Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Army and People (1920).pdf/33

 officer. I can well imagine how strange and foreign all that is now going on must seem to him. Strange and foreign must Communism appear to him, strange and foreign the Soviets. He has never thought of these things. Let him, however, give some thought to the result for all mankind of such an unheard-of crisis, the result of four years' war. He will not surely deny that the greatest changes are inevitable. The great question is—what are these changes to be?

No longer now can they consist in setting one Tsar in the place of another, or convoking some sort of a new Duma instead of the former one, even under the name of „Constituant Assembly“. The changes must be on a very different scale. It is the working classes who will take the helm in their own hands; they will make a lot of blunders, will go stumbling along, will learn from their mistakes. But all the same they will trust nobody but themselves to rule the country. After four years of war, when the men of toil have been laid low by tens of millions, they have become distrustful of the possessing classes; why should they not? The peasants and workers now trust only themselves.

This, then, is the meaning the substance of the revolution brought about by the war. This is where everything comes from which appears to us at first sight so unaccustomed, so