Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/97

 with Kerensky, Tseretelii and other Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, were arresting the members of the land-committees. The truth is that a bourgeois State, which embodies and exercises the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie through a democratic republic, cannot confess to the people that it serves the interests of the bourgeoisie; it cannot tell them the plain truth, and is compelled to be hypocritical. But a State of the Commune or Soviet type tells the people the truth, proclaiming plainly and openly, that it is the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the poorer peasantry, thereby, by that very truth, rallying to itself scores of millions of new citizens, who are of no account under any democratic republic, but who are now drawn by the Soviets into political life, into democracy, into the administration of the State. The Soviet Republic sends into the villages detachments of armed workers (in the first place the most advanced) from the capitals, who carry Socialism into the country-side, rally to their side the poorer elements, organize and enlighten them, and help them to suppress the resistance of the bourgeoisie.

All acquainted with the conditions who have been to the villages, declare that it was not until the summer and autumn of 1918, that our country-side passed through its November (that is, proletarian) revolution. The crisis is now passing. The wave of well-to-do peasant insurrections has given place to the rising of the poor and to the growth of the committees of the poor. In the army, too, the number of Commissaries and officers and commanders of divisions and armies recruited from the ranks of the working-class, is steadily growing. At the very time when Kautsky, frightened by the July (1918), crisis, and the lamentations of the bourgeoisie was hastening to the latter's assistance, and was writing a pamphlet inspired by the conviction that the Bolsheviks were on the of those who support the Bolsheviks,—at that very time, when Kautsky saw in the desertion of the Left-Social