We, peasants assembled in Congress, we, too, have been the object of violence and outrages, unheard of even under the Czarist regime.  Red Guards and sailors, armed, invaded our premises.  We were searched in the rudest manner.  Our goods and the provisions which we had brought from home were stolen.  Several of our comrade-delegates and all the members of the Committee were arrested and taken to Peter and Paul Fortress.  We ourselves were, late at night, put out of doors in a city which we did not know, deprived of shelter under which to sleep.  All that, to oblige us either to go to Smolny, where the Bolshevist government called another Congress, or to return to our homes without having attained any result.  But violence could not stop us; secretly, as in the time of Czarist autocracy, we found a place to assemble and to continue our work.

In making known these facts to the country and the numerous millions of the peasant population, we call upon them to stigmatize the revolting policy practised by the Bolshevik government with regard to all those who are not in accord with it.  Returned to our villages, dispersed in every corner of immense Russia, we shall use all our powers to make known to the mass of peasants and to the entire country the truth concerning this government of violence; to make known in every corner of the fatherland that the actual government, which has the hardihood to call itself “Government of the Workmen and Peasants,” in reality shoots down workmen and peasants and shamelessly scoffs at the country.  We shall use all our strength to induce the population of peasant workers to demand an account from this government of violence, as well as from their prodigal children, their sons and brothers, who in the army and navy give aid to these autocrats in the commission of violence.

In the name of millions of peasants, by whom we were delegated, we demand that they no longer obstruct the work of the Constituent Assembly.  We were not allowed to finish the work for which we had come; at home we shall continue this work.  We shall employ all our strength to effect, as soon as possible, the convocation of a new National Congress of Peasants’ Delegates united on the principle of the defense of the Constituante, and that in a place where we need not fear a new dissolution.  Lately we fought against autocracy and Czarist violence; we shall fight with no less energy against the new autocrats who practise violence, whoever they may be, and whatever may be the shibboleths by which they cover their criminal acts.  We shall fight for the Constituent Assembly, because it is in that alone that we see the salvation of our country, that of the Revolution, and that of Land and Liberty.

Charged by our constituents to defend the Constituent Assembly, we cannot participate