ABSTRACT
"The Russian people looked upon the War as an unforeseen corvee similar to their daily tasks of drudgery and one which must be carried through to the end". The extraordinary power which that hideous monk, Grigori Rasputin, had exercised in Russia for the last twelve years, caused violent individual attacks to be made upon him; in 1912 the fiance of a woman whom he had outraged made a vain attempt to liberate Holy Russia from this human horror. The First Pan-Russian Conference of the Soviets had just come to an end. On 4 April the Bolshevist delegates to this conference met to hear Lenin. In the towns the Soviets underwent a transformation. Composed at the outset of the Revolution of Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, they now fell under Bolshevist influence. The Soviets did for the Russian peasantry what the Tiers-Etat had done in 1789-1793 for the French peasant by allowing him to acquire property and by liberating him from feudal service.
