Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/74

 writing his "Road to Power"), he was insisting upon the inevitability of a revolution in connection with the war, and spoke abobut the approach of an era of revolutions. The Basel Manifesto of 1912 definitely speaks of a proletarian revolution in connection with that very Imperialist war between the Germans and the British Coalition, which actually broke out in 1914. But in 1918, when these revolutions began in connection with the war, Kautsky, instead of pointing out their inevitable character and reflecting upon and thinking out to the end the revolutionary policy and the methods of preparing for revolution, sets out to represent the reformist tactics of the Mensheviks as Internationalism. Is not this a piece of apostasy?

Kautsky praises the Mensheviks for having insisted upon efficiency in the army, and he blames the Bolsheviks for having increased the disorganization of the army, which had been growing even without their intervention. This means praising reformism and submission to the Imperialist bourgeoisie, blaming the revolution and abjuring it. For the maintenance of the fighting efficiency of the army meant, under Kerensky, its maintenance under the bourgeois (albeit republican) command. Everybody knows, and the events have proved it, that this republican army was preserving what may be called a Korniloff spirit, thanks to the reactionary attitude of the command. The bourgeois officers could not help being of a Korniloff spirit; they could not help gravitating towards Imperialism and towards a forcible suppression of the proletariat. To leave as before all the foundations of the Imperialist war, all the foundations of bourgeois dictatorship intact, to correct details and to improve the little minor defects by means of so-called reforms—this is what, in practice, the Menshevik policy amounted to.

On the other hand, ,not a single great revolution ever did or could do without a so-called disorganization of the army, the strongest instrument of support of the old