Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Army and People (1920).pdf/15

 policy of General Mina, Stolypin, Nicolas Romanov, who held the army in their hands.

Why is it, however, that the former government in Russia and the bourgeois governments in Europe keep on to this day asserting that the army must stand outside of politics? This is why: because their conscience is not at rest, because they cannot tell the people the truth, because their entire form of government is founded not only on self-delusion, but on deceit. They cannot openly tell the army, composed as it is of working men and peasants, that it is bound to safeguard the interests of the possessing classes, the bourgeoisie, the landed gentry and the bankers; they cannot comfort the people with such candid statements; nothing remains but to invent something plausible, if only external, and so that the labourers and peasants may swallow the pill whole, they gild it; so they hit on the hypocritical ideology which declares that the army is a thing by itself and standing to one side, or somewhere midway between; that it takes and must take no interest in politics.

The bourgeois government is compelled to be hypocritical; only a Workers' and Peasants' government is able to speak the truth to the people openly and definitely.

It is possible that in our Army, both in the rank and file and in the command, there may