But the Bolsheviki were meanwhile holding mass meetings among the troops, preaching defeatism and surrender and urging the soldiers not to obey the orders of “bourgeois” officers.  The Provisional Government was not blind to the peril of this propaganda, but it dared not attempt to end it by force, conscious that any attempt to do so would provoke revolt which could not be stayed.  The Bolsheviki, unable to control the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council, sought in every possible manner to weaken its influence and to discredit it.  They conspired to overthrow the Provisional Government.  Their plot was to bring about an armed revolt on the 24th of June, when the All-Russian Congress of Soviets would be in session.  They planned to arrest the members of the Provisional Government and assume full power. At the same time, all the soldiers at the front were to be called on to leave the trenches.  On the eve of the date when it was to be executed this plot was divulged.  There was treachery within their own ranks.  The Bolshevik leaders humbly apologized and promised to abandon their plans.  Under other conditions the Provisional Government might have refused to be satisfied with apologies, might have adopted far sterner measures, but it was face to face with the bitter fact that the nation was drunk with the strong wine of freedom.  The time had not yet arrived when the masses could be expected to recognize the distinction between liberty within the law and the license that leads always to tyranny.  It takes time and experience of freedom to teach the stern lesson that, as Rousseau has it, freedom comes by way of self-imposed compulsions to be free.

The offensive which Kerensky had urged and planned began on July 1st and its initial success was encouraging.  It seemed as though the miracle of the restoration of the Russian army had been achieved, despite everything.  Here was an army whose killed and dead already amounted to more than three million men,[20] an army which had suffered incredible hardships, again going into battle with songs.  On the 1st of July more than thirty-six thousand prisoners were taken by the Russians on the southwestern front.  Then came the tragic harvest of the Bolshevist propaganda.  In northeastern Galicia the 607th Russian Regiment left the trenches and forced other units to do the same thing, opening a clear way for the German advance.  Regiment after regiment refused to obey orders.  Officers were brutally murdered by their men.  Along a front of more than one hundred and fifty miles the Russians, greatly superior in numbers, retreated without attempting to fight, while the enemy steadily advanced.  This was made possible by the agitation of the Bolsheviki, especially by the mutiny which they provoked among the troops in the garrison at Petrograd.  On the 17th of July, at the very time when the separatist movement in the Ukraine, the resignation of the Constitutional Democrats from the government, and the revolt and