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headed first by the moderate liberal Duma leaders (seep. 74), then by the vaguely socialist radical Kerensky.Lenin proclaimed as his watchword "all power to theSoviets," which summed up the only two things whichthe immense majority of the country wanted, an end tothe war, the land for the peasants immediately. By theend of October 1917 both the Petrograd and the MoscowSoviets had Bolshevik majorities. The moment hadcome for the Bolshevik seizure of power.It coincided with the second All-Russian Congress ofSoviets, which immediately declared that it had taken"power into its own hands," adopted decrees offeringpeace and handing over the land forthwith to the peasants,accepted as its own the revolutionary government formedby Lenin, and rendered itself permanent through itscentral executive committee. This committee and thecongress counted for much in the early period of theBolshevik Revolution. Though the Bolsheviks had amajority, and after July 1918 an overwhelming one, itwas not a packed body. Lenin had to exert himself tothe utmost, for instance, to secure acceptance of theGerman terms imposed at Brest-Litovsk, and even then261 voted against the treaty and 115 abstained. Laterit subsided relatively into the background, but it alwaysremained the central national revolutionary institution,linking the party and the people at large, and it wasaccording to the constitution the supreme authority inthe Union.The local Soviets were of even more importance.Elected originally largely on an occupational basis, theytoo were formed on a class but not on a party basis; i.e.all those who were branded as bourgeois or in any waycounter-revolutionary were excluded. After the successfulfight for the seizure and maintenance of power, thenetwork of Soviets reaching up from the village at thebottom to the Congress of Soviets at the top was graduallyhammered into shape, and the Soviets became the indispensableapparatus, especially in the large cities, for thelocal social services and the organization of distributionand production; all the more indispensable if the Communistparty was to be preserved as a permeating elite,64