Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/45

38 The peasants wanted to seize the land and the feudal estates. The bourgeoisie, in conjunction with the Junkers, wished to avert this. The workers were not willing to endure the rule of the bourgeoisie any longer. That rule had ruined the country, and they were convinced that it could not build it up again. All the means of violence in the hands of the bourgeoisie were unavailing in face of the fact that proletarians and peasants were in a majority in the army, and that the working class were in control of industrial and governmental centers. In November 1917, the power of the bourgeoisie was at an end. What could the Marxists—the representavtivesrepresentatives [sic] of the working class—do in this process of the decay of capitalist power? The friends of Kautsky, the Russian Mensheviks, who considered themselves Marxians, and were so described by Kautsky, decided by an overwhelming majority that "The Russian proletariat are too weak to assume power; they must cooperate with the bourgeoisie and support their rule; and as the bourgeoisie of Russia did not want to stop the war they demanded of the proletariat that they (the proletariat) should remain true to the cause of Entente Capitalism. Herr Kautsky has never fought against this policy, but has discovered that Tseretelli is the representative of Marxism. The Russian workers, however, hunted both Kerensky and Tseretelli: and those who did this were the overwhelming majority of the population. No "democratic" government in the world ever had such resolute masses of people behind it as the Bolsheviks had from November, 1917, to March, 1918. No historian will be able to deny that the Bolsheviks came to power supported by the immense majority of the people. The opposite impression was created by the Press on the one hand, which was entirely controlled by the small sections of the bourgeoisie and the Intelligentsia; and on the other, by the circumstance that owing to the lack of suitable political apparatus in the villages and to the incapacity of the peasants to express their will sufficiently clear, the adherents of the Constitutional Assembly were able to misrepresent the true state of affairs. What it meant, however,