The Note was subjected to long and detailed examination by the Provisional Government, and was unanimously approved.  This Note, in speaking of a “decisive victory,” had in view a solution of the problems mentioned in the communication of April 9th, and which was thus specified: 

“The government deems it to be its right and duty to declare now that free Russia does not aim at the domination of other nations, or at depriving them of their national patrimony, or at occupying by force foreign territories, but that its object is to establish a durable peace on the basis of the rights of nations to decide their own destiny.

“The Russian nation does not lust after the strengthening of its power abroad at the expense of other nations.  Its aim is not to subjugate or humiliate any one.  In the name of the higher principles of equity, the Russian people have broken the chains which fettered the Polish nation, but it will not suffer that its own country shall emerge from the great struggle humiliated or weakened in its vital forces.

“In referring to the ‘penalties and guarantees’ essential to a durable peace, the Provisional Government had in view the reduction of armaments, the establishment of international tribunals, etc.

    “This explanation will be communicated by the Minister of Foreign
    Affairs to the Ambassadors of the Allied Powers.”

This assurance satisfied a majority of the delegates to the Soviet meeting held on the evening of May 4th, and a resolution of confidence in the Provisional Government was carried, after a very stormy debate.  The majority, however, was a very small one, thirty-five in a total vote of about twenty-five hundred.  It was clearly evident that the political government and the Soviet, which was increasingly inclined to assume the functions of government, were nearing a serious breach.  With each day the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, as the organized expression of the great mass of wage-workers in Petrograd, grew in power over the Provisional Government and its influence throughout the whole of Russia.  On May 13th Guchkov resigned, and three days later Miliukov followed his example.  The party of the Constitutional Democrats had come to be identified in the minds of the revolutionary proletariat with imperialism and secret diplomacy, and was utterly discredited.  The crisis developed an intensification of the distrust of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat.

IV

The crisis was not due solely to the diplomacy of the Provisional Government.  Indeed, that was a minor cause.  Behind all the discussions and disputes over Miliukov’s conduct of the affairs of the Foreign Office there was the far more serious issue created by the agitation of the Bolsheviki.  Under the leadership of Kamenev, Lenine, and others less well known, who skillfully exploited the friction with the Provisional Government, the idea of overthrowing that bourgeois body and of asserting that the Councils of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates would rule Russia in the interests of the working class made steady if not rapid progress.