Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/219

Rh was their own institution, born in their own class and admirably fitted to realize their own ends.

Every dominant class fashions the kind of stateapparatus that will best secure its power, thru which it can govern in its own interests. When kings and nobles were in power the state-apparatus thru which they functioned was the Autocracy, the Bureaucracy. When the bourgeois-capitalist classes rose to power in the 18th century they scrapped this old stateapparatus and created a new one adapted to their purposes—the Parliament, Congress.

In like manner the working-classes rising to power in Russia brought with them their own state-apparatus—the Soviet. They had tried and tested it in thousands of local Soviets. They were familiar with its workings. It was part of their daily experience. Thru it they had achieved the desires of their hearts—land, factories, and the proffers of peace. They had marched to victory with it. They had made it the government of Russia.

And now this belated Constituent Assembly refused to recognize the Soviet as the government of Russia. It refused to accept the Soviets' Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited Peoples—"the Magna Charta of the Russian Revolution." It was as if the French Revolution refused to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Accordingly it was dissolved. In the morning of January 19, 1918, the sailor guards said they were