Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/17



capable of restoring the regime of absolutism. The Czar has the power to lay his country waste, but he never more can govern it.

"In any case the Russian revolution is far from being at an end. It cannot end so long as the Russian peasants are not satisfied. The longer it continues the greater will be the unrest of the masses of the workers of Western Europe, the nearer the danger of financial catastrophes, and the more probable that an era of acute class struggles will begin in Western Europe."

What is there in these words, written in January, 1906, of which I should now be ashamed? Does anyone believe that the Russian revolution is at an end and that normal conditions are now prevailing in Russia? And is it not true that since the above lines were written the whole world has been in a condition of great unrest.

And now about my "unfortunate prophecy" in my "Various Phases of Revolution." I was there writing a polemic against Lusnia, who declared it impossible that a war over Corea could lead to a Revolution in Russia, and claimed that I exaggerated when I pronounced the Russian laborers a much more vital political factor than the English. On these points I replied as follows in February, 1904, at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war:

I explained the reasons that made the Russian proletariat such an extraordinary revolutionary force, and continued: