by the throat. “If the Kaiser and his generals, gritting their teeth, are now expressing willingness to enter into negotiations with a mere _praporschik_ [non-commissioned officer]--if they do that, it is only because the Russian Revolution has cried to the people of the world of slaughter, famine, and disease in the trenches. “The German Kaiser is now talking to us as an equal with equals because he knows that the uprising of the German workmen and soldiers would be fatal to him if he should make a different answer.” Sometimes, when a critical situation developed, Lenin himself came to the meetings. “We have to act, when action is due,” said Lenin. “We have the right to function as a government because we are a government.” One night, when one of Lenin’s decrees was under discussion, Trotzky came to speak for him. The Soviet government knew that the peasant would tolerate no further delay in the settlement of the land question. The land decree was passed, not by the People’s Commissaries, but by the whole Russian Soviet. It abolished the landlords’ property in land and confiscated all landed estates with their movable and immovable property, excepting the small holdings of peasants and Cossacks. The decree vested the administration of the land in district land committees or district soviets, and declared that “any damage to the confiscated property, which from now on belongs to all the people, will be declared a heinous crime, punishable by the revolutionary court.” The regulations for the administration of land were based upon instructions formulated by peasants in two hundred and forty-two districts. These instructions--or regulations, as we would call them--had been collected and published three months before the Soviet government took power. The peasants, impatient of the delays of the Kerensky government in solving the land problems, had taken the matter in their own hands.