Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/50



The question of the Constituent Assembly and its dispersal by the Bolsheviks constitutes the crux of the entire book of Kautsky. He constantly returns to it, and the whole literary production of the theoretical leader of the Second international is. stuffed with innuendoes as to how the Bolsheviks had "destroyed democracy." The question is really an interesting and important one, since in that case the relation between bourgeois and proletarian democracy arose before the revolution in a practical form. Let us see, how the question has been dealt with by our "Marxist theoretician."

He quotes my theses about the Constituent Assembly which were drafted and published by me in the "Pravda" of December 26th, 1917 (January 8th, 1918). It might seem that there could be no better proof of Kautsky's seriousness in treating the subject in a business-like, documentary, fashion. But observe how he quotes. He does net tell us that there were nineteen such theses, he does not tell us that they dealt both with the question of the relation between the ordinary bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly, on the one hand, and a Soviet Republic on the other, and the history of the divergence, in the course of our revolution, between the Constituent Assembly and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky suppresses all that, and simply tells the reader, that "the most important of these theses were two"; one, that the Socialist Revolutionaries split into two sections, after the elections to the Constituent Assembly and before its meeting (Kautsky does not mention that this was the fifth thesis) and the other, that the republic of the Soviets is in general a higher democratic form than the Constituent Assembly (Kautsky does not mention that this was