Date: 1917
Source: ru:PSS/v32

Frenzied, raging, maddened, gnashing their teeth and showering our party with a ceaseless torrent of slanderous and riotous epithets, they do not accuse us of anything outright—they merely “hint” at it.

At what?

There is only one thing they can possibly be hinting at: the Bolsheviks sought to carry out a state coup—such are the Catalinas; that is why they are monsters and abominations, worthy of being torn to shreds.

Our enemies dare not openly utter this absurdity; thus they are reduced to “hinting” and raving with mere “verbal fury.” For this accusation is extraordinarily foolish: a state coup carried out through a peaceful demonstration, decided upon on a Thursday and scheduled for Saturday—with publication in the morning of the following Saturday! So, gentlemen, whom do you imagine you might delude with the absurdities of your veiled insinuations?

“The demand for the overthrow of the Provisional Government,” reads the resolution of the Congress of Soviets. Is the removal of certain ministers from the Provisional Government—(one of the slogans inscribed on the banners then being prepared proclaimed: “Down with the bourgeois members of the government”)—a state coup??

Why then has no one even attempted, let alone threatened, to bring to trial the countless times the banner “All Power to the Soviets” was unfurled in the streets of Petrograd?

The frenzied ones are afraid of themselves.

A government that knows its entire composition rests upon the will of the majority of the people cannot afford to fear public demonstrations that have been announced well in advance.

It will not prohibit them.

Only one who knows that he does not command the majority, that he lacks the broad consensus of the masses, is capable of raging so wildly and casting such malicious hints in his vicious articles.

“Pravda,” No. 79, June 24 (11), 1917

Printed according to the text of the newspaper “Pravda.”