The chief basis for the counter-revolutionary organisations was the Cadet and Engineering Schools, where a considerable quantity of arms and munitions were stored and from which raids were carried out against the institutions of the Revolutionary Government.

Detachments of Red Guards and sailors surrounded the Cadet School and sent parlementaires to demand the surrender of arms. The besieged replied with bullets. The besiegers were marking time, and a crowd collected round them. Now and again a stray shot from within would hit a passer-by. The skirmish seemed to be getting prolonged indefinitely and was threatening to have a demoralising effect on the revolutionary detachments. It was imperative to resort to drastic measures. The duty of disarming the cadets was then placed on the commander of the Peter and Paul Fortress, Ensign B – who closely surrounded the Cadet School, brought up some armoured cars and artillery, and delivered an ultimatum to the cadets to surrender in ten minutes. They answered with renewed fire from the windows. At the end of the ten minutes, B – commanded the artillery to open fire. The first shots made a wide gaping breach in the walls, and the cadets surrendered, although many of them tried to escape and, in so doing, continued firing at their pursuers. The exasperation and bitterness accompanying every civil war was soon engendered. The sailors undoubtedly committed cruelties on individual Cadets. The bourgeois press afterwards accused the sailors and the Soviet Government of inhumanity and savagery. But it was silent on one point: that the Revolution of 7th-8th November had been accomplished without a single shot and without a single victim, and that it was only the counter-revolutionary plot which had been organised by the bourgeoisie and which threw its young men into the cauldron of a civil war against the workers, soldiers, and sailors that led to inevitable atrocities and victims. The events of 11th November effected a radical change in the temper of the Petrograd people. The struggle took on a more tragic aspect. At the same time our enemies at length realised that the state of affairs was much more serious than they had thought, and that the Soviet by no means intended to give up the power it had just won, merely at the bidding of the capitalist press and Cadets.

The clearance of Petrograd of all counter-revolutionary hotbeds went on with great intensity. The Cadets were disarmed almost entirely, and those who took part in the rising were arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, or taken to Kronstadt. Those papers which had been openly calling for a rising against the Soviet authority were suppressed. An order was also issued for the arrest of some of the leaders of the former Soviet parties whose names appeared in the intercepted counter-revolutionary correspondence. With this, all military resistance to the new authority was finally broken in the capital.

Then followed a prolonged and exhausting struggle with the sabotage of officials, technical staffs, employees of government departments, etc. These individuals, although belonging for the most part, in point of pay, to the oppressed class, adhere by their mode of life and their psychology to the bourgeoisie. They had faithfully served the state when Tsarism stood at its head, and they continued to serve it faithfully when authority passed into the hands of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Afterwards, in the next period of the revolution, they passed over with all their knowledge and their technical skill to the service of the coalition government. When, however, the insurgent workers, soldiers, and peasants hurled the exploiting classes from the helm of the state and tried to take the direction of affairs into their own hands, the officials and employees revolted and absolutely refused to support the new government in any way whatever. As time went on, this sabotage spread more and more, its organisers being, in the main, Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and its financial support being derived from the banks of the Entente embassies.