Finally the Bolshevik government agreed to a peace with the central powers which gave Germany and Austria everything that they wanted.  The Russian armies were disbanded and the Germans and Austrians were free to turn their fighting men back to the western front.  In the meantime, the Ruthenian republic, now called the Ukraine, was allowed by the Bolsheviki to make a separate peace with Germany and Austria.  The troops of the Germans and Austrians began joyously to pillage both Russia and the Ukraine, hunting for the food that was so scarce in the central empires.  However, for a whole year hardly anybody in Russia had been willing to do a stroke of work.  The fields had gone untilled while the peasants, drunk with their new freedom, and without a care for the morrow, lived off the grain that had been saved up during the past years.  As a result, whatever grain the enemy found proved spoiled and mouldy, hardly fit to feed to hogs.  As the Germans went about, taking anything that they wished and as food grew scarce, the unrest in Russia grew greater.

The Bolshevik government had not set up a democracy—­a government where all the people had equal rights:  they had set up a tyranny of the lower classes.  The small land owners, the tradesmen, the middle classes were not allowed any voice in the government.  When the first National Assembly or Congress was elected and called together, the Bolsheviki finding that they did not control a majority of its members, disbanded it by force.

Little by little people began to oppose this rule.  They objected to being robbed of their rights by the rabble just as much as by the Czar.

When the Russian armies were disbanded, there were some troops that refused to throw down their arms.  Among them were the regiments of Czecho-Slovaks.  These men had been forced, against their will, to serve in the Austrian army.  They were from the northern part of the Austrian empire, Bohemia and Moravia.  They were Slavs, related to the Russians, speaking a language very much like Russian, hating the Germans of Austria and anxious to free their country from the empire of the Hapsburgs.  When General Brusiloff made his big attack in June, 1916, these men had deserted the Austrian army and re-enlisted as Russians.  They could not get back to Austria for the Austrians would shoot them as deserters.  Of course, the Austrian and the German generals would make no peace with them.  Therefore, this army, 200,000 strong, kept their own officers and their order and their arms and refused to have anything to do with the cowardly peace made by the Bolsheviki.  Several thousand of them made their way across Siberia, across the Pacific Ocean, across America, across the Atlantic to France and Italy, where they are fighting by the thousands in the armies of the Entente.  The main body of them, however, are still in Russia (August 1, 1918), holding the great Siberian railway, fully ready to renew the war against the central powers at any time when the patriotic Russians will rise and help them.  The problem of how to get aid to the Czechs without angering the Russian people is a big one for the allied statesmen.