Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/56

49 the struggle of the Russian Revolution more severe in character. When the Russian working class attained to power they sought to avoid the infliction of cruelties in spite of the savage persecution to which they had been subjected during the Kerensky regime. The revolutionary workers shielded with their own bodies the arrested Ministers of Kerensky, they pardoned counter-revolutionary generals, because, instructed by the Communist Party, they understood that the proletarian revolution did not mean the removal of individuals, but the alteration of social conditions. When savage reprisals took place they were the work of peasant masses clad in soldier's uniforms, and not of the organized workers. Except for the fight in Moscow the Revolution was carried through practically peacefully. The political Terror was instituted on a large scale when the Russian bourgeoisie under the protection of German bayonets in the Ukraine, began to advance against the workers with fire and sword; when in Central Russia in the spring of 1918 they, concealed behind the German Government, and with the assistance of its officials, sought to remove substantial portions of the impoverished Russian people's property to Germany; when, with English and French money they began to hatch plots and organized attempts on the lives of the leaders of the Russian proletariat; and when, finally, they began to arm all armies of mercenaries in Siberia and in the Caucasus against Soviet Russia. This is not the place to repeat the details of the savage White Terror which can be gleaned from the report of Joshua Rosset, the representative of the American Red Cross in Siberia. Kautsky declares that when the leaders of the counter-revolution resorted to terrorist methods they were true to themselves, "because to them human life was so cheap as to be merely a means of furthering their own aims." "They do not renounce their principles when they sacrifice human life in order to retain their power, but the Bolsheviks can only do this when they become untrue to the principle of the sacredness of human life which they themselves have exalted and vindicated." Herr Hilferding, the junior