Page:Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky - The Aims of the Bolsheviki (1919).djvu/8

 of armed workers to the Imperial Duma constituted a provocation, and a betrayal of the struggle with the foreign foe. And already some of our Right Wing Socialists, as, for instance, G. Plekhanov, formerly leader of the Russian Socialists, were joining in the chorus of the bourgeoisie!

All this was typical of the bourgeoisie and the part it played in the Russian Revolution. How, indeed, could it have been otherwise? for by the very fact of its being the bourgeoisie it cannot but be against the people. There is a Russian proverb which says that "as long as the pike is in the water the carp must beware." True to this wise, popular saying, the Bolsheviki have ever been watchful in the stream of political and social action. Instead of union with the predatory pikes, the Czars and the capitalists, they had planned long ago, even in the gloomy days of Czarist shootings and other repressive measures, a more profitable union for the people—that of the working class and the peasantry. They maintained that only the united workers and peasants would have the power to create a true people's government and set up the so-called Dictatorship, i.e., the supreme power of the proletariat and peasantry, in the form of a sovereign All-Russian Soviet of Workers', Soldiers', Peasants' and Cossacks' Delegates.

The Mensheviki's conception of the Revolution was as follows:—

We must, they averred, support and encourage the bourgeoisie in the struggle with Czarism in order to force them to adopt more energetic action. As the present revolution is not in itself directed against the rich, but is a political bourgeois-democratic revolution against Czarism, it is in the interests of the struggle to unite the forces of the working class with those of the bourgeoisie against the common enemy.