Page:Building Up Socialism - Nikolai Bukharin (1926).pdf/45

 Rh the comrades mentioned opposed to Lenin not only their theoretical "line," but put forward "in a friendly manner" also their political counter-platform.

First of all, however, we must deal with the criticism of the Leninist point of view advanced by Kamenev at the Conference of April, 1917. This is absolutely necessary because the position occupied by Kamenev in April, 1917, which was revealed with particular distinctness in his speech in opposition to the Central Committee's report at the All-Russian Conference, is the intellectual source and the theoretical basis of the desertion from the October line of policy on the part of the comrades mentioned.

At the April Conference, Lenin's report and Kamenev's opposition report dealt with the character of the revolution which was then commencing and with the classes which might be and were it driving forces. The conference, in determining the line of policy to be carried on by the Party for the period immediately ahead—and that was the period when the revolution was unfolding itself—could not avoid answering the question: "What kind of revolution was unfolding itself, merely bourgeois revolution or a revolution growing into a Socialist revolution?" Both the reporter, comrade Lenin and the counter-reporter, comrade Kamenev, raised this question and answered it. Lenin saw the task of the immediate future, of the next few months ahead, to be "to take the first concrete steps towards this transition," i.e., transition to lines of Socialist revolution. To Kamenev, however, to think as Lenin did, that "this revolution is not a bourgeois democratic revolution, that it is approaching towards a Socialist revolution," implied "falling into great error." Thus: