Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/65

 most honest citizen. He is an ardent believer in the victory of the working class, in the proletarian revolution. He would only have liked that sweetly reasonable Philistines in night-caps should, in advance—that is, before the masses have begun to move, and before they have engaged in raging battles with the exploiters, and certainly without any civil war—have drawn up a nice and model set of rules for the development of the revolution!

Our most learned Tartuffe tells the German workers, with profound indignation, that on June 14th, 1918, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets decided to exclude from the Soviets the representatives of the Socialist Evolutionary and Menshevik parties. "This measure," our Tartuffe says, burning with noble indignation, "is directed not against definite persons guilty of definite punishable offences. … The constitution of the Soviet Republic does not mention the inviolability of the Soviet members at all. It is not definite persons, but definite parties, that have been excluded from the Soviets" (p. 37).

Indeed, it is a most terrible, most intolerable departure from pure democracy, according to whose rules our revolutionary Tartuffe would like to make a revolution. We, Russian Bolsheviks, ought first to have promised inviolability to the Savinkoffs and Co., to the Liebers and Dans and Potressoffs (so-called "Activists"), then to have drawn up a criminal code proclaiming any participation in the Czecho-Slovak counter-revolutionary war, any alliance with the German Imperialists in the Ukraine or in Georgia, against the workers of the country, to be punishable offences, and then, and only then, on the strength of this criminal code, we should have been justified, according to the principles of the bourgeoisie, in excluding from the Soviets "definite individuals." It goes without saying that the Czecho-Slovaks, who were receiving subsidies from Anglo-French capitalists through the medium, or thanks to the agitation, of the Savinkoffs, Pottressoffs, and