his mariners fled the field. According to the memoirs of Bonch-Bruyevich, the mariners came by a barrel of pure alcohol and consumed it. Their whereabouts were unknown for at least a month. Lenin wrote in his famous article on 25 February 1918, in Pravda evening edition: A lesson humiliating but necessary : "Refused to fight,... refused to defend the Narva line,...failed to destroy everything as they retreated..." Lenin added: From the point of view of the defence of the fatherland it would be a crime to enter into an armed conflict with an infinitely superior and well-prepared enemy when we obviously have no army.... implying that Dybenko and his mariners definitely were not an army. The government issued an order to arrest Dybenko and to deliver him to Moscow, that he might face court martial. His command was taken over by General Parsky. The Germans were in fact stopped by the ex-Tsarist general Aleksandr Panfilovich Nikolayev, who organized some retreating Russian soldiers to fight. The defeat at Narva caused the Bolshevik government to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Another outcome was the transfer of the Bolshevik capital from Petrograd to Moscow. In April 1918, he was dismissed from the government, expelled from the communist party and put to trial for cowardice. Unexpectedly, the court martial declared him innocent, since "Being no military expert, he was absolutely neither competent nor trained for the task,... he was not prepared to fight...". Dybenko strongly opposed the Brest-Litovsk peace, and tried to organize mariners to act against it. He was arrested. According to the testimony of Jacques Sadoul, a French socialist who was present then in Moscow and wrote memoirs about this period, it was Dybenko's fellow mariners who saved him. They threatened to open fire on the Kremlin and terrorized Bolshevik government members. The intervention of his wife Alexandra Kollontai, then a People's Commissar of social affairs, also played a role. In April 1918, Dybenko arrived in Samara, a city governed by local Left Socialist Revolutionary party, along with Anarchists and some other non-Bolshevik groups, all opposing Bolsheviks and the Brest-Litovsk peace. Dybenko soon headed the local opposition and from that remote town he published letters accusing Lenin of corruption, stealing 90 tons of gold, incompetence, terrorism, and of being a German agent. The Samara opposition groups planned an armed revolt on May 15, 1918. However, one week prior to that date, Dybenko