Page:Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky - The Aims of the Bolsheviki (1919).djvu/7

 by heavy and unjust taxation imposed on them by the predatory bureaucracy, and were at the mercy of the capitalists and merchants and all those who, under the Czarist autocracy, had access to governmental power and the public purse.

For this reason the Bolsheviki refused even to admit the possibility of the workers ever coming to an understanding with capitalist parties on the question of joint political action.. They maintained that there must be no compromise with capitalists, or with men like Gutchkov, Miliukov, Terestchenko and Buryshkin, who were all much nearer to Czarism than to the people.

The hostility of the Russian bourgeoisie towards the people and their sympathy for the old order was manifested a few days before the February (March), 1917, Revolution in the following incident. On February 14th, 1917, the Czar convened the Imperial Duma. The workers, realising that they were betrayed and deceived, and that by the convening of the Duma the landowners and capitalists were only throwing dust in their eyes and seeking to lull their revolutionary ardour, decided to go to this institution of the master-class, not with humble petitions and slavishly-bowed heads, but with weapons in their hands and revolutionary demands on their lips. The workers meant to tell the Duma not to waste torrents of words about the "fatherland" being in danger from a foreign foe, but to fight the enemy at home—Nicholas the last, and the capitalists who were supporting him in a war profitable only to themselves.

What was the bourgeoisie's answer to the workers of Petrograd? It was Miliukov, the leader of the capitalist party, the party of so-called "National Freedom," who was the mouthpiece of the bourgeoisie on that occasion, and his message was that a procession