Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/58

51 the "moral" Kautskys, Hilferdings and Ledebours bring forward against the young struggling working class, is nonsensical, it is not thereby stated that terrorism answers the purpose, what views it has, or what aims it pursues.

It is clear that, in the long run, even the most severe terrorism would not have been able to save the Russian Revolution if Capitalism had emerged victorious from the crisis of the war and consolidated itself. Then the counter-revolution, while compelling Soviet Russia to produce only for war purposes, could have achieved its own ends. If the Soviet Republic cannot, within a reasonable space of time, establish its production on a peaceful basis so as to be able to give its industrial products to the peasants in exchange for food, it is clear that the weaker sections of the workers, will, even in the midst of victorious campaigns, be destroyed. But this very possibility must act as an incentive on every West European Socialist, to whom Socialism is not an empty term, to make the most strenuous efforts to get the working class of the West to engage in the fight against Capitalism, instead of inviting the Russian revolutionaries to lay down their arms before the counter-revolutionaries in the name or human right. When Kautsky, in his book of last year on Democracy and Dictatorship, expressed the hope that the Bolshevist dictatorship in Russia would be dissolved by democracy, it must have been evident not only to the Russian Mensheviks, but also to their stupid Western imitators, that if the Russian workers' dictatorship with its Terror collapsed, its place would be taken, not by democracy, but by the White Terror of Kolchak and Denikin. Compelled to choose between the proletarian dictatorship with its terrorism, and the naked terrorism of the White dictatorship, these people implore the Russian proletariat to be gentle and good and prepared to assist others, and promise that they will erect a monument to the Russian proletariat inscribed as follows: "Ye fallen heroes, assassinated by the capitalist Terror, because it was a noble thing to obey the dictates of humanity; to have lived